arXiv subjects

Yongchao Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Yongchao Liu.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Multi-Grained Preference Enhanced Transformer for Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict the next purchasing item according to users' dynamic preference learned from their historical user-item interactions. To improve the performance of recommendation, learning dynamic heterogeneous cross-type behavior dependencies is indispensable for recommender system. However, there still exists some challenges in Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (MBSR). On the one hand, existing methods only model heterogeneous multi-behavior dependencies at behavior-level or item-level, and modelling interaction-level dependencies is still a challenge. On the other hand, the dynamic multi-grained behavior-aware preference is hard to capture in interaction sequences, which reflects interaction-aware sequential pattern. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Multi-Grained Preference enhanced Transformer framework (M-GPT). First, M-GPT constructs a interaction-level graph of historical cross-typed interactions in a sequence. Then graph convolution is performed to derive interaction-level multi-behavior dependency representation repeatedly, in which the complex correlation between historical cross-typed interactions at specific orders can be well learned. Secondly, a novel multi-scale transformer architecture equipped with multi-grained user preference extraction is proposed to encode the interaction-aware sequential pattern enhanced by capturing temporal behavior-aware multi-grained preference . Experiments on the real-world datasets indicate that our method M-GPT consistently outperforms various state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

AGD: an Auto-switchable Optimizer using Stepwise Gradient Difference for Preconditioning Matrix

Adaptive optimizers, such as Adam, have achieved remarkable success in deep learning. A key component of these optimizers is the so-called preconditioning matrix, providing enhanced gradient information and regulating the step size of each gradient direction. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to designing the preconditioning matrix by utilizing the gradient difference between two successive steps as the diagonal elements. These diagonal elements are closely related to the Hessian and can be perceived as an approximation of the inner product between the Hessian row vectors and difference of the adjacent parameter vectors. Additionally, we introduce an auto-switching function that enables the preconditioning matrix to switch dynamically between Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and the adaptive optimizer. Based on these two techniques, we develop a new optimizer named AGD that enhances the generalization performance. We evaluate AGD on public datasets of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), and Recommendation Systems (RecSys). Our experimental results demonstrate that AGD outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) optimizers, achieving highly competitive or significantly better predictive performance. Furthermore, we analyze how AGD is able to switch automatically between SGD and the adaptive optimizer and its actual effects on various scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/atorch/tree/main/atorch/optimizers.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Sharpness-Aware Minimization Revisited: Weighted Sharpness as a Regularization Term

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) generalization is known to be closely related to the flatness of minima, leading to the development of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) for seeking flatter minima and better generalization. In this paper, we revisit the loss of SAM and propose a more general method, called WSAM, by incorporating sharpness as a regularization term. We prove its generalization bound through the combination of PAC and Bayes-PAC techniques, and evaluate its performance on various public datasets. The results demonstrate that WSAM achieves improved generalization, or is at least highly competitive, compared to the vanilla optimizer, SAM and its variants. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/atorch/tree/main/atorch/optimizers.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Adaptive Optimizers with Sparse Group Lasso for Neural Networks in CTR Prediction

We develop a novel framework that adds the regularizers of the sparse group lasso to a family of adaptive optimizers in deep learning, such as Momentum, Adagrad, Adam, AMSGrad, AdaHessian, and create a new class of optimizers, which are named Group Momentum, Group Adagrad, Group Adam, Group AMSGrad and Group AdaHessian, etc., accordingly. We establish theoretically proven convergence guarantees in the stochastic convex settings, based on primal-dual methods. We evaluate the regularized effect of our new optimizers on three large-scale real-world ad click datasets with state-of-the-art deep learning models. The experimental results reveal that compared with the original optimizers with the post-processing procedure which uses the magnitude pruning method, the performance of the models can be significantly improved on the same sparsity level. Furthermore, in comparison to the cases without magnitude pruning, our methods can achieve extremely high sparsity with significantly better or highly competitive performance. The code is available at https://github.com/intelligent-machine-learning/tfplus/tree/main/tfplus.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced by Graph-Text Alignment for Commonsense Question Answering

