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Fragkiskos D. Malliaros

Publications and source records attributed to Fragkiskos D. Malliaros.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Higher-Order GNNs Meet Efficiency: Sparse Sobolev Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in modeling relationships between nodes in a graph, but capturing higher-order relationships remains a challenge for large-scale networks. Previous studies have primarily attempted to utilize the information from higher-order neighbors in the graph, involving the incorporation of powers of the shift operator, such as the graph Laplacian or adjacency matrix. This approach comes with a trade-off in terms of increased computational and memory demands. Relying on graph spectral theory, we make a fundamental observation: the regular and the Hadamard power of the Laplacian matrix behave similarly in the spectrum. This observation has significant implications for capturing higher-order information in GNNs for various tasks such as node classification and semi-supervised learning. Consequently, we propose a novel graph convolutional operator based on the sparse Sobolev norm of graph signals. Our approach, known as Sparse Sobolev GNN (S2-GNN), employs Hadamard products between matrices to maintain the sparsity level in graph representations. S2-GNN utilizes a cascade of filters with increasing Hadamard powers to generate a diverse set of functions. We theoretically analyze the stability of S2-GNN to show the robustness of the model against possible graph perturbations. We also conduct a comprehensive evaluation of S2-GNN across various graph mining, semi-supervised node classification, and computer vision tasks. In particular use cases, our algorithm demonstrates competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art GNNs in terms of performance and running time.

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Centrality Graph Shift Operators for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Shift Operators (GSOs), such as the adjacency and graph Laplacian matrices, play a fundamental role in graph theory and graph representation learning. Traditional GSOs are typically constructed by normalizing the adjacency matrix by the degree matrix, a local centrality metric. In this work, we instead propose and study Centrality GSOs (CGSOs), which normalize adjacency matrices by global centrality metrics such as the PageRank, $k$-core or count of fixed length walks. We study spectral properties of the CGSOs, allowing us to get an understanding of their action on graph signals. We confirm this understanding by defining and running the spectral clustering algorithm based on different CGSOs on several synthetic and real-world datasets. We furthermore outline how our CGSO can act as the message passing operator in any Graph Neural Network and in particular demonstrate strong performance of a variant of the Graph Convolutional Network and Graph Attention Network using our CGSOs on several real-world benchmark datasets.

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Continuous Product Graph Neural Networks

Processing multidomain data defined on multiple graphs holds significant potential in various practical applications in computer science. However, current methods are mostly limited to discrete graph filtering operations. Tensorial partial differential equations on graphs (TPDEGs) provide a principled framework for modeling structured data across multiple interacting graphs, addressing the limitations of the existing discrete methodologies. In this paper, we introduce Continuous Product Graph Neural Networks (CITRUS) that emerge as a natural solution to the TPDEG. CITRUS leverages the separability of continuous heat kernels from Cartesian graph products to efficiently implement graph spectral decomposition. We conduct thorough theoretical analyses of the stability and over-smoothing properties of CITRUS in response to domain-specific graph perturbations and graph spectra effects on the performance. We evaluate CITRUS on well-known traffic and weather spatiotemporal forecasting datasets, demonstrating superior performance over existing approaches. The implementation codes are available at https://github.com/ArefEinizade2/CITRUS.

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Cometh: A continuous-time discrete-state graph diffusion model

Discrete-state denoising diffusion models led to state-of-the-art performance in graph generation, especially in the molecular domain. Recently, they have been transposed to continuous time, allowing more flexibility in the reverse process and a better trade-off between sampling efficiency and quality. Here, to leverage the benefits of both approaches, we propose Cometh, a continuous-time discrete-state graph diffusion model, tailored to the specificities of graph data. In addition, we also successfully replaced the set of structural encodings previously used in the discrete graph diffusion model with a single random-walk-based encoding, providing a simple and principled way to boost the model's expressive power. Empirically, we show that integrating continuous time leads to significant improvements across various metrics over state-of-the-art discrete-state diffusion models on a large set of molecular and non-molecular benchmark datasets. In terms of VUN samples, Cometh obtains a near-perfect performance of 99.5% on the planar graph dataset and outperforms DiGress by 12.6% on the large GuacaMol dataset.

