arXiv subjects

Chunping Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Chunping Wang.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Towards Fair Graph Federated Learning via Incentive Mechanisms

Graph federated learning (FL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm enabling multiple agents to collaboratively train a graph model while preserving local data privacy. Yet, current efforts overlook a key issue: agents are self-interested and would hesitant to share data without fair and satisfactory incentives. This paper is the first endeavor to address this issue by studying the incentive mechanism for graph federated learning. We identify a unique phenomenon in graph federated learning: the presence of agents posing potential harm to the federation and agents contributing with delays. This stands in contrast to previous FL incentive mechanisms that assume all agents contribute positively and in a timely manner. In view of this, this paper presents a novel incentive mechanism tailored for fair graph federated learning, integrating incentives derived from both model gradient and payoff. To achieve this, we first introduce an agent valuation function aimed at quantifying agent contributions through the introduction of two criteria: gradient alignment and graph diversity. Moreover, due to the high heterogeneity in graph federated learning, striking a balance between accuracy and fairness becomes particularly crucial. We introduce motif prototypes to enhance accuracy, communicated between the server and agents, enhancing global model aggregation and aiding agents in local model optimization. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves the best trade-off between accuracy and the fairness of model gradient, as well as superior payoff fairness.

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arXiv2023

Better with Less: A Data-Active Perspective on Pre-Training Graph Neural Networks

Pre-training on graph neural networks (GNNs) aims to learn transferable knowledge for downstream tasks with unlabeled data, and it has recently become an active research area. The success of graph pre-training models is often attributed to the massive amount of input data. In this paper, however, we identify the curse of big data phenomenon in graph pre-training: more training data do not necessarily lead to better downstream performance. Motivated by this observation, we propose a better-with-less framework for graph pre-training: fewer, but carefully chosen data are fed into a GNN model to enhance pre-training. The proposed pre-training pipeline is called the data-active graph pre-training (APT) framework, and is composed of a graph selector and a pre-training model. The graph selector chooses the most representative and instructive data points based on the inherent properties of graphs as well as predictive uncertainty. The proposed predictive uncertainty, as feedback from the pre-training model, measures the confidence level of the model in the data. When fed with the chosen data, on the other hand, the pre-training model grasps an initial understanding of the new, unseen data, and at the same time attempts to remember the knowledge learned from previous data. Therefore, the integration and interaction between these two components form a unified framework (APT), in which graph pre-training is performed in a progressive and iterative way. Experiment results show that the proposed APT is able to obtain an efficient pre-training model with fewer training data and better downstream performance.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

DGraph: A Large-Scale Financial Dataset for Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) has recently become a hot research spot due to its practicability and theoretical value. Since GAD emphasizes the application and the rarity of anomalous samples, enriching the varieties of its datasets is fundamental work. Thus, this paper present DGraph, a real-world dynamic graph in the finance domain. DGraph overcomes many limitations of current GAD datasets. It contains about 3M nodes, 4M dynamic edges, and 1M ground-truth nodes. We provide a comprehensive observation of DGraph, revealing that anomalous nodes and normal nodes generally have different structures, neighbor distribution, and temporal dynamics. Moreover, it suggests that unlabeled nodes are also essential for detecting fraudsters. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments on DGraph. Observation and experiments demonstrate that DGraph is propulsive to advance GAD research and enable in-depth exploration of anomalous nodes.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2023

When to Pre-Train Graph Neural Networks? From Data Generation Perspective!

In recent years, graph pre-training has gained significant attention, focusing on acquiring transferable knowledge from unlabeled graph data to improve downstream performance. Despite these recent endeavors, the problem of negative transfer remains a major concern when utilizing graph pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Previous studies made great efforts on the issue of what to pre-train and how to pre-train by designing a variety of graph pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. However, there are cases where even the most advanced "pre-train and fine-tune" paradigms fail to yield distinct benefits. This paper introduces a generic framework W2PGNN to answer the crucial question of when to pre-train (i.e., in what situations could we take advantage of graph pre-training) before performing effortful pre-training or fine-tuning. We start from a new perspective to explore the complex generative mechanisms from the pre-training data to downstream data. In particular, W2PGNN first fits the pre-training data into graphon bases, each element of graphon basis (i.e., a graphon) identifies a fundamental transferable pattern shared by a collection of pre-training graphs. All convex combinations of graphon bases give rise to a generator space, from which graphs generated form the solution space for those downstream data that can benefit from pre-training. In this manner, the feasibility of pre-training can be quantified as the generation probability of the downstream data from any generator in the generator space. W2PGNN offers three broad applications: providing the application scope of graph pre-trained models, quantifying the feasibility of pre-training, and assistance in selecting pre-training data to enhance downstream performance. We provide a theoretically sound solution for the first application and extensive empirical justifications for the latter two applications.

