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Jun Xia

Publications and source records attributed to Jun Xia.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Reinforcement Graph Clustering with Unknown Cluster Number

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group nodes into disjoint clusters by neural networks in an unsupervised manner, has attracted great attention in recent years. Although the performance has been largely improved, the excellent performance of the existing methods heavily relies on an accurately predefined cluster number, which is not always available in the real-world scenario. To enable the deep graph clustering algorithms to work without the guidance of the predefined cluster number, we propose a new deep graph clustering method termed Reinforcement Graph Clustering (RGC). In our proposed method, cluster number determination and unsupervised representation learning are unified into a uniform framework by the reinforcement learning mechanism. Concretely, the discriminative node representations are first learned with the contrastive pretext task. Then, to capture the clustering state accurately with both local and global information in the graph, both node and cluster states are considered. Subsequently, at each state, the qualities of different cluster numbers are evaluated by the quality network, and the greedy action is executed to determine the cluster number. In order to conduct feedback actions, the clustering-oriented reward function is proposed to enhance the cohesion of the same clusters and separate the different clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The source code of RGC is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/RGC and a collection (papers, codes and, datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering on Github.

cs.LG↗

On the importance of low-frequency signals in functional and molecular photoacoustic computed tomography

In photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) with short-pulsed laser excitation, wideband acoustic signals are generated in biological tissues with frequencies related to the effective shapes and sizes of the optically absorbing targets. Low-frequency photoacoustic signal components correspond to slowly varying spatial features and are often omitted during imaging due to the limited detection bandwidth of the ultrasound transducer, or during image reconstruction as undesired background that degrades image contrast. Here we demonstrate that low-frequency photoacoustic signals, in fact, contain functional and molecular information, and can be used to enhance structural visibility, improve quantitative accuracy, and reduce spare-sampling artifacts. We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of low-frequency signals in PACT, and experimentally evaluate their impact on several representative PACT applications, such as mapping temperature in photothermal treatment, measuring blood oxygenation in a hypoxia challenge, and detecting photoswitchable molecular probes in deep organs. Our results strongly suggest that low-frequency signals are important for functional and molecular PACT.

physics.med-ph↗

Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group the nodes of a graph into disjoint clusters with deep neural networks, has achieved promising progress in recent years. However, the existing methods fail to scale to the large graph with million nodes. To solve this problem, a scalable deep graph clustering method (Dink-Net) is proposed with the idea of dilation and shrink. Firstly, by discriminating nodes, whether being corrupted by augmentations, representations are learned in a self-supervised manner. Meanwhile, the cluster centres are initialized as learnable neural parameters. Subsequently, the clustering distribution is optimized by minimizing the proposed cluster dilation loss and cluster shrink loss in an adversarial manner. By these settings, we unify the two-step clustering, i.e., representation learning and clustering optimization, into an end-to-end framework, guiding the network to learn clustering-friendly features. Besides, Dink-Net scales well to large graphs since the designed loss functions adopt the mini-batch data to optimize the clustering distribution even without performance drops. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of our method. Compared to the runner-up, Dink-Net achieves 9.62% NMI improvement on the ogbn-papers100M dataset with 111 million nodes and 1.6 billion edges. The source code is released at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Dink-Net. Besides, a collection (papers, codes, and datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering.

cs.LG↗

Why Deep Models Often cannot Beat Non-deep Counterparts on Molecular Property Prediction?

Molecular property prediction (MPP) is a crucial task in the drug discovery pipeline, which has recently gained considerable attention thanks to advances in deep neural networks. However, recent research has revealed that deep models struggle to beat traditional non-deep ones on MPP. In this study, we benchmark 12 representative models (3 non-deep models and 9 deep models) on 14 molecule datasets. Through the most comprehensive study to date, we make the following key observations: \textbf{(\romannumeral 1)} Deep models are generally unable to outperform non-deep ones; \textbf{(\romannumeral 2)} The failure of deep models on MPP cannot be solely attributed to the small size of molecular datasets. What matters is the irregular molecule data pattern; \textbf{(\romannumeral 3)} In particular, tree models using molecular fingerprints as inputs tend to perform better than other competitors. Furthermore, we conduct extensive empirical investigations into the unique patterns of molecule data and inductive biases of various models underlying these phenomena.

