Learning low-level node embeddings using techniques from network representation learning is useful for solving downstream tasks such as node classification and link prediction. An important consideration in such applications is the robustness of the embedding algorithms against adversarial attacks, which can be examined by performing perturbation on the original network. An efficient perturbation technique can degrade the performance of network embeddings on downstream tasks. In this paper, we study network embedding algorithms from an adversarial point of view and observe the effect of poisoning the network on downstream tasks. We propose VIKING, a supervised network poisoning strategy that outperforms the state-of-the-art poisoning methods by upto 18% on the original network structure. We also extend VIKING to a semi-supervised attack setting and show that it is comparable to its supervised counterpart.
A bipartite network is a graph structure where nodes are from two distinct domains and only inter-domain interactions exist as edges. A large number of network embedding methods exist to learn vectorial node representations from general graphs with both homogeneous and heterogeneous node and edge types, including some that can specifically model the distinct properties of bipartite networks. However, these methods are inadequate to model multiplex bipartite networks (e.g., in e-commerce), that have multiple types of interactions (e.g., click, inquiry, and buy) and node attributes. Most real-world multiplex bipartite networks are also sparse and have imbalanced node distributions that are challenging to model. In this paper, we develop an unsupervised Dual HyperGraph Convolutional Network (DualHGCN) model that scalably transforms the multiplex bipartite network into two sets of homogeneous hypergraphs and uses spectral hypergraph convolutional operators, along with intra- and inter-message passing strategies to promote information exchange within and across domains, to learn effective node embedding. We benchmark DualHGCN using four real-world datasets on link prediction and node classification tasks. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that DualHGCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, and is robust to varying sparsity levels and imbalanced node distributions.
Network embedding maps the nodes of a given network into a low-dimensional space such that the semantic similarities among the nodes can be effectively inferred. Most existing approaches use inner-product of node embedding to measure the similarity between nodes leading to the fact that they lack the capacity to capture complex relationships among nodes. Besides, they take the path in the network just as structural auxiliary information when inferring node embeddings, while paths in the network are formed with rich user informations which are semantically relevant and cannot be ignored. In this paper, We propose a novel method called Network Embedding on the Metric of Relation, abbreviated as NEMR, which can learn the embeddings of nodes in a relational metric space efficiently. First, our NEMR models the relationships among nodes in a metric space with deep learning methods including variational inference that maps the relationship of nodes to a gaussian distribution so as to capture the uncertainties. Secondly, our NEMR considers not only the equivalence of multiple-paths but also the natural order of a single-path when inferring embeddings of nodes, which makes NEMR can capture the multiple relationships among nodes since multiple paths contain rich user information, e.g., age, hobby and profession. Experimental results on several public datasets show that the NEMR outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on relevant inference tasks including link prediction and node classification.
Random-walk based network embedding algorithms like DeepWalk and node2vec are widely used to obtain Euclidean representation of the nodes in a network prior to performing downstream inference tasks. However, despite their impressive empirical performance, there is a lack of theoretical results explaining their large-sample behavior. In this paper, we study node2vec and DeepWalk through the perspective of matrix factorization. In particular, we analyze these algorithms in the setting of community detection for stochastic blockmodel graphs (and their degree-corrected variants). By exploiting the row-wise uniform perturbation bound for leading singular vectors, we derive high-probability error bounds between the matrix factorization-based node2vec/DeepWalk embeddings and their true counterparts, uniformly over all node embeddings. Based on strong concentration results, we further show the perfect membership recovery by node2vec/DeepWalk, followed by $K$-means/medians algorithms. Specifically, as the network becomes sparser, our results guarantee that with large enough window size and vertices number, applying $K$-means/medians on the matrix factorization-based node2vec embeddings can, with high probability, correctly recover the memberships of all vertices in a network generated from the stochastic blockmodel (or its degree-corrected variants). The theoretical justifications are mirrored in the numerical experiments and real data applications, for both the original node2vec and its matrix factorization variant.
