Daniele Grattarola

Daniele Grattarola, Pierre Vandergheynst

We consider the problem of learning implicit neural representations (INRs) for signals on non-Euclidean domains. In the Euclidean case, INRs are trained on a discrete sampling of a signal over a regular lattice. Here, we assume that the continuous signal exists on some unknown topological space from which we sample a discrete graph. In the absence of a coordinate system to identify the sampled nodes, we propose approximating their location with a spectral embedding of the graph. This allows us to train INRs without knowing the underlying continuous domain, which is the case for most graph signals in nature, while also making the INRs independent of any choice of coordinate system. We show experiments with our method on various real-world signals on non-Euclidean domains.

Alexander H. Liu, Kartik Khandelwal, Sandeep Subramanian et al.

We introduce the Ministral 3 series, a family of parameter-efficient dense language models designed for compute and memory constrained applications, available in three model sizes: 3B, 8B, and 14B parameters. For each model size, we release three variants: a pretrained base model for general-purpose use, an instruction finetuned, and a reasoning model for complex problem-solving. In addition, we present our recipe to derive the Ministral 3 models through Cascade Distillation, an iterative pruning and continued training with distillation technique. Each model comes with image understanding capabilities, all under the Apache 2.0 license.

Zhiqiang Zhong, Guadalupe Gonzalez, Daniele Grattarola et al.

Network embedding (NE) approaches have emerged as a predominant technique to represent complex networks and have benefited numerous tasks. However, most NE approaches rely on a homophily assumption to learn embeddings with the guidance of supervisory signals, leaving the unsupervised heterophilous scenario relatively unexplored. This problem becomes especially relevant in fields where a scarcity of labels exists. Here, we formulate the unsupervised NE task as an r-ego network discrimination problem and develop the SELENE framework for learning on networks with homophily and heterophily. Specifically, we design a dual-channel feature embedding pipeline to discriminate r-ego networks using node attributes and structural information separately. We employ heterophily adapted self-supervised learning objective functions to optimise the framework to learn intrinsic node embeddings. We show that SELENE's components improve the quality of node embeddings, facilitating the discrimination of connected heterophilous nodes. Comprehensive empirical evaluations on both synthetic and real-world datasets with varying homophily ratios validate the effectiveness of SELENE in homophilous and heterophilous settings showing an up to 12.52% clustering accuracy gain.

Gennaro Gala, Daniele Grattarola, Erik Quaeghebeur

Cellular automata (CAs) are notable computational models exhibiting rich dynamics emerging from the local interaction of cells arranged in a regular lattice. Graph CAs (GCAs) generalise standard CAs by allowing for arbitrary graphs rather than regular lattices, similar to how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) generalise Convolutional NNs. Recently, Graph Neural CAs (GNCAs) have been proposed as models built on top of standard GNNs that can be trained to approximate the transition rule of any arbitrary GCA. We note that existing GNCAs can violate the locality principle of CAs by leveraging global information and, furthermore, are anisotropic in the sense that their transition rules are not equivariant to isometries of the nodes' spatial locations. However, it is desirable for instances related by such transformations to be treated identically by the model. By replacing standard graph convolutions with E(n)-equivariant ones, we avoid anisotropy by design and propose a class of isotropic automata that we call E(n)-GNCAs. These models are lightweight, but can nevertheless handle large graphs, capture complex dynamics and exhibit emergent self-organising behaviours. We showcase the broad and successful applicability of E(n)-GNCAs on three different tasks: (i) isotropic pattern formation, (ii) graph auto-encoding, and (iii) simulation of E(n)-equivariant dynamical systems.

