Quan Gan

Linjie Xu, Yanlin Zhang, Quan Gan et al.

Relational databases (RDBs) contain vast amounts of heterogeneous tabular information that can be exploited for predictive modeling purposes. But since the space of potential targets is vast across enterprise settings, how can we avoid retraining a new model each time we wish to predict a new quantity of interest? Foundation models based on in-context learning (ICL) offer a convenient option, but so far are largely restricted to single-table operability. In generalizing to multiple interrelated tables, it is essential to compress variably-sized RDB neighborhoods into fixed-length ICL samples for consumption by the decoder. However, the details here are critical: unlike existing supervised learning RDB pipelines, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that ICL-specific compression should be constrained within high-dimensional RDB columns where all entities share units and roles, not across columns where the relevance of heterogeneous data types cannot be determined without extensive label information. Conditioned on this restriction, we then demonstrate that encoder expressiveness is actually not compromised by excluding trainable parameters. Hence we arrive at a principled family of RDB encoders that can be seamlessly paired with already-existing single-table ICL foundation models, whereby no training or fine-tuning is required. From a practical standpoint, we develop scalable SQL primitives to implement the encoder stage, resulting in the easy-to-use open-source RDBLearn foundation model capable of robust performance on unseen datasets out of the box.

Yuxin Wang, Quan Gan, Xipeng Qiu et al.

Hypergraphs are a powerful abstraction for representing higher-order interactions between entities of interest. To exploit these relationships in making downstream predictions, a variety of hypergraph neural network architectures have recently been proposed, in large part building upon precursors from the more traditional graph neural network (GNN) literature. Somewhat differently, in this paper we begin by presenting an expressive family of parameterized, hypergraph-regularized energy functions. We then demonstrate how minimizers of these energies effectively serve as node embeddings that, when paired with a parameterized classifier, can be trained end-to-end via a supervised bilevel optimization process. Later, we draw parallels between the implicit architecture of the predictive models emerging from the proposed bilevel hypergraph optimization, and existing GNN architectures in common use. Empirically, we demonstrate state-of-the-art results on various hypergraph node classification benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/yxzwang/PhenomNN.

Yuxin Wang, Xiannian Hu, Quan Gan et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) for link prediction can loosely be divided into two broad categories. First, \emph{node-wise} architectures pre-compute individual embeddings for each node that are later combined by a simple decoder to make predictions. While extremely efficient at inference time, model expressiveness is limited such that isomorphic nodes contributing to candidate edges may not be distinguishable, compromising accuracy. In contrast, \emph{edge-wise} methods rely on the formation of edge-specific subgraph embeddings to enrich the representation of pair-wise relationships, disambiguating isomorphic nodes to improve accuracy, but with increased model complexity. To better navigate this trade-off, we propose a novel GNN architecture whereby the \emph{forward pass} explicitly depends on \emph{both} positive (as is typical) and negative (unique to our approach) edges to inform more flexible, yet still cheap node-wise embeddings. This is achieved by recasting the embeddings themselves as minimizers of a forward-pass-specific energy function that favors separation of positive and negative samples. Notably, this energy is distinct from the actual training loss shared by most existing link prediction models, where contrastive pairs only influence the \textit{backward pass}. As demonstrated by extensive empirical evaluations, the resulting architecture retains the inference speed of node-wise models, while producing competitive accuracy with edge-wise alternatives. We released our code at https://github.com/yxzwang/SubmissionverOfYinYanGNN.

Kounianhua Du, Weinan Zhang, Ruiwen Zhou et al.

Prediction over tabular data is an essential and fundamental problem in many important downstream tasks. However, existing methods either take a data instance of the table independently as input or do not fully utilize the multi-rows features and labels to directly change and enhance the target data representations. In this paper, we propose to 1) construct a hypergraph from relevant data instance retrieval to model the cross-row and cross-column patterns of those instances, and 2) perform message Propagation to Enhance the target data instance representation for Tabular prediction tasks. Specifically, our specially-designed message propagation step benefits from 1) fusion of label and features during propagation, and 2) locality-aware high-order feature interactions. Experiments on two important tabular data prediction tasks validate the superiority of the proposed PET model against other baselines. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the model components and the feature enhancement ability of PET via various ablation studies and visualizations. The code is included in https://github.com/KounianhuaDu/PET.

