The privacy concerns associated with the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) have grown dramatically with the development of pioneer LLMs such as ChatGPT. Differential Privacy (DP) techniques that utilize DP-SGD are explored in existing work to mitigate their privacy risks at the cost of generalization degradation. Our paper reveals that the flatness of DP-SGD trained models’ loss landscape plays an essential role in the trade-off between their privacy and generalization. We further propose a holistic framework Privacy-Flat to enforce appropriate weight flatness, which substantially improves model generalization with promising privacy protection. It innovates from three coarse-to-grained levels: Perturbation-aware min-max optimization within a layer, flatness-guided sparse prefix-tuning across layers, and weight knowledge distillation between private & non-private weights copies. We empirically demonstrate that our framework Privacy-Flat outperforms vanilla private training baseline while protecting privacy from membership inference attacks (MIA). Comprehensive experiments of both black-box and white-box scenarios are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal in enhancing generalization. The code link is provided at https://github.com/tiejin98/Privacy_ Flatness.

Multivariate time series classification is an important task with widespread domains of applications. Recently, deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in time series classification. However, they often require large expert-labeled training datasets which can be infeasible in practice. In few-shot settings, i.e. only a limited number of samples per class are available in training data, DNNs show a significant drop in testing accuracy and poor generalization ability. In this paper, we propose to address these problems from an optimization and a loss function perspective. Specifically, we propose a new learning framework named COSCO consisting of a sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization and a Prototypical loss function to improve the generalization ability of DNN for multivariate time series classification problems under few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate our proposed method outperforms the existing baseline methods. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/JRB9/COSCO.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown proficiency in question-answering tasks but often struggle to integrate real-time knowledge, leading to potentially outdated or inaccurate responses. This problem becomes even more challenging when dealing with multi-hop questions, since they require LLMs to update and integrate multiple knowledge pieces relevant to the questions. To tackle the problem, we propose the Retrieval-Augmented model Editing (RAE) framework for multi-hop question answering. RAE first retrieves edited facts and then refines the language model through in-context learning. Specifically, our retrieval approach, based on mutual information maximization, leverages the reasoning abilities of LLMs to identify chain facts that traditional similarity-based searches might miss. In addition, our framework includes a pruning strategy to eliminate redundant information from the retrieved facts, which enhances the editing accuracy and mitigates the hallucination problem. Our framework is supported by theoretical justification for its fact retrieval efficacy. Finally, comprehensive evaluation across various LLMs validates RAE's ability in providing accurate answers with updated knowledge. Our code is available at: https://github.com/sycny/RAE.

Despite the recent progress of molecular representation learning, its effectiveness is assumed on the close-world assumptions that training and testing graphs are from identical distribution. The open-world test dataset is often mixed with out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, where the deployed models will struggle to make accurate predictions. The misleading estimations of molecules' properties in drug screening or design can result in the tremendous waste of wet-lab resources and delay the discovery of novel therapies. Traditional detection methods need to trade off OOD detection and in-distribution (ID) classification performance since they share the same representation learning model. In this work, we propose to detect OOD molecules by adopting an auxiliary diffusion model-based framework, which compares similarities between input molecules and reconstructed graphs. Due to the generative bias towards reconstructing ID training samples, the similarity scores of OOD molecules will be much lower to facilitate detection. Although it is conceptually simple, extending this vanilla framework to practical detection applications is still limited by two significant challenges. First, the popular similarity metrics based on Euclidian distance fail to consider the complex graph structure. Second, the generative model involving iterative denoising steps is notoriously time-consuming especially when it runs on the enormous pool of drugs. To address these challenges, our research pioneers an approach of Prototypical Graph Reconstruction for Molecular OOd Detection, dubbed as PGR-MOOD. Specifically, PGR-MOOD hinges on three innovations: i) An effective metric to comprehensively quantify the matching degree of input and reconstructed molecules according to their discrete edges and continuous node features; ii) A creative graph generator to construct a list of prototypical graphs that are in line with ID distribution but away from OOD one; iii) An efficient and scalable OOD detector to compare the similarity between test samples and pre-constructed prototypical graphs and omit the generative process on every new molecule. Extensive experiments on ten benchmark datasets and six baselines are conducted to demonstrate our superiority: PGR-MOOD achieves more than 8% of average improvement in terms of detection AUC and AUPR accompanied by the reduced cost of testing time and memory consumption. The anonymous code is in: https://github.com/se7esx/PGR-MOOD.

