Yulong Pei

Tianjin Huang, Tianlong Chen, Meng Fang et al.

Recent works have impressively demonstrated that there exists a subnetwork in randomly initialized convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that can match the performance of the fully trained dense networks at initialization, without any optimization of the weights of the network (i.e., untrained networks). However, the presence of such untrained subnetworks in graph neural networks (GNNs) still remains mysterious. In this paper we carry out the first-of-its-kind exploration of discovering matching untrained GNNs. With sparsity as the core tool, we can find \textit{untrained sparse subnetworks} at the initialization, that can match the performance of \textit{fully trained dense} GNNs. Besides this already encouraging finding of comparable performance, we show that the found untrained subnetworks can substantially mitigate the GNN over-smoothing problem, hence becoming a powerful tool to enable deeper GNNs without bells and whistles. We also observe that such sparse untrained subnetworks have appealing performance in out-of-distribution detection and robustness of input perturbations. We evaluate our method across widely-used GNN architectures on various popular datasets including the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB).

Vibhor Agarwal, Yulong Pei, Salwa Alamir et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising potentials in program generation and no-code automation. However, LLMs are prone to generate hallucinations, i.e., they generate text which sounds plausible but is incorrect. Although there has been a recent surge in research on LLM hallucinations for text generation, similar hallucination phenomenon can happen in code generation. Sometimes the generated code can have syntactical or logical errors as well as more advanced issues like security vulnerabilities, memory leaks, etc. Given the wide adaptation of LLMs to enhance efficiency in code generation and development in general, it becomes imperative to investigate hallucinations in code generation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt at studying hallucinations in the code generated by LLMs. We start by introducing the code hallucination definition and a comprehensive taxonomy of code hallucination types. We propose the first benchmark CodeMirage dataset for code hallucinations. The benchmark contains 1,137 GPT-3.5 generated hallucinated code snippets for Python programming problems from two base datasets - HumanEval and MBPP. We then propose the methodology for code hallucination detection and experiment with open source LLMs such as CodeLLaMA as well as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models using one-shot prompt. We find that GPT-4 performs the best on HumanEval dataset and gives comparable results to the fine-tuned CodeBERT baseline on MBPP dataset. Towards the end, we discuss various mitigation strategies for code hallucinations and conclude our work.

Lu Yin, Vlado Menkovski, Meng Fang et al.

Recent works on sparse neural network training (sparse training) have shown that a compelling trade-off between performance and efficiency can be achieved by training intrinsically sparse neural networks from scratch. Existing sparse training methods usually strive to find the best sparse subnetwork possible in one single run, without involving any expensive dense or pre-training steps. For instance, dynamic sparse training (DST), is capable of reaching a competitive performance of dense training by iteratively evolving the sparse topology during the course of training. In this paper, we argue that it is better to allocate the limited resources to create multiple low-loss sparse subnetworks and superpose them into a stronger one, instead of allocating all resources entirely to find an individual subnetwork. To achieve this, two desiderata are required: (1) efficiently producing many low-loss subnetworks, the so-called cheap tickets, within one training process limited to the standard training time used in dense training; (2) effectively superposing these cheap tickets into one stronger subnetwork. To corroborate our conjecture, we present a novel sparse training approach, termed Sup-tickets, which can satisfy the above two desiderata concurrently in a single sparse-to-sparse training process. Across various modern architectures on CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet, we show that Sup-tickets integrates seamlessly with the existing sparse training methods and demonstrates consistent performance improvement.

Tianjin Huang, Shiwei Liu, Tianlong Chen et al.