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Uplift Modeling Under Limited Supervision

Estimating causal effects in e-commerce tends to involve costly treatment assignments which can be impractical in large-scale settings. Leveraging machine learning to predict such treatment effects without actual intervention is a standard practice to diminish the risk. However, existing methods for treatment effect prediction tend to rely on training sets of substantial size, which are built from real experiments and are thus inherently risky to create. In this work we propose a graph neural network to diminish the required training set size, relying on graphs that are common in e-commerce data. Specifically, we view the problem as node regression with a restricted number of labeled instances, develop a two-model neural architecture akin to previous causal effect estimators, and test varying message-passing layers for encoding. Furthermore, as an extra step, we combine the model with an acquisition function to guide the creation of the training set in settings with extremely low experimental budget. The framework is flexible since each step can be used separately with other models or treatment policies. The experiments on real large-scale networks indicate a clear advantage of our methodology over the state of the art, which in many cases performs close to random, underlining the need for models that can generalize with limited supervision to reduce experimental risks.

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Do We Really Need to Drop Items with Missing Modalities in Multimodal Recommendation?

Generally, items with missing modalities are dropped in multimodal recommendation. However, with this work, we question this procedure, highlighting that it would further damage the pipeline of any multimodal recommender system. First, we show that the lack of (some) modalities is, in fact, a widely-diffused phenomenon in multimodal recommendation. Second, we propose a pipeline that imputes missing multimodal features in recommendation by leveraging traditional imputation strategies in machine learning. Then, given the graph structure of the recommendation data, we also propose three more effective imputation solutions that leverage the item-item co-purchase graph and the multimodal similarities of co-interacted items. Our method can be plugged into any multimodal RSs in the literature working as an untrained pre-processing phase, showing (through extensive experiments) that any data pre-filtering is not only unnecessary but also harmful to the performance.

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Improving Molecular Modeling with Geometric GNNs: an Empirical Study

Rapid advancements in machine learning (ML) are transforming materials science by significantly speeding up material property calculations. However, the proliferation of ML approaches has made it challenging for scientists to keep up with the most promising techniques. This paper presents an empirical study on Geometric Graph Neural Networks for 3D atomic systems, focusing on the impact of different (1) canonicalization methods, (2) graph creation strategies, and (3) auxiliary tasks, on performance, scalability and symmetry enforcement. Our findings and insights aim to guide researchers in selecting optimal modeling components for molecular modeling tasks.

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Spatiotemporal Forecasting Meets Efficiency: Causal Graph Process Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have advanced spatiotemporal forecasting by leveraging relational inductive biases among sensors (or any other measuring scheme) represented as nodes in a graph. However, current methods often rely on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), leading to increased runtimes and memory use. Moreover, these methods typically operate within 1-hop neighborhoods, exacerbating the reduction of the receptive field. Causal Graph Processes (CGPs) offer an alternative, using graph filters instead of MLP layers to reduce parameters and minimize memory consumption. This paper introduces the Causal Graph Process Neural Network (CGProNet), a non-linear model combining CGPs and GNNs for spatiotemporal forecasting. CGProNet employs higher-order graph filters, optimizing the model with fewer parameters, reducing memory usage, and improving runtime efficiency. We present a comprehensive theoretical and experimental stability analysis, highlighting key aspects of CGProNet. Experiments on synthetic and real data demonstrate CGProNet's superior efficiency, minimizing memory and time requirements while maintaining competitive forecasting performance.

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Gegenbauer Graph Neural Networks for Time-varying Signal Reconstruction

Reconstructing time-varying graph signals (or graph time-series imputation) is a critical problem in machine learning and signal processing with broad applications, ranging from missing data imputation in sensor networks to time-series forecasting. Accurately capturing the spatio-temporal information inherent in these signals is crucial for effectively addressing these tasks. However, existing approaches relying on smoothness assumptions of temporal differences and simple convex optimization techniques have inherent limitations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach that incorporates a learning module to enhance the accuracy of the downstream task. To this end, we introduce the Gegenbauer-based graph convolutional (GegenConv) operator, which is a generalization of the conventional Chebyshev graph convolution by leveraging the theory of Gegenbauer polynomials. By deviating from traditional convex problems, we expand the complexity of the model and offer a more accurate solution for recovering time-varying graph signals. Building upon GegenConv, we design the Gegenbauer-based time Graph Neural Network (GegenGNN) architecture, which adopts an encoder-decoder structure. Likewise, our approach also utilizes a dedicated loss function that incorporates a mean squared error component alongside Sobolev smoothness regularization. This combination enables GegenGNN to capture both the fidelity to ground truth and the underlying smoothness properties of the signals, enhancing the reconstruction performance. We conduct extensive experiments on real datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. The experimental results demonstrate that GegenGNN outperforms state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its superior capability in recovering time-varying graph signals.

