Bingxin Zhou

LG
h-index13
28papers
367citations
Novelty50%
AI Score47

28 Papers

IVJun 15, 2022Code
How GNNs Facilitate CNNs in Mining Geometric Information from Large-Scale Medical Images

Yiqing Shen, Bingxin Zhou, Xinye Xiong et al.

Gigapixel medical images provide massive data, both morphological textures and spatial information, to be mined. Due to the large data scale in histology, deep learning methods play an increasingly significant role as feature extractors. Existing solutions heavily rely on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for global pixel-level analysis, leaving the underlying local geometric structure such as the interaction between cells in the tumor microenvironment unexplored. The topological structure in medical images, as proven to be closely related to tumor evolution, can be well characterized by graphs. To obtain a more comprehensive representation for downstream oncology tasks, we propose a fusion framework for enhancing the global image-level representation captured by CNNs with the geometry of cell-level spatial information learned by graph neural networks (GNN). The fusion layer optimizes an integration between collaborative features of global images and cell graphs. Two fusion strategies have been developed: one with MLP which is simple but turns out efficient through fine-tuning, and the other with Transformer gains a champion in fusing multiple networks. We evaluate our fusion strategies on histology datasets curated from large patient cohorts of colorectal and gastric cancers for three biomarker prediction tasks. Both two models outperform plain CNNs or GNNs, reaching a consistent AUC improvement of more than 5% on various network backbones. The experimental results yield the necessity for combining image-level morphological features with cell spatial relations in medical image analysis. Codes are available at https://github.com/yiqings/HEGnnEnhanceCnn.

AIJul 10, 2024Code
Secondary Structure-Guided Novel Protein Sequence Generation with Latent Graph Diffusion

Yutong Hu, Yang Tan, Andi Han et al.

The advent of deep learning has introduced efficient approaches for de novo protein sequence design, significantly improving success rates and reducing development costs compared to computational or experimental methods. However, existing methods face challenges in generating proteins with diverse lengths and shapes while maintaining key structural features. To address these challenges, we introduce CPDiffusion-SS, a latent graph diffusion model that generates protein sequences based on coarse-grained secondary structural information. CPDiffusion-SS offers greater flexibility in producing a variety of novel amino acid sequences while preserving overall structural constraints, thus enhancing the reliability and diversity of generated proteins. Experimental analyses demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed method in producing diverse and novel sequences, with CPDiffusion-SS surpassing popular baseline methods on open benchmarks across various quantitative measurements. Furthermore, we provide a series of case studies to highlight the biological significance of the generation performance by the proposed method. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/riacd/CPDiffusion-SS

QMApr 13, 2023
Accurate and Definite Mutational Effect Prediction with Lightweight Equivariant Graph Neural Networks

Bingxin Zhou, Outongyi Lv, Kai Yi et al.

Directed evolution as a widely-used engineering strategy faces obstacles in finding desired mutants from the massive size of candidate modifications. While deep learning methods learn protein contexts to establish feasible searching space, many existing models are computationally demanding and fail to predict how specific mutational tests will affect a protein's sequence or function. This research introduces a lightweight graph representation learning scheme that efficiently analyzes the microenvironment of wild-type proteins and recommends practical higher-order mutations exclusive to the user-specified protein and function of interest. Our method enables continuous improvement of the inference model by limited computational resources and a few hundred mutational training samples, resulting in accurate prediction of variant effects that exhibit near-perfect correlation with the ground truth across deep mutational scanning assays of 19 proteins. With its affordability and applicability to both computer scientists and biochemical laboratories, our solution offers a wide range of benefits that make it an ideal choice for the community.

QMJun 8, 2023
Multi-level Protein Representation Learning for Blind Mutational Effect Prediction

Yang Tan, Bingxin Zhou, Yuanhong Jiang et al.