Network embedding (NE) can generate succinct node representations for massive-scale networks and enable direct applications of common machine learning methods to the network structure. Various NE algorithms have been proposed and used in a number of applications, such as node classification and link prediction. NE algorithms typically contain hyperparameters that are key to performance, but the hyperparameter tuning process can be time consuming. It is desirable to have the hyperparameters tuned within a specified length of time. Although AutoML methods have been applied to the hyperparameter tuning of NE algorithms, the problem of how to tune hyperparameters in a given period of time is not studied for NE algorithms before. In this paper, we propose JITuNE, a just-in-time hyperparameter tuning framework for NE algorithms. Our JITuNE framework enables the time-constrained hyperparameter tuning for NE algorithms by employing the tuning over hierarchical network synopses and transferring the knowledge obtained on synopses to the whole network. The hierarchical generation of synopsis and a time-constrained tuning method enable the constraining of overall tuning time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JITuNE can significantly improve performances of NE algorithms, outperforming state-of-the-art methods within the same number of algorithm runs.
Result relevance prediction is an essential task of e-commerce search engines to boost the utility of search engines and ensure smooth user experience. The last few years eyewitnessed a flurry of research on the use of Transformer-style models and deep text-match models to improve relevance. However, these two types of models ignored the inherent bipartite network structures that are ubiquitous in e-commerce search logs, making these models ineffective. We propose in this paper a novel Second-order Relevance, which is fundamentally different from the previous First-order Relevance, to improve result relevance prediction. We design, for the first time, an end-to-end First-and-Second-order Relevance prediction model for e-commerce item relevance. The model is augmented by the neighborhood structures of bipartite networks that are built using the information of user behavioral feedback, including clicks and purchases. To ensure that edges accurately encode relevance information, we introduce external knowledge generated from BERT to refine the network of user behaviors. This allows the new model to integrate information from neighboring items and queries, which are highly relevant to the focus query-item pair under consideration. Results of offline experiments showed that the new model significantly improved the prediction accuracy in terms of human relevance judgment. An ablation study showed that the First-and-Second-order model gained a 4.3% average gain over the First-order model. Results of an online A/B test revealed that the new model derived more commercial benefits compared to the base model.
Network embedding is aimed at mapping nodes in a network into low-dimensional vector representations. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received widespread attention and lead to state-of-the-art performance in learning node representations. However, most GNNs only work in unsigned networks, where only positive links exist. It is not trivial to transfer these models to signed directed networks, which are widely observed in the real world yet less studied. In this paper, we first review two fundamental sociological theories (i.e., status theory and balance theory) and conduct empirical studies on real-world datasets to analyze the social mechanism in signed directed networks. Guided by related sociological theories, we propose a novel Signed Directed Graph Neural Networks model named SDGNN to learn node embeddings for signed directed networks. The proposed model simultaneously reconstructs link signs, link directions, and signed directed triangles. We validate our model's effectiveness on five real-world datasets, which are commonly used as the benchmark for signed network embedding. Experiments demonstrate the proposed model outperforms existing models, including feature-based methods, network embedding methods, and several GNN methods.
Given a signed social graph, how can we learn appropriate node representations to infer the signs of missing edges? Signed social graphs have received considerable attention to model trust relationships. Learning node representations is crucial to effectively analyze graph data, and various techniques such as network embedding and graph convolutional network (GCN) have been proposed for learning signed graphs. However, traditional network embedding methods are not end-to-end for a specific task such as link sign prediction, and GCN-based methods suffer from a performance degradation problem when their depth increases. In this paper, we propose Signed Graph Diffusion Network (SGDNet), a novel graph neural network that achieves end-to-end node representation learning for link sign prediction in signed social graphs. We propose a random walk technique specially designed for signed graphs so that SGDNet effectively diffuses hidden node features. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that SGDNet outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of link sign prediction accuracy.
The real-world networks often compose of different types of nodes and edges with rich semantics, widely known as heterogeneous information network (HIN). Heterogeneous network embedding aims to embed nodes into low-dimensional vectors which capture rich intrinsic information of heterogeneous networks. However, existing models either depend on manually designing meta-paths, ignore mutual effects between different semantics, or omit some aspects of information from global networks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Graph-Aggregated Heterogeneous Network Embedding (GAHNE), which is designed to extract the semantics of HINs as comprehensively as possible to improve the results of downstream tasks based on graph convolutional neural networks. In GAHNE model, we develop several mechanisms that can aggregate semantic representations from different single-type sub-networks as well as fuse the global information into final embeddings. Extensive experiments on three real-world HIN datasets show that our proposed model consistently outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods.