Commonsense question answering is a crucial task that requires machines to employ reasoning according to commonsense. Previous studies predominantly employ an extracting-and-modeling paradigm to harness the information in KG, which first extracts relevant subgraphs based on pre-defined rules and then proceeds to design various strategies aiming to improve the representations and fusion of the extracted structural knowledge. Despite their effectiveness, there are still two challenges. On one hand, subgraphs extracted by rule-based methods may have the potential to overlook critical nodes and result in uncontrollable subgraph size. On the other hand, the misalignment between graph and text modalities undermines the effectiveness of knowledge fusion, ultimately impacting the task performance. To deal with the problems above, we propose a novel framework: \textbf{S}ubgraph R\textbf{E}trieval Enhanced by Gra\textbf{P}h-\textbf{T}ext \textbf{A}lignment, named \textbf{SEPTA}. Firstly, we transform the knowledge graph into a database of subgraph vectors and propose a BFS-style subgraph sampling strategy to avoid information loss, leveraging the analogy between BFS and the message-passing mechanism. In addition, we propose a bidirectional contrastive learning approach for graph-text alignment, which effectively enhances both subgraph retrieval and knowledge fusion. Finally, all the retrieved information is combined for reasoning in the prediction module. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our framework.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

GraphRPM: Risk Pattern Mining on Industrial Large Attributed Graphs

Graph-based patterns are extensively employed and favored by practitioners within industrial companies due to their capacity to represent the behavioral attributes and topological relationships among users, thereby offering enhanced interpretability in comparison to black-box models commonly utilized for classification and recognition tasks. For instance, within the scenario of transaction risk management, a graph pattern that is characteristic of a particular risk category can be readily employed to discern transactions fraught with risk, delineate networks of criminal activity, or investigate the methodologies employed by fraudsters. Nonetheless, graph data in industrial settings is often characterized by its massive scale, encompassing data sets with millions or even billions of nodes, making the manual extraction of graph patterns not only labor-intensive but also necessitating specialized knowledge in particular domains of risk. Moreover, existing methodologies for mining graph patterns encounter significant obstacles when tasked with analyzing large-scale attributed graphs. In this work, we introduce GraphRPM, an industry-purpose parallel and distributed risk pattern mining framework on large attributed graphs. The framework incorporates a novel edge-involved graph isomorphism network alongside optimized operations for parallel graph computation, which collectively contribute to a considerable reduction in computational complexity and resource expenditure. Moreover, the intelligent filtration of efficacious risky graph patterns is facilitated by the proposed evaluation metrics. Comprehensive experimental evaluations conducted on real-world datasets of varying sizes substantiate the capability of GraphRPM to adeptly address the challenges inherent in mining patterns from large-scale industrial attributed graphs, thereby underscoring its substantial value for industrial deployment.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Survey

Recently, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has achieved remarkable success in addressing the challenges of Large Language Models (LLMs) without necessitating retraining. By referencing an external knowledge base, RAG refines LLM outputs, effectively mitigating issues such as ``hallucination'', lack of domain-specific knowledge, and outdated information. However, the complex structure of relationships among different entities in databases presents challenges for RAG systems. In response, GraphRAG leverages structural information across entities to enable more precise and comprehensive retrieval, capturing relational knowledge and facilitating more accurate, context-aware responses. Given the novelty and potential of GraphRAG, a systematic review of current technologies is imperative. This paper provides the first comprehensive overview of GraphRAG methodologies. We formalize the GraphRAG workflow, encompassing Graph-Based Indexing, Graph-Guided Retrieval, and Graph-Enhanced Generation. We then outline the core technologies and training methods at each stage. Additionally, we examine downstream tasks, application domains, evaluation methodologies, and industrial use cases of GraphRAG. Finally, we explore future research directions to inspire further inquiries and advance progress in the field. In order to track recent progress in this field, we set up a repository at \url{https://github.com/pengboci/GraphRAG-Survey}.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