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arXiv2023

DropMessage: Unifying Random Dropping for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for graph representation learning. Despite their rapid development, GNNs also face some challenges, such as over-fitting, over-smoothing, and non-robustness. Previous works indicate that these problems can be alleviated by random dropping methods, which integrate augmented data into models by randomly masking parts of the input. However, some open problems of random dropping on GNNs remain to be solved. First, it is challenging to find a universal method that are suitable for all cases considering the divergence of different datasets and models. Second, augmented data introduced to GNNs causes the incomplete coverage of parameters and unstable training process. Third, there is no theoretical analysis on the effectiveness of random dropping methods on GNNs. In this paper, we propose a novel random dropping method called DropMessage, which performs dropping operations directly on the propagated messages during the message-passing process. More importantly, we find that DropMessage provides a unified framework for most existing random dropping methods, based on which we give theoretical analysis of their effectiveness. Furthermore, we elaborate the superiority of DropMessage: it stabilizes the training process by reducing sample variance; it keeps information diversity from the perspective of information theory, enabling it become a theoretical upper bound of other methods. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct experiments that aims for multiple tasks on five public datasets and two industrial datasets with various backbone models. The experimental results show that DropMessage has the advantages of both effectiveness and generalization, and can significantly alleviate the problems mentioned above.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Blindfolded Attackers Still Threatening: Strict Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Graphs

Adversarial attacks on graphs have attracted considerable research interests. Existing works assume the attacker is either (partly) aware of the victim model, or able to send queries to it. These assumptions are, however, unrealistic. To bridge the gap between theoretical graph attacks and real-world scenarios, in this work, we propose a novel and more realistic setting: strict black-box graph attack, in which the attacker has no knowledge about the victim model at all and is not allowed to send any queries. To design such an attack strategy, we first propose a generic graph filter to unify different families of graph-based models. The strength of attacks can then be quantified by the change in the graph filter before and after attack. By maximizing this change, we are able to find an effective attack strategy, regardless of the underlying model. To solve this optimization problem, we also propose a relaxation technique and approximation theories to reduce the difficulty as well as the computational expense. Experiments demonstrate that, even with no exposure to the model, the Macro-F1 drops 6.4% in node classification and 29.5% in graph classification, which is a significant result compared with existent works.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Unsupervised Adversarially-Robust Representation Learning on Graphs

Unsupervised/self-supervised pre-training methods for graph representation learning have recently attracted increasing research interests, and they are shown to be able to generalize to various downstream applications. Yet, the adversarial robustness of such pre-trained graph learning models remains largely unexplored. More importantly, most existing defense techniques designed for end-to-end graph representation learning methods require pre-specified label definitions, and thus cannot be directly applied to the pre-training methods. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised defense technique to robustify pre-trained deep graph models, so that the perturbations on the input graph can be successfully identified and blocked before the model is applied to different downstream tasks. Specifically, we introduce a mutual information-based measure, \textit{graph representation vulnerability (GRV)}, to quantify the robustness of graph encoders on the representation space. We then formulate an optimization problem to learn the graph representation by carefully balancing the trade-off between the expressive power and the robustness (\emph{i.e.}, GRV) of the graph encoder. The discrete nature of graph topology and the joint space of graph data make the optimization problem intractable to solve. To handle the above difficulty and to reduce computational expense, we further relax the problem and thus provide an approximate solution. Additionally, we explore a provable connection between the robustness of the unsupervised graph encoder and that of models on downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that even without access to labels and tasks, our model is still able to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks on three downstream tasks (node classification, link prediction, and community detection) by an average of +16.5% compared with existing methods.

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arXiv2019

Learning Fair Representations via an Adversarial Framework

Fairness has become a central issue for our research community as classification algorithms are adopted in societally critical domains such as recidivism prediction and loan approval. In this work, we consider the potential bias based on protected attributes (e.g., race and gender), and tackle this problem by learning latent representations of individuals that are statistically indistinguishable between protected groups while sufficiently preserving other information for classification. To do that, we develop a minimax adversarial framework with a generator to capture the data distribution and generate latent representations, and a critic to ensure that the distributions across different protected groups are similar. Our framework provides a theoretical guarantee with respect to statistical parity and individual fairness. Empirical results on four real-world datasets also show that the learned representation can effectively be used for classification tasks such as credit risk prediction while obstructing information related to protected groups, especially when removing protected attributes is not sufficient for fair classification.

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arXiv2018

Particle Probability Hypothesis Density Filter based on Pairwise Markov Chains

Most multi-target tracking filters assume that one target and its observation follow a Hidden Markov Chain (HMC) model, but the implicit independence assumption of HMC model is invalid in many practical applications, and a Pairwise Markov Chain (PMC) model is more universally suitable than traditional HMC model. A particle probability hypothesis density filter based on PMC model (PF-PMC-PHD) is proposed for the nonlinear multi-target tracking system. Simulation results show the effectiveness of PF-PMC-PHD filter, and that the tracking performance of PF-PMC-PHD filter is superior to the particle PHD filter based on HMC model in a scenario where we kept the local physical properties of nonlinear and Gaussian HMC models while relaxing their independence assumption.

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