Hongyu Ren

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29ranked-venue papers
10as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict

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Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 24 · 9 first-author · 14 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 4 · 2 first-author · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 2 · 2 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 first-author
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 A 2-GHz 5.06-mW Phase Accumulator Employing Dynamic Regulation for High-Speed Direct Digital Frequency Synthesizers in 65-nm CMOS
Hongyu Ren, Xianghe Meng, Xiaoyu Shan, Yunbo Huang, Zunsong Yang, Bo Li 0051
ISCAS3
2025 Maliciously Secure Circuit Private Set Intersection via SPDZ-Compatible Oblivious PRF
abstract
Circuit Private Set Intersection (Circuit-PSI) allows two parties to compute a function f on items in the intersection of their input sets without revealing items in the intersection set. It is a well-known variant of PSI and has numerous practical applications. However, existing Circuit-PSI protocols only provide security against semi-honest adversaries. A straightforward approach to constructing a maliciously secure Circuit-PSI is to extend a pure garbled-circuit-based PSI (NDSS'12) to a maliciously secure circuit-PSI, but it will not be concretely efficient. Another is converting state-of-the-art semi-honest Circuit-PSI protocols (EUROCRYPT'21; PoPETS'22) to be secure in the malicious setting. However, it will come across the consistency issue (EUROCRYPT'11) since parties can not guarantee the inputs of the function f stay unchanged as obtained from the last step. This paper tackles the previously mentioned issue by presenting the first maliciously secure Circuit-PSI protocol. Our key innovation, the Distributed Dual-key Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (DDOPRF), enables the oblivious evaluation of secret-shared inputs using dual keys within the SPDZ MPC framework. Notably, this construction seamlessly ensures fairness within the Circuit-PSI. Compared to the state-of-the-art semi-honest Circuit-PSI protocol (PoPETS'22), experimental results demonstrate that our malicious Circuit-PSI protocol not only reduces around 5x communication costs but also enhances efficiency, particularly for modest input sets (<= 2^{14}) in the case of the WAN setting with high latency and limited bandwidth.
Yaxi Yang, Xiaojian Liang, Xiangfu Song, Ye Dong, Linting Huang, Hongyu Ren, Changyu Dong, Jianying Zhou 0001
Proc. Priv. Enhancing Technol.6
2024 MAgIC: Investigation of Large Language Model Powered Multi-Agent in Cognition, Adaptability, Rationality and Collaboration
abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional reasoning, tool usage, and memory capabilities.As their applications expand into multi-agent environments, there arises a need for a comprehensive evaluation framework that captures LLMs' reasoning, planning, collaboration, and other social abilities.This work introduces a novel competitionbased benchmark framework specifically designed to assess LLMs within multi-agent settings, providing quantitative metrics to evaluate their judgment, reasoning, deception, selfawareness, cooperation, coordination, and rationality.We utilize two social deduction games alongside three game-theory scenarios to create diverse environments.Our frame is fortified with the probabilistic graphic modeling (PGM) method, enhancing the LLMs' capabilities in navigating complex social and cognitive dimensions.We evaluate seven LLMs, quantitatively highlighting a significant capability gap of over threefold between the strongest, GPT o1, and the weakest, Llama-2-70B.It also confirms that our PGM enhancement boosts the abilities of all selected models by an average of 37%.Our data and code can be found here https://github.com/cathyxl/MAgIC.
Daquan Zhou, Hongyu Ren, Zhen Dong 0003, Kurt Keutzer, See-Kiong Ng, Jiashi Feng
EMNLP4
2024 SRAM-Based PUF with Noise Immunity Achieving 0.58% Native BER in 55-nm CMOS
abstract
In this paper, a novel static random-access memory (SRAM) based physical unclonable function (PUF) with ultra-low native bit error rate (BER) is proposed. In the conventional 6T SRAM PUF, the thermal noise weakens the effect of the inherent mismatch on the PUF cell output at the initial power-on transition time, resulting in a high native BER. To realize a low native BER, a 7T PUF with noise immunity is proposed. Through inserting a mono-stable state before the bistable state, the 7T cell avoids the noise impact during the power-on transition period and amplify the mismatch voltage, resulting a huge native BER reduction. Two custom SRAM PUFs adopting 6T cell and 7T cell respectively, were fabricated in 55nm CMOS process to evaluate BER characteristics. The experimental results show that the native BER of the proposed 7T SRAM PUF is only 0.58%, which is nearly 11X lower than the 6T PUF of 6.12%. And as temperature varying from -25°C to 75°C, the worst BER of 7T PUF is 2.31% and is around 5X lower than the 6T PUF of 11.9%. In addition, raw bits generated from the proposed 7T PUF also passed the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) randomness tests.
