Zhengzhang Chen NEC Labs America

Zhengzhang Chen

Senior Researcher

Data Science and System Security

Posts

Prompt-based Domain Discrimination for Multi-source Time Series Domain Adaptation

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Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, their primary focus has been on the common representations of time series data. This concentration might inadvertently lead to the oversight of valuable domain-specific information originating from different source domains. To bridge this gap, we introduce POND, a novel prompt-based deep learning model designed explicitly for multi-source time series domain adaptation. POND is tailored to address significant challenges, notably: 1) The unavailability of a quantitative relationship between meta-data information and time series distributions, and 2) The dearth of exploration into extracting domain specific meta-data information. In this paper, we present an instance-level prompt generator and afidelity loss mechanism to facilitate the faithful learning of meta-data information. Additionally, we propose a domain discrimination technique to discern domain-specific meta-data information from multiple source domains. Our approach involves a simple yet effective meta-learning algorithm to optimize the objective efficiently. Furthermore, we augment the model’s performance by incorporating the Mixture of Expert (MoE) technique. The efficacy and robustness of our proposed POND model are extensively validated through experiments across 50 scenarios encompassing five datasets, which demonstrates that our proposed POND model outperforms the state-of the-art methods by up to 66% on the F1-score.

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NEC Labs America Team Heading to NeurIPS23 in New Orleans

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NEC Labs America is proud to be a Silver Sponsor for NeurIPS 2023 in New Orleans from December 10-16. Visit our booth to meet our team and learn about our intern opportunities in machine learning, data science, media analytics and integrated systems. Also, our Vijay Kumar.B.G, Samuel Schulter & Manmohan Chandraker, along with Zaid Khan, Northeastern University and Yun Fu, UC San Diego will present a paper, Exploring Question Decomposition for Zero-Shot VQA.

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GLAD: Content-Aware Dynamic Graphs for Log Anomaly Detection

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Logs play a crucial role in system monitoring and debugging by recording valuable system information, including events and status. Although various methods have been proposed to detect anomalies in log sequences, they often overlook the significance of considering relationships among system components, such as services and users, which can be identified from log contents. Understanding these relationships is vital for identifying anomalies and their underlying causes. To address this issue, we introduce GLAD, a Graph-based Log Anomaly Detection framework designed to detect relational anomalies in system logs. GLAD incorporates log semantics, relationship patterns, and sequential patterns into a unified framework for anomaly detection. Specifically, GLAD first introduces a field extraction module that utilizes prompt-based few-shot learning to extract essential field information, such as services and users, from log contents. Then GLAD constructs dynamic log graphs for sliding windows by leveraging the log events and extracted fields. These graphs represent events and fields as nodes and their relationships as edges. Subsequently, we propose atemporal-attentive graph edge anomaly detection model for identifying anomalous relationships in the dynamic log graphs. This model employs a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based encoder enhanced with transformers to capture structural, content, and temporal features. We evaluate our proposed method on three datasets, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of GLAD in detecting anomalies indicated by varying relation patterns.

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Interdependent Causal Networks for Root Cause Localization

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The goal of root cause analysis is to identify the underlying causes of system problems by discovering and analyzing the causal structure from system monitoring data. It is indispensable for maintaining the stability and robustness of large-scale complex systems. Existing methods mainly focus on the construction of a single effective isolated causal network, whereas many real-world systems are complex and exhibit interdependent structures (i.e., multiple networks of a system are interconnected by cross-network links). In interdependent networks, the malfunctioning effects of problematic system entities can propagate to other networks or different levels of system entities. Consequently, ignoring the interdependency results in suboptimal root cause analysis outcomes.In this paper, we propose REASON, a novel framework that enables the automatic discovery of both intra-level (i.e., within-network) and inter-level (i.e., across-network) causal relationships for root cause localization. REASON consists of Topological Causal Discovery (TCD) and Individual Causal Discovery (ICD). The TCD component aims to model the fault propagation in order to trace back to the root causes. To achieve this, we propose novel hierarchical graph neural networks to construct interdependent causal networks by modeling both intra-level and inter-level non-linear causal relations. Based on the learned interdependent causal networks, we then leverage random walk with restarts to model the network propagation of a system fault. The ICD component focuses on capturing abrupt change patterns of a single system entity. This component examines the temporal patterns of each entity’s metric data (i.e., time series), and estimates its likelihood of being a root cause based on the Extreme Value theory. Combining the topological and individual causal scores, the top K system entities are identified as root causes. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

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Incremental Causal Graph Learning for Online Root Cause Localization

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The task of root cause analysis (RCA) is to identify the root causes of system faults/failures by analyzing system monitoring data. Efficient RCA can greatly accelerate system failure recovery and mitigate system damages or financial losses. However, previous research has mostly focused on developing offline RCA algorithms, which often require manually initiating the RCA process, a significant amount of time and data to train a robust model, and then being retrained from scratch for a new system fault.In this paper, we propose CORAL, a novel online RCA framework that can automatically trigger the RCA process and incrementally update the RCA model. CORAL consists of Trigger Point Detection, Incremental Disentangled Causal Graph Learning, and Network Propagation-based Root Cause Localization. The Trigger Point Detection component aims to detect system state transitions automatically and in near-real-time. To achieve this, we develop an online trigger point detection approach based on multivariate singular spectrum analysis and cumulative sum statistics. To efficiently update the RCA model, we propose an incremental disentangled causal graph learning approach to decouple the state-invariant and state-dependent information. After that, CORAL applies a random walk with restarts to the updated causal graph to accurately identify root causes. The online RCA process terminates when the causal graph and the generated root cause list converge. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed framework.