Hongjoon Ahn, Yongyi Yang, Quan Gan et al.

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong performance on node classification tasks in a semi-supervised learning setting. However, as in the simpler homogeneous GNN case, message-passing-based heterogeneous GNNs may struggle to balance between resisting the oversmoothing that may occur in deep models, and capturing long-range dependencies of graph structured data. Moreover, the complexity of this trade-off is compounded in the heterogeneous graph case due to the disparate heterophily relationships between nodes of different types. To address these issues, we propose a novel heterogeneous GNN architecture in which layers are derived from optimization steps that descend a novel relation-aware energy function. The corresponding minimizer is fully differentiable with respect to the energy function parameters, such that bilevel optimization can be applied to effectively learn a functional form whose minimum provides optimal node representations for subsequent classification tasks. In particular, this methodology allows us to model diverse heterophily relationships between different node types while avoiding oversmoothing effects. Experimental results on 8 heterogeneous graph benchmarks demonstrates that our proposed method can achieve competitive node classification accuracy

Kezhao Huang, Haitian Jiang, Minjie Wang et al.

A key performance bottleneck when training graph neural network (GNN) models on large, real-world graphs is loading node features onto a GPU. Due to limited GPU memory, expensive data movement is necessary to facilitate the storage of these features on alternative devices with slower access (e.g. CPU memory). Moreover, the irregularity of graph structures contributes to poor data locality which further exacerbates the problem. Consequently, existing frameworks capable of efficiently training large GNN models usually incur a significant accuracy degradation because of the currently-available shortcuts involved. To address these limitations, we instead propose FreshGNN, a general-purpose GNN mini-batch training framework that leverages a historical cache for storing and reusing GNN node embeddings instead of re-computing them through fetching raw features at every iteration. Critical to its success, the corresponding cache policy is designed, using a combination of gradient-based and staleness criteria, to selectively screen those embeddings which are relatively stable and can be cached, from those that need to be re-computed to reduce estimation errors and subsequent downstream accuracy loss. When paired with complementary system enhancements to support this selective historical cache, FreshGNN is able to accelerate the training speed on large graph datasets such as ogbn-papers100M and MAG240M by 3.4x up to 20.5x and reduce the memory access by 59%, with less than 1% influence on test accuracy.

Xuhong Wang, Sirui Chen, Yixuan He et al.

Many real world applications can be formulated as event forecasting on Continuous Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) where the occurrence of a timed event between two entities is represented as an edge along with its occurrence timestamp in the graphs.However, most previous works approach the problem in compromised settings, either formulating it as a link prediction task on the graph given the event time or a time prediction problem given which event will happen next. In this paper, we propose a novel model combining Graph Neural Networks and Marked Temporal Point Process (MTPP) that jointly forecasts multiple link events and their timestamps on communities over a CTDG. Moreover, to scale our model to large graphs, we factorize the jointly event prediction problem into three easier conditional probability modeling problems.To evaluate the effectiveness of our model and the rationale behind such a decomposition, we establish a set of benchmarks and evaluation metrics for this event forecasting task. Our experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our model in terms of both model accuracy and training efficiency.

Jiarui Jin, Yangkun Wang, Weinan Zhang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), originally proposed for node classification, have also motivated many recent works on edge prediction (a.k.a., link prediction). However, existing methods lack elaborate design regarding the distinctions between two tasks that have been frequently overlooked: (i) edges only constitute the topology in the node classification task but can be used as both the topology and the supervisions (i.e., labels) in the edge prediction task; (ii) the node classification makes prediction over each individual node, while the edge prediction is determinated by each pair of nodes. To this end, we propose a novel edge prediction paradigm named Edge-aware Message PassIng neuRal nEtworks (EMPIRE). Concretely, we first introduce an edge splitting technique to specify use of each edge where each edge is solely used as either the topology or the supervision (named as topology edge or supervision edge). We then develop a new message passing mechanism that generates the messages to source nodes (through topology edges) being aware of target nodes (through supervision edges). In order to emphasize the differences between pairs connected by supervision edges and pairs unconnected, we further weight the messages to highlight the relative ones that can reflect the differences. In addition, we design a novel negative node-pair sampling trick that efficiently samples 'hard' negative instances in the supervision instances, and can significantly improve the performance. Experimental results verify that the proposed method can significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art models regarding the edge prediction task on multiple homogeneous and heterogeneous graph datasets.

