skip to main content


Title: OpenWGL: Open-World Graph Learning
In traditional graph learning tasks, such as node classification, learning is carried out in a closed-world setting where the number of classes and their training samples are provided to help train models, and the learning goal is to correctly classify unlabeled nodes into classes already known. In reality, due to limited labeling capability and dynamic evolving of networks, some nodes in the networks may not belong to any existing/seen classes, and therefore cannot be correctly classified by closed-world learning algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new open-world graph learning paradigm, where the learning goal is to not only classify nodes belonging to seen classes into correct groups, but also classify nodes not belonging to existing classes to an unseen class. The essential challenge of the openworld graph learning is that (1) unseen class has no labeled samples, and may exist in an arbitrary form different from existing seen classes; and (2) both graph feature learning and prediction should differentiate whether a node may belong to an existing/seen class or an unseen class. To tackle the challenges, we propose an uncertain node representation learning approach, using constrained variational graph autoencoder networks, where the label loss and class uncertainty loss constraints are used to ensure that the node representation learning are sensitive to unseen class. As a result, node embedding features are denoted by distributions, instead of deterministic feature vectors. By using a sampling process to generate multiple versions of feature vectors, we are able to test the certainty of a node belonging to seen classes, and automatically determine a threshold to reject nodes not belonging to seen classes as unseen class nodes. Experiments on real-world networks demonstrate the algorithm performance, comparing to baselines. Case studies and ablation analysis also show the rationale of our design for open-world graph learning.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1828181 2027339 1763452
NSF-PAR ID:
10199471
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proc. Of the 20th IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, November 17-20, 2020, Sorrento, Italy
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)

    Networked data often demonstrate the Pareto principle (i.e., 80/20 rule) with skewed class distributions, where most vertices belong to a few majority classes and minority classes only contain a handful of instances. When presented with imbalanced class distributions, existing graph embedding learning tends to bias to nodes from majority classes, leaving nodes from minority classes under-trained. In this paper, we propose Dual-Regularized Graph Convolutional Networks (DR-GCN) to handle multi-class imbalanced graphs, where two types of regularization are imposed to tackle class imbalanced representation learning. To ensure that all classes are equally represented, we propose a class-conditioned adversarial training process to facilitate the separation of labeled nodes. Meanwhile, to maintain training equilibrium (i.e., retaining quality of fit across all classes), we force unlabeled nodes to follow a similar latent distribution to the labeled nodes by minimizing their difference in the embedding space. Experiments on real-world imbalanced graphs demonstrate that DR-GCN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in node classification, graph clustering, and visualization.

     
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    Networked data often demonstrate the Pareto principle (i.e., 80/20 rule) with skewed class distributions, where most vertices belong to a few majority classes and minority classes only contain a handful of instances. When presented with imbalanced class distributions, existing graph embedding learning tends to bias to nodes from majority classes, leaving nodes from minority classes under-trained. In this paper, we propose Dual-Regularized Graph Convolutional Networks (DRGCN) to handle multi-class imbalanced graphs, where two types of regularization are imposed to tackle class imbalanced representation learning. To ensure that all classes are equally represented, we propose a class-conditioned adversarial training process to facilitate the separation of labeled nodes. Meanwhile, to maintain training equilibrium (i.e., retaining quality of fit across all classes), we force unlabeled nodes to follow a similar latent distribution to the labeled nodes by minimizing their difference in the embedding space. Experiments on real-world imbalanced graphs demonstrate that DR-GCN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in node classification, graph clustering, and visualization. 
    more » « less
  3. A fundamental limitation of applying semi-supervised learning in real-world settings is the assumption that unlabeled test data contains only classes previously encountered in the labeled training data. However, this assumption rarely holds for data in-the-wild, where instances belonging to novel classes may appear at testing time. Here, we introduce a novel open-world semi-supervised learning setting that formalizes the notion that novel classes may appear in the unlabeled test data. In this novel setting, the goal is to solve the class distribution mismatch between labeled and unlabeled data, where at the test time every input instance either needs to be classified into one of the existing classes or a new unseen class needs to be initialized. To tackle this challenging problem, we propose ORCA, an end-to-end deep learning approach that introduces uncertainty adaptive margin mechanism to circumvent the bias towards seen classes caused by learning discriminative features for seen classes faster than for the novel classes. In this way, ORCA reduces the gap between intra-class variance of seen with respect to novel classes. Experiments on image classification datasets and a single-cell annotation dataset demonstrate that ORCA consistently outperforms alternative baselines, achieving 25% improvement on seen and 96% improvement on novel classes of the ImageNet dataset. 
    more » « less
  4. In a closed world setting, classifiers are trained on examples from a number of classes and tested with unseen examples belonging to the same set of classes. However, in most real-world scenarios, a trained classifier is likely to come across novel examples that do not belong to any of the known classes. Such examples should ideally be categorized as belonging to an unknown class. The goal of an open set classifier is to anticipate and be ready to handle test examples of classes unseen during training. The classifier should be able to declare that a test example belongs to a class it does not know, and possi- bly, incorporate it into its knowledge as an example of a new class it has encoun- tered. There is some published research in open world image classification, but open set text classification remains mostly un- explored. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of Convolutional Neural Net- works (CNNs) for open set text classifi- cation. We find that CNNs are good fea- ture extractors and hence perform better than existing state-of-the-art open set clas- sifiers in smaller domains, although their open set classification abilities in general still need to be investigated. 
    more » « less
  5. Supervised learning, while deployed in real-life scenarios, often encounters instances of unknown classes. Conventional algorithms for training a supervised learning model do not provide an option to detect such instances, so they miss-classify such instances with 100% probability. Open Set Recognition (OSR) and Non-Exhaustive Learning (NEL) are potential solutions to overcome this problem. Most existing methods of OSR first classify members of existing classes and then identify instances of new classes. However, many of the existing methods of OSR only makes a binary decision, i.e., they only identify the existence of the unknown class. Hence, such methods cannot distinguish test instances belonging to incremental unseen classes. On the other hand, the majority of NEL methods often make a parametric assumption over the data distribution, which either fail to return good results, due to the reason that real-life complex datasets may not follow a well-known data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new online non-exhaustive learning model, namely, Non-Exhaustive Gaussian Mixture Generative Adversarial Networks (NE-GM-GAN) to address these issues. Our proposed model synthesizes Gaussian mixture based latent representation over a deep generative model, such as GAN, for incremental detection of instances of emerging classes in the test data. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that NE-GM-GAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in detecting instances of novel classes in streaming data. 
    more » « less