IENE: Identifying and Extrapolating the Node Environment for Out-of-Distribution Generalization on Graphs

Due to the performance degradation of graph neural networks (GNNs) under distribution shifts, the work on out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization on graphs has received widespread attention. A novel perspective involves distinguishing potential confounding biases from different environments through environmental identification, enabling the model to escape environmentally-sensitive correlations and maintain stable performance under distribution shifts. However, in graph data, confounding factors not only affect the generation process of node features but also influence the complex interaction between nodes. We observe that neglecting either aspect of them will lead to a decrease in performance. In this paper, we propose IENE, an OOD generalization method on graphs based on node-level environmental identification and extrapolation techniques. It strengthens the model's ability to extract invariance from two granularities simultaneously, leading to improved generalization. Specifically, to identify invariance in features, we utilize the disentangled information bottleneck framework to achieve mutual promotion between node-level environmental estimation and invariant feature learning. Furthermore, we extrapolate topological environments through graph augmentation techniques to identify structural invariance. We implement the conceptual method with specific algorithms and provide theoretical analysis and proofs for our approach. Extensive experimental evaluations on two synthetic and four real-world OOD datasets validate the superiority of IENE, which outperforms existing techniques and provides a flexible framework for enhancing the generalization of GNNs.

Hyperedge Interaction-aware Hypergraph Neural Network

Hypergraphs provide an effective modeling approach for modeling high-order relationships in many real-world datasets. To capture such complex relationships, several hypergraph neural networks have been proposed for learning hypergraph structure, which propagate information from nodes to hyperedges and then from hyperedges back to nodes. However, most existing methods focus on information propagation between hyperedges and nodes, neglecting the interactions among hyperedges themselves. In this paper, we propose HeIHNN, a hyperedge interaction-aware hypergraph neural network, which captures the interactions among hyperedges during the convolution process and introduce a novel mechanism to enhance information flow between hyperedges and nodes. Specifically, HeIHNN integrates the interactions between hyperedges into the hypergraph convolution by constructing a three-stage information propagation process. After propagating information from nodes to hyperedges, we introduce a hyperedge-level convolution to update the hyperedge embeddings. Finally, the embeddings that capture rich information from the interaction among hyperedges will be utilized to update the node embeddings. Additionally, we introduce a hyperedge outlier removal mechanism in the information propagation stages between nodes and hyperedges, which dynamically adjusts the hypergraph structure using the learned embeddings, effectively removing outliers. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets show the competitive performance of HeIHNN compared with state-of-the-art methods.

Semi-supervised learning via DQN for log anomaly detection

Log anomaly detection plays a critical role in ensuring the security and maintenance of modern software systems. At present, the primary approach for detecting anomalies in log data is through supervised anomaly detection. Nonetheless, existing supervised methods heavily rely on labeled data, which can be frequently limited in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised log anomaly detection method that combines the DQN algorithm from deep reinforcement learning, which is called DQNLog. DQNLog leverages a small amount of labeled data and a large-scale unlabeled dataset, effectively addressing the challenges of imbalanced data and limited labeling. This approach not only learns known anomalies by interacting with an environment biased towards anomalies but also discovers unknown anomalies by actively exploring the unlabeled dataset. Additionally, DQNLog incorporates a cross-entropy loss term to prevent model overestimation during Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Our evaluation on three widely-used datasets demonstrates that DQNLog significantly improves recall rate and F1-score while maintaining precision, validating its practicality.

Deeper and Wider Networks for Performance Metrics Prediction in Communication Networks

In today's era, users have increasingly high expectations regarding the performance and efficiency of communication networks. Network operators aspire to achieve efficient network planning, operation, and optimization through Digital Twin Networks (DTN). The effectiveness of DTN heavily relies on the network model, with graph neural networks (GNN) playing a crucial role in network modeling. However, existing network modeling methods still lack a comprehensive understanding of communication networks. In this paper, we propose DWNet (Deeper and Wider Networks), a heterogeneous graph neural network modeling method based on data-driven approaches that aims to address end-to-end latency and jitter prediction in network models. This method stands out due to two distinctive features: firstly, it introduces deeper levels of state participation in the message passing process; secondly, it extensively integrates relevant features during the feature fusion process. Through experimental validation and evaluation, our model achieves higher prediction accuracy compared to previous research achievements, particularly when dealing with unseen network topologies during model training. Our model not only provides more accurate predictions but also demonstrates stronger generalization capabilities across diverse topological structures.

