OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Imperceptible Backdoor Attack: From Input Space to Feature Representation
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Backdoor attacks are rapidly emerging threats to deep neural networks (DNNs). In the backdoor attack scenario, attackers usually implant the backdoor into the target model by manipulating the training dataset or training process. Then, the compromised model behaves normally for benign input yet makes mistakes when the pre-defined trigger appears. In this paper, we analyze the drawbacks of existing attack approaches and propose a novel imperceptible backdoor attack. We treat the trigger pattern as a special kind of noise following a multinomial distribution. A U-net-based network is employed to generate concrete parameters of multinomial distribution for each benign input. This elaborated trigger ensures that our approach is invisible to both humans and statistical detection. Besides the design of the trigger, we also consider the robustness of our approach against model diagnose-based defences. We force the feature representation of malicious input stamped with the trigger to be entangled with the benign one. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness against multiple state-of-the-art defences through extensive datasets and networks. Our trigger only modifies less than 1\% pixels of a benign image while the modification magnitude is 1. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Ekko-zn/IJCAI2022-Backdoor.
A Solver + Gradient Descent Training Algorithm for Deep Neural Networks
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

We present a novel hybrid algorithm for training Deep Neural Networks that combines the state-of-the-art Gradient Descent (GD) method with a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) solver, outperforming GD and variants in terms of accuracy, as well as resource and data efficiency for both regression and classification tasks. Our GD+Solver hybrid algorithm, called GDSolver, works as follows: given a DNN $D$ as input, GDSolver invokes GD to partially train $D$ until it gets stuck in a local minima, at which point GDSolver invokes an MILP solver to exhaustively search a region of the loss landscape around the weight assignments of $D$'s final layer parameters with the goal of tunnelling through and escaping the local minima. The process is repeated until desired accuracy is achieved. In our experiments, we find that GDSolver not only scales well to additional data and very large model sizes, but also outperforms all other competing methods in terms of rates of convergence and data efficiency. For regression tasks, GDSolver produced models that, on average, had 31.5% lower MSE in 48% less time, and for classification tasks on MNIST and CIFAR10, GDSolver was able to achieve the highest accuracy over all competing methods, using only 50% of the training data that GD baselines required.
A Multivariate Complexity Analysis of Qualitative Reasoning Problems
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Qualitative reasoning is an important subfield of artificial intelligence where one describes relationships with qualitative, rather than numerical, relations. Many such reasoning tasks, e.g., Allen's interval algebra, can be solved in $2^{O(n \cdot \log n)}$ time, but single-exponential running times $2^{O(n)}$ are currently far out of reach. In this paper we consider single-exponential algorithms via a multivariate analysis consisting of a fine-grained parameter $n$ (e.g., the number of variables) and a coarse-grained parameter $k$ expected to be relatively small. We introduce the classes FPE and XE of problems solvable in $f(k) \cdot 2^{O(n)}$, respectively $f(k)^n$, time, and prove several fundamental properties of these classes. We proceed by studying temporal reasoning problems and (1) show that the Partially Ordered Time problem of effective width $k$ is solvable in $16^{kn}$ time and is thus included in XE, and (2) that the network consistency problem for Allen's interval algebra with no interval overlapping with more than $k$ others is solvable in $(2nk)^{2k} \cdot 2^{n}$ time and is included in FPE. Our multivariate approach is in no way limited to these to specific problems and may be a generally useful approach for obtaining single-exponential algorithms.
Using Constraint Programming and Graph Representation Learning for Generating Interpretable Cloud Security Policies
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Modern software systems rely on mining insights from business sensitive data stored in public clouds. A data breach usually incurs significant (monetary) loss for a commercial organization. Conceptually, cloud security heavily relies on Identity Access Management (IAM) policies that IT admins need to properly configure and periodically update. Security negligence and human errors often lead to misconfiguring IAM policies which may open a backdoor for attackers. To address these challenges, first, we develop a novel framework that encodes generating optimal IAM policies using constraint programming (CP). We identify reducing dark permissions of cloud users as an optimality criterion, which intuitively implies minimizing unnecessary datastore access permissions. Second, to make IAM policies interpretable, we use graph representation learning applied to historical access patterns of users to augment our CP model with similarity constraints: similar users should be grouped together and share common IAM policies. Third, we describe multiple attack models and show that our optimized IAM policies significantly reduce the impact of security attacks using real data from 8 commercial organizations, and synthetic instances.