Zexin Su, Xiaohui Su, Hongyu Ren, Zhengsheng Han
ISCAS6
2023 VQA-GNN: Reasoning with Multimodal Knowledge via Graph Neural Networks for Visual Question Answering
abstract
Visual question answering (VQA) requires systems to perform concept-level reasoning by unifying unstructured (e.g., the context in question and answer; “QA context”) and structured (e.g., knowledge graph for the QA context and scene; “concept graph”) multimodal knowledge. Existing works typically combine a scene graph and a concept graph of the scene by connecting corresponding visual nodes and concept nodes, then incorporate the QA context representation to perform question answering. However, these methods only perform a unidirectional fusion from unstructured knowledge to structured knowledge, limiting their potential to capture joint reasoning over the heterogeneous modalities of knowledge. To perform more expressive reasoning, we propose VQA-GNN, a new VQA model that performs bidirectional fusion between unstructured and structured multimodal knowledge to obtain unified knowledge representations. Specifically, we inter-connect the scene graph and the concept graph through a super node that represents the QA context, and introduce a new multimodal GNN technique to perform inter-modal message passing for reasoning that mitigates representational gaps between modalities. On two challenging VQA tasks (VCR and GQA), our method outperforms strong baseline VQA methods by 3.2% on VCR (Q-AR) and 4.6% on GQA, suggesting its strength in performing concept-level reasoning. Ablation studies further demonstrate the efficacy of the bidirectional fusion and multimodal GNN method in unifying unstructured and structured multimodal knowledge.
Yanan Wang 0002, Michihiro Yasunaga, Hongyu Ren, Shinya Wada, Jure Leskovec
ICCV3
2023 PRODIGY: Enabling In-context Learning Over Graphs
abstract
In-context learning is the ability of a pretrained model to adapt to novel and diverse downstream tasks by conditioning on prompt examples, without optimizing any parameters. While large language models have demonstrated this ability, how in-context learning could be performed over graphs is unexplored. In this paper, we develop \textbf{Pr}etraining \textbf{O}ver \textbf{D}iverse \textbf{I}n-Context \textbf{G}raph S\textbf{y}stems (PRODIGY), the first pretraining framework that enables in-context learning over graphs. The key idea of our framework is to formulate in-context learning over graphs with a novel \emph{prompt graph} representation, which connects prompt examples and queries. We then propose a graph neural network architecture over the prompt graph and a corresponding family of in-context pretraining objectives. With PRODIGY, the pretrained model can directly perform novel downstream classification tasks on unseen graphs via in-context learning. We provide empirical evidence of the effectiveness of our framework by showcasing its strong in-context learning performance on tasks involving citation networks and knowledge graphs. Our approach outperforms the in-context learning accuracy of contrastive pretraining baselines with hard-coded adaptation by 18\% on average across all setups. Moreover, it also outperforms standard finetuning with limited data by 33\% on average with in-context learning.
Qian Huang 0006, Hongyu Ren, Gregor Krzmanc, Daniel Zeng 0003, Percy Liang, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS2
2023 High dimensional, tabular deep learning with an auxiliary knowledge graph
abstract
Machine learning models exhibit strong performance on datasets with abundant labeled samples. However, for tabular datasets with extremely high $d$-dimensional features but limited $n$ samples (i.e. $d \gg n$), machine learning models struggle to achieve strong performance due to the risk of overfitting. Here, our key insight is that there is often abundant, auxiliary domain information describing input features which can be structured as a heterogeneous knowledge graph (KG). We propose PLATO, a method that achieves strong performance on tabular data with $d \gg n$ by using an auxiliary KG describing input features to regularize a multilayer perceptron (MLP). In PLATO, each input feature corresponds to a node in the auxiliary KG. In the MLP’s first layer, each input feature also corresponds to a weight vector. PLATO is based on the inductive bias that two input features corresponding to similar nodes in the auxiliary KG should have similar weight vectors in the MLP's first layer. PLATO captures this inductive bias by inferring the weight vector for each input feature from its corresponding node in the KG via a trainable message-passing function. Across 6 $d \gg n$ datasets, PLATO outperforms 13 state-of-the-art baselines by up to 10.19%.