Despite the fact that adversarial training has become the de facto method for improving the robustness of deep neural networks, it is well-known that vanilla adversarial training suffers from daunting robust overfitting, resulting in unsatisfactory robust generalization. A number of approaches have been proposed to address these drawbacks such as extra regularization, adversarial weights perturbation, and training with more data over the last few years. However, the robust generalization improvement is yet far from satisfactory. In this paper, we approach this challenge with a brand new perspective -- refining historical optimization trajectories. We propose a new method named \textbf{Weighted Optimization Trajectories (WOT)} that leverages the optimization trajectories of adversarial training in time. We have conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of WOT under various state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. Our results show that WOT integrates seamlessly with the existing adversarial training methods and consistently overcomes the robust overfitting issue, resulting in better adversarial robustness. For example, WOT boosts the robust accuracy of AT-PGD under AA-$L_{\infty}$ attack by 1.53\% $\sim$ 6.11\% and meanwhile increases the clean accuracy by 0.55\%$\sim$5.47\% across SVHN, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet datasets.

Ricky Fajri, Akrati Saxena, Yulong Pei et al.

Active Learning (AL) techniques have proven to be highly effective in reducing data labeling costs across a range of machine learning tasks. Nevertheless, one known challenge of these methods is their potential to introduce unfairness towards sensitive attributes. Although recent approaches have focused on enhancing fairness in AL, they tend to reduce the model's accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy, named Fair Active Learning using fair Clustering, Uncertainty, and Representativeness (FAL-CUR), to improve fairness in AL. FAL-CUR tackles the fairness problem in AL by combining fair clustering with an acquisition function that determines which samples to query based on their uncertainty and representativeness scores. We evaluate the performance of FAL-CUR on four real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate that FAL-CUR achieves a 15% - 20% improvement in fairness compared to the best state-of-the-art method in terms of equalized odds while maintaining stable accuracy scores. Furthermore, an ablation study highlights the crucial roles of fair clustering in preserving fairness and the acquisition function in stabilizing the accuracy performance.

Ricky Maulana Fajri, Yulong Pei, Lu Yin et al.

Despite significant advancements in active learning and adversarial attacks, the intersection of these two fields remains underexplored, particularly in developing robust active learning frameworks against dynamic adversarial threats. The challenge of developing robust active learning frameworks under dynamic adversarial attacks is critical, as these attacks can lead to catastrophic forgetting within the active learning cycle. This paper introduces Robust Active Learning (RoAL), a novel approach designed to address this issue by integrating Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) into the active learning process. Our contributions are threefold: First, we propose a new dynamic adversarial attack that poses significant threats to active learning frameworks. Second, we introduce a novel method that combines EWC with active learning to mitigate catastrophic forgetting caused by dynamic adversarial attacks. Finally, we conduct extensive experimental evaluations to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. The results show that RoAL not only effectively counters dynamic adversarial threats but also significantly reduces the impact of catastrophic forgetting, thereby enhancing the robustness and performance of active learning systems in adversarial environments.

Ethan Callanan, Amarachi Mbakwe, Antony Papadimitriou et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, often matching or even beating state-of-the-art task-specific models. This study aims at assessing the financial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We leverage mock exam questions of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Program to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ChatGPT and GPT-4 in financial analysis, considering Zero-Shot (ZS), Chain-of-Thought (CoT), and Few-Shot (FS) scenarios. We present an in-depth analysis of the models' performance and limitations, and estimate whether they would have a chance at passing the CFA exams. Finally, we outline insights into potential strategies and improvements to enhance the applicability of LLMs in finance. In this perspective, we hope this work paves the way for future studies to continue enhancing LLMs for financial reasoning through rigorous evaluation.

Tianjin Huang, Fang Meng, Li Shen et al.

