Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently gained traction in transportation, bioinformatics, language and image processing, but research on their application to supply chain management remains limited. Supply chains are inherently graph-like, making them ideal for GNN methodologies, which can optimize and solve complex problems. The barriers include a lack of proper conceptual foundations, familiarity with graph applications in SCM, and real-world benchmark datasets for GNN-based supply chain research. To address this, we discuss and connect supply chains with graph structures for effective GNN application, providing detailed formulations, examples, mathematical definitions, and task guidelines. Additionally, we present a multi-perspective real-world benchmark dataset from a leading FMCG company in Bangladesh, focusing on supply chain planning. We discuss various supply chain tasks using GNNs and benchmark several state-of-the-art models on homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs across six supply chain analytics tasks. Our analysis shows that GNN-based models consistently outperform statistical Machine Learning and other Deep Learning models by around 10-30% in regression, 10-30% in classification and detection tasks, and 15-40% in anomaly detection tasks on designated metrics. With this work, we lay the groundwork for solving supply chain problems using GNNs, supported by conceptual discussions, methodological insights, and a comprehensive dataset.
It is often desirable to distill the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into smaller student models due to compute and memory constraints. One way to do this for classification tasks is via dataset synthesis, which can be accomplished by generating examples of each label from the LLM. Prior approaches to synthesis use few-shot prompting, which relies on the LLM's parametric knowledge to generate usable examples. However, this leads to issues of repetition, bias towards popular entities, and stylistic differences from human text. In this work, we propose Synthesize by Retrieval and Refinement (SynthesizRR), which uses retrieval augmentation to introduce variety into the dataset synthesis process: as retrieved passages vary, the LLM is seeded with different content to generate its examples. We empirically study the synthesis of six datasets, covering topic classification, sentiment analysis, tone detection, and humor, requiring complex synthesis strategies. We find that SynthesizRR greatly improves lexical and semantic diversity, similarity to human-written text, and distillation performance, when compared to 32-shot prompting and four prior approaches. We release our code to perform all steps at https://github.com/amazon-science/synthesizrr
Few-shot node classification is tasked to provide accurate predictions for nodes from novel classes with only few representative labeled nodes. This problem has drawn tremendous attention for its projection to prevailing real-world applications, such as product categorization for newly added commodity categories on an E-commerce platform with scarce records or diagnoses for rare diseases on a patient similarity graph. To tackle such challenging label scarcity issues in the non-Euclidean graph domain, meta-learning has become a successful and predominant paradigm. More recently, inspired by the development of graph self-supervised learning, transferring pretrained node embeddings for few-shot node classification could be a promising alternative to meta-learning but remains unexposed. In this work, we empirically demonstrate the potential of an alternative framework, \textit{Transductive Linear Probing}, that transfers pretrained node embeddings, which are learned from graph contrastive learning methods. We further extend the setting of few-shot node classification from standard fully supervised to a more realistic self-supervised setting, where meta-learning methods cannot be easily deployed due to the shortage of supervision from training classes. Surprisingly, even without any ground-truth labels, transductive linear probing with self-supervised graph contrastive pretraining can outperform the state-of-the-art fully supervised meta-learning based methods under the same protocol. We hope this work can shed new light on few-shot node classification problems and foster future research on learning from scarcely labeled instances on graphs.
In E-commerce, it is a common practice to organize the product catalog using product taxonomy. This enables the buyer to easily locate the item they are looking for and also to explore various items available under a category. Product taxonomy is a tree structure with 3 or more levels of depth and several leaf nodes. Product categorization is a large scale classification task that assigns a category path to a particular product. Research in this area is restricted by the unavailability of good real-world datasets and the variations in taxonomy due to the absence of a standard across the different e-commerce stores. In this paper, we introduce a high-quality product taxonomy dataset focusing on clothing products which contain 186,150 images under clothing category with 3 levels and 52 leaf nodes in the taxonomy. We explain the methodology used to collect and label this dataset. Further, we establish the benchmark by comparing image classification and Attention based Sequence models for predicting the category path. Our benchmark model reaches a micro f-score of 0.92 on the test set. The dataset, code and pre-trained models are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/vumaasha/atlas}. We invite the community to improve upon these baselines.
We consider the extreme multi-label text classification (XMC) problem: given an input text, return the most relevant labels from a large label collection. For example, the input text could be a product description on Amazon.com and the labels could be product categories. XMC is an important yet challenging problem in the NLP community. Recently, deep pretrained transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many NLP tasks including sentence classification, albeit with small label sets. However, naively applying deep transformer models to the XMC problem leads to sub-optimal performance due to the large output space and the label sparsity issue. In this paper, we propose X-Transformer, the first scalable approach to fine-tuning deep transformer models for the XMC problem. The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art results on four XMC benchmark datasets. In particular, on a Wiki dataset with around 0.5 million labels, the prec@1 of X-Transformer is 77.28%, a substantial improvement over state-of-the-art XMC approaches Parabel (linear) and AttentionXML (neural), which achieve 68.70% and 76.95% precision@1, respectively. We further apply X-Transformer to a product2query dataset from Amazon and gained 10.7% relative improvement on prec@1 over Parabel.
Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) is an important problem in the era of big data, for tagging a given text with the most relevant multiple labels from an extremely large-scale label set. XMTC can be found in many applications, such as item categorization, web page tagging, and news annotation. Traditionally most methods used bag-of-words (BOW) as inputs, ignoring word context as well as deep semantic information. Recent attempts to overcome the problems of BOW by deep learning still suffer from 1) failing to capture the important subtext for each label and 2) lack of scalability against the huge number of labels. We propose a new label tree-based deep learning model for XMTC, called AttentionXML, with two unique features: 1) a multi-label attention mechanism with raw text as input, which allows to capture the most relevant part of text to each label; and 2) a shallow and wide probabilistic label tree (PLT), which allows to handle millions of labels, especially for "tail labels". We empirically compared the performance of AttentionXML with those of eight state-of-the-art methods over six benchmark datasets, including Amazon-3M with around 3 million labels. AttentionXML outperformed all competing methods under all experimental settings. Experimental results also show that AttentionXML achieved the best performance against tail labels among label tree-based methods. The code and datasets are available at http://github.com/yourh/AttentionXML .