Veronika Thost

dblp:132/3874 · DBLP profile ↗
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24ranked-venue papers
4as first author
12since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0003-4984-1532ORCID · verified

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 18 · 3 first-author · 11 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 7 · 2 first-author · 2 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 6 · 2 since 2021Theory of computation · 4 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Understanding and Tackling Over-Dilution in Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs) hold a key position in machine learning on graphs, but they struggle with unintended behaviors, such as over-smoothing and over-squashing, due to irregular data structures. The observation and formulation of these limitations have become foundational in constructing more informative graph representations. In this paper, we delve into the limitations of MPNNs, focusing on aspects that have previously been overlooked. Our observations reveal that even within a single layer, the information specific to an individual node can become significantly diluted. To delve into this phenomenon in depth, we present the concept of Over-dilution and formulate it with two dilution factors: intra-node dilution for attribute-level and inter-node dilution for node-level representations. We also introduce a transformer-based solution that alleviates over-dilution and complements existing node embedding methods like MPNNs. Our findings provide new insights and contribute to the development of informative representations. The implementation and supplementary materials are publicly available at https://github.com/LeeJunHyun/NATR.
Jun-Hyun Lee, Veronika Thost, Bumsoo Kim 0005, Jaewoo Kang, Tengfei Ma 0001
KDD (2)2
2024 Representing Molecules as Random Walks Over Interpretable Grammars
abstract
Recent research in molecular discovery has primarily been devoted to small, drug-like molecules, leaving many similarly important applications in material design without adequate technology. These applications often rely on more complex molecular structures with fewer examples that are carefully designed using known substructures. We propose a data-efficient and interpretable model for representing and reasoning over such molecules in terms of graph grammars that explicitly describe the hierarchical design space featuring motifs to be the design basis. We present a novel representation in the form of random walks over the design space, which facilitates both molecule generation and property prediction. We demonstrate clear advantages over existing methods in terms of performance, efficiency, and synthesizability of predicted molecules, and we provide detailed insights into the method’s chemical interpretability.
Michael Sun, Weize Yuan, Veronika Thost, Crystal Elaine Owens, Aristotle Franklin Grosz, Sharvaa Selvan, Katelyn Zhou, Hassan Mohiuddin, Benjamin J. Pedretti, Zachary P. Smith, Jie Chen 0007, Wojciech Matusik
ICML4
2023 Knowledge Graph Compression Enhances Diverse Commonsense Generation
abstract
Generating commonsense explanations requires reasoning about commonsense knowledge beyond what is explicitly mentioned in the context.Existing models use commonsense knowledge graphs such as ConceptNet to extract a subgraph of relevant knowledge pertaining to concepts in the input.However, due to the large coverage and, consequently, vast scale of ConceptNet, the extracted subgraphs may contain loosely related, redundant and irrelevant information, which can introduce noise into the model.We propose to address this by applying a differentiable graph compression algorithm that focuses on more salient and relevant knowledge for the task.The compressed subgraphs yield considerably more diverse outputs when incorporated into models for the tasks of generating commonsense and abductive explanations.Moreover, our model achieves better quality-diversity tradeoff than a large language model with 100 times the number of parameters.Our generic approach can be applied to additional NLP tasks that can benefit from incorporating external knowledge.1
Eunjeong Hwang, Veronika Thost, Vered Shwartz, Tengfei Ma 0001
EMNLP2
2023 Hierarchical Grammar-Induced Geometry for Data-Efficient Molecular Property Prediction
abstract
The prediction of molecular properties is a crucial task in the field of material and drug discovery. The potential benefits of using deep learning techniques are reflected in the wealth of recent literature. Still, these techniques are faced with a common challenge in practice: Labeled data are limited by the cost of manual extraction from literature and laborious experimentation. In this work, we propose a data-efficient property predictor by utilizing a learnable hierarchical molecular grammar that can generate molecules from grammar production rules. Such a grammar induces an explicit geometry of the space of molecular graphs, which provides an informative prior on molecular structural similarity. The property prediction is performed using graph neural diffusion over the grammar-induced geometry. On both small and large datasets, our evaluation shows that this approach outperforms a wide spectrum of baselines, including supervised and pre-trained graph neural networks. We include a detailed ablation study and further analysis of our solution, showing its effectiveness in cases with extremely limited data.