Daniele Grattarola, Cesare Alippi

In this paper we present Spektral, an open-source Python library for building graph neural networks with TensorFlow and the Keras application programming interface. Spektral implements a large set of methods for deep learning on graphs, including message-passing and pooling operators, as well as utilities for processing graphs and loading popular benchmark datasets. The purpose of this library is to provide the essential building blocks for creating graph neural networks, focusing on the guiding principles of user-friendliness and quick prototyping on which Keras is based. Spektral is, therefore, suitable for absolute beginners and expert deep learning practitioners alike. In this work, we present an overview of Spektral's features and report the performance of the methods implemented by the library in scenarios of node classification, graph classification, and graph regression.

Daniele Grattarola, Lorenzo Livi, Cesare Alippi

Cellular automata (CA) are a class of computational models that exhibit rich dynamics emerging from the local interaction of cells arranged in a regular lattice. In this work we focus on a generalised version of typical CA, called graph cellular automata (GCA), in which the lattice structure is replaced by an arbitrary graph. In particular, we extend previous work that used convolutional neural networks to learn the transition rule of conventional CA and we use graph neural networks to learn a variety of transition rules for GCA. First, we present a general-purpose architecture for learning GCA, and we show that it can represent any arbitrary GCA with finite and discrete state space. Then, we test our approach on three different tasks: 1) learning the transition rule of a GCA on a Voronoi tessellation; 2) imitating the behaviour of a group of flocking agents; 3) learning a rule that converges to a desired target state.

Daniele Grattarola, Daniele Zambon, Filippo Maria Bianchi et al.

Inspired by the conventional pooling layers in convolutional neural networks, many recent works in the field of graph machine learning have introduced pooling operators to reduce the size of graphs. The great variety in the literature stems from the many possible strategies for coarsening a graph, which may depend on different assumptions on the graph structure or the specific downstream task. In this paper we propose a formal characterization of graph pooling based on three main operations, called selection, reduction, and connection, with the goal of unifying the literature under a common framework. Following this formalization, we introduce a taxonomy of pooling operators and categorize more than thirty pooling methods proposed in recent literature. We propose criteria to evaluate the performance of a pooling operator and use them to investigate and contrast the behavior of different classes of the taxonomy on a variety of tasks.

Filippo Maria Bianchi, Daniele Grattarola, Lorenzo Livi et al.

In graph neural networks (GNNs), pooling operators compute local summaries of input graphs to capture their global properties, and they are fundamental for building deep GNNs that learn hierarchical representations. In this work, we propose the Node Decimation Pooling (NDP), a pooling operator for GNNs that generates coarser graphs while preserving the overall graph topology. During training, the GNN learns new node representations and fits them to a pyramid of coarsened graphs, which is computed offline in a pre-processing stage. NDP consists of three steps. First, a node decimation procedure selects the nodes belonging to one side of the partition identified by a spectral algorithm that approximates the \maxcut{} solution. Afterwards, the selected nodes are connected with Kron reduction to form the coarsened graph. Finally, since the resulting graph is very dense, we apply a sparsification procedure that prunes the adjacency matrix of the coarsened graph to reduce the computational cost in the GNN. Notably, we show that it is possible to remove many edges without significantly altering the graph structure. Experimental results show that NDP is more efficient compared to state-of-the-art graph pooling operators while reaching, at the same time, competitive performance on a significant variety of graph classification tasks.

Filippo Maria Bianchi, Daniele Grattarola, Cesare Alippi

Spectral clustering (SC) is a popular clustering technique to find strongly connected communities on a graph. SC can be used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to implement pooling operations that aggregate nodes belonging to the same cluster. However, the eigendecomposition of the Laplacian is expensive and, since clustering results are graph-specific, pooling methods based on SC must perform a new optimization for each new sample. In this paper, we propose a graph clustering approach that addresses these limitations of SC. We formulate a continuous relaxation of the normalized minCUT problem and train a GNN to compute cluster assignments that minimize this objective. Our GNN-based implementation is differentiable, does not require to compute the spectral decomposition, and learns a clustering function that can be quickly evaluated on out-of-sample graphs. From the proposed clustering method, we design a graph pooling operator that overcomes some important limitations of state-of-the-art graph pooling techniques and achieves the best performance in several supervised and unsupervised tasks.