Qidan Zhu, Jing Li, Fei Yuan et al.

Continuous Sign Language Recognition (CSLR) is a challenging research task due to the lack of accurate annotation on the temporal sequence of sign language data. The recent popular usage is a hybrid model based on "CNN + RNN" for CSLR. However, when extracting temporal features in these works, most of the methods using a fixed temporal receptive field and cannot extract the temporal features well for each sign language word. In order to obtain more accurate temporal features, this paper proposes a multi-scale temporal network (MSTNet). The network mainly consists of three parts. The Resnet and two fully connected (FC) layers constitute the frame-wise feature extraction part. The time-wise feature extraction part performs temporal feature learning by first extracting temporal receptive field features of different scales using the proposed multi-scale temporal block (MST-block) to improve the temporal modeling capability, and then further encoding the temporal features of different scales by the transformers module to obtain more accurate temporal features. Finally, the proposed multi-level Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss part is used for training to obtain recognition results. The multi-level CTC loss enables better learning and updating of the shallow network parameters in CNN, and the method has no parameter increase and can be flexibly embedded in other models. Experimental results on two publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method can effectively extract sign language features in an end-to-end manner without any prior knowledge, improving the accuracy of CSLR and achieving competitive results.

Yuchen Zhong, Guangming Sheng, Tianzuo Qin et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) play a crucial role in various fields. However, most existing deep graph learning frameworks assume pre-stored static graphs and do not support training on graph streams. In contrast, many real-world graphs are dynamic and contain time domain information. We introduce GNNFlow, a distributed framework that enables efficient continuous temporal graph representation learning on dynamic graphs on multi-GPU machines. GNNFlow introduces an adaptive time-indexed block-based data structure that effectively balances memory usage with graph update and sampling operation efficiency. It features a hybrid GPU-CPU graph data placement for rapid GPU-based temporal neighborhood sampling and kernel optimizations for enhanced sampling processes. A dynamic GPU cache for node and edge features is developed to maximize cache hit rates through reuse and restoration strategies. GNNFlow supports distributed training across multiple machines with static scheduling to ensure load balance. We implement GNNFlow based on DGL and PyTorch. Our experimental results show that GNNFlow provides up to 21.1x faster continuous learning than existing systems.

Qidan Zhu, Jing Li, Fei Yuan et al.

Aiming at the problem that the spatial-temporal hierarchical continuous sign language recognition model based on deep learning has a large amount of computation, which limits the real-time application of the model, this paper proposes a temporal super-resolution network(TSRNet). The data is reconstructed into a dense feature sequence to reduce the overall model computation while keeping the final recognition accuracy loss to a minimum. The continuous sign language recognition model(CSLR) via TSRNet mainly consists of three parts: frame-level feature extraction, time series feature extraction and TSRNet, where TSRNet is located between frame-level feature extraction and time-series feature extraction, which mainly includes two branches: detail descriptor and rough descriptor. The sparse frame-level features are fused through the features obtained by the two designed branches as the reconstructed dense frame-level feature sequence, and the connectionist temporal classification(CTC) loss is used for training and optimization after the time-series feature extraction part. To better recover semantic-level information, the overall model is trained with the self-generating adversarial training method proposed in this paper to reduce the model error rate. The training method regards the TSRNet as the generator, and the frame-level processing part and the temporal processing part as the discriminator. In addition, in order to unify the evaluation criteria of model accuracy loss under different benchmarks, this paper proposes word error rate deviation(WERD), which takes the error rate between the estimated word error rate (WER) and the reference WER obtained by the reconstructed frame-level feature sequence and the complete original frame-level feature sequence as the WERD. Experiments on two large-scale sign language datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Qidan Zhu, Jing Li, Fei Yuan et al.

