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Richard Yi Da Xu

Richard Yi Da Xu contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Rethinking Generalization in Graph Neural Networks: A Structural Complexity Perspective

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a fundamental tool for learning from graph-structured data, achieving strong performance across a wide range of applications. However, understanding their generalization capabilities remains challenging due to the complex structural dependencies inherent in such data. Existing generalization analyses largely follow the classical machine learning paradigm, focusing primarily on model complexity while overlooking the fundamental role of graph structure. Therefore, in this work, we systematically investigate this role by asking: does the graph structure actually influence generalization, and if so, by how much? To answer the first question and validate our intuition, we theoretically prove that incorporating more edges into the prediction process transforms the input representations to be overly accommodating to the output model, thereby inducing overfitting. To address the second question, we formulate a structural complexity measure based on the number of effective edges and derive a Rademacher complexity-based generalization bound. In doing so, we demonstrate that GNN generalization depends explicitly on structural complexity, alongside traditional parameter-dependent factors. Motivated by these theoretical findings, we propose a structural entropy regularization method. This approach controls structural complexity by regulating effective edges to balance underfitting and overfitting, ultimately improving the generalization performance of GNNs.

preprint2023arXiv

A variational autoencoder-based nonnegative matrix factorisation model for deep dictionary learning

Construction of dictionaries using nonnegative matrix factorisation (NMF) has extensive applications in signal processing and machine learning. With the advances in deep learning, training compact and robust dictionaries using deep neural networks, i.e., dictionaries of deep features, has been proposed. In this study, we propose a probabilistic generative model which employs a variational autoencoder (VAE) to perform nonnegative dictionary learning. In contrast to the existing VAE models, we cast the model under a statistical framework with latent variables obeying a Gamma distribution and design a new loss function to guarantee the nonnegative dictionaries. We adopt an acceptance-rejection sampling reparameterization trick to update the latent variables iteratively. We apply the dictionaries learned from VAE-NMF to two signal processing tasks, i.e., enhancement of speech and extraction of muscle synergies. Experimental results demonstrate that VAE-NMF performs better in learning the latent nonnegative dictionaries in comparison with state-of-the-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Demystify Optimization and Generalization of Over-parameterized PAC-Bayesian Learning

PAC-Bayesian is an analysis framework where the training error can be expressed as the weighted average of the hypotheses in the posterior distribution whilst incorporating the prior knowledge. In addition to being a pure generalization bound analysis tool, PAC-Bayesian bound can also be incorporated into an objective function to train a probabilistic neural network, making them a powerful and relevant framework that can numerically provide a tight generalization bound for supervised learning. For simplicity, we call probabilistic neural network learned using training objectives derived from PAC-Bayesian bounds as {\it PAC-Bayesian learning}. Despite their empirical success, the theoretical analysis of PAC-Bayesian learning for neural networks is rarely explored. This paper proposes a new class of convergence and generalization analysis for PAC-Bayes learning when it is used to train the over-parameterized neural networks by the gradient descent method. For a wide probabilistic neural network, we show that when PAC-Bayes learning is applied, the convergence result corresponds to solving a kernel ridge regression when the probabilistic neural tangent kernel (PNTK) is used as its kernel. Based on this finding, we further characterize the uniform PAC-Bayesian generalization bound which improves over the Rademacher complexity-based bound for non-probabilistic neural network. Finally, drawing the insight from our theoretical results, we propose a proxy measure for efficient hyperparameters selection, which is proven to be time-saving.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Deepening Graph Neural Networks: A GNTK-based Optimization Perspective