Camilo Ruiz, Hongyu Ren, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS2
2022 GreaseLM: Graph REASoning Enhanced Language Models
Xikun Zhang 0001, Antoine Bosselut, Michihiro Yasunaga, Hongyu Ren, Percy Liang, Christopher D. Manning, Jure Leskovec
ICLR4
2022 SMORE: Knowledge Graph Completion and Multi-hop Reasoning in Massive Knowledge Graphs
abstract
Knowledge graphs (KGs) capture knowledge in the form of head--relation--tail triples and are a crucial component in many AI systems. There are two important reasoning tasks on KGs: (1) single-hop knowledge graph completion, which involves predicting individual links in the KG; and (2), multi-hop reasoning, where the goal is to predict which KG entities satisfy a given logical query. Embedding-based methods solve both tasks by first computing an embedding for each entity and relation, then using them to form predictions. However, existing scalable KG embedding frameworks only support single-hop knowledge graph completion and cannot be applied to the more challenging multi-hop reasoning task. Here we present Scalable Multi-hOp REasoning (SMORE), the first general framework for both single-hop and multi-hop reasoning in KGs. Using a single machine SMORE can perform multi-hop reasoning in Freebase KG (86M entities, 338M edges), which is 1,500x larger than previously considered KGs. The key to SMORE's runtime performance is a novel bidirectional rejection sampling that achieves a square root reduction of the complexity of online training data generation. Furthermore, SMORE exploits asynchronous scheduling, overlapping CPU-based data sampling, GPU-based embedding computation, and frequent CPU--GPU IO. SMORE increases throughput (i.e., training speed) over prior multi-hop KG frameworks by 2.2x with minimal GPU memory requirements (2GB for training 400-dim embeddings on 86M-node Freebase) and achieves near linear speed-up with the number of GPUs. Moreover, on the simpler single-hop knowledge graph completion task SMORE achieves comparable or even better runtime performance to state-of-the-art frameworks on both single GPU and multi-GPU settings.
Hongyu Ren, Hanjun Dai, Bo Dai 0001, Denny Zhou, Jure Leskovec, Dale Schuurmans
KDD1
2022 Inductive Logical Query Answering in Knowledge Graphs
abstract
Formulating and answering logical queries is a standard communication interface for knowledge graphs (KGs). Alleviating the notorious incompleteness of real-world KGs, neural methods achieved impressive results in link prediction and complex query answering tasks by learning representations of entities, relations, and queries. Still, most existing query answering methods rely on transductive entity embeddings and cannot generalize to KGs containing new entities without retraining entity embeddings. In this work, we study the inductive query answering task where inference is performed on a graph containing new entities with queries over both seen and unseen entities. To this end, we devise two mechanisms leveraging inductive node and relational structure representations powered by graph neural networks (GNNs).Experimentally, we show that inductive models are able to perform logical reasoning at inference time over unseen nodes generalizing to graphs up to 500% larger than training ones. Exploring the efficiency--effectiveness trade-off, we find the inductive relational structure representation method generally achieves higher performance, while the inductive node representation method is able to answer complex queries in the inference-only regime without any training on queries and scale to graphs of millions of nodes. Code is available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/InductiveQE
Michael Galkin, Zhaocheng Zhu, Hongyu Ren, Jian Tang 0005
NeurIPS3
2022 Few-shot Relational Reasoning via Connection Subgraph Pretraining
abstract
Few-shot knowledge graph (KG) completion task aims to perform inductive reasoning over the KG: given only a few support triplets of a new relation $\bowtie$ (e.g., (chop,$\bowtie$,kitchen), (read,$\bowtie$,library), the goal is to predict the query triplets of the same unseen relation $\bowtie$, e.g., (sleep,$\bowtie$,?). Current approaches cast the problem in a meta-learning framework, where the model needs to be first jointly trained over many training few-shot tasks, each being defined by its own relation, so that learning/prediction on the target few-shot task can be effective. However, in real-world KGs, curating many training tasks is a challenging ad hoc process. Here we propose Connection Subgraph Reasoner (CSR), which can make predictions for the target few-shot task directly without the need for pre-training on the human curated set of training tasks. The key to CSR is that we explicitly model a shared connection subgraph between support and query triplets, as inspired by the principle of eliminative induction. To adapt to specific KG, we design a corresponding self-supervised pretraining scheme with the objective of reconstructing automatically sampled connection subgraphs. Our pretrained model can then be directly applied to target few-shot tasks on without the need for training few-shot tasks. Extensive experiments on real KGs, including NELL, FB15K-237, and ConceptNet, demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework: we show that even a learning-free implementation of CSR can already perform competitively to existing methods on target few-shot tasks; with pretraining, CSR can achieve significant gains of up to 52% on the more challenging inductive few-shot tasks where the entities are also unseen during (pre)training.