CL4KGE: A Curriculum Learning Method for Knowledge Graph Embedding

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) constitutes a foundational task, directed towards learning representations for entities and relations within knowledge graphs (KGs), with the objective of crafting representations comprehensive enough to approximate the logical and symbolic interconnections among entities. In this paper, we define a metric Z-counts to measure the difficulty of training each triple ($<$head entity, relation, tail entity$>$) in KGs with theoretical analysis. Based on this metric, we propose \textbf{CL4KGE}, an efficient \textbf{C}urriculum \textbf{L}earning based training strategy for \textbf{KGE}. This method includes a difficulty measurer and a training scheduler that aids in the training of KGE models. Our approach possesses the flexibility to act as a plugin within a wide range of KGE models, with the added advantage of adaptability to the majority of KGs in existence. The proposed method has been evaluated on popular KGE models, and the results demonstrate that it enhances the state-of-the-art methods. The use of Z-counts as a metric has enabled the identification of challenging triples in KGs, which helps in devising effective training strategies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Supporting Energy-Based Learning With An Ising Machine Substrate: A Case Study on RBM

Nature apparently does a lot of computation constantly. If we can harness some of that computation at an appropriate level, we can potentially perform certain type of computation (much) faster and more efficiently than we can do with a von Neumann computer. Indeed, many powerful algorithms are inspired by nature and are thus prime candidates for nature-based computation. One particular branch of this effort that has seen some recent rapid advances is Ising machines. Some Ising machines are already showing better performance and energy efficiency for optimization problems. Through design iterations and co-evolution between hardware and algorithm, we expect more benefits from nature-based computing systems. In this paper, we make a case for an augmented Ising machine suitable for both training and inference using an energy-based machine learning algorithm. We show that with a small change, the Ising substrate accelerate key parts of the algorithm and achieve non-trivial speedup and efficiency gain. With a more substantial change, we can turn the machine into a self-sufficient gradient follower to virtually complete training entirely in hardware. This can bring about 29x speedup and about 1000x reduction in energy compared to a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) host.

cs.ET↗

arXiv2023

Efficient LDPC Decoding using Physical Computation

Due to 5G deployment, there is significant interest in LDPC decoding. While much research is devoted on efficient hardwiring of algorithms based on Belief Propagation (BP), it has been shown that LDPC decoding can be formulated as a combinatorial optimization problem, which could benefit from significant acceleration of physical computation mechanisms such as Ising machines. This approach has so far resulted in poor performance. This paper shows that the reason is not fundamental but suboptimal hardware and formulation. A co-designed Ising machine-based system can improve speed by 3 orders of magnitude. As a result, a physical computation approach can outperform hardwiring state-of-the-art algorithms. In this paper, we show such an augmented Ising machine that is 4.4$\times$ more energy efficient than the state of the art in the literature.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2023

A Variance-Reduced Aggregation Based Gradient Tracking method for Distributed Optimization over Directed Networks

This paper studies the distributed optimization problem over directed networks with noisy information-sharing. To resolve the imperfect communication issue over directed networks, a series of noise-robust variants of Push-Pull/AB method have been developed. These methods improve the robustness of Push-Pull method against the information-sharing noise through adding small factors on weight matrices and replacing the global gradient tracking with the cumulative gradient tracking. Based on the two techniques, we propose a new variant of the Push-Pull method by presenting a novel mechanism of inter-agent information aggregation, named variance-reduced aggregation (VRA). VRA helps us to release some conditions on the objective function and networks. When the objective function is convex and the sharing-information noise is variance-unbounded, it can be shown that the proposed method converges to the optimal solution almost surely. When the objective function is strongly convex and the sharing-information noise is variance-bounded, the proposed method achieves the convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}\left(k^{-(1-ε)}\right)$ in the mean square sense, where $ε$ could be close to 0 infinitely. Simulated experiments on ridge regression problems verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

math.OC↗

arXiv2023

GraphTheta: A Distributed Graph Neural Network Learning System With Flexible Training Strategy