Large-scale neural networks have demonstrated remarkable performance in different domains like vision and language processing, although at the cost of massive computation resources. As illustrated by compression literature, structural model pruning is a prominent algorithm to encourage model efficiency, thanks to its acceleration-friendly sparsity patterns. One of the key questions of structural pruning is how to estimate the channel significance. In parallel, work on data-centric AI has shown that prompting-based techniques enable impressive generalization of large language models across diverse downstream tasks. In this paper, we investigate a charming possibility - \textit{leveraging visual prompts to capture the channel importance and derive high-quality structural sparsity}. To this end, we propose a novel algorithmic framework, namely \texttt{PASS}. It is a tailored hyper-network to take both visual prompts and network weight statistics as input, and output layer-wise channel sparsity in a recurrent manner. Such designs consider the intrinsic channel dependency between layers. Comprehensive experiments across multiple network architectures and six datasets demonstrate the superiority of \texttt{PASS} in locating good structural sparsity. For example, at the same FLOPs level, \texttt{PASS} subnetworks achieve $1\%\sim 3\%$ better accuracy on Food101 dataset; or with a similar performance of $80\%$ accuracy, \texttt{PASS} subnetworks obtain $0.35\times$ more speedup than the baselines.

Zirui Liang, Yuntao Li, Tianjin Huang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown promise in addressing graph-related problems, including node classification. However, conventional GNNs assume an even distribution of data across classes, which is often not the case in real-world scenarios, where certain classes are severely underrepresented. This leads to suboptimal performance of standard GNNs on imbalanced graphs. In this paper, we introduce a unique approach that tackles imbalanced classification on graphs by considering graph heterophily. We investigate the intricate relationship between class imbalance and graph heterophily, revealing that minority classes not only exhibit a scarcity of samples but also manifest lower levels of homophily, facilitating the propagation of erroneous information among neighboring nodes. Drawing upon this insight, we propose an efficient method, called Fast Im-GBK, which integrates an imbalance classification strategy with heterophily-aware GNNs to effectively address the class imbalance problem while significantly reducing training time. Our experiments on real-world graphs demonstrate our model's superiority in classification performance and efficiency for node classification tasks compared to existing baselines.

Tianchao Li, Yulong Pei

This paper is to introduce an asynchronous and local learning framework for neural networks, named Modular Learning Framework (MOLE). This framework modularizes neural networks by layers, defines the training objective via mutual information for each module, and sequentially trains each module by mutual information maximization. MOLE makes the training become local optimization with gradient-isolated across modules, and this scheme is more biologically plausible than BP. We run experiments on vector-, grid- and graph-type data. In particular, this framework is capable of solving both graph- and node-level tasks for graph-type data. Therefore, MOLE has been experimentally proven to be universally applicable to different types of data.

Shiwei Liu, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Yulong Pei et al.

Sparse neural networks have been widely applied to reduce the computational demands of training and deploying over-parameterized deep neural networks. For inference acceleration, methods that discover a sparse network from a pre-trained dense network (dense-to-sparse training) work effectively. Recently, dynamic sparse training (DST) has been proposed to train sparse neural networks without pre-training a dense model (sparse-to-sparse training), so that the training process can also be accelerated. However, previous sparse-to-sparse methods mainly focus on Multilayer Perceptron Networks (MLPs) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), failing to match the performance of dense-to-sparse methods in the Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) setting. In this paper, we propose an approach to train intrinsically sparse RNNs with a fixed parameter count in one single run, without compromising performance. During training, we allow RNN layers to have a non-uniform redistribution across cell gates for better regularization. Further, we propose SNT-ASGD, a novel variant of the averaged stochastic gradient optimizer, which significantly improves the performance of all sparse training methods for RNNs. Using these strategies, we achieve state-of-the-art sparse training results, better than the dense-to-sparse methods, with various types of RNNs on Penn TreeBank and Wikitext-2 datasets. Our codes are available at https://github.com/Shiweiliuiiiiiii/Selfish-RNN.

Dongsheng Wang, Natraj Raman, Mathieu Sibue et al.