The exponential growth in scholarly publications necessitates advanced tools for efficient article retrieval, especially in interdisciplinary fields where diverse terminologies are used to describe similar research. Traditional keyword-based search engines often fall short in assisting users who may not be familiar with specific terminologies. To address this, we present a knowledge graph based paper search engine for biomedical research to enhance the user experience in discovering relevant queries and articles. The system, dubbed DiscoverPath, employs Named Entity Recognition (NER) and part-of-speech (POS) tagging to extract terminologies and relationships from article abstracts to create a KG. To reduce information overload, DiscoverPath presents users with a focused subgraph containing the queried entity and its neighboring nodes and incorporates a query recommendation system enabling users to iteratively refine their queries. The system is equipped with an accessible Graphical User Interface that provides an intuitive visualization of the KG, query recommendations, and detailed article information, enabling efficient article retrieval, thus fostering interdisciplinary knowledge exploration. DiscoverPath is open-sourced at https://github.com/ynchuang/DiscoverPath with a demo video at Youtube.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in recommender systems. Nevertheless, the process of searching and ranking from a large item corpus usually requires high latency, which limits the widespread deployment of GNNs in industry-scale applications. To address this issue, many methods compress user/item representations into the binary embedding space to reduce space requirements and accelerate inference. Also, they use the Straight-through Estimator (STE) to prevent vanishing gradients during back-propagation. However, the STE often causes the gradient mismatch problem, leading to sub-optimal results.

Time series anomaly detection is a challenging task with a wide range of real-world applications. Due to label sparsity, training a deep anomaly detector often relies on unsupervised approaches. Recent efforts have been devoted to time series domain adaptation to leverage knowledge from similar domains. However, existing solutions may suffer from negative knowledge transfer on anomalies due to their diversity and sparsity. Motivated by the empirical study of context alignment between two domains, we aim to transfer knowledge between two domains via adaptively sampling context information for two domains. This is challenging because it requires simultaneously modeling the complex in-domain temporal dependencies and cross-domain correlations while exploiting label information from the source domain. To this end, we propose a framework that combines context sampling and anomaly detection into a joint learning procedure. We formulate context sampling into the Markov decision process and exploit deep reinforcement learning to optimize the time series domain adaptation process via context sampling and design a tailored reward function to generate domain-invariant features that better align two domains for anomaly detection. Experiments on three public datasets show promise for knowledge transfer between two similar domains and two entirely different domains.

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which learn the node representations by recursively aggregating information from its neighbors, have become a predominant computational tool in many domains. To handle large-scale graphs, most of the existing methods partition the input graph into multiple sub-graphs (e.g., through node clustering) and apply batch training to save memory cost. However, such batch training will lead to label bias within each batch and result in over- confidence in model predictions. Since the connected nodes with positively related labels tend to be assigned together, the traditional cross-entropy minimization process attends on the predictions of biased classes at a batch to intensify the overfitting issue. To overcome the problem of label bias, we propose adaptive label smoothing (ALS) method to replace the one-hot hard labels with smoothed ones, which learns to allocate label confidences from the biased classes to the others. Specifically, ALS propagates node labels to aggregate the neighborhood label distribution in a pre-processing step, and then updates the optimal smoothed labels online to adapt to specific graph structure. Experiments on the real-world datasets demonstrate that ALS can be generally applied to the main scalable learning frameworks to calibrate the biased labels and improve generalization performances.

