arXiv subjects

Christos Faloutsos

Publications and source records attributed to Christos Faloutsos.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

PaGE-Link: Path-based Graph Neural Network Explanation for Heterogeneous Link Prediction

Transparency and accountability have become major concerns for black-box machine learning (ML) models. Proper explanations for the model behavior increase model transparency and help researchers develop more accountable models. Graph neural networks (GNN) have recently shown superior performance in many graph ML problems than traditional methods, and explaining them has attracted increased interest. However, GNN explanation for link prediction (LP) is lacking in the literature. LP is an essential GNN task and corresponds to web applications like recommendation and sponsored search on web. Given existing GNN explanation methods only address node/graph-level tasks, we propose Path-based GNN Explanation for heterogeneous Link prediction (PaGE-Link) that generates explanations with connection interpretability, enjoys model scalability, and handles graph heterogeneity. Qualitatively, PaGE-Link can generate explanations as paths connecting a node pair, which naturally captures connections between the two nodes and easily transfer to human-interpretable explanations. Quantitatively, explanations generated by PaGE-Link improve AUC for recommendation on citation and user-item graphs by 9 - 35% and are chosen as better by 78.79% of responses in human evaluation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Train Your Own GNN Teacher: Graph-Aware Distillation on Textual Graphs

How can we learn effective node representations on textual graphs? Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that use Language Models (LMs) to encode textual information of graphs achieve state-of-the-art performance in many node classification tasks. Yet, combining GNNs with LMs has not been widely explored for practical deployments due to its scalability issues. In this work, we tackle this challenge by developing a Graph-Aware Distillation framework (GRAD) to encode graph structures into an LM for graph-free, fast inference. Different from conventional knowledge distillation, GRAD jointly optimizes a GNN teacher and a graph-free student over the graph's nodes via a shared LM. This encourages the graph-free student to exploit graph information encoded by the GNN teacher while at the same time, enables the GNN teacher to better leverage textual information from unlabeled nodes. As a result, the teacher and the student models learn from each other to improve their overall performance. Experiments in eight node classification benchmarks in both transductive and inductive settings showcase GRAD's superiority over existing distillation approaches for textual graphs.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

CGC: Contrastive Graph Clustering for Community Detection and Tracking

Given entities and their interactions in the web data, which may have occurred at different time, how can we find communities of entities and track their evolution? In this paper, we approach this important task from graph clustering perspective. Recently, state-of-the-art clustering performance in various domains has been achieved by deep clustering methods. Especially, deep graph clustering (DGC) methods have successfully extended deep clustering to graph-structured data by learning node representations and cluster assignments in a joint optimization framework. Despite some differences in modeling choices (e.g., encoder architectures), existing DGC methods are mainly based on autoencoders and use the same clustering objective with relatively minor adaptations. Also, while many real-world graphs are dynamic, previous DGC methods considered only static graphs. In this work, we develop CGC, a novel end-to-end framework for graph clustering, which fundamentally differs from existing methods. CGC learns node embeddings and cluster assignments in a contrastive graph learning framework, where positive and negative samples are carefully selected in a multi-level scheme such that they reflect hierarchical community structures and network homophily. Also, we extend CGC for time-evolving data, where temporal graph clustering is performed in an incremental learning fashion, with the ability to detect change points. Extensive evaluation on real-world graphs demonstrates that the proposed CGC consistently outperforms existing methods.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

ExplainFix: Explainable Spatially Fixed Deep Networks

Is there an initialization for deep networks that requires no learning? ExplainFix adopts two design principles: the "fixed filters" principle that all spatial filter weights of convolutional neural networks can be fixed at initialization and never learned, and the "nimbleness" principle that only few network parameters suffice. We contribute (a) visual model-based explanations, (b) speed and accuracy gains, and (c) novel tools for deep convolutional neural networks. ExplainFix gives key insights that spatially fixed networks should have a steered initialization, that spatial convolution layers tend to prioritize low frequencies, and that most network parameters are not necessary in spatially fixed models. ExplainFix models have up to 100x fewer spatial filter kernels than fully learned models and matching or improved accuracy. Our extensive empirical analysis confirms that ExplainFix guarantees nimbler models (train up to 17\% faster with channel pruning), matching or improved predictive performance (spanning 13 distinct baseline models, four architectures and two medical image datasets), improved robustness to larger learning rate, and robustness to varying model size. We are first to demonstrate that all spatial filters in state-of-the-art convolutional deep networks can be fixed at initialization, not learned.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