Directed evolution plays an indispensable role in protein engineering that revises existing protein sequences to attain new or enhanced functions. Accurately predicting the effects of protein variants necessitates an in-depth understanding of protein structure and function. Although large self-supervised language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in zero-shot inference using only protein sequences, these models inherently do not interpret the spatial characteristics of protein structures, which are crucial for comprehending protein folding stability and internal molecular interactions. This paper introduces a novel pre-training framework that cascades sequential and geometric analyzers for protein primary and tertiary structures. It guides mutational directions toward desired traits by simulating natural selection on wild-type proteins and evaluates the effects of variants based on their fitness to perform the function. We assess the proposed approach using a public database and two new databases for a variety of variant effect prediction tasks, which encompass a diverse set of proteins and assays from different taxa. The prediction results achieve state-of-the-art performance over other zero-shot learning methods for both single-site mutations and deep mutations.

QMJun 29, 2023
Graph Denoising Diffusion for Inverse Protein Folding

Kai Yi, Bingxin Zhou, Yiqing Shen et al.

Inverse protein folding is challenging due to its inherent one-to-many mapping characteristic, where numerous possible amino acid sequences can fold into a single, identical protein backbone. This task involves not only identifying viable sequences but also representing the sheer diversity of potential solutions. However, existing discriminative models, such as transformer-based auto-regressive models, struggle to encapsulate the diverse range of plausible solutions. In contrast, diffusion probabilistic models, as an emerging genre of generative approaches, offer the potential to generate a diverse set of sequence candidates for determined protein backbones. We propose a novel graph denoising diffusion model for inverse protein folding, where a given protein backbone guides the diffusion process on the corresponding amino acid residue types. The model infers the joint distribution of amino acids conditioned on the nodes' physiochemical properties and local environment. Moreover, we utilize amino acid replacement matrices for the diffusion forward process, encoding the biologically-meaningful prior knowledge of amino acids from their spatial and sequential neighbors as well as themselves, which reduces the sampling space of the generative process. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance over a set of popular baseline methods in sequence recovery and exhibits great potential in generating diverse protein sequences for a determined protein backbone structure.

IVJun 17, 2022
Approximate Equivariance SO(3) Needlet Convolution

Kai Yi, Jialin Chen, Yu Guang Wang et al.

This paper develops a rotation-invariant needlet convolution for rotation group SO(3) to distill multiscale information of spherical signals. The spherical needlet transform is generalized from $\mathbb{S}^2$ onto the SO(3) group, which decomposes a spherical signal to approximate and detailed spectral coefficients by a set of tight framelet operators. The spherical signal during the decomposition and reconstruction achieves rotation invariance. Based on needlet transforms, we form a Needlet approximate Equivariance Spherical CNN (NES) with multiple SO(3) needlet convolutional layers. The network establishes a powerful tool to extract geometric-invariant features of spherical signals. The model allows sufficient network scalability with multi-resolution representation. A robust signal embedding is learned with wavelet shrinkage activation function, which filters out redundant high-pass representation while maintaining approximate rotation invariance. The NES achieves state-of-the-art performance for quantum chemistry regression and Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) delensing reconstruction, which shows great potential for solving scientific challenges with high-resolution and multi-scale spherical signal representation.