Veronika Thost, Samuel W. Song, Adithya Balachandran, Jie Chen 0007, Wojciech Matusik
ICML2
2023 Improving Self-supervised Molecular Representation Learning using Persistent Homology
abstract
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has great potential for molecular representation learning given the complexity of molecular graphs, the large amounts of unlabelled data available, the considerable cost of obtaining labels experimentally, and the hence often only small training datasets. The importance of the topic is reflected in the variety of paradigms and architectures that have been investigated recently, most focus on designing views for contrastive learning. In this paper, we study SSL based on persistent homology (PH), a mathematical tool for modeling topological features of data that persist across multiple scales. It has several unique features which particularly suit SSL, naturally offering: different views of the data, stability in terms of distance preservation, and the opportunity to flexibly incorporate domain knowledge. We (1) investigate an autoencoder, which shows the general representational power of PH, and (2) propose a contrastive loss that complements existing approaches. We rigorously evaluate our approach for molecular property prediction and demonstrate its particular features in improving the embedding space: after SSL, the representations are better and offer considerably more predictive power than the baselines over different probing tasks; our loss increases baseline performance, sometimes largely; and we often obtain substantial improvements over very small datasets, a common scenario in practice.
Yuankai Luo, Lei Shi 0002, Veronika Thost
NeurIPS3
2023 Transformers over Directed Acyclic Graphs
abstract
Transformer models have recently gained popularity in graph representation learning as they have the potential to learn complex relationships beyond the ones captured by regular graph neural networks. The main research question is how to inject the structural bias of graphs into the transformer architecture, and several proposals have been made for undirected molecular graphs and, recently, also for larger network graphs. In this paper, we study transformers over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) and propose architecture adaptations tailored to DAGs: (1) An attention mechanism that is considerably more efficient than the regular quadratic complexity of transformers and at the same time faithfully captures the DAG structure, and (2) a positional encoding of the DAG's partial order, complementing the former. We rigorously evaluate our approach over various types of tasks, ranging from classifying source code graphs to nodes in citation networks, and show that it is effective in two important aspects: in making graph transformers generally outperform graph neural networks tailored to DAGs and in improving SOTA graph transformer performance in terms of both quality and efficiency.
Yuankai Luo, Veronika Thost, Lei Shi 0002
NeurIPS2
2022 Data-Efficient Graph Grammar Learning for Molecular Generation
Veronika Thost, Beichen Li 0005, Jie Chen 0007, Wojciech Matusik
ICLR2
2022 Improving Inductive Link Prediction Using Hyper-Relational Facts (Extended Abstract)
abstract
For many years, link prediction on knowledge. graphs has been a purely transductive task, not allowing for reasoning on unseen entities. Recently, increasing efforts are put into exploring semi- and fully inductive scenarios, enabling inference over unseen and emerging entities. Still, all these approaches only consider triple-based KGs, whereas their richer counterparts, hyper-relational KGs (e.g., Wikidata), have not yet been properly studied. In this work, we classify different inductive settings and study the benefits of employing hyper-relational KGs on a wide range of semi- and fully inductive link prediction tasks powered by recent advancements in graph neural networks. Our experiments on a novel set of benchmarks show that qualifiers over typed edges can lead to performance improvements of 6% of absolute gains (for the Hits@10 metric) compared to triple-only baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/mali-git/hyper_relational_ilp.