Training graph neural networks (GNNs) with good generalizability on large-scale graphs is a challenging problem. Existing methods mainly divide the input graph into multiple subgraphs and train them in different batches to improve training scalability. However, the local batches obtained by such a strategy could contain topological bias compared with the complete graph structure. It has been studied that the topological bias results in more significant gaps between training and testing performances, or worse generalization robustness. A straightforward solution is to utilize contrastive learning, and train node embeddings to be robust and invariant among the augmented imperfect graphs. However, most of the existing work are inefficient by contrasting extensive node pairs at the large-scale graph. With random data augmentation, they may deteriorate the embedding process by transforming well-sampled batches into meaningless graph structures.

Despite the promising representation learning of graph neural networks (GNNs), the supervised training of GNNs notoriously requires large amounts of labeled data from each application. An effective solution is to apply the transfer learning in graph: using easily accessible information to pre-train GNNs, and fine-tuning them to optimize the downstream task with only a few labels. Recently, many efforts have been paid to design the self-supervised pretext tasks, and encode the universal graph knowledge among the various applications. However, they rarely notice the inherent training objective gap between the pretext and downstream tasks. This significant gap often requires costly fine-tuning for adapting the pre-trained model to downstream problem, which prevents the efficient elicitation of pre-trained knowledge and then results in poor results. Even worse, the naive pre-training strategy usually deteriorates the downstream task, and damages the reliability of transfer learning in graph data. To bridge the task gap, we propose a novel transfer learning paradigm to generalize GNNs, namely graph pre-training and prompt tuning (GPPT). Specifically, we first adopt the masked edge prediction, the most simplest and popular pretext task, to pre-train GNNs. Based on the pre-trained model, we propose the graph prompting function to modify the standalone node into a token pair, and reformulate the downstream node classification looking the same as edge prediction. The token pair is consisted of candidate label class and node entity. Therefore, the pre-trained GNNs could be applied without tedious fine-tuning to evaluate the linking probability of token pair, and produce the node classification decision. The extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of GPPT, delivering an average improvement of 4.29% in few-shot graph analysis and accelerating the model convergence up to 4.32X. The code is available in: https://github.com/MingChen-Sun/GPPT.

There has been an explosion of interest in designing various Knowledge Graph Neural Networks (KGNNs), which achieve state-of-the-art performance and provide great explainability for recommendation. The promising performance is mainly resulting from their capability of capturing high-order proximity messages over the knowledge graphs. However, training KGNNs at scale is challenging due to the high memory usage. In the forward pass, the automatic differentiation engines (e.g., TensorFlow/PyTorch) generally need to cache all intermediate activation maps in order to compute gradients in the backward pass, which leads to a large GPU memory footprint. Existing work solves this problem by utilizing multi-GPU distributed frameworks. Nonetheless, this poses a practical challenge when seeking to deploy KGNNs in memory-constrained environments, especially for industry-scale graphs.

We study time-series classification (TSC), a fundamental task of time-series data mining. Prior work has approached TSC from two major directions: (1) similarity-based methods that classify time-series based on the nearest neighbors, and (2) deep learning models that directly learn the representations for classification in a data-driven manner. Motivated by the different working mechanisms within these two research lines, we aim to connect them in such a way as to jointly model time-series similarities and learn the representations. This is a challenging task because it is unclear how we should efficiently leverage similarity information. To tackle the challenge, we propose Similarity-Aware Time-Series Classification (SimTSC), a conceptually simple and general framework that models similarity information with graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we formulate TSC as a node classification problem in graphs, where the nodes correspond to time-series, and the links correspond to pair-wise similarities. We further design a graph construction strategy and a batch training algorithm with negative sampling to improve training efficiency. We instantiate SimTSC with ResNet as the backbone and Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) as the similarity measure. Extensive experiments on the full UCR datasets and several multivariate datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating similarity information into deep learning models in both supervised and semi-supervised settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/daochenzha/SimTSC.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide a class of powerful architectures that are effective for graph-based collaborative filtering. Nevertheless, GNNs are known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations. Adversarial training is a simple yet effective way to improve the robustness of neural models. For example, many prior studies inject adversarial perturbations into either node features or hidden layers of GNNs. However, perturbing graph structures has been far less studied in recommendations.