Qian Huang 0006, Hongyu Ren, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS2
2022 Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining
abstract
Pretraining a language model (LM) on text has been shown to help various downstream NLP tasks. Recent works show that a knowledge graph (KG) can complement text data, offering structured background knowledge that provides a useful scaffold for reasoning. However, these works are not pretrained to learn a deep fusion of the two modalities at scale, limiting the potential to acquire fully joint representations of text and KG. Here we propose DRAGON (Deep Bidirectional Language-Knowledge Graph Pretraining), a self-supervised approach to pretraining a deeply joint language-knowledge foundation model from text and KG at scale. Specifically, our model takes pairs of text segments and relevant KG subgraphs as input and bidirectionally fuses information from both modalities. We pretrain this model by unifying two self-supervised reasoning tasks, masked language modeling and KG link prediction. DRAGON outperforms existing LM and LM+KG models on diverse downstream tasks including question answering across general and biomedical domains, with +5% absolute gain on average. In particular, DRAGON achieves notable performance on complex reasoning about language and knowledge (+10% on questions involving long contexts or multi-step reasoning) and low-resource QA (+8% on OBQA and RiddleSense), and new state-of-the-art results on various BioNLP tasks. Our code and trained models are available at https://github.com/michiyasunaga/dragon.
Michihiro Yasunaga, Antoine Bosselut, Hongyu Ren, Xikun Zhang 0001, Christopher D. Manning, Percy Liang, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS3
2021 LEGO: Latent Execution-Guided Reasoning for Multi-Hop Question Answering on Knowledge Graphs
abstract
Answering complex natural language questions on knowledge graphs (KGQA) is a challenging task. It requires reasoning with the input natural language questions as well as a massive, incomplete heterogeneous KG. Prior methods obtain an abstract structured query graph/tree from the input question and traverse the KG for answers following the query tree. However, they inherently cannot deal with missing links in the KG. Here we present LEGO, a Latent Execution-Guided reasOning framework to handle this challenge in KGQA. LEGO works in an iterative way, which alternates between (1) a Query Synthesizer, which synthesizes a reasoning action and grows the query tree step-by-step, and (2) a Latent Space Executor that executes the reasoning action in the latent embedding space to combat against the missing information in KG. To learn the synthesizer without step-wise supervision, we design a generic latent execution guided bottom-up search procedure to find good execution traces efficiently in the vast query space. Experimental results on several KGQA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework compared with previous state of the art.
Hongyu Ren, Hanjun Dai, Bo Dai 0001, Michihiro Yasunaga, Haitian Sun, Dale Schuurmans, Jure Leskovec, Denny Zhou
ICML1
2021 Relational Message Passing for Knowledge Graph Completion
abstract
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. In this work, we propose a relational message passing method for knowledge graph completion. Different from existing embedding-based methods, relational message passing only considers edge features (i.e., relation types) without entity IDs in the knowledge graph, and passes relational messages among edges iteratively to aggregate neighborhood information. Specifically, two kinds of neighborhood topology are modeled for a given entity pair under the relational message passing framework: (1) Relational context, which captures the relation types of edges adjacent to the given entity pair; (2) Relational paths, which characterize the relative position between the given two entities in the knowledge graph. The two message passing modules are combined together for relation prediction. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that, our method PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. PathCon is also shown applicable to inductive settings where entities are not seen in training stage, and it is able to provide interpretable explanations for the predicted results. The code and all datasets are available at https://github.com/hwwang55/PathCon.
Hongwei Wang 0004, Hongyu Ren, Jure Leskovec
KDD2
2021 QA-GNN: Reasoning with Language Models and Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering
abstract
Michihiro Yasunaga, Hongyu Ren, Antoine Bosselut, Percy Liang, Jure Leskovec. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.