OrthoReg: Improving Graph-regularized MLPs via Orthogonality Regularization

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are currently dominating in modeling graph-structure data, while their high reliance on graph structure for inference significantly impedes them from widespread applications. By contrast, Graph-regularized MLPs (GR-MLPs) implicitly inject the graph structure information into model weights, while their performance can hardly match that of GNNs in most tasks. This motivates us to study the causes of the limited performance of GR-MLPs. In this paper, we first demonstrate that node embeddings learned from conventional GR-MLPs suffer from dimensional collapse, a phenomenon in which the largest a few eigenvalues dominate the embedding space, through empirical observations and theoretical analysis. As a result, the expressive power of the learned node representations is constrained. We further propose OrthoReg, a novel GR-MLP model to mitigate the dimensional collapse issue. Through a soft regularization loss on the correlation matrix of node embeddings, OrthoReg explicitly encourages orthogonal node representations and thus can naturally avoid dimensionally collapsed representations. Experiments on traditional transductive semi-supervised classification tasks and inductive node classification for cold-start scenarios demonstrate its effectiveness and superiority.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

HeartSpot: Privatized and Explainable Data Compression for Cardiomegaly Detection

Advances in data-driven deep learning for chest X-ray image analysis underscore the need for explainability, privacy, large datasets and significant computational resources. We frame privacy and explainability as a lossy single-image compression problem to reduce both computational and data requirements without training. For Cardiomegaly detection in chest X-ray images, we propose HeartSpot and four spatial bias priors. HeartSpot priors define how to sample pixels based on domain knowledge from medical literature and from machines. HeartSpot privatizes chest X-ray images by discarding up to 97% of pixels, such as those that reveal the shape of the thoracic cage, bones, small lesions and other sensitive features. HeartSpot priors are ante-hoc explainable and give a human-interpretable image of the preserved spatial features that clearly outlines the heart. HeartSpot offers strong compression, with up to 32x fewer pixels and 11x smaller filesize. Cardiomegaly detectors using HeartSpot are up to 9x faster to train or at least as accurate (up to +.01 AUC ROC) when compared to a baseline DenseNet121. HeartSpot is post-hoc explainable by re-using existing attribution methods without requiring access to the original non-privatized image. In summary, HeartSpot improves speed and accuracy, reduces image size, improves privacy and ensures explainability. Source code: https://www.github.com/adgaudio/HeartSpot

eess.IV↗

arXiv2022

ScatterSample: Diversified Label Sampling for Data Efficient Graph Neural Network Learning

What target labels are most effective for graph neural network (GNN) training? In some applications where GNNs excel-like drug design or fraud detection, labeling new instances is expensive. We develop a data-efficient active sampling framework, ScatterSample, to train GNNs under an active learning setting. ScatterSample employs a sampling module termed DiverseUncertainty to collect instances with large uncertainty from different regions of the sample space for labeling. To ensure diversification of the selected nodes, DiverseUncertainty clusters the high uncertainty nodes and selects the representative nodes from each cluster. Our ScatterSample algorithm is further supported by rigorous theoretical analysis demonstrating its advantage compared to standard active sampling methods that aim to simply maximize the uncertainty and not diversify the samples. In particular, we show that ScatterSample is able to efficiently reduce the model uncertainty over the whole sample space. Our experiments on five datasets show that ScatterSample significantly outperforms the other GNN active learning baselines, specifically it reduces the sampling cost by up to 50% while achieving the same test accuracy.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

ColdGuess: A General and Effective Relational Graph Convolutional Network to Tackle Cold Start Cases

