Generative and Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection from graph data has drawn much attention due to its practical significance in many critical applications including cybersecurity, finance, and social networks. Existing data mining and machine learning methods are either shallow methods that could not effectively capture the complex interdependency of graph data or graph autoencoder methods that could not fully exploit the contextual information as supervision signals for effective anomaly detection. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel method, Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection (SL-GAD). Our method constructs different contextual subgraphs (views) based on a target node and employs two modules, generative attribute regression and multi-view contrastive learning for anomaly detection. While the generative attribute regression module allows us to capture the anomalies in the attribute space, the multi-view contrastive learning module can exploit richer structure information from multiple subgraphs, thus abling to capture the anomalies in the structure space, mixing of structure, and attribute information. We conduct extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Priority prediction of Asian Hornet sighting report using machine learning methods

As infamous invaders to the North American ecosystem, the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) is devastating not only to native bee colonies, but also to local apiculture. One of the most effective way to combat the harmful species is to locate and destroy their nests. By mobilizing the public to actively report possible sightings of the Asian giant hornet, the governmentcould timely send inspectors to confirm and possibly destroy the nests. However, such confirmation requires lab expertise, where manually checking the reports one by one is extremely consuming of human resources. Further given the limited knowledge of the public about the Asian giant hornet and the randomness of report submission, only few of the numerous reports proved positive, i.e. existing nests. How to classify or prioritize the reports efficiently and automatically, so as to determine the dispatch of personnel, is of great significance to the control of the Asian giant hornet. In this paper, we propose a method to predict the priority of sighting reports based on machine learning. We model the problem of optimal prioritization of sighting reports as a problem of classification and prediction. We extracted a variety of rich features in the report: location, time, image(s), and textual description. Based on these characteristics, we propose a classification model based on logistic regression to predict the credibility of a certain report. Furthermore, our model quantifies the impact between reports to get the priority ranking of the reports. Extensive experiments on the public dataset from the WSDA (the Washington State Department of Agriculture) have proved the effectiveness of our method.

Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs via Transformer

Detecting anomalies for dynamic graphs has drawn increasing attention due to their wide applications in social networks, e-commerce, and cybersecurity. The recent deep learning-based approaches have shown promising results over shallow methods. However, they fail to address two core challenges of anomaly detection in dynamic graphs: the lack of informative encoding for unattributed nodes and the difficulty of learning discriminate knowledge from coupled spatial-temporal dynamic graphs. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we present a novel Transformer-based Anomaly Detection framework for DYnamic graph (TADDY). Our framework constructs a comprehensive node encoding strategy to better represent each nodes structural and temporal roles in an evolving graphs stream. Meanwhile, TADDY captures informative representation from dynamic graphs with coupled spatial-temporal patterns via a dynamic graph transformer model. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed TADDY framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on four real-world datasets.

SimCLS: A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Abstractive Summarization

In this paper, we present a conceptually simple while empirically powerful framework for abstractive summarization, SimCLS, which can bridge the gap between the learning objective and evaluation metrics resulting from the currently dominated sequence-to-sequence learning framework by formulating text generation as a reference-free evaluation problem (i.e., quality estimation) assisted by contrastive learning. Experimental results show that, with minor modification over existing top-scoring systems, SimCLS can improve the performance of existing top-performing models by a large margin. Particularly, 2.51 absolute improvement against BART and 2.50 over PEGASUS w.r.t ROUGE-1 on the CNN/DailyMail dataset, driving the state-of-the-art performance to a new level. We have open-sourced our codes and results: https://github.com/yixinL7/SimCLS. Results of our proposed models have been deployed into ExplainaBoard platform, which allows researchers to understand our systems in a more fine-grained way.

Block Access Control in Wireless Blockchain Network: Design, Modeling and Analysis

Wireless blockchain network is proposed to enable a decentralized and safe wireless networks for various blockchain applications. To achieve blockchain consensus in wireless network, one of the important steps is to broadcast new block using wireless channel. Under wireless network protocols, the block transmitting will be affected significantly. In this work, we focus on the consensus process in blockchain-based wireless local area network (B-WLAN) by investigating the impact of the media access control (MAC) protocol, CSMA/CA. With the randomness of the backoff counter in CSMA/CA, it is possible for latter blocks to catch up or outpace the earlier one, which complicates blockchain forking problem. In view of this, we propose mining strategies to pause mining for reducing the forking probability, and a discard strategy to remove the forking blocks that already exist in CSMA/CA backoff procedure. Based on the proposed strategies, we design Block Access Control (BAC) approaches to effectively schedule block mining and transmitting for improving the performance of B-WLAN. Then, Markov chain models are presented to conduct performance analysis in B-WLAN. The results show that BAC approaches can help the network to achieve a high transaction throughput while improving block utilization and saving computational power. Meanwhile, the trade-off between transaction throughput and block utilization is demonstrated, which can act as a guidance for practical deployment of blockchain.

