Information Technology
Mixture of Link Predictors on Graphs
Link prediction, which aims to forecast unseen connections in graphs, is a fundamental task in graph machine learning. Heuristic methods, leveraging a range of different pairwise measures such as common neighbors and shortest paths, often rival the performance of vanilla Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Therefore, recent advancements in GNNs for link prediction (GNN4LP) have primarily focused on integrating one or a few types of pairwise information. In this work, we reveal that different node pairs within the same dataset necessitate varied pairwise information for accurate prediction and models that only apply the same pairwise information uniformly could achieve suboptimal performance. As a result, we propose a simple mixture of experts model Link-MoE for link prediction. Link-MoE utilizes various GNNs as experts and strategically selects the appropriate expert for each node pair based on various types of pairwise information. Experimental results across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate substantial performance improvement from Link-MoE. Notably, Link-MoE achieves a relative improvement of 18.71% on the MRR metric for the Pubmed dataset and 9.59% on the Hits@100 metric for the ogbl-ppa dataset, compared to the best baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ml-ml/Link-MoE/.
Smart home got the cold shoulder at Google's I/O keynote
From game-changing text diffusion models and cutting-edge AR glasses to AI videos with sound and virtual clothing try-ons, there was plenty of amazing tech to see during Google's I/O keynote on Tuesday. The closest we got to a smart home shout-out was when a Google exec said that Gemini--the star of the show--is "coming to your watch, your car dashboard, even your TV." As Google puts its Google TV Streamer under the umbrella of smart home, we'll count that as a fleeting reference. Officially, Google has promised that Gemini is coming to Nest devices. Gemini on Nest speakers has been available on a public-preview basis for months now, and back in March, Google confirmed that a "new experience powered by Gemini" is coming to smart speakers and displays.
Google made it clear at I/O that AI will soon be inescapable
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of Google's announcements at I/O this week focused on AI. Although past Google I/O events also heavily leaned on AI, what made this year's announcements different is that the features were spread across nearly every Google offering and touched nearly every task people partake in every day. Because I'm an AI optimist, and my job as an AI editor involves testing tools, I have always been pretty open to using AI to optimize my daily tasks. However, Google's keynote made it clear that even those who may not be as open to it will soon find it unavoidable. Moreover, the tech giants' announcements shed light on the industry's future, revealing three major trends about where AI is headed, which you can read more about below.
75877cb75154206c4e65e76b88a12712-Paper.pdf
The ability to detect and count certain substructures in graphs is important for solving many tasks on graph-structured data, especially in the contexts of computational chemistry and biology as well as social network analysis. Inspired by this, we propose to study the expressive power of graph neural networks (GNNs) via their ability to count attributed graph substructures, extending recent works that examine their power in graph isomorphism testing and function approximation. We distinguish between two types of substructure counting: induced-subgraph-count and subgraph-count, and establish both positive and negative answers for popular GNN architectures. Specifically, we prove that Message Passing Neural Networks (MPNNs), 2-Weisfeiler-Lehman (2-WL) and 2-Invariant Graph Networks (2-IGNs) cannot perform induced-subgraph-count of any connected substructure consisting of 3 or more nodes, while they can perform subgraph-count of star-shaped substructures. As an intermediary step, we prove that 2-WL and 2-IGNs are equivalent in distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs, partly answering an open problem raised in [38]. We also prove positive results for k-WL and k-IGNs as well as negative results for k-WL with a finite number of iterations. We then conduct experiments that support the theoretical results for MPNNs and 2-IGNs. Moreover, motivated by substructure counting and inspired by [45], we propose the Local Relational Pooling model and demonstrate that it is not only effective for substructure counting but also able to achieve competitive performance on molecular prediction tasks.
Handling Learnwares from Heterogeneous Feature Spaces with Explicit Label Exploitation
The learnware paradigm aims to help users leverage numerous existing highperforming models instead of starting from scratch, where a learnware consists of a well-trained model and the specification describing its capability. Numerous learnwares are accommodated by a learnware dock system. When users solve tasks with the system, models that fully match the task feature space are often rare or even unavailable. However, models with heterogeneous feature space can still be helpful. This paper finds that label information, particularly model outputs, is helpful yet previously less exploited in the accommodation of heterogeneous learnwares. We extend the specification to better leverage model pseudo-labels and subsequently enrich the unified embedding space for better specification evolvement. With label information, the learnware identification can also be improved by additionally comparing conditional distributions. Experiments demonstrate that, even without a model explicitly tailored to user tasks, the system can effectively handle tasks by leveraging models from diverse feature spaces.