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been demonstrated as a powerful tool for analyzing non-Euclidean graph data. However, the lack of efficient distributed graph learning systems severely hinders applications of GNNs, especially when graphs are big and GNNs are relatively deep. Herein, we present GraphTheta, the first distributed and scalable graph learning system built upon vertex-centric distributed graph processing with neural network operators implemented as user-defined functions. This system supports multiple training strategies and enables efficient and scalable big-graph learning on distributed (virtual) machines with low memory. To facilitate graph convolutions, GraphTheta puts forward a new graph learning abstraction named NN-TGAR to bridge the gap between graph processing and graph deep learning. A distributed graph engine is proposed to conduct the stochastic gradient descent optimization with a hybrid-parallel execution, and a new cluster-batched training strategy is supported. We evaluate GraphTheta using several datasets with network sizes ranging from small-, modest- to large-scale. Experimental results show that GraphTheta can scale well to 1,024 workers for training an in-house developed GNN on an industry-scale Alipay dataset of 1.4 billion nodes and 4.1 billion attributed edges, with a cluster of CPU virtual machines (dockers) of small memory each (5$\sim$12GB). Moreover, GraphTheta can outperform DistDGL by up to $2.02\times$, with better scalability, and GraphLearn by up to $30.56\times$. As for model accuracy, GraphTheta is capable of learning as good GNNs as existing frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the largest edge-attributed GNN learning task in the literature.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Numerical Methods for Distributed Stochastic Compositional Optimization Problems with Aggregative Structure

The paper studies the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over networks, where all the agents' inner-level function is the sum of each agent's private expectation function. Focusing on the aggregative structure of the inner-level function, we employ the hybrid variance reduction method to obtain the information on each agent's private expectation function, and apply the dynamic consensus mechanism to track the information on each agent's inner-level function. Then by combining with the standard distributed stochastic gradient descent method, we propose a distributed aggregative stochastic compositional gradient descent method. When the objective function is smooth, the proposed method achieves the optimal convergence rate $\mathcal{O}\left(K^{-1/2}\right)$. We further combine the proposed method with the communication compression and propose the communication compressed variant distributed aggregative stochastic compositional gradient descent method. The compressed variant of the proposed method maintains the optimal convergence rate $\mathcal{O}\left(K^{-1/2}\right)$. Simulated experiments on decentralized reinforcement learning verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Asymptotic Properties of $\mathcal{S}$-$\mathcal{AB}$ Method with Diminishing Stepsize

The popular $\mathcal{AB}$/push-pull method for distributed optimization problem may unify much of the existing decentralized first-order methods based on gradient tracking technique. More recently, the stochastic gradient variant of $\mathcal{AB}$/Push-Pull method ($\mathcal{S}$-$\mathcal{AB}$) has been proposed, which achieves the linear rate of converging to a neighborhood of the global minimizer when the step-size is constant. This paper is devoted to the asymptotic properties of $\mathcal{S}$-$\mathcal{AB}$ with diminishing stepsize. Specifically, under the condition that each local objective is smooth and the global objective is strongly-convex, we first present the boundedness of the iterates of $\mathcal{S}$-$\mathcal{AB}$ and then show that the iterates converge to the global minimizer with the rate $\mathcal{O}\left(1/\sqrt{k}\right)$. Furthermore, the asymptotic normality of Polyak-Ruppert averaged $\mathcal{S}$-$\mathcal{AB}$ is obtained and applications on statistical inference are discussed. Finally, numerical tests are conducted to demonstrate the theoretic results.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Distributed Stochastic Compositional Optimization Problems over Directed Networks

