No Arabic abstract
Graph neural network (GNN) explanations have largely been facilitated through post-hoc introspection. While this has been deemed successful, many post-hoc explanation methods have been shown to fail in capturing a models learned representation. Due to this problem, it is worthwhile to consider how one might train a model so that it is more amenable to post-hoc analysis. Given the success of adversarial training in the computer vision domain to train models with more reliable representations, we propose a similar training paradigm for GNNs and analyze the respective impact on a models explanations. In instances without ground truth labels, we also determine how well an explanation method is utilizing a models learned representation through a new metric and demonstrate adversarial training can help better extract domain-relevant insights in chemistry.
We show new connections between adversarial learning and explainability for deep neural networks (DNNs). One form of explanation of the output of a neural network model in terms of its input features, is a vector of feature-attributions. Two desirable characteristics of an attribution-based explanation are: (1) $textit{sparseness}$: the attributions of irrelevant or weakly relevant features should be negligible, thus resulting in $textit{concise}$ explanations in terms of the significant features, and (2) $textit{stability}$: it should not vary significantly within a small local neighborhood of the input. Our first contribution is a theoretical exploration of how these two properties (when using attributions based on Integrated Gradients, or IG) are related to adversarial training, for a class of 1-layer networks (which includes logistic regression models for binary and multi-class classification); for these networks we show that (a) adversarial training using an $ell_infty$-bounded adversary produces models with sparse attribution vectors, and (b) natural model-training while encouraging stable explanations (via an extra term in the loss function), is equivalent to adversarial training. Our second contribution is an empirical verification of phenomenon (a), which we show, somewhat surprisingly, occurs $textit{not only}$ $textit{in 1-layer networks}$, $textit{but also DNNs}$ $textit{trained on }$ $textit{standard image datasets}$, and extends beyond IG-based attributions, to those based on DeepSHAP: adversarial training with $ell_infty$-bounded perturbations yields significantly sparser attribution vectors, with little degradation in performance on natural test data, compared to natural training. Moreover, the sparseness of the attribution vectors is significantly better than that achievable via $ell_1$-regularized natural training.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have boosted the performance for many graph-related tasks. Despite the great success, recent studies have shown that GNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where adversaries can mislead the GNNs prediction by modifying graphs. On the other hand, the explanation of GNNs (GNNExplainer) provides a better understanding of a trained GNN model by generating a small subgraph and features that are most influential for its prediction. In this paper, we first perform empirical studies to validate that GNNExplainer can act as an inspection tool and have the potential to detect the adversarial perturbations for graphs. This finding motivates us to further initiate a new problem investigation: Whether a graph neural network and its explanations can be jointly attacked by modifying graphs with malicious desires? It is challenging to answer this question since the goals of adversarial attacks and bypassing the GNNExplainer essentially contradict each other. In this work, we give a confirmative answer to this question by proposing a novel attack framework (GEAttack), which can attack both a GNN model and its explanations by simultaneously exploiting their vulnerabilities. Extensive experiments on two explainers (GNNExplainer and PGExplainer) under various real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Graph representation learning has emerged as a powerful technique for addressing real-world problems. Various downstream graph learning tasks have benefited from its recent developments, such as node classification, similarity search, and graph classification. However, prior arts on graph representation learning focus on domain specific problems and train a dedicated model for each graph dataset, which is usually non-transferable to out-of-domain data. Inspired by the recent advances in pre-training from natural language processing and computer vision, we design Graph Contrastive Coding (GCC) -- a self-supervised graph neural network pre-training framework -- to capture the universal network topological properties across multiple networks. We design GCCs pre-training task as subgraph instance discrimination in and across networks and leverage contrastive learning to empower graph neural networks to learn the intrinsic and transferable structural representations. We conduct extensive experiments on three graph learning tasks and ten graph datasets. The results show that GCC pre-trained on a collection of diverse datasets can achieve competitive or better performance to its task-specific and trained-from-scratch counterparts. This suggests that the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm presents great potential for graph representation learning.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are a new and increasingly popular family of deep neural network architectures to perform learning on graphs. Training them efficiently is challenging due to the irregular nature of graph data. The problem becomes even more challenging when scaling to large graphs that exceed the capacity of single devices. Standard approaches to distributed DNN training, such as data and model parallelism, do not directly apply to GNNs. Instead, two different approaches have emerged in the literature: whole-graph and sample-based training. In this paper, we review and compare the two approaches. Scalability is challenging with both approaches, but we make a case that research should focus on sample-based training since it is a more promising approach. Finally, we review recent systems supporting sample-based training.
Techniques such as ensembling and distillation promise model quality improvements when paired with almost any base model. However, due to increased test-time cost (for ensembles) and increased complexity of the training pipeline (for distillation), these techniques are challenging to use in industrial settings. In this paper we explore a variant of distillation which is relatively straightforward to use as it does not require a complicated multi-stage setup or many new hyperparameters. Our first claim is that online distillation enables us to use extra parallelism to fit very large datasets about twice as fast. Crucially, we can still speed up training even after we have already reached the point at which additional parallelism provides no benefit for synchronous or asynchronous stochastic gradient descent. Two neural networks trained on disjoint subsets of the data can share knowledge by encouraging each model to agree with the predictions the other model would have made. These predictions can come from a stale version of the other model so they can be safely computed using weights that only rarely get transmitted. Our second claim is that online distillation is a cost-effective way to make the exact predictions of a model dramatically more reproducible. We support our claims using experiments on the Criteo Display Ad Challenge dataset, ImageNet, and the largest to-date dataset used for neural language modeling, containing $6times 10^{11}$ tokens and based on the Common Crawl repository of web data.