LGJul 5, 2023
LLQL: Logistic Likelihood Q-Learning for Reinforcement Learning

Outongyi Lv, Bingxin Zhou

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) can be categorized into online and offline variants. As a pivotal aspect of both online and offline RL, current research on the Bellman equation revolves primarily around optimization techniques and performance enhancement rather than exploring the inherent structural properties of the Bellman error, such as its distribution characteristics. This study investigates the distribution of the Bellman approximation error through iterative exploration of the Bellman equation with the observation that the Bellman error approximately follows the Logistic distribution. Based on this, we proposed the utilization of the Logistic maximum likelihood function (LLoss) as an alternative to the commonly used mean squared error (MSELoss) that assumes a Normal distribution for Bellman errors. We validated the hypotheses through extensive numerical experiments across diverse online and offline environments. In particular, we applied the Logistic correction to loss functions in various RL baseline methods and observed that the results with LLoss consistently outperformed the MSE counterparts. We also conducted the Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests to confirm the reliability of the Logistic distribution. Moreover, our theory connects the Bellman error to the proportional reward scaling phenomenon by providing a distribution-based analysis. Furthermore, we applied the bias-variance decomposition for sampling from the Logistic distribution. The theoretical and empirical insights of this study lay a valuable foundation for future investigations and enhancements centered on the distribution of Bellman error.

LGMay 30, 2022
Embedding Graphs on Grassmann Manifold

Bingxin Zhou, Xuebin Zheng, Yu Guang Wang et al.

Learning efficient graph representation is the key to favorably addressing downstream tasks on graphs, such as node or graph property prediction. Given the non-Euclidean structural property of graphs, preserving the original graph data's similarity relationship in the embedded space needs specific tools and a similarity metric. This paper develops a new graph representation learning scheme, namely EGG, which embeds approximated second-order graph characteristics into a Grassmann manifold. The proposed strategy leverages graph convolutions to learn hidden representations of the corresponding subspace of the graph, which is then mapped to a Grassmann point of a low dimensional manifold through truncated singular value decomposition (SVD). The established graph embedding approximates denoised correlationship of node attributes, as implemented in the form of a symmetric matrix space for Euclidean calculation. The effectiveness of EGG is demonstrated using both clustering and classification tasks at the node level and graph level. It outperforms baseline models on various benchmarks.

LGFeb 28, 2023
Framelet Message Passing

Xinliang Liu, Bingxin Zhou, Chutian Zhang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved champion in wide applications. Neural message passing is a typical key module for feature propagation by aggregating neighboring features. In this work, we propose a new message passing based on multiscale framelet transforms, called Framelet Message Passing. Different from traditional spatial methods, it integrates framelet representation of neighbor nodes from multiple hops away in node message update. We also propose a continuous message passing using neural ODE solvers. It turns both discrete and continuous cases can provably achieve network stability and limit oversmoothing due to the multiscale property of framelets. Numerical experiments on real graph datasets show that the continuous version of the framelet message passing significantly outperforms existing methods when learning heterogeneous graphs and achieves state-of-the-art performance on classic node classification tasks with low computational costs.

QMApr 5, 2023
Graph Representation Learning for Interactive Biomolecule Systems

Xinye Xiong, Bingxin Zhou, Yu Guang Wang

Advances in deep learning models have revolutionized the study of biomolecule systems and their mechanisms. Graph representation learning, in particular, is important for accurately capturing the geometric information of biomolecules at different levels. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the methodologies used to represent biological molecules and systems as computer-recognizable objects, such as sequences, graphs, and surfaces. Moreover, it examines how geometric deep learning models, with an emphasis on graph-based techniques, can analyze biomolecule data to enable drug discovery, protein characterization, and biological system analysis. The study concludes with an overview of the current state of the field, highlighting the challenges that exist and the potential future research directions.

CLOct 28, 2024Code
Retrieval-Enhanced Mutation Mastery: Augmenting Zero-Shot Prediction of Protein Language Model

Yang Tan, Ruilin Wang, Banghao Wu et al.

Enzyme engineering enables the modification of wild-type proteins to meet industrial and research demands by enhancing catalytic activity, stability, binding affinities, and other properties. The emergence of deep learning methods for protein modeling has demonstrated superior results at lower costs compared to traditional approaches such as directed evolution and rational design. In mutation effect prediction, the key to pre-training deep learning models lies in accurately interpreting the complex relationships among protein sequence, structure, and function. This study introduces a retrieval-enhanced protein language model for comprehensive analysis of native properties from sequence and local structural interactions, as well as evolutionary properties from retrieved homologous sequences. The state-of-the-art performance of the proposed ProtREM is validated on over 2 million mutants across 217 assays from an open benchmark (ProteinGym). We also conducted post-hoc analyses of the model's ability to improve the stability and binding affinity of a VHH antibody. Additionally, we designed 10 new mutants on a DNA polymerase and conducted wet-lab experiments to evaluate their enhanced activity at higher temperatures. Both in silico and experimental evaluations confirmed that our method provides reliable predictions of mutation effects, offering an auxiliary tool for biologists aiming to evolve existing enzymes. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/tyang816/ProtREM.