Enterprise documents such as forms, invoices, receipts, reports, contracts, and other similar records, often carry rich semantics at the intersection of textual and spatial modalities. The visual cues offered by their complex layouts play a crucial role in comprehending these documents effectively. In this paper, we present DocLLM, a lightweight extension to traditional large language models (LLMs) for reasoning over visual documents, taking into account both textual semantics and spatial layout. Our model differs from existing multimodal LLMs by avoiding expensive image encoders and focuses exclusively on bounding box information to incorporate the spatial layout structure. Specifically, the cross-alignment between text and spatial modalities is captured by decomposing the attention mechanism in classical transformers to a set of disentangled matrices. Furthermore, we devise a pre-training objective that learns to infill text segments. This approach allows us to address irregular layouts and heterogeneous content frequently encountered in visual documents. The pre-trained model is fine-tuned using a large-scale instruction dataset, covering four core document intelligence tasks. We demonstrate that our solution outperforms SotA LLMs on 14 out of 16 datasets across all tasks, and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets.

Ran Zmigrod, Dongsheng Wang, Mathieu Sibue et al.

The field of visually rich document understanding (VRDU) aims to solve a multitude of well-researched NLP tasks in a multi-modal domain. Several datasets exist for research on specific tasks of VRDU such as document classification (DC), key entity extraction (KEE), entity linking, visual question answering (VQA), inter alia. These datasets cover documents like invoices and receipts with sparse annotations such that they support one or two co-related tasks (e.g., entity extraction and entity linking). Unfortunately, only focusing on a single specific of documents or task is not representative of how documents often need to be processed in the wild - where variety in style and requirements is expected. In this paper, we introduce BuDDIE (Business Document Dataset for Information Extraction), the first multi-task dataset of 1,665 real-world business documents that contains rich and dense annotations for DC, KEE, and VQA. Our dataset consists of publicly available business entity documents from US state government websites. The documents are structured and vary in their style and layout across states and types (e.g., forms, certificates, reports, etc.). We provide data variety and quality metrics for BuDDIE as well as a series of baselines for each task. Our baselines cover traditional textual, multi-modal, and large language model approaches to VRDU.

Ricky Maulana Fajri, Yulong Pei, Lu Yin et al.

In active learning for graph-structured data, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown effectiveness. However, a common challenge in these applications is the underutilization of crucial structural information. To address this problem, we propose the Structural-Clustering PageRank method for improved Active learning (SPA) specifically designed for graph-structured data. SPA integrates community detection using the SCAN algorithm with the PageRank scoring method for efficient and informative sample selection. SPA prioritizes nodes that are not only informative but also central in structure. Through extensive experiments, SPA demonstrates higher accuracy and macro-F1 score over existing methods across different annotation budgets and achieves significant reductions in query time. In addition, the proposed method only adds two hyperparameters, $ε$ and $μ$ in the algorithm to finely tune the balance between structural learning and node selection. This simplicity is a key advantage in active learning scenarios, where extensive hyperparameter tuning is often impractical.

Yirui Liu, Xinghao Qiao, Yulong Pei et al.

This paper introduces the Deep Functional Factor Model (DF2M), a Bayesian nonparametric model designed for analysis of high-dimensional functional time series. DF2M is built upon the Indian Buffet Process and the multi-task Gaussian Process, incorporating a deep kernel function that captures non-Markovian and nonlinear temporal dynamics. Unlike many black-box deep learning models, DF2M offers an explainable approach to utilizing neural networks by constructing a factor model and integrating deep neural networks within the kernel function. Additionally, we develop a computationally efficient variational inference algorithm to infer DF2M. Empirical results from four real-world datasets demonstrate that DF2M provides better explainability and superior predictive accuracy compared to conventional deep learning models for high-dimensional functional time series.

Xianzhi Li, Samuel Chan, Xiaodan Zhu et al.

The most recent large language models(LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown exceptional capabilities of generalist models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks with little or no adaptation. How effective are such models in the financial domain? Understanding this basic question would have a significant impact on many downstream financial analytical tasks. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study and provide experimental evidences of their performance on a wide variety of financial text analytical problems, using eight benchmark datasets from five categories of tasks. We report both the strengths and limitations of the current models by comparing them to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned approaches and the recently released domain-specific pretrained models. We hope our study can help understand the capability of the existing models in the financial domain and facilitate further improvements.