cs.LG↗

Asymptotics of the deformed higher order Airy-kernel determinants and applications

We study the one-parameter family of Fredholm determinants $\det(I-ρ^2\mathcal{K}_{n,x})$, $ρ\in\mathbb{R}$, where $\mathcal{K}_{n,x}$ stands for the integral operator acting on $L^2(x,+\infty)$ with the higher order Airy kernel. This family of determinants represents a new universal class of distributions which is a higher order analogue of the classical Tracy-Widom distribution. Each of the determinants admits an integral representation in terms of a special real solution to the $n$-th member of the Painlevé II hierarchy. Using the Riemann-Hilbert approach, we establish asymptotics of the determinants and the associated higher order Painlevé II transcendents as $x\to -\infty$ for $0<|ρ|<1$ and $|ρ|>1$, respectively. In the case of $0<|ρ|<1$, we are able to calculate the constant term in the asymptotic expansion of the determinants, while for $|ρ|>1$, the relevant asymptotics exhibit singular behaviors. Applications of our results are also discussed, which particularly include asymptotic statistical properties of the counting function for the random point process defined by the higher order Airy kernel.

math-ph↗

Teaching Yourself: Graph Self-Distillation on Neighborhood for Node Classification

Recent years have witnessed great success in handling graph-related tasks with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their great academic success, Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) remain the primary workhorse for practical industrial applications. One reason for this academic-industrial gap is the neighborhood-fetching latency incurred by data dependency in GNNs, which make it hard to deploy for latency-sensitive applications that require fast inference. Conversely, without involving any feature aggregation, MLPs have no data dependency and infer much faster than GNNs, but their performance is less competitive. Motivated by these complementary strengths and weaknesses, we propose a Graph Self-Distillation on Neighborhood (GSDN) framework to reduce the gap between GNNs and MLPs. Specifically, the GSDN framework is based purely on MLPs, where structural information is only implicitly used as prior to guide knowledge self-distillation between the neighborhood and the target, substituting the explicit neighborhood information propagation as in GNNs. As a result, GSDN enjoys the benefits of graph topology-awareness in training but has no data dependency in inference. Extensive experiments have shown that the performance of vanilla MLPs can be greatly improved with self-distillation, e.g., GSDN improves over stand-alone MLPs by 15.54% on average and outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs on six datasets. Regarding inference speed, GSDN infers 75X-89X faster than existing GNNs and 16X-25X faster than other inference acceleration methods.

cs.LG↗

A Systematic Survey of Chemical Pre-trained Models

Deep learning has achieved remarkable success in learning representations for molecules, which is crucial for various biochemical applications, ranging from property prediction to drug design. However, training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) from scratch often requires abundant labeled molecules, which are expensive to acquire in the real world. To alleviate this issue, tremendous efforts have been devoted to Molecular Pre-trained Models (CPMs), where DNNs are pre-trained using large-scale unlabeled molecular databases and then fine-tuned over specific downstream tasks. Despite the prosperity, there lacks a systematic review of this fast-growing field. In this paper, we present the first survey that summarizes the current progress of CPMs. We first highlight the limitations of training molecular representation models from scratch to motivate CPM studies. Next, we systematically review recent advances on this topic from several key perspectives, including molecular descriptors, encoder architectures, pre-training strategies, and applications. We also highlight the challenges and promising avenues for future research, providing a useful resource for both machine learning and scientific communities.

cs.LG↗

Temporal Attention Unit: Towards Efficient Spatiotemporal Predictive Learning

Spatiotemporal predictive learning aims to generate future frames by learning from historical frames. In this paper, we investigate existing methods and present a general framework of spatiotemporal predictive learning, in which the spatial encoder and decoder capture intra-frame features and the middle temporal module catches inter-frame correlations. While the mainstream methods employ recurrent units to capture long-term temporal dependencies, they suffer from low computational efficiency due to their unparallelizable architectures. To parallelize the temporal module, we propose the Temporal Attention Unit (TAU), which decomposes the temporal attention into intra-frame statical attention and inter-frame dynamical attention. Moreover, while the mean squared error loss focuses on intra-frame errors, we introduce a novel differential divergence regularization to take inter-frame variations into account. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method enables the derived model to achieve competitive performance on various spatiotemporal prediction benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