CLApr 23, 2024Code
Simple, Efficient and Scalable Structure-aware Adapter Boosts Protein Language Models

Yang Tan, Mingchen Li, Bingxin Zhou et al.

Fine-tuning Pre-trained protein language models (PLMs) has emerged as a prominent strategy for enhancing downstream prediction tasks, often outperforming traditional supervised learning approaches. As a widely applied powerful technique in natural language processing, employing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning techniques could potentially enhance the performance of PLMs. However, the direct transfer to life science tasks is non-trivial due to the different training strategies and data forms. To address this gap, we introduce SES-Adapter, a simple, efficient, and scalable adapter method for enhancing the representation learning of PLMs. SES-Adapter incorporates PLM embeddings with structural sequence embeddings to create structure-aware representations. We show that the proposed method is compatible with different PLM architectures and across diverse tasks. Extensive evaluations are conducted on 2 types of folding structures with notable quality differences, 9 state-of-the-art baselines, and 9 benchmark datasets across distinct downstream tasks. Results show that compared to vanilla PLMs, SES-Adapter improves downstream task performance by a maximum of 11% and an average of 3%, with significantly accelerated training speed by a maximum of 1034% and an average of 362%, the convergence rate is also improved by approximately 2 times. Moreover, positive optimization is observed even with low-quality predicted structures. The source code for SES-Adapter is available at https://github.com/tyang816/SES-Adapter.

65.0AIMar 28
Self-evolving AI agents for protein discovery and directed evolution

Yang Tan, Lingrong Zhang, Mingchen Li et al.

Protein scientific discovery is bottlenecked by the manual orchestration of information and algorithms, while general agents are insufficient in complex domain projects. VenusFactory2 provides an autonomous framework that shifts from static tool usage to dynamic workflow synthesis via a self-evolving multi-agent infrastructure to address protein-related demands. It outperforms a set of well-known agents on the VenusAgentEval benchmark, and autonomously organizes the discovery and optimization of proteins from a single natural language prompt.

SIOct 2, 2023
A Unified View on Neural Message Passing with Opinion Dynamics for Social Networks

Outongyi Lv, Bingxin Zhou, Jing Wang et al.

Social networks represent a common form of interconnected data frequently depicted as graphs within the domain of deep learning-based inference. These communities inherently form dynamic systems, achieving stability through continuous internal communications and opinion exchanges among social actors along their social ties. In contrast, neural message passing in deep learning provides a clear and intuitive mathematical framework for understanding information propagation and aggregation among connected nodes in graphs. Node representations are dynamically updated by considering both the connectivity and status of neighboring nodes. This research harmonizes concepts from sociometry and neural message passing to analyze and infer the behavior of dynamic systems. Drawing inspiration from opinion dynamics in sociology, we propose ODNet, a novel message passing scheme incorporating bounded confidence, to refine the influence weight of local nodes for message propagation. We adjust the similarity cutoffs of bounded confidence and influence weights of ODNet and define opinion exchange rules that align with the characteristics of social network graphs. We show that ODNet enhances prediction performance across various graph types and alleviates oversmoothing issues. Furthermore, our approach surpasses conventional baselines in graph representation learning and proves its practical significance in analyzing real-world co-occurrence networks of metabolic genes. Remarkably, our method simplifies complex social network graphs solely by leveraging knowledge of interaction frequencies among entities within the system. It accurately identifies internal communities and the roles of genes in different metabolic pathways, including opinion leaders, bridge communicators, and isolators.