Lu Yin, Vlado Menkovski, Yulong Pei et al.

Few-shot classification tasks aim to classify images in query sets based on only a few labeled examples in support sets. Most studies usually assume that each image in a task has a single and unique class association. Under these assumptions, these algorithms may not be able to identify the proper class assignment when there is no exact matching between support and query classes. For example, given a few images of lions, bikes, and apples to classify a tiger. However, in a more general setting, we could consider the higher-level concept, the large carnivores, to match the tiger to the lion for semantic classification. Existing studies rarely considered this situation due to the incompatibility of label-based supervision with complex conception relationships. In this work, we advance the few-shot learning towards this more challenging scenario, the semantic-based few-shot learning, and propose a method to address the paradigm by capturing the inner semantic relationships using interactive psychometric learning. The experiment results on the CIFAR-100 dataset show the superiority of our method for the semantic-based few-shot learning compared to the baseline.

Zeyu Zhang, Yulong Pei

Graph neural networks (GNNs) learn node representations by passing and aggregating messages between neighboring nodes. GNNs have been applied successfully in several application domains and achieved promising performance. However, GNNs could be vulnerable to structural noise because of the message passing mechanism where noise may be propagated through the entire graph. Although a series of robust GNNs have been proposed, they are evaluated with different structural noises, and it lacks a systematic comparison with consistent settings. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive and systematical comparative study on different types of robust GNNs under consistent structural noise settings. From the noise aspect, we design three different levels of structural noises, i.e., local, community, and global noises. From the model aspect, we select some representative models from sample-based, revision-based, and construction-based robust GNNs. Based on the empirical results, we provide some practical suggestions for robust GNNs selection.

Tianjin Huang, Vlado Menkovski, Yulong Pei et al.

Adversarial training is an approach of increasing the robustness of models to adversarial attacks by including adversarial examples in the training set. One major challenge of producing adversarial examples is to contain sufficient perturbation in the example to flip the model's output while not making severe changes in the example's semantical content. Exuberant change in the semantical content could also change the true label of the example. Adding such examples to the training set results in adverse effects. In this paper, we present the Calibrated Adversarial Training, a method that reduces the adverse effects of semantic perturbations in adversarial training. The method produces pixel-level adaptations to the perturbations based on novel calibrated robust error. We provide theoretical analysis on the calibrated robust error and derive an upper bound for it. Our empirical results show a superior performance of the Calibrated Adversarial Training over a number of public datasets.

Pengfei Jiao, Xuan Guo, Ting Pan et al.

Recently, Network Embedding (NE) has become one of the most attractive research topics in machine learning and data mining. NE approaches have achieved promising performance in various of graph mining tasks including link prediction and node clustering and classification. A wide variety of NE methods focus on the proximity of networks. They learn community-oriented embedding for each node, where the corresponding representations are similar if two nodes are closer to each other in the network. Meanwhile, there is another type of structural similarity, i.e., role-based similarity, which is usually complementary and completely different from the proximity. In order to preserve the role-based structural similarity, the problem of role-oriented NE is raised. However, compared to community-oriented NE problem, there are only a few role-oriented embedding approaches proposed recently. Although less explored, considering the importance of roles in analyzing networks and many applications that role-oriented NE can shed light on, it is necessary and timely to provide a comprehensive overview of existing role-oriented NE methods. In this review, we first clarify the differences between community-oriented and role-oriented network embedding. Afterwards, we propose a general framework for understanding role-oriented NE and a two-level categorization to better classify existing methods. Then, we select some representative methods according to the proposed categorization and briefly introduce them by discussing their motivation, development and differences. Moreover, we conduct comprehensive experiments to empirically evaluate these methods on a variety of role-related tasks including node classification and clustering (role discovery), top-k similarity search and visualization using some widely used synthetic and real-world datasets...

