skip to main content


This content will become publicly available on May 1, 2024

Title: AutoTransfer: AutoML with Knowledge Transfer - An Application to Graph Neural Networks
AutoML has demonstrated remarkable success in finding an effective neural architecture for a given machine learning task defined by a specific dataset and an evaluation metric. However, most present AutoML techniques consider each task independently from scratch, which requires exploring many architectures, leading to high computational costs. We proposed AutoTransfer, an AutoML solution that improves search efficiency by transferring the prior architectural design knowledge to the novel task of interest. Our key innovation includes a task-model bank that captures the model performance over a diverse set of GNN architectures and tasks, and a computationally efficient task embedding that can accurately measure the similarity among different tasks. Based on the task-model bank and the task embeddings, our method estimates the design priors of desirable models of the novel task, by aggregating a similarity-weighted sum of the top-K design distributions on tasks that are similar to the task of interest. The computed design priors can be used with any AutoML search algorithm. We evaluated AutoTransfer on six datasets in the graph machine learning domain. Experiments demonstrate that (i) our proposed task embedding can be computed efficiently, and that tasks with similar embeddings have similar best-performing architectures; (ii) AutoTransfer significantly improves search efficiency with the transferred design priors, reducing the number of explored architectures by an order of magnitude. Finally, we released GNN-BANK-101, a large-scale dataset of detailed GNN training information of 120,000 task-model combinations to facilitate and inspire future research.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1835598 1918940
NSF-PAR ID:
10471860
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
NSF-PAR
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. Active learning is commonly used to train label-efficient models by adaptively selecting the most informative queries. However, most active learning strategies are designed to either learn a representation of the data (e.g., embedding or metric learning) or perform well on a task (e.g., classification) on the data. However, many machine learning tasks involve a combination of both representation learning and a task-specific goal. Motivated by this, we propose a novel unified query framework that can be applied to any problem in which a key component is learning a representation of the data that reflects similarity. Our approach builds on similarity or nearest neighbor (NN) queries which seek to select samples that result in improved embeddings. The queries consist of a reference and a set of objects, with an oracle selecting the object most similar (i.e., nearest) to the reference. In order to reduce the number of solicited queries, they are chosen adaptively according to an information theoretic criterion. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy on two tasks - active metric learning and active classification - using a variety of synthetic and real world datasets. In particular, we demonstrate that actively selected NN queries outperform recently developed active triplet selection methods in a deep metric learning setting. Further, we show that in classification, actively selecting class labels can be reformulated as a process of selecting the most informative NN query, allowing direct application of our method. 
    more » « less
  2. The rapid evolution of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has led to a growing number of new architectures as well as novel applications. However, current research focuses on proposing and evaluating specific architectural designs of GNNs, such as GCN, GIN, or GAT, as opposed to studying the more general design space of GNNs that consists of a Cartesian product of different design dimensions, such as the number of layers or the type of the aggregation function. Additionally, GNN designs are often specialized to a single task, yet few efforts have been made to understand how to quickly find the best GNN design for a novel task or a novel dataset. Here we define and systematically study the architectural design space for GNNs which consists of 315,000 different designs over 32 different predictive tasks. Our approach features three key innovations: (1) A general GNN design space; (2) a GNN task space with a similarity metric, so that for a given novel task/dataset, we can quickly identify/transfer the best performing architecture; (3) an efficient and effective design space evaluation method which allows insights to be distilled from a huge number of model-task combinations. Our key results include: (1) A comprehensive set of guidelines for designing well-performing GNNs; (2) while best GNN designs for different tasks vary significantly, the GNN task space allows for transferring the best designs across different tasks; (3) models discovered using our design space achieve state-of-the-art performance. Overall, our work offers a principled and scalable approach to transition from studying individual GNN designs for specific tasks, to systematically studying the GNN design space and the task space. Finally, we release GraphGym, a powerful platform for exploring different GNN designs and tasks. GraphGym features modularized GNN implementation, standardized GNN evaluation, and reproducible and scalable experiment management 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract Twitter is a frequent target for machine learning research and applications. Many problems, such as sentiment analysis, image tagging, and location prediction have been studied on Twitter data. Much of the prior work that addresses these problems within the context of Twitter focuses on a subset of the types of data available, e.g. only text, or text and image. However, a tweet can have several additional components, such as the location and the author, that can also provide useful information for machine learning tasks. In this work, we explore the problem of jointly modeling several tweet components in a common embedding space via task-agnostic representation learning, which can then be used to tackle various machine learning applications. To address this problem, we propose a deep neural network framework that combines text, image, and graph representations to learn joint embeddings for 5 tweet components: body, hashtags, images, user, and location. In our experiments, we use a large dataset of tweets to learn a joint embedding model and use it in multiple tasks to evaluate its performance vs. state-of-the-art baselines specific to each task. Our results show that our proposed generic method has similar or superior performance to specialized application-specific approaches, including accuracy of 52.43% vs. 48.88% for location prediction and recall of up to 15.93% vs. 12.12% for hashtag recommendation. 
    more » « less
  4. A key assumption in multi-task learning is that at the inference time the multi-task model only has access to a given data point but not to the data point’s labels from other tasks. This presents an opportunity to extend multi-task learning to utilize data point’s labels from other auxiliary tasks, and this way improves performance on the new task. Here we introduce a novel relational multi-task learning setting where we leverage data point labels from auxiliary tasks to make more accurate predictions on the new task. We develop MetaLink, where our key innovation is to build a knowledge graph that connects data points and tasks and thus allows us to leverage labels from auxiliary tasks. The knowledge graph consists of two types of nodes: (1) data nodes, where node features are data embeddings computed by the neural network, and (2) task nodes, with the last layer’s weights for each task as node features. The edges in this knowledge graph capture data-task relationships, and the edge label captures the label of a data point on a particular task. Under MetaLink, we reformulate the new task as a link label prediction problem between a data node and a task node. The MetaLink framework provides flexibility to model knowledge transfer from auxiliary task labels to the task of interest. We evaluate MetaLink on 6 benchmark datasets in both biochemical and vision domains. Experiments demonstrate that MetaLink can successfully utilize the relations among different tasks, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods under the proposed relational multi-task learning setting, with up to 27% improvement in ROC AUC. 
    more » « less
  5. When searching for mathematical content, accurate measures of formula similarity can help with tasks such as document ranking, query recommendation, and result set clustering. While there have been many attempts at embedding words and graphs, formula embedding is in its early stages. We introduce a new formula em- bedding model that we use with two hierarchical representations, (1) Symbol Layout Trees (SLTs) for appearance, and (2) Operator Trees (OPTs) for mathematical content. Following the approach of graph embeddings such as DeepWalk, we generate tuples represent- ing paths between pairs of symbols depth-first, embed tuples using the fastText n-gram embedding model, and then represent an SLT or OPT by its average tuple embedding vector. We then combine SLT and OPT embeddings, leading to state-of-the-art results for the NTCIR-12 formula retrieval task. Our fine-grained holistic vector representations allow us to retrieve many more partially similar for- mulas than methods using structural matching in trees. Combining our embedding model with structural matching in the Approach0 formula search engine produces state-of-the-art results for both fully and partially relevant results on the NTCIR-12 benchmark. Source code for our system is publicly available. 
    more » « less