Shift-Robust GNNs: Overcoming the Limitations of Localized Graph Training data

There has been a recent surge of interest in designing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for semi-supervised learning tasks. Unfortunately this work has assumed that the nodes labeled for use in training were selected uniformly at random (i.e. are an IID sample). However in many real world scenarios gathering labels for graph nodes is both expensive and inherently biased -- so this assumption can not be met. GNNs can suffer poor generalization when this occurs, by overfitting to superfluous regularities present in the training data. In this work we present a method, Shift-Robust GNN (SR-GNN), designed to account for distributional differences between biased training data and the graphs true inference distribution. SR-GNN adapts GNN models for the presence of distributional shifts between the nodes which have had labels provided for training and the rest of the dataset. We illustrate the effectiveness of SR-GNN in a variety of experiments with biased training datasets on common GNN benchmark datasets for semi-supervised learning, where we see that SR-GNN outperforms other GNN baselines by accuracy, eliminating at least (~40%) of the negative effects introduced by biased training data. On the largest dataset we consider, ogb-arxiv, we observe an 2% absolute improvement over the baseline and reduce 30% of the negative effects.

Multi-head or Single-head? An Empirical Comparison for Transformer Training

Multi-head attention plays a crucial role in the recent success of Transformer models, which leads to consistent performance improvements over conventional attention in various applications. The popular belief is that this effectiveness stems from the ability of jointly attending multiple positions. In this paper, we first demonstrate that jointly attending multiple positions is not a unique feature of multi-head attention, as multi-layer single-head attention also attends multiple positions and is more effective. Then, we suggest the main advantage of the multi-head attention is the training stability, since it has less number of layers than the single-head attention, when attending the same number of positions. For example, 24-layer 16-head Transformer (BERT-large) and 384-layer single-head Transformer has the same total attention head number and roughly the same model size, while the multi-head one is significantly shallower. Meanwhile, we show that, with recent advances in deep learning, we can successfully stabilize the training of the 384-layer Transformer. As the training difficulty is no longer a bottleneck, substantially deeper single-head Transformer achieves consistent performance improvements without tuning hyper-parameters.

Scaling Deep Contrastive Learning Batch Size under Memory Limited Setup

Contrastive learning has been applied successfully to learn vector representations of text. Previous research demonstrated that learning high-quality representations benefits from batch-wise contrastive loss with a large number of negatives. In practice, the technique of in-batch negative is used, where for each example in a batch, other batch examples positives will be taken as its negatives, avoiding encoding extra negatives. This, however, still conditions each examples loss on all batch examples and requires fitting the entire large batch into GPU memory. This paper introduces a gradient caching technique that decouples backpropagation between contrastive loss and the encoder, removing encoder backward pass data dependency along the batch dimension. As a result, gradients can be computed for one subset of the batch at a time, leading to almost constant memory usage.

Near-imperceptible Neural Linguistic Steganography via Self-Adjusting Arithmetic Coding

Linguistic steganography studies how to hide secret messages in natural language cover texts. Traditional methods aim to transform a secret message into an innocent text via lexical substitution or syntactical modification. Recently, advances in neural language models (LMs) enable us to directly generate cover text conditioned on the secret message. In this study, we present a new linguistic steganography method which encodes secret messages using self-adjusting arithmetic coding based on a neural language model. We formally analyze the statistical imperceptibility of this method and empirically show it outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods on four datasets by 15.3% and 38.9% in terms of bits/word and KL metrics, respectively. Finally, human evaluations show that 51% of generated cover texts can indeed fool eavesdroppers.

Generating Representative Headlines for News Stories

Millions of news articles are published online every day, which can be overwhelming for readers to follow. Grouping articles that are reporting the same event into news stories is a common way of assisting readers in their news consumption. However, it remains a challenging research problem to efficiently and effectively generate a representative headline for each story. Automatic summarization of a document set has been studied for decades, while few studies have focused on generating representative headlines for a set of articles. Unlike summaries, which aim to capture most information with least redundancy, headlines aim to capture information jointly shared by the story articles in short length, and exclude information that is too specific to each individual article. In this work, we study the problem of generating representative headlines for news stories. We develop a distant supervision approach to train large-scale generation models without any human annotation. This approach centers on two technical components. First, we propose a multi-level pre-training framework that incorporates massive unlabeled corpus with different quality-vs.-quantity balance at different levels. We show that models trained within this framework outperform those trained with pure human curated corpus. Second, we propose a novel self-voting-based article attention layer to extract salient information shared by multiple articles. We show that models that incorporate this layer are robust to potential noises in news stories and outperform existing baselines with or without noises. We can further enhance our model by incorporating human labels, and we show our distant supervision approach significantly reduces the demand on labeled data.