LGMay 17, 2025Code
VenusX: Unlocking Fine-Grained Functional Understanding of Proteins

Yang Tan, Wenrui Gou, Bozitao Zhong et al.

Deep learning models have driven significant progress in predicting protein function and interactions at the protein level. While these advancements have been invaluable for many biological applications such as enzyme engineering and function annotation, a more detailed perspective is essential for understanding protein functional mechanisms and evaluating the biological knowledge captured by models. To address this demand, we introduce VenusX, the first large-scale benchmark for fine-grained functional annotation and function-based protein pairing at the residue, fragment, and domain levels. VenusX comprises three major task categories across six types of annotations, including residue-level binary classification, fragment-level multi-class classification, and pairwise functional similarity scoring for identifying critical active sites, binding sites, conserved sites, motifs, domains, and epitopes. The benchmark features over 878,000 samples curated from major open-source databases such as InterPro, BioLiP, and SAbDab. By providing mixed-family and cross-family splits at three sequence identity thresholds, our benchmark enables a comprehensive assessment of model performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios. For baseline evaluation, we assess a diverse set of popular and open-source models, including pre-trained protein language models, sequence-structure hybrids, structure-based methods, and alignment-based techniques. Their performance is reported across all benchmark datasets and evaluation settings using multiple metrics, offering a thorough comparison and a strong foundation for future research. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ai4protein/VenusX.

CLMar 19, 2025Code
VenusFactory: A Unified Platform for Protein Engineering Data Retrieval and Language Model Fine-Tuning

Yang Tan, Chen Liu, Jingyuan Gao et al.

Natural language processing (NLP) has significantly influenced scientific domains beyond human language, including protein engineering, where pre-trained protein language models (PLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success. However, interdisciplinary adoption remains limited due to challenges in data collection, task benchmarking, and application. This work presents VenusFactory, a versatile engine that integrates biological data retrieval, standardized task benchmarking, and modular fine-tuning of PLMs. VenusFactory supports both computer science and biology communities with choices of both a command-line execution and a Gradio-based no-code interface, integrating $40+$ protein-related datasets and $40+$ popular PLMs. All implementations are open-sourced on https://github.com/tyang816/VenusFactory.

QMOct 12, 2025Code
Fast and Interpretable Protein Substructure Alignment via Optimal Transport

Zhiyu Wang, Bingxin Zhou, Jing Wang et al.

Proteins are essential biological macromolecules that execute life functions. Local motifs within protein structures, such as active sites, are the most critical components for linking structure to function and are key to understanding protein evolution and enabling protein engineering. Existing computational methods struggle to identify and compare these local structures, which leaves a significant gap in understanding protein structures and harnessing their functions. This study presents PLASMA, the first deep learning framework for efficient and interpretable residue-level protein substructure alignment. We reformulate the problem as a regularized optimal transport task and leverage differentiable Sinkhorn iterations. For a pair of input protein structures, PLASMA outputs a clear alignment matrix with an interpretable overall similarity score. Through extensive quantitative evaluations and three biological case studies, we demonstrate that PLASMA achieves accurate, lightweight, and interpretable residue-level alignment. Additionally, we introduce PLASMA-PF, a training-free variant that provides a practical alternative when training data are unavailable. Our method addresses a critical gap in protein structure analysis tools and offers new opportunities for functional annotation, evolutionary studies, and structure-based drug design. Reproducibility is ensured via our official implementation at https://github.com/ZW471/PLASMA-Protein-Local-Alignment.git.

CVJan 8, 2024
Two-stream joint matching method based on contrastive learning for few-shot action recognition

Long Deng, Ziqiang Li, Bingxin Zhou et al.