CVT-SLR: Contrastive Visual-Textual Transformation for Sign Language Recognition with Variational Alignment

Sign language recognition (SLR) is a weakly supervised task that annotates sign videos as textual glosses. Recent studies show that insufficient training caused by the lack of large-scale available sign datasets becomes the main bottleneck for SLR. Most SLR works thereby adopt pretrained visual modules and develop two mainstream solutions. The multi-stream architectures extend multi-cue visual features, yielding the current SOTA performances but requiring complex designs and might introduce potential noise. Alternatively, the advanced single-cue SLR frameworks using explicit cross-modal alignment between visual and textual modalities are simple and effective, potentially competitive with the multi-cue framework. In this work, we propose a novel contrastive visual-textual transformation for SLR, CVT-SLR, to fully explore the pretrained knowledge of both the visual and language modalities. Based on the single-cue cross-modal alignment framework, we propose a variational autoencoder (VAE) for pretrained contextual knowledge while introducing the complete pretrained language module. The VAE implicitly aligns visual and textual modalities while benefiting from pretrained contextual knowledge as the traditional contextual module. Meanwhile, a contrastive cross-modal alignment algorithm is designed to explicitly enhance the consistency constraints. Extensive experiments on public datasets (PHOENIX-2014 and PHOENIX-2014T) demonstrate that our proposed CVT-SLR consistently outperforms existing single-cue methods and even outperforms SOTA multi-cue methods.

cs.CV↗

Using Context-to-Vector with Graph Retrofitting to Improve Word Embeddings

Although contextualized embeddings generated from large-scale pre-trained models perform well in many tasks, traditional static embeddings (e.g., Skip-gram, Word2Vec) still play an important role in low-resource and lightweight settings due to their low computational cost, ease of deployment, and stability. In this paper, we aim to improve word embeddings by 1) incorporating more contextual information from existing pre-trained models into the Skip-gram framework, which we call Context-to-Vec; 2) proposing a post-processing retrofitting method for static embeddings independent of training by employing priori synonym knowledge and weighted vector distribution. Through extrinsic and intrinsic tasks, our methods are well proven to outperform the baselines by a large margin.

cs.CL↗

SimGRACE: A Simple Framework for Graph Contrastive Learning without Data Augmentation

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has emerged as a dominant technique for graph representation learning which maximizes the mutual information between paired graph augmentations that share the same semantics. Unfortunately, it is difficult to preserve semantics well during augmentations in view of the diverse nature of graph data. Currently, data augmentations in GCL that are designed to preserve semantics broadly fall into three unsatisfactory ways. First, the augmentations can be manually picked per dataset by trial-and-errors. Second, the augmentations can be selected via cumbersome search. Third, the augmentations can be obtained by introducing expensive domain-specific knowledge as guidance. All of these limit the efficiency and more general applicability of existing GCL methods. To circumvent these crucial issues, we propose a \underline{Sim}ple framework for \underline{GRA}ph \underline{C}ontrastive l\underline{E}arning, \textbf{SimGRACE} for brevity, which does not require data augmentations. Specifically, we take original graph as input and GNN model with its perturbed version as two encoders to obtain two correlated views for contrast. SimGRACE is inspired by the observation that graph data can preserve their semantics well during encoder perturbations while not requiring manual trial-and-errors, cumbersome search or expensive domain knowledge for augmentations selection. Also, we explain why SimGRACE can succeed. Furthermore, we devise adversarial training scheme, dubbed \textbf{AT-SimGRACE}, to enhance the robustness of graph contrastive learning and theoretically explain the reasons. Albeit simple, we show that SimGRACE can yield competitive or better performance compared with state-of-the-art methods in terms of generalizability, transferability and robustness, while enjoying unprecedented degree of flexibility and efficiency.