Daniele Zambon, Daniele Grattarola, Lorenzo Livi et al.

This paper proposes an autoregressive (AR) model for sequences of graphs, which generalises traditional AR models. A first novelty consists in formalising the AR model for a very general family of graphs, characterised by a variable topology, and attributes associated with nodes and edges. A graph neural network (GNN) is also proposed to learn the AR function associated with the graph-generating process (GGP), and subsequently predict the next graph in a sequence. The proposed method is compared with four baselines on synthetic GGPs, denoting a significantly better performance on all considered problems.

Filippo Maria Bianchi, Daniele Grattarola, Lorenzo Livi et al.

Popular graph neural networks implement convolution operations on graphs based on polynomial spectral filters. In this paper, we propose a novel graph convolutional layer inspired by the auto-regressive moving average (ARMA) filter that, compared to polynomial ones, provides a more flexible frequency response, is more robust to noise, and better captures the global graph structure. We propose a graph neural network implementation of the ARMA filter with a recursive and distributed formulation, obtaining a convolutional layer that is efficient to train, localized in the node space, and can be transferred to new graphs at test time. We perform a spectral analysis to study the filtering effect of the proposed ARMA layer and report experiments on four downstream tasks: semi-supervised node classification, graph signal classification, graph classification, and graph regression. Results show that the proposed ARMA layer brings significant improvements over graph neural networks based on polynomial filters.

Daniele Grattarola, Lorenzo Livi, Cesare Alippi

Constant-curvature Riemannian manifolds (CCMs) have been shown to be ideal embedding spaces in many application domains, as their non-Euclidean geometry can naturally account for some relevant properties of data, like hierarchy and circularity. In this work, we introduce the CCM adversarial autoencoder (CCM-AAE), a probabilistic generative model trained to represent a data distribution on a CCM. Our method works by matching the aggregated posterior of the CCM-AAE with a probability distribution defined on a CCM, so that the encoder implicitly learns to represent data on the CCM to fool the discriminator network. The geometric constraint is also explicitly imposed by jointly training the CCM-AAE to maximise the membership degree of the embeddings to the CCM. While a few works in recent literature make use of either hyperspherical or hyperbolic manifolds for different learning tasks, ours is the first unified framework to seamlessly deal with CCMs of different curvatures. We show the effectiveness of our model on three different datasets characterised by non-trivial geometry: semi-supervised classification on MNIST, link prediction on two popular citation datasets, and graph-based molecule generation using the QM9 chemical database. Results show that our method improves upon other autoencoders based on Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries on all tasks taken into account.

Daniele Grattarola, Daniele Zambon, Cesare Alippi et al.

The space of graphs is often characterised by a non-trivial geometry, which complicates learning and inference in practical applications. A common approach is to use embedding techniques to represent graphs as points in a conventional Euclidean space, but non-Euclidean spaces have often been shown to be better suited for embedding graphs. Among these, constant-curvature Riemannian manifolds (CCMs) offer embedding spaces suitable for studying the statistical properties of a graph distribution, as they provide ways to easily compute metric geodesic distances. In this paper, we focus on the problem of detecting changes in stationarity in a stream of attributed graphs. To this end, we introduce a novel change detection framework based on neural networks and CCMs, that takes into account the non-Euclidean nature of graphs. Our contribution in this work is twofold. First, via a novel approach based on adversarial learning, we compute graph embeddings by training an autoencoder to represent graphs on CCMs. Second, we introduce two novel change detection tests operating on CCMs. We perform experiments on synthetic data, as well as two real-world application scenarios: the detection of epileptic seizures using functional connectivity brain networks, and the detection of hostility between two subjects, using human skeletal graphs. Results show that the proposed methods are able to detect even small changes in a graph-generating process, consistently outperforming approaches based on Euclidean embeddings.