Mehdi Ali, Max Berrendorf, Michael Galkin, Veronika Thost, Tengfei Ma 0001, Volker Tresp, Jens Lehmann 0001
IJCAI4
2021 A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach to First-Order Logic Theorem Proving
abstract
Automated theorem provers have traditionally relied on manually tuned heuristics to guide how they perform proof search. Deep reinforcement learning has been proposed as a way to obviate the need for such heuristics, however, its deployment in automated theorem proving remains a challenge. In this paper we introduce TRAIL, a system that applies deep reinforcement learning to saturation-based theorem proving. TRAIL leverages (a) a novel neural representation of the state of a theorem prover and (b) a novel characterization of the inference selection process in terms of an attention-based action policy. We show through systematic analysis that these mechanisms allow TRAIL to significantly outperform previous reinforcement-learning-based theorem provers on two benchmark datasets for first-order logic automated theorem proving (proving around 15% more theorems).
Maxwell Crouse, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Bassem Makni, Spencer Whitehead, Cristina Cornelio, Pavan Kapanipathi, Kavitha Srinivas, Veronika Thost, Michael Witbrock, Achille Fokoue
AAAI8
2021 Directed Acyclic Graph Neural Networks
Veronika Thost, Jie Chen 0007
ICLR1
2021 Synthetic Datasets and Evaluation Tools for Inductive Neural Reasoning
Cristina Cornelio, Veronika Thost
ILP2
2021 Improving Inductive Link Prediction Using Hyper-relational Facts
Mehdi Ali, Max Berrendorf, Michael Galkin, Veronika Thost, Tengfei Ma 0001, Volker Tresp, Jens Lehmann 0001
ISWC4
2020 Infusing Knowledge into the Textual Entailment Task Using Graph Convolutional Networks
abstract
Textual entailment is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Most approaches for solving this problem use only the textual content present in training data. A few approaches have shown that information from external knowledge sources like knowledge graphs (KGs) can add value, in addition to the textual content, by providing background knowledge that may be critical for a task. However, the proposed models do not fully exploit the information in the usually large and noisy KGs, and it is not clear how it can be effectively encoded to be useful for entailment. We present an approach that complements text-based entailment models with information from KGs by (1) using Personalized PageRank to generate contextual subgraphs with reduced noise and (2) encoding these subgraphs using graph convolutional networks to capture the structural and semantic information in KGs. We evaluate our approach on multiple textual entailment datasets and show that the use of external knowledge helps the model to be robust and improves prediction accuracy. This is particularly evident in the challenging BreakingNLI dataset, where we see an absolute improvement of 5-20% over multiple text-based entailment models.
Pavan Kapanipathi, Veronika Thost, Siva Sankalp Patel, Spencer Whitehead, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Avinash Balakrishnan, Maria Chang 0001, Kshitij Fadnis, R. Chulaka Gunasekara, Bassem Makni, Nicholas Mattei, Kartik Talamadupula, Achille Fokoue
AAAI2
2020 Metric Temporal Description Logics with Interval-Rigid Names
abstract
In contrast to qualitative linear temporal logics, which can be used to state that some property will eventually be satisfied, metric temporal logics allow us to formulate constraints on how long it may take until the property is satisfied. While most of the work on combining description logics (DLs) with temporal logics has concentrated on qualitative temporal logics, there is a growing interest in extending this work to the quantitative case. In this article, we complement existing results on the combination of DLs with metric temporal logics by introducing interval-rigid concept and role names. Elements included in an interval-rigid concept or role name are required to stay in it for some specified amount of time. We investigate several combinations of (metric) temporal logics with A ℒ C by either allowing temporal operators only on the level of axioms or also applying them to concepts. In contrast to most existing work on the topic, we consider a timeline based on the integers and also allow assertional axioms. We show that the worst-case complexity does not increase beyond the previously known bound of 2-E xp S pace and investigate in detail how this complexity can be reduced by restricting the temporal logic and the occurrences of interval-rigid names.
