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Liheng Ma

PhD - McGill University
Supervisor

Publications

CKGConv: General Graph Convolution with Continuous Kernels
Liheng Ma
Soumyasundar Pal
Yitian Zhang
Jiaming Zhou
Yingxue Zhang
The existing definitions of graph convolution, either from spatial or spectral perspectives, are inflexible and not unified. Defining a gene… (see more)ral convolution operator in the graph domain is challenging due to the lack of canonical coordinates, the presence of irregular structures, and the properties of graph symmetries. In this work, we propose a novel graph convolution framework by parameterizing the kernels as continuous functions of pseudo-coordinates derived via graph positional encoding. We name this Continuous Kernel Graph Convolution (CKGConv). Theoretically, we demonstrate that CKGConv is flexible and expressive. CKGConv encompasses many existing graph convolutions, and exhibits the same expressiveness as graph transformers in terms of distinguishing non-isomorphic graphs. Empirically, we show that CKGConv-based Networks outperform existing graph convolutional networks and perform comparably to the best graph transformers across a variety of graph datasets.
Multi-resolution Time-Series Transformer for Long-term Forecasting
Yitian Zhang
Liheng Ma
Soumyasundar Pal
Yingxue Zhang
Multi-resolution Time-Series Transformer for Long-term Forecasting
Yitian Zhang
Liheng Ma
Soumyasundar Pal
Yingxue Zhang
Graph Inductive Biases in Transformers without Message Passing
Liheng Ma
Chen Lin
Derek Lim
Puneet K. Dokania
Philip Torr
Ser-Nam Lim
Transformers for graph data are increasingly widely studied and successful in numerous learning tasks. Graph inductive biases are crucial fo… (see more)r Graph Transformers, and previous works incorporate them using message-passing modules and/or positional encodings. However, Graph Transformers that use message-passing inherit known issues of message-passing, and differ significantly from Transformers used in other domains, thus making transfer of research advances more difficult. On the other hand, Graph Transformers without message-passing often perform poorly on smaller datasets, where inductive biases are more crucial. To bridge this gap, we propose the Graph Inductive bias Transformer (GRIT) -- a new Graph Transformer that incorporates graph inductive biases without using message passing. GRIT is based on several architectural changes that are each theoretically and empirically justified, including: learned relative positional encodings initialized with random walk probabilities, a flexible attention mechanism that updates node and node-pair representations, and injection of degree information in each layer. We prove that GRIT is expressive -- it can express shortest path distances and various graph propagation matrices. GRIT achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance across a variety of graph datasets, thus showing the power that Graph Transformers without message-passing can deliver.
Graph Inductive Biases in Transformers without Message Passing
Liheng Ma
Chen Lin
Derek Lim
Puneet K. Dokania
Philip Torr
Ser-Nam Lim
Transformers for graph data are increasingly widely studied and successful in numerous learning tasks. Graph inductive biases are crucial fo… (see more)r Graph Transformers, and previous works incorporate them using message-passing modules and/or positional encodings. However, Graph Transformers that use message-passing inherit known issues of message-passing, and differ significantly from Transformers used in other domains, thus making transfer of research advances more difficult. On the other hand, Graph Transformers without message-passing often perform poorly on smaller datasets, where inductive biases are more crucial. To bridge this gap, we propose the Graph Inductive bias Transformer (GRIT) — a new Graph Transformer that incorporates graph inductive biases without using message passing. GRIT is based on several architectural changes that are each theoretically and empirically justified, including: learned relative positional encodings initialized with random walk probabilities, a flexible attention mechanism that updates node and node-pair representations, and injection of degree information in each layer. We prove that GRIT is expressive — it can express shortest path distances and various graph propagation matrices. GRIT achieves state-of-the-art empirical performance across a variety of graph datasets, thus showing the power that Graph Transformers without message-passing can deliver.
RNN with Particle Flow for Probabilistic Spatio-temporal Forecasting
Soumyasundar Pal
Liheng Ma
Yingxue Zhang
Spatio-temporal forecasting has numerous applications in analyzing wireless, traffic, and financial networks. Many classical statistical mod… (see more)els often fall short in handling the complexity and high non-linearity present in time-series data. Recent advances in deep learning allow for better modelling of spatial and temporal dependencies. While most of these models focus on obtaining accurate point forecasts, they do not characterize the prediction uncertainty. In this work, we consider the time-series data as a random realization from a nonlinear state-space model and target Bayesian inference of the hidden states for probabilistic forecasting. We use particle flow as the tool for approximating the posterior distribution of the states, as it is shown to be highly effective in complex, high-dimensional settings. Thorough experimentation on several real world time-series datasets demonstrates that our approach provides better characterization of uncertainty while maintaining comparable accuracy to the state-of-the art point forecasting methods.
RNN with Particle Flow for Probabilistic Spatio-temporal Forecasting
Soumyasundar Pal
Liheng Ma
Yingxue Zhang
M. Coates
Spatio-temporal forecasting has numerous applications in analyzing wireless, traffic, and financial networks. Many classical statistical mod… (see more)els often fall short in handling the complexity and high non-linearity present in time-series data. Recent advances in deep learning allow for better modelling of spatial and temporal dependencies. While most of these models focus on obtaining accurate point forecasts, they do not characterize the prediction uncertainty. In this work, we consider the time-series data as a random realization from a nonlinear state-space model and target Bayesian inference of the hidden states for probabilistic forecasting. We use particle flow as the tool for approximating the posterior distribution of the states, as it is shown to be highly effective in complex, high-dimensional settings. Thorough experimentation on several real world time-series datasets demonstrates that our approach provides better characterization of uncertainty while maintaining comparable accuracy to the state-of-the art point forecasting methods.
Graph Attention Networks with Positional Embeddings