RefSum: Refactoring Neural Summarization

Although some recent works show potential complementarity among different state-of-the-art systems, few works try to investigate this problem in text summarization. Researchers in other areas commonly refer to the techniques of reranking or stacking to approach this problem. In this work, we highlight several limitations of previous methods, which motivates us to present a new framework Refactor that provides a unified view of text summarization and summaries combination. Experimentally, we perform a comprehensive evaluation that involves twenty-two base systems, four datasets, and three different application scenarios. Besides new state-of-the-art results on CNN/DailyMail dataset (46.18 ROUGE-1), we also elaborate on how our proposed method addresses the limitations of the traditional methods and the effectiveness of the Refactor model sheds light on insight for performance improvement. Our system can be directly used by other researchers as an off-the-shelf tool to achieve further performance improvements. We open-source all the code and provide a convenient interface to use it: https://github.com/yixinL7/Refactoring-Summarization. We have also made the demo of this work available at: http://explainaboard.nlpedia.ai/leaderboard/task-summ/index.php.

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Multi-label Text Classification

Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is an attractive and challenging task in natural language processing (NLP). Compared with single-label text classification, MLTC has a wider range of applications in practice. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous graph convolutional network model to solve the MLTC problem by modeling tokens and labels as nodes in a heterogeneous graph. In this way, we are able to take into account multiple relationships including token-level relationships. Besides, the model allows a good explainability as the token-label edges are exposed. We evaluate our method on three real-world datasets and the experimental results show that it achieves significant improvements and outperforms state-of-the-art comparison methods.

A Hierarchical Conditional Random Field-based Attention Mechanism Approach for Gastric Histopathology Image Classification

In the Gastric Histopathology Image Classification (GHIC) tasks, which are usually weakly supervised learning missions, there is inevitably redundant information in the images. Therefore, designing networks that can focus on effective distinguishing features has become a popular research topic. In this paper, to accomplish the tasks of GHIC superiorly and to assist pathologists in clinical diagnosis, an intelligent Hierarchical Conditional Random Field based Attention Mechanism (HCRF-AM) model is proposed. The HCRF-AM model consists of an Attention Mechanism (AM) module and an Image Classification (IC) module. In the AM module, an HCRF model is built to extract attention regions. In the IC module, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is trained with the attention regions selected and then an algorithm called Classification Probability-based Ensemble Learning is applied to obtain the image-level results from patch-level output of the CNN. In the experiment, a classification specificity of 96.67% is achieved on a gastric histopathology dataset with 700 images. Our HCRF-AM model demonstrates high classification performance and shows its effectiveness and future potential in the GHIC field.

Cyclic Label Propagation for Graph Semi-supervised Learning

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as effective approaches for graph analysis, especially in the scenario of semi-supervised learning. Despite its success, GNN often suffers from over-smoothing and over-fitting problems, which affects its performance on node classification tasks. We analyze that an alternative method, the label propagation algorithm (LPA), avoids the aforementioned problems thus it is a promising choice for graph semi-supervised learning. Nevertheless, the intrinsic limitations of LPA on feature exploitation and relation modeling make propagating labels become less effective. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel framework for graph semi-supervised learning termed as Cyclic Label Propagation (CycProp for abbreviation), which integrates GNNs into the process of label propagation in a cyclic and mutually reinforcing manner to exploit the advantages of both GNNs and LPA. In particular, our proposed CycProp updates the node embeddings learned by GNN module with the augmented information by label propagation, while fine-tunes the weighted graph of label propagation with the help of node embedding in turn. After the model converges, reliably predicted labels and informative node embeddings are obtained with the LPA and GNN modules respectively. Extensive experiments on various real-world datasets are conducted, and the experimental results empirically demonstrate that the proposed CycProp model can achieve relatively significant gains over the state-of-the-art methods.

Conditional Automated Channel Pruning for Deep Neural Networks

Model compression aims to reduce the redundancy of deep networks to obtain compact models. Recently, channel pruning has become one of the predominant compression methods to deploy deep models on resource-constrained devices. Most channel pruning methods often use a fixed compression rate for all the layers of the model, which, however, may not be optimal. To address this issue, given a target compression rate for the whole model, one can search for the optimal compression rate for each layer. Nevertheless, these methods perform channel pruning for a specific target compression rate. When we consider multiple compression rates, they have to repeat the channel pruning process multiple times, which is very inefficient yet unnecessary. To address this issue, we propose a Conditional Automated Channel Pruning(CACP) method to obtain the compressed models with different compression rates through single channel pruning process. To this end, we develop a conditional model that takes an arbitrary compression rate as input and outputs the corresponding compressed model. In the experiments, the resultant models with different compression rates consistently outperform the models compressed by existing methods with a channel pruning process for each target compression rate.