Tianjin Huang, Yulong Pei, Vlado Menkovski et al.

Adversarial training is an approach for increasing model's resilience against adversarial perturbations. Such approaches have been demonstrated to result in models with feature representations that generalize better. However, limited works have been done on adversarial training of models on graph data. In this paper, we raise such a question { does adversarial training improve the generalization of graph representations. We formulate L2 and L1 versions of adversarial training in two powerful node embedding methods: graph autoencoder (GAE) and variational graph autoencoder (VGAE). We conduct extensive experiments on three main applications, i.e. link prediction, node clustering, graph anomaly detection of GAE and VGAE, and demonstrate that both L2 and L1 adversarial training boost the generalization of GAE and VGAE.

Tianjin Huang, Vlado Menkovski, Yulong Pei et al.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial examples that are crafted by imposing imperceptible changes to the inputs. However, these adversarial examples are most successful in white-box settings where the model and its parameters are available. Finding adversarial examples that are transferable to other models or developed in a black-box setting is significantly more difficult. In this paper, we propose the Direction-Aggregated adversarial attacks that deliver transferable adversarial examples. Our method utilizes aggregated direction during the attack process for avoiding the generated adversarial examples overfitting to the white-box model. Extensive experiments on ImageNet show that our proposed method improves the transferability of adversarial examples significantly and outperforms state-of-the-art attacks, especially against adversarial robust models. The best averaged attack success rates of our proposed method reaches 94.6\% against three adversarial trained models and 94.8\% against five defense methods. It also reveals that current defense approaches do not prevent transferable adversarial attacks.

Tianjin Huang, Yulong Pei, Vlado Menkovski et al.

Recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in the problem of anomaly detection on attributed networks due to its importance in both research and practice. Although various approaches have been proposed to solve this problem, two major limitations exist: (1) unsupervised approaches usually work much less efficiently due to the lack of supervisory signal, and (2) existing anomaly detection methods only use local contextual information to detect anomalous nodes, e.g., one- or two-hop information, but ignore the global contextual information. Since anomalous nodes differ from normal nodes in structures and attributes, it is intuitive that the distance between anomalous nodes and their neighbors should be larger than that between normal nodes and their neighbors if we remove the edges connecting anomalous and normal nodes. Thus, hop counts based on both global and local contextual information can be served as the indicators of anomaly. Motivated by this intuition, we propose a hop-count based model (HCM) to detect anomalies by modeling both local and global contextual information. To make better use of hop counts for anomaly identification, we propose to use hop counts prediction as a self-supervised task. We design two anomaly scores based on the hop counts prediction via HCM model to identify anomalies. Besides, we employ Bayesian learning to train HCM model for capturing uncertainty in learned parameters and avoiding overfitting. Extensive experiments on real-world attributed networks demonstrate that our proposed model is effective in anomaly detection.

Tianjin Huang, Vlado Menkovski, Yulong Pei et al.

Deep learning achieves state-of-the-art performance in many tasks but exposes to the underlying vulnerability against adversarial examples. Across existing defense techniques, adversarial training with the projected gradient decent attack (adv.PGD) is considered as one of the most effective ways to achieve moderate adversarial robustness. However, adv.PGD requires too much training time since the projected gradient attack (PGD) takes multiple iterations to generate perturbations. On the other hand, adversarial training with the fast gradient sign method (adv.FGSM) takes much less training time since the fast gradient sign method (FGSM) takes one step to generate perturbations but fails to increase adversarial robustness. In this work, we extend adv.FGSM to make it achieve the adversarial robustness of adv.PGD. We demonstrate that the large curvature along FGSM perturbed direction leads to a large difference in performance of adversarial robustness between adv.FGSM and adv.PGD, and therefore propose combining adv.FGSM with a curvature regularization (adv.FGSMR) in order to bridge the performance gap between adv.FGSM and adv.PGD. The experiments show that adv.FGSMR has higher training efficiency than adv.PGD. In addition, it achieves comparable performance of adversarial robustness on MNIST dataset under white-box attack, and it achieves better performance than adv.PGD under white-box attack and effectively defends the transferable adversarial attack on CIFAR-10 dataset.