Low-quality listings and bad actor behavior in online retail websites threatens e-commerce business as these result in sub-optimal buying experience and erode customer trust. When a new listing is created, how to tell it has good-quality? Is the method effective, fast, and scalable? Previous approaches often have three limitations/challenges: (1) unable to handle cold start problems where new sellers/listings lack sufficient selling histories. (2) inability of scoring hundreds of millions of listings at scale, or compromise performance for scalability. (3) has space challenges from large-scale graph with giant e-commerce business size. To overcome these limitations/challenges, we proposed ColdGuess, an inductive graph-based risk predictor built upon a heterogeneous seller product graph, which effectively identifies risky seller/product/listings at scale. ColdGuess tackles the large-scale graph by consolidated nodes, and addresses the cold start problems using homogeneous influence1. The evaluation on real data demonstrates that ColdGuess has stable performance as the number of unknown features increases. It outperforms the lightgbm2 by up to 34 pcp ROC-AUC in a cold start case when a new seller sells a new product . The resulting system, ColdGuess, is effective, adaptable to changing risky seller behavior, and is already in production

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

OA-Mine: Open-World Attribute Mining for E-Commerce Products with Weak Supervision

Automatic extraction of product attributes from their textual descriptions is essential for online shopper experience. One inherent challenge of this task is the emerging nature of e-commerce products -- we see new types of products with their unique set of new attributes constantly. Most prior works on this matter mine new values for a set of known attributes but cannot handle new attributes that arose from constantly changing data. In this work, we study the attribute mining problem in an open-world setting to extract novel attributes and their values. Instead of providing comprehensive training data, the user only needs to provide a few examples for a few known attribute types as weak supervision. We propose a principled framework that first generates attribute value candidates and then groups them into clusters of attributes. The candidate generation step probes a pre-trained language model to extract phrases from product titles. Then, an attribute-aware fine-tuning method optimizes a multitask objective and shapes the language model representation to be attribute-discriminative. Finally, we discover new attributes and values through the self-ensemble of our framework, which handles the open-world challenge. We run extensive experiments on a large distantly annotated development set and a gold standard human-annotated test set that we collected. Our model significantly outperforms strong baselines and can generalize to unseen attributes and product types.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Real-Time Anomaly Detection in Edge Streams

Given a stream of graph edges from a dynamic graph, how can we assign anomaly scores to edges in an online manner, for the purpose of detecting unusual behavior, using constant time and memory? Existing approaches aim to detect individually surprising edges. In this work, we propose MIDAS, which focuses on detecting microcluster anomalies, or suddenly arriving groups of suspiciously similar edges, such as lockstep behavior, including denial of service attacks in network traffic data. We further propose MIDAS-F, to solve the problem by which anomalies are incorporated into the algorithm's internal states, creating a `poisoning' effect that can allow future anomalies to slip through undetected. MIDAS-F introduces two modifications: 1) We modify the anomaly scoring function, aiming to reduce the `poisoning' effect of newly arriving edges; 2) We introduce a conditional merge step, which updates the algorithm's data structures after each time tick, but only if the anomaly score is below a threshold value, also to reduce the `poisoning' effect. Experiments show that MIDAS-F has significantly higher accuracy than MIDAS. MIDAS has the following properties: (a) it detects microcluster anomalies while providing theoretical guarantees about its false positive probability; (b) it is online, thus processing each edge in constant time and constant memory, and also processes the data orders-of-magnitude faster than state-of-the-art approaches; (c) it provides up to 62% higher ROC-AUC than state-of-the-art approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Coarse-to-Fine Sparse Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation aims to model dynamic user behavior from historical interactions. Self-attentive methods have proven effective at capturing short-term dynamics and long-term preferences. Despite their success, these approaches still struggle to model sparse data, on which they struggle to learn high-quality item representations. We propose to model user dynamics from shopping intents and interacted items simultaneously. The learned intents are coarse-grained and work as prior knowledge for item recommendation. To this end, we present a coarse-to-fine self-attention framework, namely CaFe, which explicitly learns coarse-grained and fine-grained sequential dynamics. Specifically, CaFe first learns intents from coarse-grained sequences which are dense and hence provide high-quality user intent representations. Then, CaFe fuses intent representations into item encoder outputs to obtain improved item representations. Finally, we infer recommended items based on representations of items and corresponding intents. Experiments on sparse datasets show that CaFe outperforms state-of-the-art self-attentive recommenders by 44.03% NDCG@5 on average.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