HC-Ref: Hierarchical Constrained Refinement for Robust Adversarial Training of GNNs

Recent studies have shown that attackers can catastrophically reduce the performance of GNNs by maliciously modifying the graph structure or node features on the graph. Adversarial training, which has been shown to be one of the most effective defense mechanisms against adversarial attacks in computer vision, holds great promise for enhancing the robustness of GNNs. There is limited research on defending against attacks by performing adversarial training on graphs, and it is crucial to delve deeper into this approach to optimize its effectiveness. Therefore, based on robust adversarial training on graphs, we propose a hierarchical constraint refinement framework (HC-Ref) that enhances the anti-perturbation capabilities of GNNs and downstream classifiers separately, ultimately leading to improved robustness. We propose corresponding adversarial regularization terms that are conducive to adaptively narrowing the domain gap between the normal part and the perturbation part according to the characteristics of different layers, promoting the smoothness of the predicted distribution of both parts. Moreover, existing research on graph robust adversarial training primarily concentrates on training from the standpoint of node feature perturbations and seldom takes into account alterations in the graph structure. This limitation makes it challenging to prevent attacks based on topological changes in the graph. This paper generates adversarial examples by utilizing graph structure perturbations, offering an effective approach to defend against attack methods that are based on topological changes. Extensive experiments on two real-world graph benchmarks show that HC-Ref successfully resists various attacks and has better node classification performance compared to several baseline methods.

Fine-grained Graph Learning for Multi-view Subspace Clustering

Multi-view subspace clustering has conventionally focused on integrating heterogeneous feature descriptions to capture higher-dimensional information. One popular strategy is to generate a common subspace from different views and then apply graph-based approaches to deal with clustering. However, the performance of these methods is still subject to two limitations, namely the multiple views fusion pattern and the connection between the fusion process and clustering tasks. To address these problems, we propose a novel multi-view subspace clustering framework via fine-grained graph learning, which can tell the consistency of local structures between different views and integrate all views more delicately than previous weight regularizations. Different from other models in the literature, the point-level graph regularization and the reformulation of spectral clustering are introduced to perform graphs fusion and learn the shared cluster structure together. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets show that the proposed framework has comparable performance to the SOTA algorithms.

Black-box Gradient Attack on Graph Neural Networks: Deeper Insights in Graph-based Attack and Defense

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received significant attention due to their state-of-the-art performance on various graph representation learning tasks. However, recent studies reveal that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, i.e. an attacker is able to fool the GNNs by perturbing the graph structure or node features deliberately. While being able to successfully decrease the performance of GNNs, most existing attacking algorithms require access to either the model parameters or the training data, which is not practical in the real world. In this paper, we develop deeper insights into the Mettack algorithm, which is a representative grey-box attacking method, and then we propose a gradient-based black-box attacking algorithm. Firstly, we show that the Mettack algorithm will perturb the edges unevenly, thus the attack will be highly dependent on a specific training set. As a result, a simple yet useful strategy to defense against Mettack is to train the GNN with the validation set. Secondly, to overcome the drawbacks, we propose the Black-Box Gradient Attack (BBGA) algorithm. Extensive experiments demonstrate that out proposed method is able to achieve stable attack performance without accessing the training sets of the GNNs. Further results shows that our proposed method is also applicable when attacking against various defense methods.

I-GCN: Robust Graph Convolutional Network via Influence Mechanism

Deep learning models for graphs, especially Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have achieved remarkable performance in the task of semi-supervised node classification. However, recent studies show that GCNs suffer from adversarial perturbations. Such vulnerability to adversarial attacks significantly decreases the stability of GCNs when being applied to security-critical applications. Defense methods such as preprocessing, attention mechanism and adversarial training have been discussed by various studies. While being able to achieve desirable performance when the perturbation rates are low, such methods are still vulnerable to high perturbation rates. Meanwhile, some defending algorithms perform poorly when the node features are not visible. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel mechanism called influence mechanism, which is able to enhance the robustness of the GCNs significantly. The influence mechanism divides the effect of each node into two parts: introverted influence which tries to maintain its own features and extroverted influence which exerts influences on other nodes. Utilizing the influence mechanism, we propose the Influence GCN (I-GCN) model. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model is able to achieve higher accuracy rates than state-of-the-art methods when defending against non-targeted attacks.

Automatic Lumbar Spinal CT Image Segmentation with a Dual Densely Connected U-Net

The clinical treatment of degenerative and developmental lumbar spinal stenosis (LSS) is different. Computed tomography (CT) is helpful in distinguishing degenerative and developmental LSS due to its advantage in imaging of osseous and calcified tissues. However, boundaries of the vertebral body, spinal canal and dural sac have low contrast and hard to identify in a CT image, so the diagnosis depends heavily on the knowledge of expert surgeons and radiologists. In this paper, we develop an automatic lumbar spinal CT image segmentation method to assist LSS diagnosis. The main contributions of this paper are the following: 1) a new lumbar spinal CT image dataset is constructed that contains 2393 axial CT images collected from 279 patients, with the ground truth of pixel-level segmentation labels; 2) a dual densely connected U-shaped neural network (DDU-Net) is used to segment the spinal canal, dural sac and vertebral body in an end-to-end manner; 3) DDU-Net is capable of segmenting tissues with large scale-variant, inconspicuous edges (e.g., spinal canal) and extremely small size (e.g., dural sac); and 4) DDU-Net is practical, requiring no image preprocessing such as contrast enhancement, registration and denoising, and the running time reaches 12 FPS. In the experiment, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the lumbar spinal image segmentation task. We expect that the technique will increase both radiology workflow efficiency and the perceived value of radiology reports for referring clinicians and patients.