Yulong Pei, Tianjin Huang, Werner van Ipenburg et al.

Effectively detecting anomalous nodes in attributed networks is crucial for the success of many real-world applications such as fraud and intrusion detection. Existing approaches have difficulties with three major issues: sparsity and nonlinearity capturing, residual modeling, and network smoothing. We propose Residual Graph Convolutional Network (ResGCN), an attention-based deep residual modeling approach that can tackle these issues: modeling the attributed networks with GCN allows to capture the sparsity and nonlinearity; utilizing a deep neural network allows to directly learn residual from the input, and a residual-based attention mechanism reduces the adverse effect from anomalous nodes and prevents over-smoothing. Extensive experiments on several real-world attributed networks demonstrate the effectiveness of ResGCN in detecting anomalies.

Rahul Radhakrishnan Iyer, Yulong Pei, Katia Sycara

Tweet classification has attracted considerable attention recently. Most of the existing work on tweet classification focuses on topic classification, which classifies tweets into several predefined categories, and sentiment classification, which classifies tweets into positive, negative and neutral. Since tweets are different from conventional text in that they generally are of limited length and contain informal, irregular or new words, so it is difficult to determine user intention to publish a tweet and user attitude towards certain topic. In this paper, we aim to simultaneously classify tweet purpose, i.e., the intention for user to publish a tweet, and position, i.e., supporting, opposing or being neutral to a given topic. By transforming this problem to a multi-label classification problem, a multi-label classification method with post-processing is proposed. Experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of this method and the results outperform the individual classification methods.

Shiwei Liu, Decebal Constantin Mocanu, Amarsagar Reddy Ramapuram Matavalam et al.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have emerged as hot topics in the research community. Despite the success of ANNs, it is challenging to train and deploy modern ANNs on commodity hardware due to the ever-increasing model size and the unprecedented growth in the data volumes. Particularly for microarray data, the very-high dimensionality and the small number of samples make it difficult for machine learning techniques to handle. Furthermore, specialized hardware such as Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is expensive. Sparse neural networks are the leading approaches to address these challenges. However, off-the-shelf sparsity inducing techniques either operate from a pre-trained model or enforce the sparse structure via binary masks. The training efficiency of sparse neural networks cannot be obtained practically. In this paper, we introduce a technique allowing us to train truly sparse neural networks with fixed parameter count throughout training. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method can be applied directly to handle high dimensional data, while achieving higher accuracy than the traditional two phases approaches. Moreover, we have been able to create truly sparse MultiLayer Perceptrons (MLPs) models with over one million neurons and to train them on a typical laptop without GPU, this being way beyond what is possible with any state-of-the-art techniques.

Yulong Pei, Xin Du, Jianpeng Zhang et al.

Network embedding (NE) is playing a principal role in network mining, due to its ability to map nodes into efficient low-dimensional embedding vectors. However, two major limitations exist in state-of-the-art NE methods: role preservation and uncertainty modeling. Almost all previous methods represent a node into a point in space and focus on local structural information, i.e., neighborhood information. However, neighborhood information does not capture global structural information and point vector representation fails in modeling the uncertainty of node representations. In this paper, we propose a new NE framework, struc2gauss, which learns node representations in the space of Gaussian distributions and performs network embedding based on global structural information. struc2gauss first employs a given node similarity metric to measure the global structural information, then generates structural context for nodes and finally learns node representations via Gaussian embedding. Different structural similarity measures of networks and energy functions of Gaussian embedding are investigated. Experiments conducted on real-world networks demonstrate that struc2gauss effectively captures global structural information while state-of-the-art network embedding methods fail to, outperforms other methods on the structure-based clustering and classification task and provides more information on uncertainties of node representations.