Michihiro Yasunaga, Hongyu Ren, Antoine Bosselut, Percy Liang, Jure Leskovec
NAACL-HLT2
2021 Modeling Heterogeneous Hierarchies with Relation-specific Hyperbolic Cones
abstract
Hierarchical relations are prevalent and indispensable for organizing human knowledge captured by a knowledge graph (KG). The key property of hierarchical relations is that they induce a partial ordering over the entities, which needs to be modeled in order to allow for hierarchical reasoning. However, current KG embeddings can model only a single global hierarchy (single global partial ordering) and fail to model multiple heterogeneous hierarchies that exist in a single KG. Here we present ConE (Cone Embedding), a KG embedding model that is able to simultaneously model multiple hierarchical as well as non-hierarchical relations in a knowledge graph. ConE embeds entities into hyperbolic cones and models relations as transformations between the cones. In particular, ConE uses cone containment constraints in different subspaces of the hyperbolic embedding space to capture multiple heterogeneous hierarchies. Experiments on standard knowledge graph benchmarks show that ConE obtains state-of-the-art performance on hierarchical reasoning tasks as well as knowledge graph completion task on hierarchical graphs. In particular, our approach yields new state-of-the-art Hits@1 of 45.3% on WN18RR and 16.1% on DDB14 (0.231 MRR). As for hierarchical reasoning task, our approach outperforms previous best results by an average of 20% across the three datasets.
Yushi Bai, Rex Ying, Hongyu Ren, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS3
2021 Combiner: Full Attention Transformer with Sparse Computation Cost
abstract
Transformers provide a class of expressive architectures that are extremely effective for sequence modeling. However, the key limitation of transformers is their quadratic memory and time complexity $\mathcal{O}(L^2)$ with respect to the sequence length in attention layers, which restricts application in extremely long sequences. Most existing approaches leverage sparsity or low-rank assumptions in the attention matrix to reduce cost, but sacrifice expressiveness. Instead, we propose Combiner, which provides full attention capability in each attention head while maintaining low computation and memory complexity. The key idea is to treat the self-attention mechanism as a conditional expectation over embeddings at each location, and approximate the conditional distribution with a structured factorization. Each location can attend to all other locations, either via direct attention, or through indirect attention to abstractions, which are again conditional expectations of embeddings from corresponding local regions. We show that most sparse attention patterns used in existing sparse transformers are able to inspire the design of such factorization for full attention, resulting in the same sub-quadratic cost ($\mathcal{O}(L\log(L))$ or $\mathcal{O}(L\sqrt{L})$). Combiner is a drop-in replacement for attention layers in existing transformers and can be easily implemented in common frameworks. An experimental evaluation on both autoregressive and bidirectional sequence tasks demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach, yielding state-of-the-art results on several image and text modeling tasks.
Hongyu Ren, Hanjun Dai, Zihang Dai, Sherry Yang 0001, Jure Leskovec, Dale Schuurmans, Bo Dai 0001
NeurIPS1
2020 Query2box: Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs in Vector Space Using Box Embeddings
Hongyu Ren, Weihua Hu, Jure Leskovec
ICLR1
2020 Open Graph Benchmark: Datasets for Machine Learning on Graphs
abstract
We present the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB), a diverse set of challenging and realistic benchmark datasets to facilitate scalable, robust, and reproducible graph machine learning (ML) research. OGB datasets are large-scale, encompass multiple important graph ML tasks, and cover a diverse range of domains, ranging from social and information networks to biological networks, molecular graphs, source code ASTs, and knowledge graphs. For each dataset, we provide a unified evaluation protocol using meaningful application-specific data splits and evaluation metrics. In addition to building the datasets, we also perform extensive benchmark experiments for each dataset. Our experiments suggest that OGB datasets present significant challenges of scalability to large-scale graphs and out-of-distribution generalization under realistic data splits, indicating fruitful opportunities for future research. Finally, OGB provides an automated end-to-end graph ML pipeline that simplifies and standardizes the process of graph data loading, experimental setup, and model evaluation. OGB will be regularly updated and welcomes inputs from the community. OGB datasets as well as data loaders, evaluation scripts, baseline code, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://ogb.stanford.edu .