BandMaxSAT: A Local Search MaxSAT Solver with Multi-armed Bandit
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

We address Partial MaxSAT (PMS) and Weighted PMS (WPMS), two practical generalizations of the MaxSAT problem, and propose a local search algorithm for these problems, called BandMaxSAT, that applies a multi-armed bandit model to guide the search direction. The bandit in our method is associated with all the soft clauses in the input (W)PMS instance. Each arm corresponds to a soft clause. The bandit model can help BandMaxSAT to select a good direction to escape from local optima by selecting a soft clause to be satisfied in the current step, that is, selecting an arm to be pulled. We further propose an initialization method for (W)PMS that prioritizes both unit and binary clauses when producing the initial solutions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BandMaxSAT significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art (W)PMS local search algorithm SATLike3.0. Specifically, the number of instances in which BandMaxSAT obtains better results is about twice that obtained by SATLike3.0. Moreover, we combine BandMaxSAT with the complete solver TT-Open-WBO-Inc. The resulting solver BandMaxSAT-c also outperforms some of the best state-of-the-art complete (W)PMS solvers, including SATLike-c, Loandra and TT-Open-WBO-Inc.
A Strengthened Branch and Bound Algorithm for the Maximum Common (Connected) Subgraph Problem
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a new and strengthened Branch-and-Bound (BnB) algorithm for the maximum common (connected) induced subgraph problem based on two new operators, Long-Short Memory (LSM) and Leaf vertex Union Match (LUM). Given two graphs for which we search for the maximum common (connected) induced subgraph, the first operator of LSM maintains a score for the branching node using the short-term reward of each vertex of the first graph and the long-term reward of each vertex pair of the two graphs. In this way, the BnB process learns to reduce the search tree size significantly and improve the algorithm performance. The second operator of LUM further improves the performance by simultaneously matching the leaf vertices connected to the current matched vertices, and allows the algorithm to match multiple vertex pairs without affecting the solution optimality. We incorporate the two operators into the state-of-the-art BnB algorithm McSplit, and denote the resulting algorithm as McSplit+LL. Experiments show that McSplit+LL outperforms McSplit+RL, a more recent variant of McSplit using reinforcement learning that is superior than McSplit.
Entity Alignment with Reliable Path Reasoning and Relation-aware Heterogeneous Graph Transformer
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Entity Alignment (EA) has attracted widespread attention in both academia and industry, which aims to seek entities with same meanings from different Knowledge Graphs (KGs). There are substantial multi-step relation paths between entities in KGs, indicating the semantic relations of entities. However, existing methods rarely consider path information because not all natural paths facilitate for EA judgment. In this paper, we propose a more effective entity alignment framework, RPR-RHGT, which integrates relation and path structure information, as well as the heterogeneous information in KGs. Impressively, an initial reliable path reasoning algorithm is developed to generate the paths favorable for EA task from the relation structures of KGs, which is the first algorithm in the literature to successfully use unrestricted path information. In addition, to efficiently capture heterogeneous features in entity neighborhoods, a relation-aware heterogeneous graph transformer is designed to model the relation and path structures of KGs. Extensive experiments on three well-known datasets show RPR-RHGT significantly outperforms 11 state-of-the-art methods, exceeding the best performing baseline up to 8.62% on Hits@1. We also show its better performance than the baselines on different ratios of training set, and harder datasets.
Non-Euclidean Self-Organizing Maps
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs, Kohonen networks) belong to neural network models of the unsupervised class. In this paper, we present the generalized setup for non-Euclidean SOMs. Most data analysts take it for granted to use some subregions of a flat space as their data model; however, by the assumption that the underlying geometry is non-Euclidean we obtain a new degree of freedom for the techniques that translate the similarities into spatial neighborhood relationships. We improve the traditional SOM algorithm by introducing topology-related extensions. Our proposition can be successfully applied to dimension reduction, clustering or finding similarities in big data (both hierarchical and non-hierarchical).
Vertically Federated Graph Neural Network for Privacy-Preserving Node Classification
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN) has achieved remarkable progresses in various real-world tasks on graph data, consisting of node features and the adjacent information between different nodes. High-performance GNN models always depend on both rich features and complete edge information in graph. However, such information could possibly be isolated by different data holders in practice, which is the so-called data isolation problem. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose VFGNN, a federated GNN learning paradigm for privacy-preserving node classification task under data vertically partitioned setting, which can be generalized to existing GNN models. Specifically, we split the computation graph into two parts. We leave the private data (i.e., features, edges, and labels) related computations on data holders, and delegate the rest of computations to a semi-honest server. We also propose to apply differential privacy to prevent potential information leakage from the server. We conduct experiments on three benchmarks and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of VFGNN.