The goal of continuous sign language recognition(CSLR) research is to apply CSLR models as a communication tool in real life, and the real-time requirement of the models is important. In this paper, we address the model real-time problem through cross-resolution knowledge distillation. In our study, we found that keeping the frame-level feature scales consistent between the output of the student network and the teacher network is better than recovering the frame-level feature sizes for feature distillation. Based on this finding, we propose a new frame-level feature extractor that keeps the output frame-level features at the same scale as the output of by the teacher network. We further combined with the TSCM+2D hybrid convolution proposed in our previous study to form a new lightweight end-to-end CSLR network-Low resolution input net(LRINet). It is then used to combine cross-resolution knowledge distillation and traditional knowledge distillation methods to form a CSLR model based on cross-resolution knowledge distillation (CRKD). The CRKD uses high-resolution frames as input to the teacher network for training, locks the weights after training, and then uses low-resolution frames as input to the student network LRINet to perform knowledge distillation on frame-level features and classification features respectively. Experiments on two large-scale continuous sign language datasets have proved the effectiveness of CRKD. Compared with the model with high-resolution data as input, the calculation amount, parameter amount and inference time of the model have been significantly reduced under the same experimental conditions, while ensuring the accuracy of the model, and has achieved very competitive results in comparison with other advanced methods.

Qidan Zhu, Jing Li, Fei Yuan et al.

The ultimate goal of continuous sign language recognition(CSLR) is to facilitate the communication between special people and normal people, which requires a certain degree of real-time and deploy-ability of the model. However, in the previous research on CSLR, little attention has been paid to the real-time and deploy-ability. In order to improve the real-time and deploy-ability of the model, this paper proposes a zero parameter, zero computation temporal superposition crossover module(TSCM), and combines it with 2D convolution to form a "TSCM+2D convolution" hybrid convolution, which enables 2D convolution to have strong spatial-temporal modelling capability with zero parameter increase and lower deployment cost compared with other spatial-temporal convolutions. The overall CSLR model based on TSCM is built on the improved ResBlockT network in this paper. The hybrid convolution of "TSCM+2D convolution" is applied to the ResBlock of the ResNet network to form the new ResBlockT, and random gradient stop and multi-level CTC loss are introduced to train the model, which reduces the final recognition WER while reducing the training memory usage, and extends the ResNet network from image classification task to video recognition task. In addition, this study is the first in CSLR to use only 2D convolution extraction of sign language video temporal-spatial features for end-to-end learning for recognition. Experiments on two large-scale continuous sign language datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and achieve highly competitive results.

Minjie Wang, Quan Gan, David Wipf et al.

Although RDBs store vast amounts of rich, informative data spread across interconnected tables, the progress of predictive machine learning models as applied to such tasks arguably falls well behind advances in other domains such as computer vision or natural language processing. This deficit stems, at least in part, from the lack of established/public RDB benchmarks as needed for training and evaluation purposes. As a result, related model development thus far often defaults to tabular approaches trained on ubiquitous single-table benchmarks, or on the relational side, graph-based alternatives such as GNNs applied to a completely different set of graph datasets devoid of tabular characteristics. To more precisely target RDBs lying at the nexus of these two complementary regimes, we explore a broad class of baseline models predicated on: (i) converting multi-table datasets into graphs using various strategies equipped with efficient subsampling, while preserving tabular characteristics; and (ii) trainable models with well-matched inductive biases that output predictions based on these input subgraphs. Then, to address the dearth of suitable public benchmarks and reduce siloed comparisons, we assemble a diverse collection of (i) large-scale RDB datasets and (ii) coincident predictive tasks. From a delivery standpoint, we operationalize the above four dimensions (4D) of exploration within a unified, scalable open-source toolbox called 4DBInfer. We conclude by presenting evaluations using 4DBInfer, the results of which highlight the importance of considering each such dimension in the design of RDB predictive models, as well as the limitations of more naive approaches such as simply joining adjacent tables. Our source code is released at https://github.com/awslabs/multi-table-benchmark .

Qidan Zhu, Jing Li, Fei Yuan et al.