Higher-order proximity (HOP) is fundamental for most network embedding methods due to its significant effects on the quality of node embedding and performance on downstream network analysis tasks. Most existing HOP definitions are based on either homophily to place close and highly interconnected nodes tightly in embedding space or heterophily to place distant but structurally similar nodes together after embedding. In real-world networks, both can co-exist, and thus considering only one could limit the prediction performance and interpretability. However, there is no general and universal solution that takes both into consideration. In this paper, we propose such a simple yet powerful framework called homophily and heterophliy preserving network transformation (H2NT) to capture HOP that flexibly unifies homophily and heterophily. Specifically, H2NT utilises motif representations to transform a network into a new network with a hybrid assumption via micro-level and macro-level walk paths. H2NT can be used as an enhancer to be integrated with any existing network embedding methods without requiring any changes to latter methods. Because H2NT can sparsify networks with motif structures, it can also improve the computational efficiency of existing network embedding methods when integrated. We conduct experiments on node classification, structural role classification and motif prediction to show the superior prediction performance and computational efficiency over state-of-the-art methods. In particular, DeepWalk-based H2 NT achieves 24% improvement in terms of precision on motif prediction, while reducing 46% computational time compared to the original DeepWalk.
Many proteins remain functionally unannotated. Sequence alignment (SA) uncovers missing annotations by transferring functional knowledge between species' sequence-conserved regions. Because SA is imperfect, network alignment (NA) complements SA by transferring functional knowledge between conserved biological network, rather than just sequence, regions of different species. Existing NA assumes that it is topological similarity (isomorphic-like matching) between network regions that corresponds to the regions' functional relatedness. However, we recently found that functionally unrelated proteins are almost as topologically similar as functionally related proteins. So, we redefined NA as a data-driven framework, TARA, which learns from network and protein functional data what kind of topological relatedness (rather than similarity) between proteins corresponds to the proteins' functional relatedness. TARA used topological information (within each network) but not sequence information (between proteins across networks). Yet, its alignments yielded higher protein functional prediction accuracy than alignments of existing NA methods, even those that used both topological and sequence information. Here, we propose TARA++ that is also data-driven, like TARA and unlike other existing methods, but that uses across-network sequence information on top of within-network topological information, unlike TARA. To deal with the within-and-across-network analysis, we adapt social network embedding to the problem of biological NA. TARA++ outperforms protein functional prediction accuracy of existing methods.
Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is a laborious process. Prior work on automated NAS targets mainly on improving accuracy, but lacks consideration of computational resource use. We propose the Resource-Efficient Neural Architect (RENA), an efficient resource-constrained NAS using reinforcement learning with network embedding. RENA uses a policy network to process the network embeddings to generate new configurations. We demonstrate RENA on image recognition and keyword spotting (KWS) problems. RENA can find novel architectures that achieve high performance even with tight resource constraints. For CIFAR10, it achieves 2.95% test error when compute intensity is greater than 100 FLOPs/byte, and 3.87% test error when model size is less than 3M parameters. For Google Speech Commands Dataset, RENA achieves the state-of-the-art accuracy without resource constraints, and it outperforms the optimized architectures with tight resource constraints.
This paper considers node localization in static sensor networks using range-only measurements. Similar to state- of-the-art algorithms, such as ECHO and DILOC, we rely on barycentric coordinates of the nodes to transform the non-convex node localization problem into a linear system of equations. The main contribution of this paper is a simple closed-form expression for generalized barycentric coordinates, which extends existing algorithms from two to n dimensions and allows arbitrary anchor-node configurations. The result relies on a connection between the Cayley-Menger bi-determinants of subsets of n+1 neighbor nodes and the signed volume of the simplices defined by these neighbor nodes. Hence, for noise-free measurements, the proposed method computes the optimal sensor network embedding as the solution of a linear system with coefficients obtained from the generalized barycentric node coordinates. Using simulations, we provide comparisons with DILOC and Matlab's MDS implementation. We also show that it is possible to improve our algorithm run time using fewer subsets of neighbor nodes.
Due to the huge commercial interests behind online reviews, a tremendousamount of spammers manufacture spam reviews for product reputation manipulation. To further enhance the influence of spam reviews, spammers often collaboratively post spam reviewers within a short period of time, the activities of whom are called collective opinion spam campaign. As the goals and members of the spam campaign activities change frequently, and some spammers also imitate normal purchases to conceal identity, which makes the spammer detection challenging. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised network embedding-based approach to jointly exploiting different types of relations, e.g., direct common behaviour relation and indirect co-reviewed relation to effectively represent the relevances of users for detecting the collective opinion spammers. The average improvements of our method over the state-of-the-art solutions on dataset AmazonCn and YelpHotel are [14.09%,12.04%] and [16.25%,12.78%] in terms of AP and AUC, respectively.