Meta-Learning Based Knowledge Extrapolation for Knowledge Graphs in the Federated Setting
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

We study the knowledge extrapolation problem to embed new components (i.e., entities and relations) that come with emerging knowledge graphs (KGs) in the federated setting. In this problem, a model trained on an existing KG needs to embed an emerging KG with unseen entities and relations. To solve this problem, we introduce the meta-learning setting, where a set of tasks are sampled on the existing KG to mimic the link prediction task on the emerging KG. Based on sampled tasks, we meta-train a graph neural network framework that can construct features for unseen components based on structural information and output embeddings for them. Experimental results show that our proposed method can effectively embed unseen components and outperforms models that consider inductive settings for KGs and baselines that directly use conventional KG embedding methods.
Mutual Distillation Learning Network for Trajectory-User Linking
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Trajectory-User Linking (TUL), which links trajectories to users who generate them, has been a challenging problem due to the sparsity in check-in mobility data. Existing methods ignore the utilization of historical data or rich contextual features in check-in data, resulting in poor performance for TUL task. In this paper, we propose a novel Mutual distillation learning network to solve the TUL problem for sparse check-in mobility data, named MainTUL. Specifically, MainTUL is composed of a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) trajectory encoder that models sequential patterns of input trajectory and a temporal-aware Transformer trajectory encoder that captures long-term time dependencies for the corresponding augmented historical trajectories. Then, the knowledge learned on historical trajectories is transferred between the two trajectory encoders to guide the learning of both encoders to achieve mutual distillation of information. Experimental results on two real-world check-in mobility datasets demonstrate the superiority of MainTUL against state-of-the-art baselines. The source code of our model is available at https://github.com/Onedean/MainTUL.
Feature and Instance Joint Selection: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Feature selection and instance selection are two important techniques of data processing. However, such selections have mostly been studied separately, while existing work towards the joint selection conducts feature/instance selection coarsely; thus neglecting the latent fine-grained interaction between feature space and instance space. To address this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning solution to accomplish the joint selection task and simultaneously capture the interaction between the selection of each feature and each instance. In particular, a sequential-scanning mechanism is designed as action strategy of agents, and a collaborative-changing environment is used to enhance agent collaboration. In addition, an interactive paradigm introduces prior selection knowledge to help agents for more efficient exploration. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets have demonstrated improved performances.
Disentangling the Computational Complexity of Network Untangling
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

We study the network untangling problem introduced by Rozenshtein, Tatti, and Gionis [DMKD 2021], which is a variant of Vertex Cover on temporal graphs -- graphs whose edge set changes over discrete time steps. They introduce two problem variants. The goal is to select at most $k$ time intervals for each vertex such that all time-edges are covered and (depending on the problem variant) either the maximum interval length or the total sum of interval lengths is minimized. This problem has data mining applications in finding activity timelines that explain the interactions of entities in complex networks. Both variants of the problem are NP-hard. In this paper, we initiate a multivariate complexity analysis involving the following parameters: number of vertices, lifetime of the temporal graph, number of intervals per vertex, and the interval length bound. For both problem versions, we (almost) completely settle the parameterized complexity for all combinations of those four parameters, thereby delineating the border of fixed-parameter tractability.
Constrained Adaptive Projection with Pretrained Features for Anomaly Detection
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Anomaly detection aims to separate anomalies from normal samples, and the pretrained network is promising for anomaly detection. However, adapting the pretrained features would be confronted with the risk of pattern collapse when finetuning on one-class training data. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection framework called constrained adaptive projection with pretrained features (CAP). Combined with pretrained features, a simple linear projection head applied on a specific input and its k most similar pretrained normal representations is designed for feature adaptation, and a reformed self-attention is leveraged to mine the inner-relationship among one-class semantic features. A loss function is proposed to avoid potential pattern collapse. Concretely, it considers the similarity between a specific data and its corresponding adaptive normal representation, and incorporates a constraint term slightly aligning pretrained and adaptive spaces. Our method achieves state-ofthe-art anomaly detection performance on semantic anomaly detection and sensory anomaly detection benchmarks including 96.5% AUROC on CIFAR- 100 dataset, 97.0% AUROC on CIFAR-10 dataset and 89.9% AUROC on MvTec dataset.