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Dealing with Missing Modalities in Multimodal Recommendation: a Feature Propagation-based Approach

Multimodal recommender systems work by augmenting the representation of the products in the catalogue through multimodal features extracted from images, textual descriptions, or audio tracks characterising such products. Nevertheless, in real-world applications, only a limited percentage of products come with multimodal content to extract meaningful features from, making it hard to provide accurate recommendations. To the best of our knowledge, very few attention has been put into the problem of missing modalities in multimodal recommendation so far. To this end, our paper comes as a preliminary attempt to formalise and address such an issue. Inspired by the recent advances in graph representation learning, we propose to re-sketch the missing modalities problem as a problem of missing graph node features to apply the state-of-the-art feature propagation algorithm eventually. Technically, we first project the user-item graph into an item-item one based on co-interactions. Then, leveraging the multimodal similarities among co-interacted items, we apply a modified version of the feature propagation technique to impute the missing multimodal features. Adopted as a pre-processing stage for two recent multimodal recommender systems, our simple approach performs better than other shallower solutions on three popular datasets.

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A Hitchhiker's Guide to Geometric GNNs for 3D Atomic Systems

Recent advances in computational modelling of atomic systems, spanning molecules, proteins, and materials, represent them as geometric graphs with atoms embedded as nodes in 3D Euclidean space. In these graphs, the geometric attributes transform according to the inherent physical symmetries of 3D atomic systems, including rotations and translations in Euclidean space, as well as node permutations. In recent years, Geometric Graph Neural Networks have emerged as the preferred machine learning architecture powering applications ranging from protein structure prediction to molecular simulations and material generation. Their specificity lies in the inductive biases they leverage - such as physical symmetries and chemical properties - to learn informative representations of these geometric graphs. In this opinionated paper, we provide a comprehensive and self-contained overview of the field of Geometric GNNs for 3D atomic systems. We cover fundamental background material and introduce a pedagogical taxonomy of Geometric GNN architectures: (1) invariant networks, (2) equivariant networks in Cartesian basis, (3) equivariant networks in spherical basis, and (4) unconstrained networks. Additionally, we outline key datasets and application areas and suggest future research directions. The objective of this work is to present a structured perspective on the field, making it accessible to newcomers and aiding practitioners in gaining an intuition for its mathematical abstractions.

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Maximizing Influence with Graph Neural Networks

Finding the seed set that maximizes the influence spread over a network is a well-known NP-hard problem. Though a greedy algorithm can provide near-optimal solutions, the subproblem of influence estimation renders the solutions inefficient. In this work, we propose \textsc{Glie}, a graph neural network that learns how to estimate the influence spread of the independent cascade. \textsc{Glie} relies on a theoretical upper bound that is tightened through supervised training. Experiments indicate that it provides accurate influence estimation for real graphs up to 10 times larger than the train set. Subsequently, we incorporate it into two influence maximization techniques. We first utilize Cost Effective Lazy Forward optimization substituting Monte Carlo simulations with \textsc{Glie}, surpassing the benchmarks albeit with a computational overhead. To improve computational efficiency we develop a provably submodular influence spread based on \textsc{Glie}'s representations, to rank nodes while building the seed set adaptively. The proposed algorithms are inductive, meaning they are trained on graphs with less than 300 nodes and up to 5 seeds, and tested on graphs with millions of nodes and up to 200 seeds. The final method exhibits the most promising combination of time efficiency and influence quality, outperforming several baselines.

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Time-varying Signals Recovery via Graph Neural Networks

The recovery of time-varying graph signals is a fundamental problem with numerous applications in sensor networks and forecasting in time series. Effectively capturing the spatio-temporal information in these signals is essential for the downstream tasks. Previous studies have used the smoothness of the temporal differences of such graph signals as an initial assumption. Nevertheless, this smoothness assumption could result in a degradation of performance in the corresponding application when the prior does not hold. In this work, we relax the requirement of this hypothesis by including a learning module. We propose a Time Graph Neural Network (TimeGNN) for the recovery of time-varying graph signals. Our algorithm uses an encoder-decoder architecture with a specialized loss composed of a mean squared error function and a Sobolev smoothness operator.TimeGNN shows competitive performance against previous methods in real datasets.