The current bottleneck in continuous sign language recognition (CSLR) research lies in the fact that most publicly available datasets are limited to laboratory environments or television program recordings, resulting in a single background environment with uniform lighting, which significantly deviates from the diversity and complexity found in real-life scenarios. To address this challenge, we have constructed a new, large-scale dataset for Chinese continuous sign language (CSL) based on complex environments, termed the complex environment - chinese sign language dataset (CE-CSL). This dataset encompasses 5,988 continuous CSL video clips collected from daily life scenes, featuring more than 70 different complex backgrounds to ensure representativeness and generalization capability. To tackle the impact of complex backgrounds on CSLR performance, we propose a time-frequency network (TFNet) model for continuous sign language recognition. This model extracts frame-level features and then utilizes both temporal and spectral information to separately derive sequence features before fusion, aiming to achieve efficient and accurate CSLR. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant performance improvements on the CE-CSL, validating its effectiveness under complex background conditions. Additionally, our proposed method has also yielded highly competitive results when applied to three publicly available CSL datasets.

Yanbo Wang, Xiyuan Wang, Quan Gan et al.

We introduce Griffin, the first foundation model attemptation designed specifically for Relational Databases (RDBs). Unlike previous smaller models focused on single RDB tasks, Griffin unifies the data encoder and task decoder to handle diverse tasks. Additionally, we enhance the architecture by incorporating a cross-attention module and a novel aggregator. Griffin utilizes pretraining on both single-table and RDB datasets, employing advanced encoders for categorical, numerical, and metadata features, along with innovative components such as cross-attention modules and enhanced message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) to capture the complexities of relational data. Evaluated on large-scale, heterogeneous, and temporal graphs extracted from RDBs across various domains (spanning over 150 million nodes), Griffin demonstrates superior or comparable performance to individually trained models, excels in low-data scenarios, and shows strong transferability with similarity and diversity in pretraining across new datasets and tasks, highlighting its potential as a universally applicable foundation model for RDBs. Code available at https://github.com/yanxwb/Griffin.

Yuxin Wang, Botian Jiang, Yiran Guo et al.

Prior-Fitted Networks (PFNs) have recently been proposed to efficiently perform tabular classification tasks. Although they achieve good performance on small datasets, they encounter limitations with larger datasets. These limitations include significant memory consumption and increased computational complexity, primarily due to the impracticality of incorporating all training samples as inputs within these networks. To address these challenges, we investigate the fitting assumption for PFNs and input samples. Building on this understanding, we propose \textit{BoostPFN} designed to enhance the performance of these networks, especially for large-scale datasets. We also theoretically validate the convergence of BoostPFN and our empirical results demonstrate that the BoostPFN method can outperform standard PFNs with the same size of training samples in large datasets and achieve a significant acceleration in training times compared to other established baselines in the field, including widely-used Gradient Boosting Decision Trees (GBDTs), deep learning methods and AutoML systems. High performance is maintained for up to 50x of the pre-training size of PFNs, substantially extending the limit of training samples. Through this work, we address the challenges of efficiently handling large datasets via PFN-based models, paving the way for faster and more effective tabular data classification training and prediction process. Code is available at Github.

Ning Li, Kounianhua Du, Han Zhang et al.

Relational databases (RDBs) have become the industry standard for storing massive and heterogeneous data. However, despite the widespread use of RDBs across various fields, the inherent structure of relational databases hinders their ability to benefit from flourishing deep learning methods. Previous research has primarily focused on exploiting the unary dependency among multiple tables in a relational database using the primary key - foreign key relationships, either joining multiple tables into a single table or constructing a graph among them, which leaves the implicit composite relations among different tables and a substantial potential of improvement for predictive modeling unexplored. In this paper, we propose SRP, a unified predictive modeling framework that synthesizes features using the unary dependency, retrieves related information to capture the composite dependency, and propagates messages across a constructed graph to learn adjacent patterns for prediction on relation databases. By introducing a new retrieval mechanism into RDB, SRP is designed to fully capture both the unary and the composite dependencies within a relational database, thereby enhancing the receptive field of tabular data prediction. In addition, we conduct a comprehensive analysis on the components of SRP, offering a nuanced understanding of model behaviors and practical guidelines for future applications. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SRP and its potential applicability in industrial scenarios. The code is released at https://github.com/NingLi670/SRP.

Yixuan He, Quan Gan, David Wipf et al.