cs.LG↗

Generative De Novo Protein Design with Global Context

The linear sequence of amino acids determines protein structure and function. Protein design, known as the inverse of protein structure prediction, aims to obtain a novel protein sequence that will fold into the defined structure. Recent works on computational protein design have studied designing sequences for the desired backbone structure with local positional information and achieved competitive performance. However, similar local environments in different backbone structures may result in different amino acids, indicating that protein structure's global context matters. Thus, we propose the Global-Context Aware generative de novo protein design method (GCA), consisting of local and global modules. While local modules focus on relationships between neighbor amino acids, global modules explicitly capture non-local contexts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GCA method outperforms state-of-the-arts on de novo protein design. Our code and pretrained model will be released.

q-bio.BM↗

Clarkson-McLeod solutions of the fourth Painlevé equation and the parabolic cylinder-kernel determinant

The Clarkson-McLeod solutions of the fourth Painlevé equation behave like $κD_{α-\frac{1}{2}}^2(\sqrt{2}x)$ as $x\rightarrow +\infty$, where $κ$ is some real constant and $D_{α-\frac{1}{2}}(x)$ is the parabolic cylinder function. Using the Deift-Zhou nonlinear steepest descent method, we derive the asymptotic behaviors for this class of solutions as $x\to-\infty$. This completes a proof of Clarkson and McLeod's conjecture on the asymptotics of this family of solutions. The total integrals of the Clarkson-McLeod solutions and the asymptotic approximations of the $σ$-form of this family of solutions are also derived. Furthermore, we find a determinantal representation of the $σ$-form of the Clarkson-McLeod solutions via an integrable operator with the parabolic cylinder kernel.

math-ph↗

HierarchyFL: Heterogeneous Federated Learning via Hierarchical Self-Distillation

Federated learning (FL) has been recognized as a privacy-preserving distributed machine learning paradigm that enables knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous artificial intelligence (AIoT) devices through centralized global model aggregation. FL suffers from model inaccuracy and slow convergence due to the model heterogeneity of the AIoT devices involved. Although various existing methods try to solve the bottleneck of the model heterogeneity problem, most of them improve the accuracy of heterogeneous models in a coarse-grained manner, which makes it still a great challenge to deploy large-scale AIoT devices. To alleviate the negative impact of this problem and take full advantage of the diversity of each heterogeneous model, we propose an efficient framework named HierarchyFL, which uses a small amount of public data for efficient and scalable knowledge across a variety of differently structured models. By using self-distillation and our proposed ensemble library, each hierarchical model can intelligently learn from each other on cloud servers. Experimental results on various well-known datasets show that HierarchyFL can not only maximize the knowledge sharing among various heterogeneous models in large-scale AIoT systems, but also greatly improve the model performance of each involved heterogeneous AIoT device.

cs.LG↗

Protein Language Models and Structure Prediction: Connection and Progression

The prediction of protein structures from sequences is an important task for function prediction, drug design, and related biological processes understanding. Recent advances have proved the power of language models (LMs) in processing the protein sequence databases, which inherit the advantages of attention networks and capture useful information in learning representations for proteins. The past two years have witnessed remarkable success in tertiary protein structure prediction (PSP), including evolution-based and single-sequence-based PSP. It seems that instead of using energy-based models and sampling procedures, protein language model (pLM)-based pipelines have emerged as mainstream paradigms in PSP. Despite the fruitful progress, the PSP community needs a systematic and up-to-date survey to help bridge the gap between LMs in the natural language processing (NLP) and PSP domains and introduce their methodologies, advancements and practical applications. To this end, in this paper, we first introduce the similarities between protein and human languages that allow LMs extended to pLMs, and applied to protein databases. Then, we systematically review recent advances in LMs and pLMs from the perspectives of network architectures, pre-training strategies, applications, and commonly-used protein databases. Next, different types of methods for PSP are discussed, particularly how the pLM-based architectures function in the process of protein folding. Finally, we identify challenges faced by the PSP community and foresee promising research directions along with the advances of pLMs. This survey aims to be a hands-on guide for researchers to understand PSP methods, develop pLMs and tackle challenging problems in this field for practical purposes.

