Yucheng Shi

Yucheng Shi, Yushun Dong, Qiaoyu Tan et al.

Self-supervised learning with masked autoencoders has recently gained popularity for its ability to produce effective image or textual representations, which can be applied to various downstream tasks without retraining. However, we observe that the current masked autoencoder models lack good generalization ability on graph data. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel graph masked autoencoder framework called GiGaMAE. Different from existing masked autoencoders that learn node presentations by explicitly reconstructing the original graph components (e.g., features or edges), in this paper, we propose to collaboratively reconstruct informative and integrated latent embeddings. By considering embeddings encompassing graph topology and attribute information as reconstruction targets, our model could capture more generalized and comprehensive knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce a mutual information based reconstruction loss that enables the effective reconstruction of multiple targets. This learning objective allows us to differentiate between the exclusive knowledge learned from a single target and common knowledge shared by multiple targets. We evaluate our method on three downstream tasks with seven datasets as benchmarks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of GiGaMAE against state-of-the-art baselines. We hope our results will shed light on the design of foundation models on graph-structured data. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sycny/GiGaMAE.

Yucheng Shi, Kaixiong Zhou, Ninghao Liu

The recent contrastive learning methods, due to their effectiveness in representation learning, have been widely applied to modeling graph data. Random perturbation is widely used to build contrastive views for graph data, which however, could accidentally break graph structures and lead to suboptimal performance. In addition, graph data is usually highly abstract, so it is hard to extract intuitive meanings and design more informed augmentation schemes. Effective representations should preserve key characteristics in data and abandon superfluous information. In this paper, we propose ENGAGE (ExplaNation Guided data AuGmEntation), where explanation guides the contrastive augmentation process to preserve the key parts in graphs and explore removing superfluous information. Specifically, we design an efficient unsupervised explanation method called smoothed activation map as the indicator of node importance in representation learning. Then, we design two data augmentation schemes on graphs for perturbing structural and feature information, respectively. We also provide justification for the proposed method in the framework of information theories. Experiments of both graph-level and node-level tasks, on various model architectures and on different real-world graphs, are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of ENGAGE. The code of ENGAGE can be found: https://github.com/sycny/ENGAGE.

Hao Zhen, Yucheng Shi, Jidong J. Yang et al.

Classification using supervised learning requires annotating a large amount of classes-balanced data for model training and testing. This has practically limited the scope of applications with supervised learning, in particular deep learning. To address the issues associated with limited and imbalanced data, this paper introduces a sample-efficient co-supervised learning paradigm (SEC-CGAN), in which a conditional generative adversarial network (CGAN) is trained alongside the classifier and supplements semantics-conditioned, confidence-aware synthesized examples to the annotated data during the training process. In this setting, the CGAN not only serves as a co-supervisor but also provides complementary quality examples to aid the classifier training in an end-to-end fashion. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed SEC-CGAN outperforms the external classifier GAN (EC-GAN) and a baseline ResNet-18 classifier. For the comparison, all classifiers in above methods adopt the ResNet-18 architecture as the backbone. Particularly, for the Street View House Numbers dataset, using the 5% of training data, a test accuracy of 90.26% is achieved by SEC-CGAN as opposed to 88.59% by EC-GAN and 87.17% by the baseline classifier; for the highway image dataset, using the 10% of training data, a test accuracy of 98.27% is achieved by SEC-CGAN, compared to 97.84% by EC-GAN and 95.52% by the baseline classifier.

Ziqi Zhao, Yucheng Shi, Shushan Wu et al.

Deep learning models developed for time-series associated tasks have become more widely researched nowadays. However, due to the unintuitive nature of time-series data, the interpretability problem -- where we understand what is under the hood of these models -- becomes crucial. The advancement of similar studies in computer vision has given rise to many post-hoc methods, which can also shed light on how to explain time-series models. In this paper, we present a wide range of post-hoc interpretation methods for time-series models based on backpropagation, perturbation, and approximation. We also want to bring focus onto inherently interpretable models, a novel category of interpretation where human-understandable information is designed within the models. Furthermore, we introduce some common evaluation metrics used for the explanations, and propose several directions of future researches on the time-series interpretability problem. As a highlight, our work summarizes not only the well-established interpretation methods, but also a handful of fairly recent and under-developed techniques, which we hope to capture their essence and spark future endeavours to innovate and improvise.