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Harry Zhao

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Publications

Complete the Missing Half: Augmenting Aggregation Filtering with Diversification for Graph Convolutional Networks
Sitao Luan
Harry Zhao
Mingde Zhao
Chenqing Hua
Xiao-Wen Chang
Doina Precup
The core operation of current Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is the aggregation enabled by the graph Laplacian or message passing, which filte… (see more)rs the neighborhood node information. Though effective for various tasks, in this paper, we show that they are potentially a problematic factor underlying all GNN methods for learning on certain datasets, as they force the node representations similar, making the nodes gradually lose their identity and become indistinguishable. Hence, we augment the aggregation operations with their dual, i.e. diversification operators that make the node more distinct and preserve the identity. Such augmentation replaces the aggregation with a two-channel filtering process that, in theory, is beneficial for enriching the node representations. In practice, the proposed two-channel filters can be easily patched on existing GNN methods with diverse training strategies, including spectral and spatial (message passing) methods. In the experiments, we observe desired characteristics of the models and significant performance boost upon the baselines on 9 node classification tasks.
2022-11-21
NeurIPS.cc/2022/Workshop/GLFrontiers (accepted)
doi.org
openreview.net
Exploration-Driven Representation Learning in Reinforcement Learning
Akram Erraqabi
Harry Zhao
Mingde Zhao
Marlos C. Machado
Yoshua Bengio
Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
Ludovic Denoyer
Alessandro Lazaric
Learning reward-agnostic representations is an emerging paradigm in reinforcement learning. These representations can be leveraged for sever… (see more)al purposes ranging from reward shaping to skill discovery. Nevertheless, in order to learn such representations, existing methods often rely on assuming uniform access to the state space. With such a privilege, the agent’s coverage of the environment can be limited which hurts the quality of the learned representations. In this work, we introduce a method that explicitly couples representation learning with exploration when the agent is not provided with a uniform prior over the state space. Our method learns representations that constantly drive exploration while the data generated by the agent’s exploratory behavior drives the learning of better representations. We empirically validate our approach in goal-achieving tasks, demonstrating that the learned representation captures the dynamics of the environment, leads to more accurate value estimation, and to faster credit assignment, both when used for control and for reward shaping. Finally, the exploratory policy that emerges from our approach proves to be successful at continuous navigation tasks with sparse rewards.
2021-07-21
ICML.cc/2021/Workshop/URL (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net