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and their variants have achieved great success in dealing with graph-structured data. Nevertheless, it is well known that deep GCNs suffer from the over-smoothing problem, where node representations tend to be indistinguishable as more layers are stacked up. The theoretical research to date on deep GCNs has focused primarily on expressive power rather than trainability, an optimization perspective. Compared to expressivity, trainability attempts to address a more fundamental question: Given a sufficiently expressive space of models, can we successfully find a good solution via gradient descent-based optimizers? This work fills this gap by exploiting the Graph Neural Tangent Kernel (GNTK), which governs the optimization trajectory under gradient descent for wide GCNs. We formulate the asymptotic behaviors of GNTK in the large depth, which enables us to reveal the dropping trainability of wide and deep GCNs at an exponential rate in the optimization process. Additionally, we extend our theoretical framework to analyze residual connection-based techniques, which are found to be merely able to mitigate the exponential decay of trainability mildly. Inspired by our theoretical insights on trainability, we propose Critical DropEdge, a connectivity-aware and graph-adaptive sampling method, to alleviate the exponential decay problem more fundamentally. Experimental evaluation consistently confirms using our proposed method can achieve better results compared to relevant counterparts with both infinite-width and finite-width.

preprint2021arXiv

Resolution-invariant Person ReID Based on Feature Transformation and Self-weighted Attention

Person Re-identification (ReID) is a critical computer vision task which aims to match the same person in images or video sequences. Most current works focus on settings where the resolution of images is kept the same. However, the resolution is a crucial factor in person ReID, especially when the cameras are at different distances from the person or the camera's models are different from each other. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream network with a lightweight resolution association ReID feature transformation (RAFT) module and a self-weighted attention (SWA) ReID module to evaluate features under different resolutions. RAFT transforms the low resolution features to corresponding high resolution features. SWA evaluates both features to get weight factors for the person ReID. Both modules are jointly trained to get a resolution-invariant representation. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of our method. For instance, we achieve Rank-1 accuracy of 43.3% and 83.2% on CAVIAR and MLR-CUHK03, outperforming the state-of-the-art.

preprint2020arXiv

Mean field theory for deep dropout networks: digging up gradient backpropagation deeply

In recent years, the mean field theory has been applied to the study of neural networks and has achieved a great deal of success. The theory has been applied to various neural network structures, including CNNs, RNNs, Residual networks, and Batch normalization. Inevitably, recent work has also covered the use of dropout. The mean field theory shows that the existence of depth scales that limit the maximum depth of signal propagation and gradient backpropagation. However, the gradient backpropagation is derived under the gradient independence assumption that weights used during feed forward are drawn independently from the ones used in backpropagation. This is not how neural networks are trained in a real setting. Instead, the same weights used in a feed-forward step needs to be carried over to its corresponding backpropagation. Using this realistic condition, we perform theoretical computation on linear dropout networks and a series of experiments on dropout networks. Our empirical results show an interesting phenomenon that the length gradients can backpropagate for a single input and a pair of inputs are governed by the same depth scale. Besides, we study the relationship between variance and mean of statistical metrics of the gradient and shown an emergence of universality. Finally, we investigate the maximum trainable length for deep dropout networks through a series of experiments using MNIST and CIFAR10 and provide a more precise empirical formula that describes the trainable length than original work.

preprint2020arXiv

RGB-IR Cross-modality Person ReID based on Teacher-Student GAN Model

RGB-Infrared (RGB-IR) person re-identification (ReID) is a technology where the system can automatically identify the same person appearing at different parts of a video when light is unavailable. The critical challenge of this task is the cross-modality gap of features under different modalities. To solve this challenge, we proposed a Teacher-Student GAN model (TS-GAN) to adopt different domains and guide the ReID backbone to learn better ReID information. (1) In order to get corresponding RGB-IR image pairs, the RGB-IR Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) was used to generate IR images. (2) To kick-start the training of identities, a ReID Teacher module was trained under IR modality person images, which is then used to guide its Student counterpart in training. (3) Likewise, to better adapt different domain features and enhance model ReID performance, three Teacher-Student loss functions were used. Unlike other GAN based models, the proposed model only needs the backbone module at the test stage, making it more efficient and resource-saving. To showcase our model's capability, we did extensive experiments on the newly-released SYSU-MM01 RGB-IR Re-ID benchmark and achieved superior performance to the state-of-the-art with 49.8% Rank-1 and 47.4% mAP.