Although few-shot action recognition based on metric learning paradigm has achieved significant success, it fails to address the following issues: (1) inadequate action relation modeling and underutilization of multi-modal information; (2) challenges in handling video matching problems with different lengths and speeds, and video matching problems with misalignment of video sub-actions. To address these issues, we propose a Two-Stream Joint Matching method based on contrastive learning (TSJM), which consists of two modules: Multi-modal Contrastive Learning Module (MCL) and Joint Matching Module (JMM). The objective of the MCL is to extensively investigate the inter-modal mutual information relationships, thereby thoroughly extracting modal information to enhance the modeling of action relationships. The JMM aims to simultaneously address the aforementioned video matching problems. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated on two widely used few shot action recognition datasets, namely, SSv2 and Kinetics. Comprehensive ablation experiments are also conducted to substantiate the efficacy of our proposed approach.

QMMay 14, 2025
Sequence-Only Prediction of Binding Affinity Changes: A Robust and Interpretable Model for Antibody Engineering

Chen Liu, Mingchen Li, Yang Tan et al.

A pivotal area of research in antibody engineering is to find effective modifications that enhance antibody-antigen binding affinity. Traditional wet-lab experiments assess mutants in a costly and time-consuming manner. Emerging deep learning solutions offer an alternative by modeling antibody structures to predict binding affinity changes. However, they heavily depend on high-quality complex structures, which are frequently unavailable in practice. Therefore, we propose ProtAttBA, a deep learning model that predicts binding affinity changes based solely on the sequence information of antibody-antigen complexes. ProtAttBA employs a pre-training phase to learn protein sequence patterns, following a supervised training phase using labeled antibody-antigen complex data to train a cross-attention-based regressor for predicting binding affinity changes. We evaluated ProtAttBA on three open benchmarks under different conditions. Compared to both sequence- and structure-based prediction methods, our approach achieves competitive performance, demonstrating notable robustness, especially with uncertain complex structures. Notably, our method possesses interpretability from the attention mechanism. We show that the learned attention scores can identify critical residues with impacts on binding affinity. This work introduces a rapid and cost-effective computational tool for antibody engineering, with the potential to accelerate the development of novel therapeutic antibodies.

QMJun 28, 2024
Protein Representation Learning with Sequence Information Embedding: Does it Always Lead to a Better Performance?

Yang Tan, Lirong Zheng, Bozitao Zhong et al.

Deep learning has become a crucial tool in studying proteins. While the significance of modeling protein structure has been discussed extensively in the literature, amino acid types are typically included in the input as a default operation for many inference tasks. This study demonstrates with structure alignment task that embedding amino acid types in some cases may not help a deep learning model learn better representation. To this end, we propose ProtLOCA, a local geometry alignment method based solely on amino acid structure representation. The effectiveness of ProtLOCA is examined by a global structure-matching task on protein pairs with an independent test dataset based on CATH labels. Our method outperforms existing sequence- and structure-based representation learning methods by more quickly and accurately matching structurally consistent protein domains. Furthermore, in local structure pairing tasks, ProtLOCA for the first time provides a valid solution to highlight common local structures among proteins with different overall structures but the same function. This suggests a new possibility for using deep learning methods to analyze protein structure to infer function.

LGFeb 10, 2022
Robust Graph Representation Learning for Local Corruption Recovery

Bingxin Zhou, Yuanhong Jiang, Yu Guang Wang et al.

The performance of graph representation learning is affected by the quality of graph input. While existing research usually pursues a globally smoothed graph embedding, we believe the rarely observed anomalies are as well harmful to an accurate prediction. This work establishes a graph learning scheme that automatically detects (locally) corrupted feature attributes and recovers robust embedding for prediction tasks. The detection operation leverages a graph autoencoder, which does not make any assumptions about the distribution of the local corruptions. It pinpoints the positions of the anomalous node attributes in an unbiased mask matrix, where robust estimations are recovered with sparsity promoting regularizer. The optimizer approaches a new embedding that is sparse in the framelet domain and conditionally close to input observations. Extensive experiments are provided to validate our proposed model can recover a robust graph representation from black-box poisoning and achieve excellent performance.