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Beyond One Model Fits All: A Survey of Domain Specialization for Large Language Models

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Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. The great promise of LLMs as general task solvers motivated people to extend their functionality largely beyond just a “chatbot”, and use it as an assistant or even replacement for domain experts and tools in specific domains such as healthcare, finance, and education. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophistication of domain knowledge, the uniqueness of domain objectives, and the diversity of the constraints (e.g., various social norms, cultural conformity, religious beliefs, and ethical standards in the domain applications). To fill such a gap, explosively increase research, and practices have been conducted in very recent years on the domain specialization of LLMs, which, however, calls for a comprehensive and systematic review to better summarizes and guide this promising domain. In this survey paper, first, we propose a systematic taxonomy that categorizes the LLM domain specialization techniques based on the accessibility to LLMs and summarizes the framework for all the subcategories as well as their relations and differences to each other. We also present a comprehensive taxonomy of critical application domains that can benefit from specialized LLMs, discussing their practical significance and open challenges. Furthermore, we offer insights into the current research status and future trends in this area.

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Towards Robust Graph Neural Networks via Adversarial Contrastive Learning

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Graph Neural Network (GNN), as a powerful representation learning model on graph data, attracts much attention across various disciplines. However, recent studies show that GNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. How to make GNN more robust? What are the key vulnerabilities in GNN? How to address the vulnerabilities and defend GNN against the adversarial attacks? Adversarial training has shown to be effective in improving the robustness of traditional Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, existing adversarial training works mainly focus on the image data, which consists of continuous features, while the features and structures of graph data are often discrete. Moreover, rather than assuming each sample is independent and identically distributed as in DNN, GNN leverages the contextual information across the graph (e.g., neighborhoods of a node). Thus, existing adversarial training techniques cannot be directly applied to defend GNN. In this paper, we propose ContrastNet, an effective adversarial defense framework for GNN. In particular, we propose an adversarial contrastive learning method to train the GNN over the adversarial space. To further improve the robustness of GNN, we investigate the latent vulnerabilities in every component of a GNN encoder and propose corresponding refining strategies. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ContrastNet in improving the robustness of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Network and GraphSage, under various types of adversarial attacks.

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Multi-source Inductive Knowledge Graph Transfer

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Multi-source Inductive Knowledge Graph Transfer Large-scale information systems, such as knowledge graphs (KGs), enterprise system networks, often exhibit dynamic and complex activities. Recent research has shown that formalizing these information systems as graphs can effectively characterize the entities (nodes) and their relationships (edges). Transferring knowledge from existing well-curated source graphs can help construct the target graph of newly-deployed systems faster and better which no doubt will benefit downstream tasks such as link prediction and anomaly detection for new systems. However, current graph transferring methods are either based on a single source, which does not sufficiently consider multiple available sources, or not selectively learns from these sources. In this paper, we propose MSGT-GNN, a graph knowledge transfer model for efficient graph link prediction from multiple source graphs. MSGT-GNN consists of two components: the Intra-Graph Encoder, which embeds latent graph features of system entities into vectors, and the graph transferor, which utilizes graph attention mechanism to learn and optimize the embeddings of corresponding entities from multiple source graphs, in both node level and graph level. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets from various domains show that MSGT-GNN outperforms other baseline approaches in the link prediction and demonstrate the merit of attentive graph knowledge transfer and the effectiveness of MSGT-GNN.

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Towards Learning Disentangled Representations for Time Series

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Promising progress has been made toward learning efficient time series representations in recent years, but the learned representations often lack interpretability and do not encode semantic meanings by the complex interactions of many latent factors. Learning representations that disentangle these latent factors can bring semantic-rich representations of time series and further enhance interpretability. However, directly adopting the sequential models, such as Long Short-Term Memory Variational AutoEncoder (LSTM-VAE), would encounter a Kullback?Leibler (KL) vanishing problem: the LSTM decoder often generates sequential data without efficiently using latent representations, and the latent spaces sometimes could even be independent of the observation space. And traditional disentanglement methods may intensify the trend of KL vanishing along with the disentanglement process, because they tend to penalize the mutual information between the latent space and the observations. In this paper, we propose Disentangle Time-Series, a novel disentanglement enhancement framework for time series data. Our framework achieves multi-level disentanglement by covering both individual latent factors and group semantic segments. We propose augmenting the original VAE objective by decomposing the evidence lower-bound and extracting evidence linking factorial representations to disentanglement. Additionally, we introduce a mutual information maximization term between the observation space to the latent space to alleviate the KL vanishing problem while preserving the disentanglement property. Experimental results on five real-world IoT datasets demonstrate that the representations learned by DTS achieve superior performance in various tasks with better interpretability.

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Superclass-Conditional Gaussian Mixture Model for Coarse-To-Fine Few-Shot Learning

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Learning fine-grained embeddings is essential for extending the generalizability of models pre-trained on “coarse” labels (e.g., animals). It is crucial to fields for which fine-grained labeling (e.g., breeds of animals) is expensive, but fine-grained prediction is desirable, such as medicine. The dilemma necessitates adaptation of a “coarsely” pre-trained model to new tasks with a few “finer-grained” training labels. However, coarsely supervised pre-training tends to suppress intra-class variation, which is vital for cross-granularity adaptation. In this paper, we develop a training framework underlain by a novel superclass-conditional Gaussian mixture model (SCGM). SCGM imitates the generative process of samples from hierarchies of classes through latent variable modeling of the fine-grained subclasses. The framework is agnostic to the encoders and only adds a few distribution related parameters, thus is efficient, and flexible to different domains. The model parameters are learned end-to-end by maximum-likelihood estimation via a principled Expectation-Maximization algorithm. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and a real-life medical dataset indicate the effectiveness of our method.

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