I'm an AI expert, and these 8 announcements at Google I/O impressed me the most
The past two Google I/O developer conferences have mainly been AI events, and this year is no different. The tech giant used the stage to unveil features across all its most popular products, even bringing AI experiments that were previously announced to fruition. This means that dozens of AI features and tools were unveiled. They're meant to transform how you use Google offerings, including how you shop, video call, sort your inbox, search the web, create images, edit video, code, and more. Since such a firehose of information is packed into a two-hour keynote address, you may be wondering which features are actually worth paying attention to.
Reversing the Forget-Retain Objectives: An Efficient LLM Unlearning Framework from Logit Difference
A conventional LLM unlearning task typically involves two goals: (1) The target LLM should forget the knowledge in the specified forget documents, and (2) it should retain the other knowledge that the LLM possesses, for which we assume access to a small number of retain documents. To achieve both goals, a mainstream class of LLM unlearning methods introduces an optimization framework with a combination of two objectives - maximizing the prediction loss on the forget documents while minimizing that on the retain documents, which suffers from two challenges, degenerated output and catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose a novel unlearning framework called Unlearning from Logit Difference (ULD), which introduces an assistant LLM that aims to achieve the opposite of the unlearning goals: remembering the forget documents and forgetting the retain knowledge. ULD then derives the unlearned LLM by computing the logit difference between the target and the assistant LLMs. We show that such reversed objectives would naturally resolve both aforementioned challenges while significantly improving the training efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method efficiently achieves the intended forgetting while preserving the LLM's overall capabilities, reducing training time by more than threefold. Notably, our method loses 0% of model utility on the ToFU benchmark, whereas baseline methods may sacrifice 17% of utility on average to achieve comparable forget quality.
AI has entered the therapy session -- and its recording you
As generative artificial intelligence becomes embedded in people's everyday lives, one emerging aspect of its use in mental health care is raising complicated questions about professional ethics and patient privacy. A number of companies, like Upheal, Blueprint, and Heidi Health, have begun offering AI-powered tools designed to make therapists more efficient at documenting sessions and completing administrative paperwork. Providers are typically required to record the entirety of their session with a client. While it's ethical for therapists to record these conversations under certain circumstances, it's rarely done outside of professional training and forensic work. Note-taking tools, or "scribes," use AI to analyze the content of a client's conversation with their therapist in order to generate documentation that therapists must submit for a variety of reasons, including for insurance payments and potential quality audits.
Symbolic Distillation for Learned TCP Congestion Control
Recent advances in TCP congestion control (CC) have achieved tremendous success with deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which use feedforward neural networks (NN) to learn complex environment conditions and make better decisions. However, such "black-box" policies lack interpretability and reliability, and often, they need to operate outside the traditional TCP datapath due to the use of complex NNs. This paper proposes a novel two-stage solution to achieve the best of both worlds: first to train a deep RL agent, then distill its (over-)parameterized NN policy into white-box, light-weight rules in the form of symbolic expressions that are much easier to understand and to implement in constrained environments. At the core of our proposal is a novel symbolic branching algorithm that enables the rule to be aware of the context in terms of various network conditions, eventually converting the NN policy into a symbolic tree. The distilled symbolic rules preserve and often improve performance over state-of-the-art NN policies while being faster and simpler than a standard neural network. We validate the performance of our distilled symbolic rules on both simulation and emulation environments.
Google's new AI shopping tool just changed the way we shop online - here's why
In recent years, Google Search's shopping features have evolved to make Search a one-stop shop for consumers searching for specific products, deals, and retailers. Shoppers on a budget can scour Search's Shopping tab during major sale events to see which retailer offered the best deal and where. But often, consumers miss out on a product's most productive discount, paying more later because they don't want to wait again. During this year's Google I/O developer conference, Google aims to solve this problem with AI. Shopping in Google's new AI Mode integrates Gemini's capabilities into Google's existing online shopping features, allowing consumers to use conversational phrases to find the perfect product.