We study the distributed stochastic compositional optimization problems over directed communication networks in which agents privately own a stochastic compositional objective function and collaborate to minimize the sum of all objective functions. We propose a distributed stochastic compositional gradient descent method, where the gradient tracking and the stochastic correction techniques are employed to adapt to the networks' directed structure and increase the accuracy of inner function estimation. When the objective function is smooth, the proposed method achieves the convergence rate $\mathcal{O}\left(k^{-1/2}\right)$ and sample complexity $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{ε^2}\right)$ for finding the ($ε$)-stationary point. When the objective function is strongly convex, the convergence rate is improved to $\mathcal{O}\left(k^{-1}\right)$. Moreover, the asymptotic normality of Polyak-Ruppert averaged iterates of the proposed method is also presented. We demonstrate the empirical performance of the proposed method on model-agnostic meta-learning problem and logistic regression problem.

math.OC↗

arXiv2022

Stochastic Approximation Based Confidence Regions for Stochastic Variational Inequalities

The sample average approximation (SAA) and the stochastic approximation (SA) are two popular schemes for solving the stochastic variational inequalities problem (SVIP). In the past decades, theories on the consistency of the SAA solutions and SA solutions have been well studied. More recently, the asymptotic confidence regions of the true solution to SVIP have been constructed when the SAA scheme is implemented. It is of fundamental interest to develop confidence regions of the true solution to the SVIP when the SA scheme is employed. In this paper, we discuss the framework of constructing asymptotic confidence regions for the true solution of SVIP with a focus on stochastic dual average method. We first establish the asymptotic normality of the SA solutions both in ergodic sense and non-ergodic sense. Then the online methods of estimating the covariance matrices in the normal distributions are studied. Finally, practical procedures of building the asymptotic confidence regions of solutions to SVIP with numerical simulations are presented.

math.OC↗

arXiv2021

GIPA: General Information Propagation Algorithm for Graph Learning

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been popularly used in analyzing graph-structured data, showing promising results in various applications such as node classification, link prediction and network recommendation. In this paper, we present a new graph attention neural network, namely GIPA, for attributed graph data learning. GIPA consists of three key components: attention, feature propagation and aggregation. Specifically, the attention component introduces a new multi-layer perceptron based multi-head to generate better non-linear feature mapping and representation than conventional implementations such as dot-product. The propagation component considers not only node features but also edge features, which differs from existing GNNs that merely consider node features. The aggregation component uses a residual connection to generate the final embedding. We evaluate the performance of GIPA using the Open Graph Benchmark proteins (ogbn-proteins for short) dataset. The experimental results reveal that GIPA can beat the state-of-the-art models in terms of prediction accuracy, e.g., GIPA achieves an average test ROC-AUC of $0.8700\pm 0.0010$ and outperforms all the previous methods listed in the ogbn-proteins leaderboard.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Path-based Deep Network for Candidate Item Matching in Recommenders

The large-scale recommender system mainly consists of two stages: matching and ranking. The matching stage (also known as the retrieval step) identifies a small fraction of relevant items from billion-scale item corpus in low latency and computational cost. Item-to-item collaborative filter (item-based CF) and embedding-based retrieval (EBR) have been long used in the industrial matching stage owing to its efficiency. However, item-based CF is hard to meet personalization, while EBR has difficulty in satisfying diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel matching architecture, Path-based Deep Network (named PDN), which can incorporate both personalization and diversity to enhance matching performance. Specifically, PDN is comprised of two modules: Trigger Net and Similarity Net. PDN utilizes Trigger Net to capture the user's interest in each of his/her interacted item, and Similarity Net to evaluate the similarity between each interacted item and the target item based on these items' profile and CF information. The final relevance between the user and the target item is calculated by explicitly considering user's diverse interests, \ie aggregating the relevance weights of the related two-hop paths (one hop of a path corresponds to user-item interaction and the other to item-item relevance). Furthermore, we describe the architecture design of a matching system with the proposed PDN in a leading real-world E-Commerce service (Mobile Taobao App). Based on offline evaluations and online A/B test, we show that PDN outperforms the existing solutions for the same task. The online results also demonstrate that PDN can retrieve more personalized and more diverse relevant items to significantly improve user engagement. Currently, PDN system has been successfully deployed at Mobile Taobao App and handling major online traffic.

cs.IR↗