EvoKG: Jointly Modeling Event Time and Network Structure for Reasoning over Temporal Knowledge Graphs

How can we perform knowledge reasoning over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs)? TKGs represent facts about entities and their relations, where each fact is associated with a timestamp. Reasoning over TKGs, i.e., inferring new facts from time-evolving KGs, is crucial for many applications to provide intelligent services. However, despite the prevalence of real-world data that can be represented as TKGs, most methods focus on reasoning over static knowledge graphs, or cannot predict future events. In this paper, we present a problem formulation that unifies the two major problems that need to be addressed for an effective reasoning over TKGs, namely, modeling the event time and the evolving network structure. Our proposed method EvoKG jointly models both tasks in an effective framework, which captures the ever-changing structural and temporal dynamics in TKGs via recurrent event modeling, and models the interactions between entities based on the temporal neighborhood aggregation framework. Further, EvoKG achieves an accurate modeling of event time, using flexible and efficient mechanisms based on neural density estimation. Experiments show that EvoKG outperforms existing methods in terms of effectiveness (up to 77% and 116% more accurate time and link prediction) and efficiency.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Dynamic Graph-Based Anomaly Detection in the Electrical Grid

Given sensor readings over time from a power grid, how can we accurately detect when an anomaly occurs? A key part of achieving this goal is to use the network of power grid sensors to quickly detect, in real-time, when any unusual events, whether natural faults or malicious, occur on the power grid. Existing bad-data detectors in the industry lack the sophistication to robustly detect broad types of anomalies, especially those due to emerging cyber-attacks, since they operate on a single measurement snapshot of the grid at a time. New ML methods are more widely applicable, but generally do not consider the impact of topology change on sensor measurements and thus cannot accommodate regular topology adjustments in historical data. Hence, we propose DYNWATCH, a domain knowledge based and topology-aware algorithm for anomaly detection using sensors placed on a dynamic grid. Our approach is accurate, outperforming existing approaches by 20% or more (F-measure) in experiments; and fast, running in less than 1.7ms on average per time tick per sensor on a 60K+ branch case using a laptop computer, and scaling linearly in the size of the graph.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

gen2Out: Detecting and Ranking Generalized Anomalies

In a cloud of m-dimensional data points, how would we spot, as well as rank, both single-point- as well as group- anomalies? We are the first to generalize anomaly detection in two dimensions: The first dimension is that we handle both point-anomalies, as well as group-anomalies, under a unified view -- we shall refer to them as generalized anomalies. The second dimension is that gen2Out not only detects, but also ranks, anomalies in suspiciousness order. Detection, and ranking, of anomalies has numerous applications: For example, in EEG recordings of an epileptic patient, an anomaly may indicate a seizure; in computer network traffic data, it may signify a power failure, or a DoS/DDoS attack. We start by setting some reasonable axioms; surprisingly, none of the earlier methods pass all the axioms. Our main contribution is the gen2Out algorithm, that has the following desirable properties: (a) Principled and Sound anomaly scoring that obeys the axioms for detectors, (b) Doubly-general in that it detects, as well as ranks generalized anomaly -- both point- and group-anomalies, (c) Scalable, it is fast and scalable, linear on input size. (d) Effective, experiments on real-world epileptic recordings (200GB) demonstrate effectiveness of gen2Out as confirmed by clinicians. Experiments on 27 real-world benchmark datasets show that gen2Out detects ground truth groups, matches or outperforms point-anomaly baseline algorithms on accuracy, with no competition for group-anomalies and requires about 2 minutes for 1 million data points on a stock machine.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Benefit-aware Early Prediction of Health Outcomes on Multivariate EEG Time Series