Most existing Heterogeneous Information Network (HIN) embedding methods focus on static environments while neglecting the evolving characteristic of realworld networks. Although several dynamic embedding methods have been proposed, they are merely designed for homogeneous networks and cannot be directly applied in heterogeneous environment. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel framework for incorporating temporal information into HIN embedding, denoted as Multi-View Dynamic HIN Embedding (MDHNE), which can efficiently preserve evolution patterns of implicit relationships from different views in updating node representations over time. We first transform HIN to a series of homogeneous networks corresponding to different views. Then our proposed MDHNE applies Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to incorporate evolving pattern of complex network structure and semantic relationships between nodes into latent embedding spaces, and thus the node representations from multiple views can be learned and updated when HIN evolves over time. Moreover, we come up with an attention based fusion mechanism, which can automatically infer weights of latent representations corresponding to different views by minimizing the objective function specific for different mining tasks. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate that our MDHNE model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three real-world dynamic datasets for different network mining tasks.
Existing network embedding approaches tackle the problem of learning low-dimensional node representations. However, networks can also be seen in the light of edges interlinking pairs of nodes. The broad goal of this paper is to introduce edge-centric network embeddings. We present an approach called ECNE, which instead of computing node embeddings directly, computes edge embeddings by relying on the notion of line graph coupled with an edge weighting mechanism to preserve the dynamic of the original graph in the line graph. We also present a link prediction framework called ECNE-LP, which given a target link (u,v) first collects paths between nodes u and v, then directly embeds the edges in these paths, and finally aggregates them toward predicting the existence of a link. We show that both ECNE and ECNE-LP bring benefit wrt the state-of-the-art.
Recently, there has been an interest in embedding networks in hyperbolic space, since hyperbolic space has been shown to work well in capturing graph/network structure as it can naturally reflect some properties of complex networks. However, the work on network embedding in hyperbolic space has been focused on microscopic node embedding. In this work, we are the first to present a framework to embed the structural roles of nodes into hyperbolic space. Our framework extends struct2vec, a well-known structural role preserving embedding method, by moving it to a hyperboloid model. We evaluated our method on four real-world and one synthetic network. Our results show that hyperbolic space is more effective than euclidean space in learning latent representations for the structural role of nodes.
The availability of different pre-trained semantic models enabled the quick development of machine learning components for downstream applications. Despite the availability of abundant text data for low resource languages, only a few semantic models are publicly available. Publicly available pre-trained models are usually built as a multilingual version of semantic models that can not fit well for each language due to context variations. In this work, we introduce different semantic models for Amharic. After we experiment with the existing pre-trained semantic models, we trained and fine-tuned nine new different models using a monolingual text corpus. The models are build using word2Vec embeddings, distributional thesaurus (DT), contextual embeddings, and DT embeddings obtained via network embedding algorithms. Moreover, we employ these models for different NLP tasks and investigate their impact. We find that newly trained models perform better than pre-trained multilingual models. Furthermore, models based on contextual embeddings from RoBERTA perform better than the word2Vec models.
Using random walk sampling methods for feature learning on networks, we develop a method for generating low-dimensional node embeddings for directed graphs and identifying transition states of stochastic chemical reacting systems. We modified objective functions adopted in existing random walk based network embedding methods to handle directed graphs and neighbors of different degrees. Through optimization via gradient ascent, we embed the weighted graph vertices into a low-dimensional vector space Rd while preserving the neighborhood of each node. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of the method on dimension reduction through several examples regarding identification of transition states of chemical reactions, especially for entropic systems.
Node classification in structural networks has been proven to be useful in many real world applications. With the development of network embedding, the performance of node classification has been greatly improved. However, nearly all the existing network embedding based methods are hard to capture the actual category features of a node because of the linearly inseparable problem in low-dimensional space; meanwhile they cannot incorporate simultaneously network structure information and node label information into network embedding. To address the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel Deep Kernel Supervised Hashing (DKSH) method to learn the hashing representations of nodes for node classification. Specifically, a deep multiple kernel learning is first proposed to map nodes into suitable Hilbert space to deal with linearly inseparable problem. Then, instead of only considering structural similarity between two nodes, a novel similarity matrix is designed to merge both network structure information and node label information. Supervised by the similarity matrix, the learned hashing representations of nodes simultaneously preserve the two kinds of information well from the learned Hilbert space. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines over three real world benchmark datasets.