Weihua Hu, Matthias Fey, Marinka Zitnik, Yuxiao Dong, Hongyu Ren, Bowen Liu 0014, Michele Catasta, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS5
2020 Beta Embeddings for Multi-Hop Logical Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs
abstract
One of the fundamental problems in Artificial Intelligence is to perform complex multi-hop logical reasoning over the facts captured by a knowledge graph (KG). This problem is challenging, because KGs can be massive and incomplete. Recent approaches embed KG entities in a low dimensional space and then use these embeddings to find the answer entities. However, it has been an outstanding challenge of how to handle arbitrary first-order logic (FOL) queries as present methods are limited to only a subset of FOL operators. In particular, the negation operator is not supported. An additional limitation of present methods is also that they cannot naturally model uncertainty. Here, we present BetaE, a probabilistic embedding framework for answering arbitrary FOL queries over KGs. BetaE is the first method that can handle a complete set of first-order logical operations: conjunction ($\wedge$), disjunction ($\vee$), and negation ($\neg$). A key insight of BetaE is to use probabilistic distributions with bounded support, specifically the Beta distribution, and embed queries/entities as distributions, which as a consequence allows us to also faithfully model uncertainty. Logical operations are performed in the embedding space by neural operators over the probabilistic embeddings. We demonstrate the performance of BetaE on answering arbitrary FOL queries on three large, incomplete KGs. While being more general, BetaE also increases relative performance by up to 25.4% over the current state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods that can only handle conjunctive queries without negation.
Hongyu Ren, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS1
2020 Graph Information Bottleneck
abstract
Representation learning of graph-structured data is challenging because both graph structure and node features carry important information. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) provide an expressive way to fuse information from network structure and node features. However, GNNs are prone to adversarial attacks. Here we introduce Graph Information Bottleneck (GIB), an information-theoretic principle that optimally balances expressiveness and robustness of the learned representation of graph-structured data. Inheriting from the general Information Bottleneck (IB), GIB aims to learn the minimal sufficient representation for a given task by maximizing the mutual information between the representation and the target, and simultaneously constraining the mutual information between the representation and the input data. Different from the general IB, GIB regularizes the structural as well as the feature information. We design two sampling algorithms for structural regularization and instantiate the GIB principle with two new models: GIB-Cat and GIB-Bern, and demonstrate the benefits by evaluating the resilience to adversarial attacks. We show that our proposed models are more robust than state-of-the-art graph defense models. GIB-based models empirically achieve up to 31% improvement with adversarial perturbation of the graph structure as well as node features.
Tailin Wu, Hongyu Ren, Pan Li 0005, Jure Leskovec
NeurIPS2
2020 OCEAN: Online Task Inference for Compositional Tasks with Context Adaptation
abstract
Real-world tasks often exhibit a compositional structure that contains a sequence of simpler sub-tasks. For instance, opening a door requires reaching, grasping, rotating, and pulling the door knob. Such compositional tasks require an agent to reason about the sub-task at hand while orchestrating global behavior accordingly. This can be cast as an online task inference problem, where the current task identity, represented by a context variable, is estimated from the agent’s past experiences with probabilistic inference. Previous approaches have employed simple latent distributions, e.g., Gaussian, to model a single context for the entire task. However, this formulation lacks the expressiveness to capture the composition and transition of the sub-tasks. We propose a variational inference framework OCEAN to perform online task inference for compositional tasks. OCEAN models global and local context variables in a joint latent space, where the global variables represent a mixture of sub-tasks required for the task, while the local variables capture the transitions between the sub-tasks. Our framework supports flexible latent distributions based on prior knowledge of the task structure and can be trained in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results show that OCEAN provides more effective task inference with sequential context adaptation and thus leads to a performance boost on complex, multi-stage tasks.
Hongyu Ren, Yuke Zhu, Jure Leskovec, Anima Anandkumar, Animesh Garg
UAI1
2019 Adaptive Antithetic Sampling for Variance Reduction
abstract
Variance reduction is crucial in stochastic estimation and optimization problems. Antithetic sampling reduces the variance of a Monte Carlo estimator by drawing correlated, rather than independent, samples. However, designing an effective correlation structure is challenging and application specific, thus limiting the practical applicability of these methods. In this paper, we propose a general-purpose adaptive antithetic sampling framework. We provide gradient-based and gradient-free methods to train the samplers such that they reduce variance while ensuring that the underlying Monte Carlo estimator is provably unbiased. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on Bayesian inference and generative model training, where it reduces variance and improves task performance with little computational overhead.