Recovering global rankings from pairwise comparisons has wide applications from time synchronization to sports team ranking. Pairwise comparisons corresponding to matches in a competition can be construed as edges in a directed graph (digraph), whose nodes represent e.g. competitors with an unknown rank. In this paper, we introduce neural networks into the ranking recovery problem by proposing the so-called GNNRank, a trainable GNN-based framework with digraph embedding. Moreover, new objectives are devised to encode ranking upsets/violations. The framework involves a ranking score estimation approach, and adds an inductive bias by unfolding the Fiedler vector computation of the graph constructed from a learnable similarity matrix. Experimental results on extensive data sets show that our methods attain competitive and often superior performance against baselines, as well as showing promising transfer ability. Codes and preprocessed data are at: \url{https://github.com/SherylHYX/GNNRank}.

Zonghan Wu, Da Zheng, Shirui Pan et al.

This paper aims to unify spatial dependency and temporal dependency in a non-Euclidean space while capturing the inner spatial-temporal dependencies for traffic data. For spatial-temporal attribute entities with topological structure, the space-time is consecutive and unified while each node's current status is influenced by its neighbors' past states over variant periods of each neighbor. Most spatial-temporal neural networks for traffic forecasting study spatial dependency and temporal correlation separately in processing, gravely impaired the spatial-temporal integrity, and ignore the fact that the neighbors' temporal dependency period for a node can be delayed and dynamic. To model this actual condition, we propose TraverseNet, a novel spatial-temporal graph neural network, viewing space and time as an inseparable whole, to mine spatial-temporal graphs while exploiting the evolving spatial-temporal dependencies for each node via message traverse mechanisms. Experiments with ablation and parameter studies have validated the effectiveness of the proposed TraverseNet, and the detailed implementation can be found from https://github.com/nnzhan/TraverseNet.

Yongyi Yang, Tang Liu, Yangkun Wang et al.

Despite the recent success of graph neural networks (GNN), common architectures often exhibit significant limitations, including sensitivity to oversmoothing, long-range dependencies, and spurious edges, e.g., as can occur as a result of graph heterophily or adversarial attacks. To at least partially address these issues within a simple transparent framework, we consider a new family of GNN layers designed to mimic and integrate the update rules of two classical iterative algorithms, namely, proximal gradient descent and iterative reweighted least squares (IRLS). The former defines an extensible base GNN architecture that is immune to oversmoothing while nonetheless capturing long-range dependencies by allowing arbitrary propagation steps. In contrast, the latter produces a novel attention mechanism that is explicitly anchored to an underlying end-to-end energy function, contributing stability with respect to edge uncertainty. When combined we obtain an extremely simple yet robust model that we evaluate across disparate scenarios including standardized benchmarks, adversarially-perturbated graphs, graphs with heterophily, and graphs involving long-range dependencies. In doing so, we compare against SOTA GNN approaches that have been explicitly designed for the respective task, achieving competitive or superior node classification accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/FFTYYY/TWIRLS.

Da Zheng, Chao Ma, Minjie Wang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNN) have shown great success in learning from graph-structured data. They are widely used in various applications, such as recommendation, fraud detection, and search. In these domains, the graphs are typically large, containing hundreds of millions of nodes and several billions of edges. To tackle this challenge, we develop DistDGL, a system for training GNNs in a mini-batch fashion on a cluster of machines. DistDGL is based on the Deep Graph Library (DGL), a popular GNN development framework. DistDGL distributes the graph and its associated data (initial features and embeddings) across the machines and uses this distribution to derive a computational decomposition by following an owner-compute rule. DistDGL follows a synchronous training approach and allows ego-networks forming the mini-batches to include non-local nodes. To minimize the overheads associated with distributed computations, DistDGL uses a high-quality and light-weight min-cut graph partitioning algorithm along with multiple balancing constraints. This allows it to reduce communication overheads and statically balance the computations. It further reduces the communication by replicating halo nodes and by using sparse embedding updates. The combination of these design choices allows DistDGL to train high-quality models while achieving high parallel efficiency and memory scalability. We demonstrate our optimizations on both inductive and transductive GNN models. Our results show that DistDGL achieves linear speedup without compromising model accuracy and requires only 13 seconds to complete a training epoch for a graph with 100 million nodes and 3 billion edges on a cluster with 16 machines. DistDGL is now publicly available as part of DGL:https://github.com/dmlc/dgl/tree/master/python/dgl/distributed.