q-bio.QM↗

GitFL: Adaptive Asynchronous Federated Learning using Version Control

As a promising distributed machine learning paradigm that enables collaborative training without compromising data privacy, Federated Learning (FL) has been increasingly used in AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) design. However, due to the lack of efficient management of straggling devices, existing FL methods greatly suffer from the problems of low inference accuracy and long training time. Things become even worse when taking various uncertain factors (e.g., network delays, performance variances caused by process variation) existing in AIoT scenarios into account. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel asynchronous FL framework named GitFL, whose implementation is inspired by the famous version control system Git. Unlike traditional FL, the cloud server of GitFL maintains a master model (i.e., the global model) together with a set of branch models indicating the trained local models committed by selected devices, where the master model is updated based on both all the pushed branch models and their version information, and only the branch models after the pull operation are dispatched to devices. By using our proposed Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based device selection mechanism, a pulled branch model with an older version will be more likely to be dispatched to a faster and less frequently selected device for the next round of local training. In this way, GitFL enables both effective control of model staleness and adaptive load balance of versioned models among straggling devices, thus avoiding the performance deterioration. Comprehensive experimental results on well-known models and datasets show that, compared with state-of-the-art asynchronous FL methods, GitFL can achieve up to 2.64X training acceleration and 7.88% inference accuracy improvements in various uncertain scenarios.

cs.LG↗

Explainable COVID-19 Infections Identification and Delineation Using Calibrated Pseudo Labels

The upheaval brought by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic has continued to bring fresh challenges over the past two years. During this COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a need for rapid identification of infected patients and specific delineation of infection areas in computed tomography (CT) images. Although deep supervised learning methods have been established quickly, the scarcity of both image-level and pixel-level labels as well as the lack of explainable transparency still hinder the applicability of AI. Can we identify infected patients and delineate the infections with extreme minimal supervision? Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated promising performance under limited labelled data and sufficient unlabelled data. Inspired by semi-supervised learning, we propose a model-agnostic calibrated pseudo-labelling strategy and apply it under a consistency regularization framework to generate explainable identification and delineation results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model with the combination of limited labelled data and sufficient unlabelled data or weakly-labelled data. Extensive experiments have shown that our model can efficiently utilize limited labelled data and provide explainable classification and segmentation results for decision-making in clinical routine. The code is available at https://github.com/ayanglab/XAI COVID-19.

eess.IV↗

ProGCL: Rethinking Hard Negative Mining in Graph Contrastive Learning

Contrastive Learning (CL) has emerged as a dominant technique for unsupervised representation learning which embeds augmented versions of the anchor close to each other (positive samples) and pushes the embeddings of other samples (negatives) apart. As revealed in recent studies, CL can benefit from hard negatives (negatives that are most similar to the anchor). However, we observe limited benefits when we adopt existing hard negative mining techniques of other domains in Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL). We perform both experimental and theoretical analysis on this phenomenon and find it can be attributed to the message passing of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Unlike CL in other domains, most hard negatives are potentially false negatives (negatives that share the same class with the anchor) if they are selected merely according to the similarities between anchor and themselves, which will undesirably push away the samples of the same class. To remedy this deficiency, we propose an effective method, dubbed \textbf{ProGCL}, to estimate the probability of a negative being true one, which constitutes a more suitable measure for negatives' hardness together with similarity. Additionally, we devise two schemes (i.e., \textbf{ProGCL-weight} and \textbf{ProGCL-mix}) to boost the performance of GCL. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProGCL brings notable and consistent improvements over base GCL methods and yields multiple state-of-the-art results on several unsupervised benchmarks or even exceeds the performance of supervised ones. Also, ProGCL is readily pluggable into various negatives-based GCL methods for performance improvement. We release the code at \textcolor{magenta}{\url{https://github.com/junxia97/ProGCL}}.

cs.AI↗