Hongyu Ren, Shengjia Zhao, Stefano Ermon
ICML1
2019 No-Reference Image Quality Assessment: An Attention Driven Approach
abstract
In this paper, we tackle no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA), which aims to predict the perceptual quality of a test image without referencing its pristine-quality counterpart. The free-energy brain theory implies that the human visual system (HVS) tends to predict the pristine image while perceiving a distorted one. Besides, image quality assessment heavily depends on the way how human beings attend to distorted images. Motivated by that, the distorted image is restored first. Then given the distorted-restored pair, we make the first attempt to formulate the NR-IQA as a dynamic attentional process and implement it via reinforcement learning. The reward is derived from two tasks-classifying the distortion type and predicting the perceptual score of a test image. The model learns a policy to sample a sequence of fixation areas with a goal to maximize the expectation of the accumulated rewards. The observations of the fixation areas are aggregated through a recurrent neural network (RNN) and the robust averaging strategy which assigns different weights on different fixation areas. Extensive experiments on TID2008, TID2013 and CSIQ demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Diqi Chen, Yizhou Wang 0001, Hongyu Ren, Wen Gao 0001
WACV3
2018 RAN4IQA: Restorative Adversarial Nets for No-Reference Image Quality Assessment
abstract
Inspired by the free-energy brain theory, which implies that human visual system (HVS) tends to reduce uncertainty and restore perceptual details upon seeing a distorted image, we propose restorative adversarial net (RAN), a GAN-based model for no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA). RAN, which mimics the process of HVS, consists of three components: a restorator, a discriminator and an evaluator. The restorator restores and reconstructs input distorted image patches, while the discriminator distinguishes the reconstructed patches from the pristine distortion-free patches. After restoration, we observe that the perceptual distance between the restored and the distorted patches is monotonic with respect to the distortion level. We further define Gain of Restoration (GoR) based on this phenomenon. The evaluator predicts perceptual score by extracting feature representations from the distorted and restored patches to measure GoR. Eventually, the quality score of an input image is estimated by weighted sum of the patch scores. Experimental results on Waterloo Exploration, LIVE and TID2013 show the effectiveness and generalization ability of RAN compared to the state-of-the-art NR-IQA models.
Hongyu Ren, Diqi Chen, Yizhou Wang 0001
AAAI1
2018 Adversarial Constraint Learning for Structured Prediction
abstract
Constraint-based learning reduces the burden of collecting labels by having users specify general properties of structured outputs, such as constraints imposed by physical laws. We propose a novel framework for simultaneously learning these constraints and using them for supervision, bypassing the difficulty of using domain expertise to manually specify constraints. Learning requires a black-box simulator of structured outputs, which generates valid labels, but need not model their corresponding inputs or the input-label relationship. At training time, we constrain the model to produce outputs that cannot be distinguished from simulated labels by adversarial training. Providing our framework with a small number of labeled inputs gives rise to a new semi-supervised structured prediction model; we evaluate this model on multiple tasks --- tracking, pose estimation and time series prediction --- and find that it achieves high accuracy with only a small number of labeled inputs. In some cases, no labels are required at all.
Hongyu Ren, Russell Stewart, Jiaming Song, Volodymyr Kuleshov, Stefano Ermon
IJCAI1
2018 Multi-Agent Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning
abstract
Imitation learning algorithms can be used to learn a policy from expert demonstrations without access to a reward signal. However, most existing approaches are not applicable in multi-agent settings due to the existence of multiple (Nash) equilibria and non-stationary environments. We propose a new framework for multi-agent imitation learning for general Markov games, where we build upon a generalized notion of inverse reinforcement learning. We further introduce a practical multi-agent actor-critic algorithm with good empirical performance. Our method can be used to imitate complex behaviors in high-dimensional environments with multiple cooperative or competing agents.
Jiaming Song, Hongyu Ren, Dorsa Sadigh, Stefano Ermon
NeurIPS2
2018 Bias and Generalization in Deep Generative Models: An Empirical Study
abstract
In high dimensional settings, density estimation algorithms rely crucially on their inductive bias. Despite recent empirical success, the inductive bias of deep generative models is not well understood. In this paper we propose a framework to systematically investigate bias and generalization in deep generative models of images by probing the learning algorithm with carefully designed training datasets. By measuring properties of the learned distribution, we are able to find interesting patterns of generalization. We verify that these patterns are consistent across datasets, common models and architectures.
Shengjia Zhao, Hongyu Ren, Arianna Yuan, Jiaming Song, Noah D. Goodman, Stefano Ermon
NeurIPS2
2016 CW interference mitigation in GNSS receiver based on frequency-locked loop
Hongyu Ren, Yongqing Wang 0002, Siliang Wu
Sci. China Inf. Sci.1