Learning Geospatial Region Embedding with Heterogeneous Graph

Learning effective geospatial embeddings is crucial for a series of geospatial applications such as city analytics and earth monitoring. However, learning comprehensive region representations presents two significant challenges: first, the deficiency of effective intra-region feature representation; and second, the difficulty of learning from intricate inter-region dependencies. In this paper, we present GeoHG, an effective heterogeneous graph structure for learning comprehensive region embeddings for various downstream tasks. Specifically, we tailor satellite image representation learning through geo-entity segmentation and point-of-interest (POI) integration for expressive intra-regional features. Furthermore, GeoHG unifies informative spatial interdependencies and socio-environmental attributes into a powerful heterogeneous graph to encourage explicit modeling of higher-order inter-regional relationships. The intra-regional features and inter-regional correlations are seamlessly integrated by a model-agnostic graph learning framework for diverse downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of GeoHG in geo-prediction tasks compared to existing methods, even under extreme data scarcity (with just 5% of training data). With interpretable region representations, GeoHG exhibits strong generalization capabilities across regions. We will release code and data upon paper notification.

Graph Machine Learning in the Era of Large Language Models

Graphs play an important role in representing complex relationships in various domains like social networks, knowledge graphs, and molecular discovery. With the advent of deep learning, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a cornerstone in Graph Machine Learning (Graph ML), facilitating the representation and processing of graph structures. Recently, LLMs have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in language tasks and are widely adopted in a variety of applications such as computer vision and recommender systems. This remarkable success has also attracted interest in applying LLMs to the graph domain. Increasing efforts have been made to explore the potential of LLMs in advancing Graph ML's generalization, transferability, and few-shot learning ability. Meanwhile, graphs, especially knowledge graphs, are rich in reliable factual knowledge, which can be utilized to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and potentially alleviate their limitations such as hallucinations and the lack of explainability. Given the rapid progress of this research direction, a systematic review summarizing the latest advancements for Graph ML in the era of LLMs is necessary to provide an in-depth understanding to researchers and practitioners. Therefore, in this survey, we first review the recent developments in Graph ML. We then explore how LLMs can be utilized to enhance the quality of graph features, alleviate the reliance on labeled data, and address challenges such as graph heterogeneity and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. Afterward, we delve into how graphs can enhance LLMs, highlighting their abilities to enhance LLM pre-training and inference. Furthermore, we investigate various applications and discuss the potential future directions in this promising field.

Improved Logical Reasoning of Language Models via Differentiable Symbolic Programming

Pre-trained large language models (LMs) struggle to perform logical reasoning reliably despite advances in scale and compositionality. In this work, we tackle this challenge through the lens of symbolic programming. We propose DSR-LM, a Differentiable Symbolic Reasoning framework where pre-trained LMs govern the perception of factual knowledge, and a symbolic module performs deductive reasoning. In contrast to works that rely on hand-crafted logic rules, our differentiable symbolic reasoning framework efficiently learns weighted rules and applies semantic loss to further improve LMs. DSR-LM is scalable, interpretable, and allows easy integration of prior knowledge, thereby supporting extensive symbolic programming to robustly derive a logical conclusion. The results of our experiments suggest that DSR-LM improves the logical reasoning abilities of pre-trained language models, resulting in a significant increase in accuracy of over 20% on deductive reasoning benchmarks. Furthermore, DSR-LM outperforms a variety of competitive baselines when faced with systematic changes in sequence length.

LASER: Neuro-Symbolic Learning of Semantic Video Representations

Modern AI applications involving video, such as video-text alignment, video search, and video captioning, benefit from a fine-grained understanding of video semantics. Existing approaches for video understanding are either data-hungry and need low-level annotation, or are based on general embeddings that are uninterpretable and can miss important details. We propose LASER, a neuro-symbolic approach that learns semantic video representations by leveraging logic specifications that can capture rich spatial and temporal properties in video data. In particular, we formulate the problem in terms of alignment between raw videos and specifications. The alignment process efficiently trains low-level perception models to extract a fine-grained video representation that conforms to the desired high-level specification. Our pipeline can be trained end-to-end and can incorporate contrastive and semantic loss functions derived from specifications. We evaluate our method on two datasets with rich spatial and temporal specifications: 20BN-Something-Something and MUGEN. We demonstrate that our method not only learns fine-grained video semantics but also outperforms existing baselines on downstream tasks such as video retrieval.

Scallop: A Language for Neurosymbolic Programming

We present Scallop, a language which combines the benefits of deep learning and logical reasoning. Scallop enables users to write a wide range of neurosymbolic applications and train them in a data- and compute-efficient manner. It achieves these goals through three key features: 1) a flexible symbolic representation that is based on the relational data model; 2) a declarative logic programming language that is based on Datalog and supports recursion, aggregation, and negation; and 3) a framework for automatic and efficient differentiable reasoning that is based on the theory of provenance semirings. We evaluate Scallop on a suite of eight neurosymbolic applications from the literature. Our evaluation demonstrates that Scallop is capable of expressing algorithmic reasoning in diverse and challenging AI tasks, provides a succinct interface for machine learning programmers to integrate logical domain knowledge, and yields solutions that are comparable or superior to state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, Scallop's solutions outperform these models in aspects such as runtime and data efficiency, interpretability, and generalizability.