Zero-Shot NAS via the Suppression of Local Entropy Decrease

Architecture performance evaluation is the most time-consuming part of neural architecture search (NAS). Zero-Shot NAS accelerates the evaluation by utilizing zero-cost proxies instead of training. Though effective, existing zero-cost proxies require invoking backpropagations or running networks on input data, making it difficult to further accelerate the computation of proxies. To alleviate this issue, architecture topologies are used to evaluate the performance of networks in this study. We prove that particular architectural topologies decrease the local entropy of feature maps, which degrades specific features to a bias, thereby reducing network performance. Based on this proof, architectural topologies are utilized to quantify the suppression of local entropy decrease (SED) as a data-free and running-free proxy. Experimental results show that SED outperforms most state-of-the-art proxies in terms of architecture selection on five benchmarks, with computation time reduced by three orders of magnitude. We further compare the SED-based NAS with state-of-the-art proxies. SED-based NAS selects the architecture with higher accuracy and fewer parameters in only one second. The theoretical analyses of local entropy and experimental results demonstrate that the suppression of local entropy decrease facilitates selecting optimal architectures in Zero-Shot NAS.

Unifying Invariant and Variant Features for Graph Out-of-Distribution via Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency

Graph Out-of-Distribution (OOD), requiring that models trained on biased data generalize to the unseen test data, has considerable real-world applications. One of the most mainstream methods is to extract the invariant subgraph by aligning the original and augmented data with the help of environment augmentation. However, these solutions might lead to the loss or redundancy of semantic subgraphs and result in suboptimal generalization. To address this challenge, we propose exploiting Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS) to extract sufficient and necessary invariant substructures. Beyond that, we further leverage the domain variant subgraphs related to the labels to boost the generalization performance in an ensemble manner. Specifically, we first consider the data generation process for graph data. Under mild conditions, we show that the sufficient and necessary invariant subgraph can be extracted by minimizing an upper bound, built on the theoretical advance of the probability of necessity and sufficiency. To further bridge the theory and algorithm, we devise the model called Sufficiency and Necessity Inspired Graph Learning (SNIGL), which ensembles an invariant subgraph classifier on top of latent sufficient and necessary invariant subgraphs, and a domain variant subgraph classifier specific to the test domain for generalization enhancement. Experimental results demonstrate that our SNIGL model outperforms the state-of-the-art techniques on six public benchmarks, highlighting its effectiveness in real-world scenarios.

Estimating Long-term Heterogeneous Dose-response Curve: Generalization Bound Leveraging Optimal Transport Weights

Long-term causal effect estimation is a significant but challenging problem in many applications. Existing methods rely on ideal assumptions to estimate long-term average effects, e.g., no unobserved confounders or a binary treatment,while in numerous real-world applications, these assumptions could be violated and average effects are unable to provide individual-level suggestions.In this paper,we address a more general problem of estimating the long-term heterogeneous dose-response curve (HDRC) while accounting for unobserved confounders. Specifically, to remove unobserved confounding in observational data, we introduce an optimal transport weighting framework to align the observational data to the experimental data with theoretical guarantees. Furthermore,to accurately predict the heterogeneous effects of continuous treatment, we establish a generalization bound on counterfactual prediction error by leveraging the reweighted distribution induced by optimal transport. Finally, we develop an HDRC estimator building upon the above theoretical foundations. Extensive experimental studies conducted on multiple synthetic and semi-synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Learning Discrete Latent Variable Structures with Tensor Rank Conditions

Unobserved discrete data are ubiquitous in many scientific disciplines, and how to learn the causal structure of these latent variables is crucial for uncovering data patterns. Most studies focus on the linear latent variable model or impose strict constraints on latent structures, which fail to address cases in discrete data involving non-linear relationships or complex latent structures. To achieve this, we explore a tensor rank condition on contingency tables for an observed variable set $\mathbf{X}_p$, showing that the rank is determined by the minimum support of a specific conditional set (not necessary in $\mathbf{X}_p$) that d-separates all variables in $\mathbf{X}_p$. By this, one can locate the latent variable through probing the rank on different observed variables set, and further identify the latent causal structure under some structure assumptions. We present the corresponding identification algorithm and conduct simulated experiments to verify the effectiveness of our method. In general, our results elegantly extend the identification boundary for causal discovery with discrete latent variables and expand the application scope of causal discovery with latent variables.

S$^2$GSL: Incorporating Segment to Syntactic Enhanced Graph Structure Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Previous graph-based approaches in Aspect based Sentiment Analysis(ABSA) have demonstrated impressive performance by utilizing graph neural networks and attention mechanisms to learn structures of static dependency trees and dynamic latent trees. However, incorporating both semantic and syntactic information simultaneously within complex global structures can introduce irrelevant contexts and syntactic dependencies during the process of graph structure learning, potentially resulting in inaccurate predictions. In order to address the issues above, we propose S$^2$GSL, incorporating Segment to Syntactic enhanced Graph Structure Learning for ABSA. Specifically,S$^2$GSL is featured with a segment-aware semantic graph learning and a syntax-based latent graph learning enabling the removal of irrelevant contexts and dependencies, respectively. We further propose a self-adaptive aggregation network that facilitates the fusion of two graph learning branches, thereby achieving complementarity across diverse structures. Experimental results on four benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

From Orthogonality to Dependency: Learning Disentangled Representation for Multi-Modal Time-Series Sensing Signals