Han Zhang, Quan Gan, David Wipf et al.

Relational databases are extensively utilized in a variety of modern information system applications, and they always carry valuable data patterns. There are a huge number of data mining or machine learning tasks conducted on relational databases. However, it is worth noting that there are limited machine learning models specifically designed for relational databases, as most models are primarily tailored for single table settings. Consequently, the prevalent approach for training machine learning models on data stored in relational databases involves performing feature engineering to merge the data from multiple tables into a single table and subsequently applying single table models. This approach not only requires significant effort in feature engineering but also destroys the inherent relational structure present in the data. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework called Graph-based Feature Synthesis (GFS). GFS formulates the relational database as a heterogeneous graph, thereby preserving the relational structure within the data. By leveraging the inductive bias from single table models, GFS effectively captures the intricate relationships inherent in each table. Additionally, the whole framework eliminates the need for manual feature engineering. In the extensive experiment over four real-world multi-table relational databases, GFS outperforms previous methods designed for relational databases, demonstrating its superior performance.

Qidan Zhu, Jing Li, Fei Yuan et al.

Changes in facial expression, head movement, body movement and gesture movement are remarkable cues in sign language recognition, and most of the current continuous sign language recognition(CSLR) research methods mainly focus on static images in video sequences at the frame-level feature extraction stage, while ignoring the dynamic changes in the images. In this paper, we propose a novel motor attention mechanism to capture the distorted changes in local motion regions during sign language expression, and obtain a dynamic representation of image changes. And for the first time, we apply the self-distillation method to frame-level feature extraction for continuous sign language, which improves the feature expression without increasing the computational resources by self-distilling the features of adjacent stages and using the higher-order features as teachers to guide the lower-order features. The combination of the two constitutes our proposed holistic model of CSLR Based on motor attention mechanism and frame-level Self-Distillation (MAM-FSD), which improves the inference ability and robustness of the model. We conduct experiments on three publicly available datasets, and the experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively extract the sign language motion information in videos, improve the accuracy of CSLR and reach the state-of-the-art level.

Yanlin Zhang, Ning Li, Quan Gan et al.

Crafting effective features is a crucial yet labor-intensive and domain-specific task within machine learning pipelines. Fortunately, recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automating various data science tasks, including feature engineering. But despite this potential, evaluations thus far are primarily based on the end performance of a complete ML pipeline, providing limited insight into precisely how LLMs behave relative to human experts in feature engineering. To address this gap, we propose ELF-Gym, a framework for Evaluating LLM-generated Features. We curated a new dataset from historical Kaggle competitions, including 251 "golden" features used by top-performing teams. ELF-Gym then quantitatively evaluates LLM-generated features by measuring their impact on downstream model performance as well as their alignment with expert-crafted features through semantic and functional similarity assessments. This approach provides a more comprehensive evaluation of disparities between LLMs and human experts, while offering valuable insights into specific areas where LLMs may have room for improvement. For example, using ELF-Gym we empirically demonstrate that, in the best-case scenario, LLMs can semantically capture approximately 56% of the golden features, but at the more demanding implementation level this overlap drops to 13%. Moreover, in other cases LLMs may fail completely, particularly on datasets that require complex features, indicating broad potential pathways for improvement.

Tianyu Zhao, Cheng Yang, Yibo Li et al.

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (HGNN) has been successfully employed in various tasks, but we cannot accurately know the importance of different design dimensions of HGNNs due to diverse architectures and applied scenarios. Besides, in the research community of HGNNs, implementing and evaluating various tasks still need much human effort. To mitigate these issues, we first propose a unified framework covering most HGNNs, consisting of three components: heterogeneous linear transformation, heterogeneous graph transformation, and heterogeneous message passing layer. Then we build a platform Space4HGNN by defining a design space for HGNNs based on the unified framework, which offers modularized components, reproducible implementations, and standardized evaluation for HGNNs. Finally, we conduct experiments to analyze the effect of different designs. With the insights found, we distill a condensed design space and verify its effectiveness.

