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1. Supervised Graph Representation Learning for Modeling the Relationship between Structural and Functional Brain Connectivity

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP40776.2020.9053711  

   Li, Yang; Shafipour, Rasoul; Mateos, Gonzalo; Zhang, Zhengwu (May 2020, 2020 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP))

   null (Ed.)

   In this paper, we propose a supervised graph representation learning method to model the relationship between brain functional connectivity (FC) and structural connectivity (SC) through a graph encoder-decoder system. The graph convolutional network (GCN) model is leveraged in the encoder to learn lower-dimensional node representations (i.e. node embeddings) integrating information from both node attributes and network topology. In doing so, the encoder manages to capture both direct and indirect interactions between brain regions in the node embeddings which later help reconstruct empirical FC networks. From node embeddings, graph representations are learnt to embed the entire graphs into a vector space. Our end-to-end model utilizes a multi-objective loss function to simultaneously learn node representations for FC network reconstruction and graph representations for subject classification. The experiment on a large population of non-drinkers and heavy drinkers shows that our model can provide a characterization of the population pattern in the SC-FC relationship, while also learning features that capture individual uniqueness for subject classification. The identified key brain subnetworks show significant between-group difference and support the promising prospect of GCN-based graph representation learning on brain networks to model human brain activity and function. 

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2. Edgeformers: Graph-Empowered Transformers for Representation Learning on Textual-Edge Networks

   Jin, Bowen; Zhang, Yu; Meng, Yu; Han, Jiawei (May 2023, The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, {ICLR} 2023)

   Edges in many real-world social/information networks are associated with rich text information (e.g., user-user communications or user-product reviews). However, mainstream network representation learning models focus on propagating and aggregating node attributes, lacking specific designs to utilize text semantics on edges. While there exist edge-aware graph neural networks, they directly initialize edge attributes as a feature vector, which cannot fully capture the contextualized text semantics of edges. In this paper, we propose Edgeformers, a framework built upon graph-enhanced Transformers, to perform edge and node representation learning by modeling texts on edges in a contextualized way. Specifically, in edge representation learning, we inject network information into each Transformer layer when encoding edge texts; in node representation learning, we aggregate edge representations through an attention mechanism within each node’s ego-graph. On five public datasets from three different domains, Edgeformers consistently outperform state-of-the-art baselines in edge classification and link prediction, demonstrating the efficacy in learning edge and node representations, respectively. 

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3. Classifying Subjects with PFC Lesions from Healthy Controls during Working Memory Encoding via Graph Convolutional Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/NER52421.2023.10123793  

   Balaji, Sai Sanjay; Parhi, Keshab K. (April 2023, 2023 11th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER))

   This paper describes a group-level classification of 14 patients with prefrontal cortex (pFC) lesions from 20 healthy controls using multi-layer graph convolutional networks (GCN) with features inferred from the scalp EEG recorded from the encoding phase of working memory (WM) trials. We first construct undirected and directed graphs to represent the WM encoding for each trial for each subject using distance correlation- based functional connectivity measures and differential directed information-based effective connectivity measures, respectively. Centrality measures of betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and closeness centrality are inferred for each of the 64 channels from the brain connectivity. Along with the three centrality measures, each graph uses the relative band powers in the five frequency bands - delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma- as node features. The summarized graph representation is learned using two layers of GCN followed by mean pooling, and fully connected layers are used for classification. The final class label for a subject is decided using majority voting based on the results from all the subject's trials. The GCN-based model can correctly classify 28 of the 34 subjects (82.35% accuracy) with undirected edges represented by functional connectivity measure of distance correlation and classify all 34 subjects (100% accuracy) with directed edges characterized by effective connectivity measure of differential directed information. 

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4. Feature-Attention Graph Convolutional Networks for Noise Resilient Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TCYB.2022.3143798  

   Shi, Min; Tang, Yufei; Zhu, Xingquan; Zhuang, Yuan; Lin, Maohua; Liu, Jianxun (January 2022, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics)

   Noise and inconsistency commonly exist in real-world information networks, due to the inherent error-prone nature of human or user privacy concerns. To date, tremendous efforts have been made to advance feature learning from networks, including the most recent graph convolutional networks (GCNs) or attention GCN, by integrating node content and topology structures. However, all existing methods consider networks as error-free sources and treat feature content in each node as independent and equally important to model node relations. Noisy node content, combined with sparse features, provides essential challenges for existing methods to be used in real-world noisy networks. In this article, we propose feature-based attention GCN (FA-GCN), a feature-attention graph convolution learning framework, to handle networks with noisy and sparse node content. To tackle noise and sparse content in each node, FA-GCN first employs a long short-term memory (LSTM) network to learn dense representation for each node feature. To model interactions between neighboring nodes, a feature-attention mechanism is introduced to allow neighboring nodes to learn and vary feature importance, with respect to their connections. By using a spectral-based graph convolution aggregation process, each node is allowed to concentrate more on the most determining neighborhood features aligned with the corresponding learning task. Experiments and validations, w.r.t. different noise levels, demonstrate that FA-GCN achieves better performance than the state-of-the-art methods in both noise-free and noisy network environments. 

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5. Modulated Graph Convolutional Network for 3D Human Pose Estimation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCV48922.2021.01128  

   Zou, Zhiming; Tang, Wei (October 2021, 2021 IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision)

   The graph convolutional network (GCN) has recently achieved promising performance of 3D human pose estimation (HPE) by modeling the relationship among body parts. However, most prior GCN approaches suffer from two main drawbacks. First, they share a feature transformation for each node within a graph convolution layer. This prevents them from learning different relations between different body joints. Second, the graph is usually defined according to the human skeleton and is suboptimal because human activities often exhibit motion patterns beyond the natural connections of body joints. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel Modulated GCN for 3D HPE. It consists of two main components: weight modulation and affinity modulation. Weight modulation learns different modulation vectors for different nodes so that the feature transformations of different nodes are disentangled while retaining a small model size. Affinity modulation adjusts the graph structure in a GCN so that it can model additional edges beyond the human skeleton. We investigate several affinity modulation methods as well as the impact of regularizations. Rigorous ablation study indicates both types of modulation improve performance with negligible overhead. Compared with state-of-the-art GCNs for 3D HPE, our approach either significantly reduces the estimation errors, e.g., by around 10%, while retaining a small model size or drastically reduces the model size, e.g., from 4.22M to 0.29M (a 14.5× reduction), while achieving comparable performance. Results on two benchmarks show our Modulated GCN outperforms some recent states of the art. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhimingZo/Modulated-GCN. 

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