Zero-shot Node Classification with Decomposed Graph Prototype Network

Node classification is a central task in graph data analysis. Scarce or even no labeled data of emerging classes is a big challenge for existing methods. A natural question arises: can we classify the nodes from those classes that have never been seen? In this paper, we study this zero-shot node classification (ZNC) problem which has a two-stage nature: (1) acquiring high-quality class semantic descriptions (CSDs) for knowledge transfer, and (2) designing a well generalized graph-based learning model. For the first stage, we give a novel quantitative CSDs evaluation strategy based on estimating the real class relationships, so as to get the best CSDs in a completely automatic way. For the second stage, we propose a novel Decomposed Graph Prototype Network (DGPN) method, following the principles of locality and compositionality for zero-shot model generalization. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solutions.

Topic-aware chatbot using Recurrent Neural Networks and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

We propose a novel model for a topic-aware chatbot by combining the traditional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) encoder-decoder model with a topic attention layer based on Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF). After learning topic vectors from an auxiliary text corpus via NMF, the decoder is trained so that it is more likely to sample response words from the most correlated topic vectors. One of the main advantages in our architecture is that the user can easily switch the NMF-learned topic vectors so that the chatbot obtains desired topic-awareness. We demonstrate our model by training on a single conversational data set which is then augmented with topic matrices learned from different auxiliary data sets. We show that our topic-aware chatbot not only outperforms the non-topic counterpart, but also that each topic-aware model qualitatively and contextually gives the most relevant answer depending on the topic of question.

The Prevalence of Errors in Machine Learning Experiments

Context: Conducting experiments is central to research machine learning research to benchmark, evaluate and compare learning algorithms. Consequently it is important we conduct reliable, trustworthy experiments. Objective: We investigate the incidence of errors in a sample of machine learning experiments in the domain of software defect prediction. Our focus is simple arithmetical and statistical errors. Method: We analyse 49 papers describing 2456 individual experimental results from a previously undertaken systematic review comparing supervised and unsupervised defect prediction classifiers. We extract the confusion matrices and test for relevant constraints, e.g., the marginal probabilities must sum to one. We also check for multiple statistical significance testing errors. Results: We find that a total of 22 out of 49 papers contain demonstrable errors. Of these 7 were statistical and 16 related to confusion matrix inconsistency (one paper contained both classes of error). Conclusions: Whilst some errors may be of a relatively trivial nature, e.g., transcription errors their presence does not engender confidence. We strongly urge researchers to follow open science principles so errors can be more easily be detected and corrected, thus as a community reduce this worryingly high error rate with our computational experiments.

ACNet: Strengthening the Kernel Skeletons for Powerful CNN via Asymmetric Convolution Blocks

As designing appropriate Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture in the context of a given application usually involves heavy human works or numerous GPU hours, the research community is soliciting the architecture-neutral CNN structures, which can be easily plugged into multiple mature architectures to improve the performance on our real-world applications. We propose Asymmetric Convolution Block (ACB), an architecture-neutral structure as a CNN building block, which uses 1D asymmetric convolutions to strengthen the square convolution kernels. For an off-the-shelf architecture, we replace the standard square-kernel convolutional layers with ACBs to construct an Asymmetric Convolutional Network (ACNet), which can be trained to reach a higher level of accuracy. After training, we equivalently convert the ACNet into the same original architecture, thus requiring no extra computations anymore. We have observed that ACNet can improve the performance of various models on CIFAR and ImageNet by a clear margin. Through further experiments, we attribute the effectiveness of ACB to its capability of enhancing the models robustness to rotational distortions and strengthening the central skeleton parts of square convolution kernels.

A Systematic Review of Unsupervised Learning Techniques for Software Defect Prediction

Background: Unsupervised machine learners have been increasingly applied to software defect prediction. It is an approach that may be valuable for software practitioners because it reduces the need for labeled training data. Objective: Investigate the use and performance of unsupervised learning techniques in software defect prediction. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review that identified 49 studies containing 2456 individual experimental results, which satisfied our inclusion criteria published between January 2000 and March 2018. In order to compare prediction performance across these studies in a consistent way, we (re-)computed the confusion matrices and employed the Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) as our main performance measure. Results: Our meta-analysis shows that unsupervised models are comparable with supervised models for both within-project and cross-project prediction. Among the 14 families of unsupervised model, Fuzzy CMeans (FCM) and Fuzzy SOMs (FSOMs) perform best. In addition, where we were able to check, we found that almost 11% (262/2456) of published results (contained in 16 papers) were internally inconsistent and a further 33% (823/2456) provided insufficient details for us to check. Conclusion: Although many factors impact the performance of a classifier, e.g., dataset characteristics, broadly speaking, unsupervised classifiers do not seem to perform worse than the supervised classifiers in our review. However, we note a worrying prevalence of (i) demonstrably erroneous experimental results, (ii) undemanding benchmarks and (iii) incomplete reporting. We therefore encourage researchers to be comprehensive in their reporting.

Approximated Oracle Filter Pruning for Destructive CNN Width Optimization

It is not easy to design and run Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) due to: 1) finding the optimal number of filters (i.e., the width) at each layer is tricky, given an architecture; and 2) the computational intensity of CNNs impedes the deployment on computationally limited devices. Oracle Pruning is designed to remove the unimportant filters from a well-trained CNN, which estimates the filters importance by ablating them in turn and evaluating the model, thus delivers high accuracy but suffers from intolerable time complexity, and requires a given resulting width but cannot automatically find it. To address these problems, we propose Approximated Oracle Filter Pruning (AOFP), which keeps searching for the least important filters in a binary search manner, makes pruning attempts by masking out filters randomly, accumulates the resulting errors, and finetunes the model via a multi-path framework. As AOFP enables simultaneous pruning on multiple layers, we can prune an existing very deep CNN with acceptable time cost, negligible accuracy drop, and no heuristic knowledge, or re-design a model which exerts higher accuracy and faster inference.

Centripetal SGD for Pruning Very Deep Convolutional Networks with Complicated Structure

The redundancy is widely recognized in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which enables to remove unimportant filters from convolutional layers so as to slim the network with acceptable performance drop. Inspired by the linear and combinational properties of convolution, we seek to make some filters increasingly close and eventually identical for network slimming. To this end, we propose Centripetal SGD (C-SGD), a novel optimization method, which can train several filters to collapse into a single point in the parameter hyperspace. When the training is completed, the removal of the identical filters can trim the network with NO performance loss, thus no finetuning is needed. By doing so, we have partly solved an open problem of constrained filter pruning on CNNs with complicated structure, where some layers must be pruned following others. Our experimental results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet have justified the effectiveness of C-SGD-based filter pruning. Moreover, we have provided empirical evidences for the assumption that the redundancy in deep neural networks helps the convergence of training by showing that a redundant CNN trained using C-SGD outperforms a normally trained counterpart with the equivalent width.