Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Until recently, research on artificial neural networks was largely restricted to systems with only two types of variable: Neural activities that represent the current or recent input and weights that learn to capture regularities among inputs, outputs and payoffs. There is no good reason for this restriction. Synapses have dynamics at many different time-scales and this suggests that artificial neural networks might benefit from variables that change slower than activities but much faster than the standard weights. These "fast weights" can be used to store temporary memories of the recent past and they provide a neurally plausible way of implementing the type of attention to the past that has recently proved very helpful in sequence-to-sequence models. By using fast weights we can avoid the need to store copies of neural activity patterns.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Graph embedding methods represent nodes in a continuous vector space, preserving different types of relational information from the graph. There are many hyper-parameters to these methods (e.g. the length of a random walk) which have to be manually tuned for every graph. In this paper, we replace previously fixed hyper-parameters with trainable ones that we automatically learn via backpropagation. In particular, we propose a novel attention model on the power series of the transition matrix, which guides the random walk to optimize an upstream objective. Unlike previous approaches to attention models, the method that we propose utilizes attention parameters exclusively on the data itself (e.g. on the random walk), and are not used by the model for inference. We experiment on link prediction tasks, as we aim to produce embeddings that best-preserve the graph structure, generalizing to unseen information. We improve state-of-the-art results on a comprehensive suite of real-world graph datasets including social, collaboration, and biological networks, where we observe that our graph attention model can reduce the error by up to 20\%-40\%. We show that our automatically-learned attention parameters can vary significantly per graph, and correspond to the optimal choice of hyper-parameter if we manually tune existing methods.

Arelated latent approach, hard attention, fixesthese issues, butisgenerally harder to train and less accurate.

Transformers may have sufficient supervision for generalization.