Given a cardiac-arrest patient being monitored in the ICU (intensive care unit) for brain activity, how can we predict their health outcomes as early as possible? Early decision-making is critical in many applications, e.g. monitoring patients may assist in early intervention and improved care. On the other hand, early prediction on EEG data poses several challenges: (i) earliness-accuracy trade-off; observing more data often increases accuracy but sacrifices earliness, (ii) large-scale (for training) and streaming (online decision-making) data processing, and (iii) multi-variate (due to multiple electrodes) and multi-length (due to varying length of stay of patients) time series. Motivated by this real-world application, we present BeneFitter that infuses the incurred savings from an early prediction as well as the cost from misclassification into a unified domain-specific target called benefit. Unifying these two quantities allows us to directly estimate a single target (i.e. benefit), and importantly, dictates exactly when to output a prediction: when benefit estimate becomes positive. BeneFitter (a) is efficient and fast, with training time linear in the number of input sequences, and can operate in real-time for decision-making, (b) can handle multi-variate and variable-length time-series, suitable for patient data, and (c) is effective, providing up to 2x time-savings with equal or better accuracy as compared to competitors.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Bridging Physics-based and Data-driven modeling for Learning Dynamical Systems

How can we learn a dynamical system to make forecasts, when some variables are unobserved? For instance, in COVID-19, we want to forecast the number of infected and death cases but we do not know the count of susceptible and exposed people. While mechanics compartment models are widely used in epidemic modeling, data-driven models are emerging for disease forecasting. We first formalize the learning of physics-based models as AutoODE, which leverages automatic differentiation to estimate the model parameters. Through a benchmark study on COVID-19 forecasting, we notice that physics-based mechanistic models significantly outperform deep learning. Our method obtains a 57.4% reduction in mean absolute errors for 7-day ahead COVID-19 forecasting compared with the best deep learning competitor. Such performance differences highlight the generalization problem in dynamical system learning due to distribution shift. We identify two scenarios where distribution shift can occur: changes in data domain and changes in parameter domain (system dynamics). Through systematic experiments on several dynamical systems, we found that deep learning models fail to forecast well under both scenarios. While much research on distribution shift has focused on changes in the data domain, our work calls attention to rethink generalization for learning dynamical systems.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

CoCoS: Fast and Accurate Distributed Triangle Counting in Graph Streams

Given a graph stream, how can we estimate the number of triangles in it using multiple machines with limited storage? Specifically, how should edges be processed and sampled across the machines for rapid and accurate estimation? The count of triangles (i.e., cliques of size three) has proven useful in numerous applications, including anomaly detection, community detection, and link recommendation. For triangle counting in large and dynamic graphs, recent work has focused largely on streaming algorithms and distributed algorithms but little on their combinations for "the best of both worlds". In this work, we propose CoCoS, a fast and accurate distributed streaming algorithm for estimating the counts of global triangles (i.e., all triangles) and local triangles incident to each node. Making one pass over the input stream, COCOS carefully processes and stores the edges across multiple machines so that the redundant use of computational and storage resources is minimized. Compared to baselines, CoCoS is (a) Accurate: giving up to 39X smaller estimation error, (b) Fast: up to 10.4X faster, scaling linearly with the size of the input stream, and (c) Theoretically sound: yielding unbiased estimates.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Detecting Group Anomalies in Tera-Scale Multi-Aspect Data via Dense-Subtensor Mining

How can we detect fraudulent lockstep behavior in large-scale multi-aspect data (i.e., tensors)? Can we detect it when data are too large to fit in memory or even on a disk? Past studies have shown that dense subtensors in real-world tensors (e.g., social media, Wikipedia, TCP dumps, etc.) signal anomalous or fraudulent behavior such as retweet boosting, bot activities, and network attacks. Thus, various approaches, including tensor decomposition and search, have been proposed for detecting dense subtensors rapidly and accurately. However, existing methods have low accuracy, or they assume that tensors are small enough to fit in main memory, which is unrealistic in many real-world applications such as social media and web. To overcome these limitations, we propose D-CUBE, a disk-based dense-subtensor detection method, which also can run in a distributed manner across multiple machines. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, D-CUBE is (1) Memory Efficient: requires up to 1,561X less memory and handles 1,000X larger data (2.6TB), (2) Fast: up to 7X faster due to its near-linear scalability, (3) Provably Accurate: gives a guarantee on the densities of the detected subtensors, and (4) Effective: spotted network attacks from TCP dumps and synchronized behavior in rating data most accurately.

cs.DB↗