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AutoTCL: Automated Time Series Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentations

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AutoTCL: Automated Time Series Contrastive Learning with Adaptive Augmentations Modern techniques like contrastive learning have been effectively used in many areas, including computer vision, natural language processing, and graph-structured data. Creating positive examples that assist the model in learning robust and discriminative representations is a crucial stage in contrastive learning approaches. Usually, preset human intuition directs the selection of relevant data augmentations. Due to patterns that are easily recognized by humans, this rule of thumb works well in the vision and language domains. However, it is impractical to visually inspect the temporal structures in time series. The diversity of time series augmentations at both the dataset and instance levels makes it difficult to choose meaningful augmentations on the fly. Thus, although prevalent, contrastive learning with data augmentation has been less studied in the time series domain. In this study, we address this gap by analyzing time series data augmentation using information theory and summarizing the most commonly adopted augmentations in a unified format. We then propose a parameterized augmentation method, AutoTCL, which can be adaptively employed to support time series representation learning. The proposed approach is encoder-agnostic, allowing it to be seamlessly integrated with different backbone encoders. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the highly competitive results of our method, with an average 10.3% reduction in MSE and 7.0% in MAE over the leading baselines.

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Time Series Contrastive Learning with Information-Aware Augmentations

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Time Series Contrastive Learning with Information-Aware Augmentations Various contrastive learning approaches have been proposed in recent years and achieve significant empirical success. While effective and prevalent, contrastive learning has been less explored for time series data. A key component of contrastive learning is to select appropriate augmentations imposing some priors to construct feasible positive samples, such that an encoder can be trained to learn robust and discriminative representations. Unlike image and language domains where “desired” augmented samples can be generated with the rule of thumb guided by prefabricated human priors, the ad-hoc manual selection of time series augmentations is hindered by their diverse and human-unrecognizable temporal structures. How to find the desired augmentations of time series data that are meaningful for given contrastive learning tasks and datasets remains an open question. In this work, we address the problem by encouraging both high fidelity and variety based on information theory. A theoretical analysis leads to the criteria for selecting feasible data augmentations. On top of that, we propose a new contrastive learning approach with information-aware augmentations, InfoTS, that adaptively selects optimal augmentations for time series representation learning. Experiments on various datasets show highly competitive performance with up to a 12.0% reduction in MSE on forecasting tasks and up to 3.7% relative improvement in accuracy on classification tasks over the leading baselines.

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Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Modular Networks

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Personalized Federated Learning via Heterogeneous Modular Networks Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) which collaboratively trains a federated model while considering local clients under privacy constraints has attracted much attention. Despite its popularity, it has been observed that existing PFL approaches result in sub-optimal solutions when the joint distribution among local clients diverges. To address this issue, we present Federated Modular Network (FedMN), a novel PFL approach that adaptively selects sub-modules from a module pool to assemble heterogeneous neural architectures for different clients. FedMN adopts a light-weighted routing hypernetwork to model the joint distribution on each client and produce the personalized selection of the module blocks for each client. To reduce the communication burden in existing FL, we develop an efficient way to interact between the clients and the server. We conduct extensive experiments on the real-world test beds and the results show both effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed FedMN over the baselines.

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InfoGCL: Information-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning

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InfoGCL: Information-Aware Graph Contrastive Learning Various graph contrastive learning models have been proposed to improve the performance of tasks on graph datasets in recent years. While effective and prevalent, these models are usually carefully customized. In particular, despite all recent work create two contrastive views, they differ in a variety of view augmentations, architectures, and objectives. It remains an open question how to build your graph contrastive learning model from scratch for particular graph tasks and datasets. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by studying how graph information is transformed and transferred during the contrastive learning process, and proposing an information-aware graph contrastive learning framework called InfoGCL. The key to the success of the proposed framework is to follow the Information Bottleneck principle to reduce the mutual information between contrastive parts while keeping task-relevant information intact at both the levels of the individual module and the entire framework so that the information loss during graph representation learning can be minimized. We show for the first time that all recent graph contrastive learning methods can be unified by our framework. Based on theoretical and empirical analysis on benchmark graph datasets, we show that InfoGCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in the settings of both graph classification and node classification tasks.

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Learning to Drop: Robust Graph Neural Network via Topological Denoising

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Learning to Drop: Robust Graph Neural Network via Topological Denoising Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown to be powerful tools for graph analytics. The key idea is to recursively propagate and aggregate information along the edges of the given graph. Despite their success, however, the existing GNNs are usually sensitive to the quality of the input graph. Real-world graphs are often noisy and contain task-irrelevant edges, which may lead to suboptimal generalization performance in the learned GNN models. In this paper, we propose PTDNet, a parameterized topological denoising network, to improve the robustness and generalization performance of GNNs by learning to drop task-irrelevant edges. PTDNet prunes task-irrelevant edges by penalizing the number of edges in the sparsified graph with parameterized networks. To take into consideration the topology of the entire graph, the nuclear norm regularization is applied to impose the low-rank constraint on the resulting sparsified graph for better generalization. PTDNet can be used as a key component in GNN models to improve their performances on various tasks, such as node classification and link prediction. Experimental studies on both synthetic and benchmark datasets show that PTDNet can improve the performance of GNNs significantly and the performance gain becomes larger for more noisy datasets.

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Parameterized Explainer for Graph Neural Network

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Parameterized Explainer for Graph Neural Network Despite recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), explaining predictions made by GNNs remains a challenging open problem. The leading method independently addresses the local explanations (i.e., important subgraph structure and node features) to interpret why a GNN model makes the prediction for a single instance, e.g. a node or a graph. As a result, the explanation generated is painstakingly customized for each instance. The unique explanation interpreting each instance independently is not sufficient to provide a global understanding of the learned GNN model, leading to the lack of generalizability and hindering it from being used in the inductive setting. Besides, as it is designed for explaining a single instance, it is challenging to explain a set of instances naturally (e.g., graphs of a given class). In this study, we address these key challenges and propose PGExplainer, a parameterized explainer for GNNs. PGExplainer adopts a deep neural network to parameterize the generation process of explanations, which enables PGExplainer a natural approach to explaining multiple instances collectively. Compared to the existing work, PGExplainer has better generalization ability and can be utilized in an inductive setting easily. Experiments on both synthetic and real-life datasets show highly competitive performance with up to 24.7% relative improvement in AUC on explaining graph classification over the leading baseline.

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