Yangkun Wang, Jiarui Jin, Weinan Zhang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) and label propagation represent two interrelated modeling strategies designed to exploit graph structure in tasks such as node property prediction. The former is typically based on stacked message-passing layers that share neighborhood information to transform node features into predictive embeddings. In contrast, the latter involves spreading label information to unlabeled nodes via a parameter-free diffusion process, but operates independently of the node features. Given then that the material difference is merely whether features or labels are smoothed across the graph, it is natural to consider combinations of the two for improving performance. In this regard, it has recently been proposed to use a randomly-selected portion of the training labels as GNN inputs, concatenated with the original node features for making predictions on the remaining labels. This so-called label trick accommodates the parallel use of features and labels, and is foundational to many of the top-ranking submissions on the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB) leaderboard. And yet despite its wide-spread adoption, thus far there has been little attempt to carefully unpack exactly what statistical properties the label trick introduces into the training pipeline, intended or otherwise. To this end, we prove that under certain simplifying assumptions, the stochastic label trick can be reduced to an interpretable, deterministic training objective composed of two factors. The first is a data-fitting term that naturally resolves potential label leakage issues, while the second serves as a regularization factor conditioned on graph structure that adapts to graph size and connectivity. Later, we leverage this perspective to motivate a broader range of label trick use cases, and provide experiments to verify the efficacy of these extensions.

Qingru Zhang, David Wipf, Quan Gan et al.

Graph neural networks (GNN) have recently emerged as a vehicle for applying deep network architectures to graph and relational data. However, given the increasing size of industrial datasets, in many practical situations the message passing computations required for sharing information across GNN layers are no longer scalable. Although various sampling methods have been introduced to approximate full-graph training within a tractable budget, there remain unresolved complications such as high variances and limited theoretical guarantees. To address these issues, we build upon existing work and treat GNN neighbor sampling as a multi-armed bandit problem but with a newly-designed reward function that introduces some degree of bias designed to reduce variance and avoid unstable, possibly-unbounded pay outs. And unlike prior bandit-GNN use cases, the resulting policy leads to near-optimal regret while accounting for the GNN training dynamics introduced by SGD. From a practical standpoint, this translates into lower variance estimates and competitive or superior test accuracy across several benchmarks.

Zihao Ye, Qipeng Guo, Quan Gan et al.

The Transformer model is widely successful on many natural language processing tasks. However, the quadratic complexity of self-attention limit its application on long text. In this paper, adopting a fine-to-coarse attention mechanism on multi-scale spans via binary partitioning (BP), we propose BP-Transformer (BPT for short). BPT yields $O(k\cdot n\log (n/k))$ connections where $k$ is a hyperparameter to control the density of attention. BPT has a good balance between computation complexity and model capacity. A series of experiments on text classification, machine translation and language modeling shows BPT has a superior performance for long text than previous self-attention models. Our code, hyperparameters and CUDA kernels for sparse attention are available in PyTorch.

Minjie Wang, Da Zheng, Zihao Ye et al.

Advancing research in the emerging field of deep graph learning requires new tools to support tensor computation over graphs. In this paper, we present the design principles and implementation of Deep Graph Library (DGL). DGL distills the computational patterns of GNNs into a few generalized sparse tensor operations suitable for extensive parallelization. By advocating graph as the central programming abstraction, DGL can perform optimizations transparently. By cautiously adopting a framework-neutral design, DGL allows users to easily port and leverage the existing components across multiple deep learning frameworks. Our evaluation shows that DGL significantly outperforms other popular GNN-oriented frameworks in both speed and memory consumption over a variety of benchmarks and has little overhead for small scale workloads.

Quan Gan, Qipeng Guo, Zheng Zhang et al.

In this paper, we propose and study a novel visual object tracking approach based on convolutional networks and recurrent networks. The proposed approach is distinct from the existing approaches to visual object tracking, such as filtering-based ones and tracking-by-detection ones, in the sense that the tracking system is explicitly trained off-line to track anonymous objects in a noisy environment. The proposed visual tracking model is end-to-end trainable, minimizing any adversarial effect from mismatches in object representation and between the true underlying dynamics and learning dynamics. We empirically show that the proposed tracking approach works well in various scenarios by generating artificial video sequences with varying conditions; the number of objects, amount of noise and the match between the training shapes and test shapes.