Outlier detection is an important data mining task with numerous applications such as intrusion detection, credit card fraud detection, and video surveillance. However, given a specific task with complex data, the process of building an effective deep learning based system for outlier detection still highly relies on human expertise and laboring trials. Moreover, while Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has shown its promise in discovering effective deep architectures in various domains, such as image classification, object detection and semantic segmentation, contemporary NAS methods are not suitable for outlier detection due to the lack of intrinsic search space and low sample efficiency. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose AutoOD, an automated outlier detection framework, which aims to search for an optimal neural network model within a predefined search space. Specifically, we introduce an experience replay mechanism based on self-imitation learning to improve the sample efficiency. Experimental results on various real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the deep model identified by AutoOD achieves the best performance, comparing with existing handcrafted models and traditional search methods.

Session-based recommendation aims to predict the next item that is most likely to be clicked by an anonymous user, based on his/her clicking sequence within one visit. It becomes an essential function of many recommender systems since it protects privacy. However, as the accumulated session records keep increasing, it becomes challenging to model the user interests since they would drift when the time span is large. Efforts have been devoted to handling dynamic user interests by modeling all historical sessions at one time or conducting offline retraining regularly. These solutions are far from practical requirements in terms of efficiency and capturing timely user interests. To this end, we propose a memory-efficient framework - TASRec. It constructs a graph for each day to model the relations among items. Thus, the same item on different days could have different neighbors, corresponding to the drifting user interests. We design a tailored graph neural network to embed this dynamic graph of items and learn temporal augmented item representations. Based on this, we leverage a sequential neural architecture to predict the next item of a given sequence. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TASRec outperforms state-of-the-art session-based recommendation methods.

Graph data are pervasive in many real-world applications. Recently, increasing attention has been paid on graph neural networks (GNNs), which aim to model the local graph structures and capture the hierarchical patterns by aggregating the information from neighbors with stackable network modules. Motivated by the observation that different nodes often require different iterations of aggregation to fully capture the structural information, in this paper, we propose to explicitly sample diverse iterations of aggregation for different nodes to boost the performance of GNNs. It is a challenging task to develop an effective aggregation strategy for each node, given complex graphs and sparse features. Moreover, it is not straightforward to derive an efficient algorithm since we need to feed the sampled nodes into different number of network layers. To address the above challenges, we propose Policy-GNN, a meta-policy framework that models the sampling procedure and message passing of GNNs into a combined learning process. Specifically, Policy-GNN uses a meta-policy to adaptively determine the number of aggregations for each node. The meta-policy is trained with deep reinforcement learning~(RL) by exploiting the feedback from the model. We further introduce parameter sharing and a buffer mechanism to boost the training efficiency. Experimental results on three real-world benchmark datasets suggest that Policy-GNN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art alternatives, showing the promise in aggregation optimization for GNNs.

Deep neural network (DNN) has become an effective computational tool because of its superior performance in practice. However, the generalization of DNN still largely depends on the training data, no matter in quantity or quality. In this paper, we propose a knowledge instillation framework, named NeuKI, for feed-forward DNN, aiming to enhance learning performance with the aid of knowledge. This task is particularly challenging due to the complicated nature of knowledge and numerous variants of DNN architectures. To bridge the gap, we construct a separate knowledge-DNN faithfully encoding the instilled knowledge for joint training. The core idea is to regularize the training of target-DNN with the constructed knowledge-DNN, so that the instilled knowledge can guide the model training. The proposed NeuKI is demonstrated to be applicable to both knowledge rules and constraints, where rules are encoded by structure and constraints are handled by loss. Experiments are conducted on several real-world datasets from different domains, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of NeuKI in improving learning performance, as well as relevant data efficiency and model interpretability.