CGMN: A Contrastive Graph Matching Network for Self-Supervised Graph Similarity Learning
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Graph similarity learning refers to calculating the similarity score between two graphs, which is required in many realistic applications, such as visual tracking, graph classification, and collaborative filtering. As most of the existing graph neural networks yield effective graph representations of a single graph, little effort has been made for jointly learning two graph representations and calculating their similarity score. In addition, existing unsupervised graph similarity learning methods are mainly clustering-based, which ignores the valuable information embodied in graph pairs. To this end, we propose a contrastive graph matching network (CGMN) for self-supervised graph similarity learning in order to calculate the similarity between any two input graph objects. Specifically, we generate two augmented views for each graph in a pair respectively. Then, we employ two strategies, namely cross-view interaction and cross-graph interaction, for effective node representation learning. The former is resorted to strengthen the consistency of node representations in two views. The latter is utilized to identify node differences between different graphs. Finally, we transform node representations into graph-level representations via pooling operations for graph similarity computation. We have evaluated CGMN on eight real-world datasets, and the experiment results show that the proposed new approach is superior to the state-of-the-art methods in graph similarity learning downstream tasks.
RAW-GNN: RAndom Walk Aggregation based Graph Neural Network
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Graph-Convolution-based methods have been successfully applied to representation learning on homophily graphs where nodes with the same label or similar attributes tend to connect with one another. Due to the homophily assumption of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) that these methods use, they are not suitable for heterophily graphs where nodes with different labels or dissimilar attributes tend to be adjacent. Several methods have attempted to address this heterophily problem, but they do not change the fundamental aggregation mechanism of GCNs because they rely on summation operators to aggregate information from neighboring nodes, which is implicitly subject to the homophily assumption. Here, we introduce a novel aggregation mechanism and develop a RAndom Walk Aggregation-based Graph Neural Network (called RAW-GNN) method. The proposed approach integrates the random walk strategy with graph neural networks. The new method utilizes breadth-first random walk search to capture homophily information and depth-first search to collect heterophily information. It replaces the conventional neighborhoods with path-based neighborhoods and introduces a new path-based aggregator based on Recurrent Neural Networks. These designs make RAW-GNN suitable for both homophily and heterophily graphs. Extensive experimental results showed that the new method achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of homophily and heterophily graphs.
Gromov-Wasserstein Discrepancy with Local Differential Privacy for Distributed Structural Graphs
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Learning the similarity between structured data, especially the graphs, is one of the essential problems. Besides the approach like graph kernels, Gromov-Wasserstein (GW) distance recently draws big attention due to its flexibility to capture both topological and feature characteristics, as well as handling the permutation invariance. However, structured data are widely distributed for different data mining and machine learning applications. With privacy concerns, accessing the decentralized data is limited to either individual clients or different silos. To tackle these issues, we propose a privacy-preserving framework to analyze the GW discrepancy of node embedding learned locally from graph neural networks in a federated flavor, and then explicitly place local differential privacy (LDP) based on Multi-bit Encoder to protect sensitive information. Our experiments show that, with strong privacy protections guaranteed by the $\varepsilon$-LDP algorithm, the proposed framework not only preserves privacy in graph learning but also presents a noised structural metric under GW distance, resulting in comparable and even better performance in classification and clustering tasks. Moreover, we reason the rationale behind the LDP-based GW distance analytically and empirically.
HashNWalk: Hash and Random Walk Based Anomaly Detection in Hyperedge Streams
Venue: Conference IJCAI 2022
Year: 2022

Sequences of group interactions, such as emails, online discussions, and co-authorships, are ubiquitous; and they are naturally represented as a stream of hyperedges. Despite their broad potential applications, anomaly detection in hypergraphs (i.e., sets of hyperedges) has received surprisingly little attention, compared to that in graphs. While it is tempting to reduce hypergraphs to graphs and apply existing graph-based methods, according to our experiments, taking higher-order structures of hypergraphs into consideration is worthwhile. We propose HashNWalk, an incremental algorithm that detects anomalies in a stream of hyperedges. It maintains and updates a constant-size summary of the structural and temporal information about the stream. Using the summary, which is the form of a proximity matrix, HashNWalk measures the anomalousness of each new hyperedge as it appears. HashNWalk is (a) Fast: it processes each hyperedge in near real-time and billions of hyperedges within a few hours, (b) Space Efficient: the size of the maintained summary is a predefined constant, (c) Effective: it successfully detects anomalous hyperedges in real-world hypergraphs.