Existing methods for multi-modal time series representation learning aim to disentangle the modality-shared and modality-specific latent variables. Although achieving notable performances on downstream tasks, they usually assume an orthogonal latent space. However, the modality-specific and modality-shared latent variables might be dependent on real-world scenarios. Therefore, we propose a general generation process, where the modality-shared and modality-specific latent variables are dependent, and further develop a \textbf{M}ulti-mod\textbf{A}l \textbf{TE}mporal Disentanglement (\textbf{MATE}) model. Specifically, our \textbf{MATE} model is built on a temporally variational inference architecture with the modality-shared and modality-specific prior networks for the disentanglement of latent variables. Furthermore, we establish identifiability results to show that the extracted representation is disentangled. More specifically, we first achieve the subspace identifiability for modality-shared and modality-specific latent variables by leveraging the pairing of multi-modal data. Then we establish the component-wise identifiability of modality-specific latent variables by employing sufficient changes of historical latent variables. Extensive experimental studies on multi-modal sensors, human activity recognition, and healthcare datasets show a general improvement in different downstream tasks, highlighting the effectiveness of our method in real-world scenarios.

On the Identification of Temporally Causal Representation with Instantaneous Dependence

Temporally causal representation learning aims to identify the latent causal process from time series observations, but most methods require the assumption that the latent causal processes do not have instantaneous relations. Although some recent methods achieve identifiability in the instantaneous causality case, they require either interventions on the latent variables or grouping of the observations, which are in general difficult to obtain in real-world scenarios. To fill this gap, we propose an \textbf{ID}entification framework for instantane\textbf{O}us \textbf{L}atent dynamics (\textbf{IDOL}) by imposing a sparse influence constraint that the latent causal processes have sparse time-delayed and instantaneous relations. Specifically, we establish identifiability results of the latent causal process based on sufficient variability and the sparse influence constraint by employing contextual information of time series data. Based on these theories, we incorporate a temporally variational inference architecture to estimate the latent variables and a gradient-based sparsity regularization to identify the latent causal process. Experimental results on simulation datasets illustrate that our method can identify the latent causal process. Furthermore, evaluations on multiple human motion forecasting benchmarks with instantaneous dependencies indicate the effectiveness of our method in real-world settings.

SeBot: Structural Entropy Guided Multi-View Contrastive Learning for Social Bot Detection

Recent advancements in social bot detection have been driven by the adoption of Graph Neural Networks. The social graph, constructed from social network interactions, contains benign and bot accounts that influence each other. However, previous graph-based detection methods that follow the transductive message-passing paradigm may not fully utilize hidden graph information and are vulnerable to adversarial bot behavior. The indiscriminate message passing between nodes from different categories and communities results in excessively homogeneous node representations, ultimately reducing the effectiveness of social bot detectors. In this paper, we propose SEBot, a novel multi-view graph-based contrastive learning-enabled social bot detector. In particular, we use structural entropy as an uncertainty metric to optimize the entire graph's structure and subgraph-level granularity, revealing the implicitly existing hierarchical community structure. And we design an encoder to enable message passing beyond the homophily assumption, enhancing robustness to adversarial behaviors of social bots. Finally, we employ multi-view contrastive learning to maximize mutual information between different views and enhance the detection performance through multi-task learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of social bot detection compared with SOTA methods.

Doubly Robust Causal Effect Estimation under Networked Interference via Targeted Learning

Causal effect estimation under networked interference is an important but challenging problem. Available parametric methods are limited in their model space, while previous semiparametric methods, e.g., leveraging neural networks to fit only one single nuisance function, may still encounter misspecification problems under networked interference without appropriate assumptions on the data generation process. To mitigate bias stemming from misspecification, we propose a novel doubly robust causal effect estimator under networked interference, by adapting the targeted learning technique to the training of neural networks. Specifically, we generalize the targeted learning technique into the networked interference setting and establish the condition under which an estimator achieves double robustness. Based on the condition, we devise an end-to-end causal effect estimator by transforming the identified theoretical condition into a targeted loss. Moreover, we provide a theoretical analysis of our designed estimator, revealing a faster convergence rate compared to a single nuisance model. Extensive experimental results on two real-world networks with semisynthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed estimators.

Causal Discovery from Poisson Branching Structural Causal Model Using High-Order Cumulant with Path Analysis

Count data naturally arise in many fields, such as finance, neuroscience, and epidemiology, and discovering causal structure among count data is a crucial task in various scientific and industrial scenarios. One of the most common characteristics of count data is the inherent branching structure described by a binomial thinning operator and an independent Poisson distribution that captures both branching and noise. For instance, in a population count scenario, mortality and immigration contribute to the count, where survival follows a Bernoulli distribution, and immigration follows a Poisson distribution. However, causal discovery from such data is challenging due to the non-identifiability issue: a single causal pair is Markov equivalent, i.e., $X\rightarrow Y$ and $Y\rightarrow X$ are distributed equivalent. Fortunately, in this work, we found that the causal order from $X$ to its child $Y$ is identifiable if $X$ is a root vertex and has at least two directed paths to $Y$, or the ancestor of $X$ with the most directed path to $X$ has a directed path to $Y$ without passing $X$. Specifically, we propose a Poisson Branching Structure Causal Model (PB-SCM) and perform a path analysis on PB-SCM using high-order cumulants. Theoretical results establish the connection between the path and cumulant and demonstrate that the path information can be obtained from the cumulant. With the path information, causal order is identifiable under some graphical conditions. A practical algorithm for learning causal structure under PB-SCM is proposed and the experiments demonstrate and verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.