LGNov 15, 2021
Spectral Transform Forms Scalable Transformer

Bingxin Zhou, Xinliang Liu, Yuehua Liu et al.

Many real-world relational systems, such as social networks and biological systems, contain dynamic interactions. When learning dynamic graph representation, it is essential to employ sequential temporal information and geometric structure. Mainstream work achieves topological embedding via message passing networks (e.g., GCN, GAT). The temporal evolution, on the other hand, is conventionally expressed via memory units (e.g., LSTM or GRU) that possess convenient information filtration in a gate mechanism. Though, such a design prevents large-scale input sequence due to the over-complicated encoding. This work learns from the philosophy of self-attention and proposes an efficient spectral-based neural unit that employs informative long-range temporal interaction. The developed spectral window unit (SWINIT) model predicts scalable dynamic graphs with assured efficiency. The architecture is assembled with a few simple effective computational blocks that constitute randomized SVD, MLP, and graph Framelet convolution. The SVD plus MLP module encodes the long-short-term feature evolution of the dynamic graph events. A fast framelet graph transform in the framelet convolution embeds the structural dynamics. Both strategies enhance the model's ability on scalable analysis. In particular, the iterative SVD approximation shrinks the computational complexity of attention to O(Nd\log(d)) for the dynamic graph with N edges and d edge features, and the multiscale transform of framelet convolution allows sufficient scalability in the network training. Our SWINIT achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of online continuous-time dynamic graph learning tasks, while compared to baseline methods, the number of its learnable parameters reduces by up to seven times.

LGNov 5, 2021
Graph Denoising with Framelet Regularizer

Bingxin Zhou, Ruikun Li, Xuebin Zheng et al.

As graph data collected from the real world is merely noise-free, a practical representation of graphs should be robust to noise. Existing research usually focuses on feature smoothing but leaves the geometric structure untouched. Furthermore, most work takes L2-norm that pursues a global smoothness, which limits the expressivity of graph neural networks. This paper tailors regularizers for graph data in terms of both feature and structure noises, where the objective function is efficiently solved with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The proposed scheme allows to take multiple layers without the concern of over-smoothing, and it guarantees convergence to the optimal solutions. Empirical study proves that our model achieves significantly better performance compared with popular graph convolutions even when the graph is heavily contaminated.

LGFeb 13, 2021
How Framelets Enhance Graph Neural Networks

Xuebin Zheng, Bingxin Zhou, Junbin Gao et al.

This paper presents a new approach for assembling graph neural networks based on framelet transforms. The latter provides a multi-scale representation for graph-structured data. We decompose an input graph into low-pass and high-pass frequencies coefficients for network training, which then defines a framelet-based graph convolution. The framelet decomposition naturally induces a graph pooling strategy by aggregating the graph feature into low-pass and high-pass spectra, which considers both the feature values and geometry of the graph data and conserves the total information. The graph neural networks with the proposed framelet convolution and pooling achieve state-of-the-art performance in many node and graph prediction tasks. Moreover, we propose shrinkage as a new activation for the framelet convolution, which thresholds high-frequency information at different scales. Compared to ReLU, shrinkage activation improves model performance on denoising and signal compression: noises in both node and structure can be significantly reduced by accurately cutting off the high-pass coefficients from framelet decomposition, and the signal can be compressed to less than half its original size with well-preserved prediction performance.

LGDec 12, 2020
Decimated Framelet System on Graphs and Fast G-Framelet Transforms

Xuebin Zheng, Bingxin Zhou, Yu Guang Wang et al.