Franz Baader, Stefan Borgwardt, Patrick Koopmann, Ana Ozaki, Veronika Thost
ACM Trans. Comput. Log.5
2019 QED: Out-of-the-Box Datasets for SPARQL Query Evaluation
abstract
In this paper, we present SPARQL QED, a system generating out-of-the-box datasets for SPARQL queries over linked data. QED distinguishes the queries according to the different SPARQL features and creates, for each query, a small but exhaustive dataset comprising linked data and the query answers over this data. These datasets can support the development of applications based on SPARQL query answering in various ways. For instance, they may serve as SPARQL compliance tests or can be used for learning in query-by-example systems. We ensure that the created datasets are diverse and cover various practical use cases and, of course, that the sets of answers included are the correct ones. Example tests generated based on queries and data from DBpedia have shown bugs in Jena and Virtuoso.
Veronika Thost, Julian Dolby
ESWC1
2018 Attributed Description Logics: Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs
abstract
In modelling real-world knowledge, there often arises a need to represent and reason with meta-knowledge. To equip description logics (DLs) for dealing with such ontologies, we enrich DL concepts and roles with finite sets of attribute–value pairs, called annotations, and allow concept inclusions to express constraints on annotations. We investigate a range of DLs starting from the lightweight description logic EL, covering the prototypical ALCH, and extending to the very expressive SROIQ, the DL underlying OWL 2 DL.
Markus Krötzsch, Maximilian Marx 0001, Ana Ozaki, Veronika Thost
IJCAI4
2018 Query Answering for Rough EL Ontologies
Rafael Peñaloza, Veronika Thost, Anni-Yasmin Turhan
KR2
2018 Metric Temporal Extensions of DL-Lite and Interval-Rigid Names
Veronika Thost
KR1
2017 Logic on MARS: Ontologies for Generalised Property Graphs
abstract
Graph-structured data is used to represent large information collections, called knowledge graphs, in many applications. Their exact format may vary, but they often share the concept that edges can be annotated with additional information, such as validity time or provenance information. Property Graph is a popular graph database format that also provides this feature. We give a formalisation of a generalised notion of Property Graphs, called multi-attributed relational structures (MARS), and introduce a matching knowledge representation formalism, multi-attributed predicate logic (MAPL). We analyse the expressive power of MAPL and suggest a simpler, rule-based fragment of MAPL that can be used for ontological reasoning on Property Graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to making Property Graphs and related data structures accessible to symbolic AI.
Maximilian Marx 0001, Markus Krötzsch, Veronika Thost
IJCAI3
2017 Attributed Description Logics: Ontologies for Knowledge Graphs
Markus Krötzsch, Maximilian Marx 0001, Ana Ozaki, Veronika Thost
ISWC (1)4
2016 Ontologies for Knowledge Graphs: Breaking the Rules
Markus Krötzsch, Veronika Thost
ISWC (1)2
2015 Temporal Query Answering in the Description Logic EL
Stefan Borgwardt, Veronika Thost
IJCAI2
2015 Temporalizing rewritable query languages over knowledge bases
Stefan Borgwardt, Marcel Lippmann, Veronika Thost
J. Web Semant.3
2013 Query matching for report recommendation
abstract
Today, reporting is an essential part of everyday business life. But the preparation of complex Business Intelligence data by formulating relevant queries and presenting them in meaningful visualizations, so-called reports, is a challenging task for non-expert database users. To support these users with report creation, we leverage existing queries and present a system for query recommendation in a reporting environment, which is based on query matching. Targeting at large-scale, real-world reporting scenarios, we propose a scalable, index-based query matching approach. Moreover, schema matching is applied for a more fine-grained, structural comparison of the queries. In addition to interactively providing content-based query recommendations of good quality, the system works independent of particular data sources or query languages.
Veronika Thost, Konrad Voigt, Daniel Schuster 0002
CIKM1