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On the Trade-off between Over-smoothing and Over-squashing in Deep Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have succeeded in various computer science applications, yet deep GNNs underperform their shallow counterparts despite deep learning's success in other domains. Over-smoothing and over-squashing are key challenges when stacking graph convolutional layers, hindering deep representation learning and information propagation from distant nodes. Our work reveals that over-smoothing and over-squashing are intrinsically related to the spectral gap of the graph Laplacian, resulting in an inevitable trade-off between these two issues, as they cannot be alleviated simultaneously. To achieve a suitable compromise, we propose adding and removing edges as a viable approach. We introduce the Stochastic Jost and Liu Curvature Rewiring (SJLR) algorithm, which is computationally efficient and preserves fundamental properties compared to previous curvature-based methods. Unlike existing approaches, SJLR performs edge addition and removal during GNN training while maintaining the graph unchanged during testing. Comprehensive comparisons demonstrate SJLR's competitive performance in addressing over-smoothing and over-squashing.

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FAENet: Frame Averaging Equivariant GNN for Materials Modeling

Applications of machine learning techniques for materials modeling typically involve functions known to be equivariant or invariant to specific symmetries. While graph neural networks (GNNs) have proven successful in such tasks, they enforce symmetries via the model architecture, which often reduces their expressivity, scalability and comprehensibility. In this paper, we introduce (1) a flexible framework relying on stochastic frame-averaging (SFA) to make any model E(3)-equivariant or invariant through data transformations. (2) FAENet: a simple, fast and expressive GNN, optimized for SFA, that processes geometric information without any symmetrypreserving design constraints. We prove the validity of our method theoretically and empirically demonstrate its superior accuracy and computational scalability in materials modeling on the OC20 dataset (S2EF, IS2RE) as well as common molecular modeling tasks (QM9, QM7-X). A package implementation is available at https://faenet.readthedocs.io.

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Higher-order Sparse Convolutions in Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been applied to many problems in computer sciences. Capturing higher-order relationships between nodes is crucial to increase the expressive power of GNNs. However, existing methods to capture these relationships could be infeasible for large-scale graphs. In this work, we introduce a new higher-order sparse convolution based on the Sobolev norm of graph signals. Our Sparse Sobolev GNN (S-SobGNN) computes a cascade of filters on each layer with increasing Hadamard powers to get a more diverse set of functions, and then a linear combination layer weights the embeddings of each filter. We evaluate S-SobGNN in several applications of semi-supervised learning. S-SobGNN shows competitive performance in all applications as compared to several state-of-the-art methods.

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NodeSig: Binary Node Embeddings via Random Walk Diffusion

Graph Representation Learning (GRL) has become a key paradigm in network analysis, with a plethora of interdisciplinary applications. As the scale of networks increases, most of the widely used learning-based graph representation models also face computational challenges. While there is a recent effort toward designing algorithms that solely deal with scalability issues, most of them behave poorly in terms of accuracy on downstream tasks. In this paper, we aim to study models that balance the trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. In particular, we propose NodeSig, a scalable model that computes binary node representations. NodeSig exploits random walk diffusion probabilities via stable random projections towards efficiently computing embeddings in the Hamming space. Our extensive experimental evaluation on various networks has demonstrated that the proposed model achieves a good balance between accuracy and efficiency compared to well-known baseline models on the node classification and link prediction tasks.

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Multiple Similarity Drug-Target Interaction Prediction with Random Walks and Matrix Factorization

The discovery of drug-target interactions (DTIs) is a very promising area of research with great potential. The accurate identification of reliable interactions among drugs and proteins via computational methods, which typically leverage heterogeneous information retrieved from diverse data sources, can boost the development of effective pharmaceuticals. Although random walk and matrix factorization techniques are widely used in DTI prediction, they have several limitations. Random walk-based embedding generation is usually conducted in an unsupervised manner, while the linear similarity combination in matrix factorization distorts individual insights offered by different views. To tackle these issues, we take a multi-layered network approach to handle diverse drug and target similarities, and propose a novel optimization framework, called Multiple similarity DeepWalk-based Matrix Factorization (MDMF), for DTI prediction. The framework unifies embedding generation and interaction prediction, learning vector representations of drugs and targets that not only retain higher-order proximity across all hyper-layers and layer-specific local invariance, but also approximate the interactions with their inner product. Furthermore, we develop an ensemble method (MDMF2A) that integrates two instantiations of the MDMF model, optimizing the area under the precision-recall curve (AUPR) and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) respectively. The empirical study on real-world DTI datasets shows that our method achieves statistically significant improvement over current state-of-the-art approaches in four different settings. Moreover, the validation of highly ranked non-interacting pairs also demonstrates the potential of MDMF2A to discover novel DTIs.

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