Graph representation learning has many real-world applications, from super-resolution imaging, 3D computer vision to drug repurposing, protein classification, social networks analysis. An adequate representation of graph data is vital to the learning performance of a statistical or machine learning model for graph-structured data. In this paper, we propose a novel multiscale representation system for graph data, called decimated framelets, which form a localized tight frame on the graph. The decimated framelet system allows storage of the graph data representation on a coarse-grained chain and processes the graph data at multi scales where at each scale, the data is stored at a subgraph. Based on this, we then establish decimated G-framelet transforms for the decomposition and reconstruction of the graph data at multi resolutions via a constructive data-driven filter bank. The graph framelets are built on a chain-based orthonormal basis that supports fast graph Fourier transforms. From this, we give a fast algorithm for the decimated G-framelet transforms, or FGT, that has linear computational complexity O(N) for a graph of size N. The theory of decimated framelets and FGT is verified with numerical examples for random graphs. The effectiveness is demonstrated by real-world applications, including multiresolution analysis for traffic network, and graph neural networks for graph classification tasks.

LGJul 22, 2020
MathNet: Haar-Like Wavelet Multiresolution-Analysis for Graph Representation and Learning

Xuebin Zheng, Bingxin Zhou, Ming Li et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently caught great attention and achieved significant progress in graph-level applications. In this paper, we propose a framework for graph neural networks with multiresolution Haar-like wavelets, or MathNet, with interrelated convolution and pooling strategies. The underlying method takes graphs in different structures as input and assembles consistent graph representations for readout layers, which then accomplishes label prediction. To achieve this, the multiresolution graph representations are first constructed and fed into graph convolutional layers for processing. The hierarchical graph pooling layers are then involved to downsample graph resolution while simultaneously remove redundancy within graph signals. The whole workflow could be formed with a multi-level graph analysis, which not only helps embed the intrinsic topological information of each graph into the GNN, but also supports fast computation of forward and adjoint graph transforms. We show by extensive experiments that the proposed framework obtains notable accuracy gains on graph classification and regression tasks with performance stability. The proposed MathNet outperforms various existing GNN models, especially on big data sets.

LGJan 17, 2020
On the Trend-corrected Variant of Adaptive Stochastic Optimization Methods

Bingxin Zhou, Xuebin Zheng, Junbin Gao

Adam-type optimizers, as a class of adaptive moment estimation methods with the exponential moving average scheme, have been successfully used in many applications of deep learning. Such methods are appealing due to the capability on large-scale sparse datasets with high computational efficiency. In this paper, we present a new framework for Adam-type methods with the trend information when updating the parameters with the adaptive step size and gradients. The additional terms in the algorithm promise an efficient movement on the complex cost surface, and thus the loss would converge more rapidly. We show empirically the importance of adding the trend component, where our framework outperforms the conventional Adam and AMSGrad methods constantly on the classical models with several real-world datasets.

LGFeb 11, 2019
Manifold Optimization Assisted Gaussian Variational Approximation

Bingxin Zhou, Junbin Gao, Minh-Ngoc Tran et al.

Gaussian variational approximation is a popular methodology to approximate posterior distributions in Bayesian inference especially in high dimensional and large data settings. To control the computational cost while being able to capture the correlations among the variables, the low rank plus diagonal structure was introduced in the previous literature for the Gaussian covariance matrix. For a specific Bayesian learning task, the uniqueness of the solution is usually ensured by imposing stringent constraints on the parameterized covariance matrix, which could break down during the optimization process. In this paper, we consider two special covariance structures by applying the Stiefel manifold and Grassmann manifold constraints, to address the optimization difficulty in such factorization architectures. To speed up the updating process with minimum hyperparameter-tuning efforts, we design two new schemes of Riemannian stochastic gradient descent methods and compare them with other existing methods of optimizing on manifolds. In addition to fixing the identification issue, results from both simulation and empirical experiments prove the ability of the proposed methods of obtaining competitive accuracy and comparable converge speed in both high-dimensional and large-scale learning tasks.