Liang Zhao

Liang Zhao
Emory University | EU · Department of Computer Science

PhD

About

311
Publications
53,323
Reads
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3,944
Citations
Introduction
spatial data mining, deep learning on graphs, sparse feature learning, interpretable machine learning, nonconvex optimization, gradient-free deep learning optimization; cyber- and hardware- security
Additional affiliations
August 2016 - August 2019
George Mason University
Position
  • Professor (Assistant)
August 2012 - July 2016
Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University)
Position
  • PhD Student
September 2010 - July 2012
Northeastern University (Shenyang, China)
Position
  • Master's Student

Publications

Publications (311)
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been used successfully in many conventional machine learning applications and is considered to be a useful alternative to Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as a deep learning optimizer. However, as an emerging domain, several challenges remain, including 1) The lack of global convergence guaran...
Preprint
Recently deep generative models for static networks have been under active development and achieved significant success in application areas such as molecule design. However, many real-world problems involve temporal graphs whose topology and attribute values evolve dynamically over time, such as in the cases of protein folding, human mobility netw...
Preprint
Full-text available
Disentangled representation learning has recently attracted a significant amount of attention, particularly in the field of image representation learning. However, learning the disentangled representations behind a graph remains largely unexplored, especially for the attributed graph with both node and edge features. Disentanglement learning for gr...
Preprint
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Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to its wide range of applications, generative mod...
Preprint
Full-text available
Events are occurrences in specific locations, time, and semantics that nontrivially impact either our society or the nature, such as earthquakes, civil unrest, system failures, pandemics, and crimes. It is highly desirable to be able to anticipate the occurrence of such events in advance in order to reduce the potential social upheaval and damage c...
Preprint
Full-text available
In this work, we present HiReview, a novel framework for hierarchical taxonomy-driven automatic literature review generation. With the exponential growth of academic documents, manual literature reviews have become increasingly labor-intensive and time-consuming, while traditional summarization models struggle to generate comprehensive document rev...
Preprint
Full-text available
Semantic trajectories, which enrich spatial-temporal data with textual information such as trip purposes or location activities, are key for identifying outlier behaviors critical to healthcare, social security, and urban planning. Traditional outlier detection relies on heuristic rules, which requires domain knowledge and limits its ability to ide...
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite significant progress in time series forecasting, existing forecasters often overlook the heterogeneity between long-range and short-range time series, leading to performance degradation in practical applications. In this work, we highlight the need of distinct objectives tailored to different ranges. We point out that time series can be dec...
Chapter
The Segment Anything Model (SAM) is a powerful foundation model that introduced revolutionary advancements in natural image segmentation. However, its performance remains sub-optimal when delineating the intricate structure of biomedical images, where multiple organs and tissues intertwine in a single image. In this study, we introduce a novel fine...
Preprint
Full-text available
Geometric trees are characterized by their tree-structured layout and spatially constrained nodes and edges, which significantly impacts their topological attributes. This inherent hierarchical structure plays a crucial role in domains such as neuron morphology and river geomorphology, but traditional graph representation methods often overlook the...
Conference Paper
Visual explanation (attention)-guided learning uses not only labels but also explanations to guide the model reasoning process. While visual attention-guided learning has shown promising results, it requires a large number of explanation annotations that are time-consuming to prepare. However, in many real-world situations, it is usually desired to...
Article
Full-text available
With the increasing popularity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for predictive tasks on graph structured data, research on their explainability is becoming more critical and achieving significant progress. Although many methods are proposed to explain the predictions of GNNs, their focus is mainly on “how to generate explanations.” However, other im...
Preprint
Full-text available
Multi-source spatial point data prediction is crucial in fields like environmental monitoring and natural resource management, where integrating data from various sensors is the key to achieving a holistic environmental understanding. Existing models in this area often fall short due to their domain-specific nature and lack a strategy for integrati...
Preprint
Polygon representation learning is essential for diverse applications, encompassing tasks such as shape coding, building pattern classification, and geographic question answering. While recent years have seen considerable advancements in this field, much of the focus has been on single polygons, overlooking the intricate inner- and inter-polygonal...
Preprint
Deep generative models like VAEs and diffusion models have advanced various generation tasks by leveraging latent variables to learn data distributions and generate high-quality samples. Despite the field of explainable AI making strides in interpreting machine learning models, understanding latent variables in generative models remains challenging...
Preprint
Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) augment graph structures with natural language descriptions, facilitating detailed depictions of data and their interconnections across various real-world settings. However, existing TAG datasets predominantly feature textual information only at the nodes, with edges typically represented by mere binary or categorical...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Time series domain adaptation stands as a pivotal and intricate challenge with diverse applications, including but not limited to human activity recognition, sleep stage classification, and machine fault diagnosis. Despite the numerous domain adaptation techniques proposed to tackle this complex problem, they primarily focus on domain adaptation fr...
Preprint
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While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the accuracy and relevance of responses by generative language models, it falls short in graph-based contexts where both textual and topological information are important. Naive RAG approaches inherently neglect the structural intricacies of textual graphs, resulting in a critical gap in the gener...
Preprint
Full-text available
Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) enhance graph structures with natural language descriptions, enabling detailed representation of data and their relationships across a broad spectrum of real-world scenarios. Despite the potential for deeper insights, existing TAG representation learning primarily relies on supervised methods, necessitating extensive l...
Preprint
Full-text available
Textual-edge Graphs (TEGs), characterized by rich text annotations on edges, are increasingly significant in network science due to their ability to capture rich contextual information among entities. Existing works have proposed various edge-aware graph neural networks (GNNs) or let language models directly make predictions. However, they often fa...
Preprint
Generating data with properties of interest by external users while following the right causation among its intrinsic factors is important yet has not been well addressed jointly. This is due to the long-lasting challenge of jointly identifying key latent variables, their causal relations, and their correlation with properties of interest, as well...
Preprint
Network interdiction problems are combinatorial optimization problems involving two players: one aims to solve an optimization problem on a network, while the other seeks to modify the network to thwart the first player's objectives. Such problems typically emerge in an attacker-defender context, encompassing areas such as military operations, dise...
Preprint
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Temporal Domain Generalization (TDG) addresses the challenge of training predictive models under temporally varying data distributions. Traditional TDG approaches typically focus on domain data collected at fixed, discrete time intervals, which limits their capability to capture the inherent dynamics within continuous-evolving and irregularly-obser...
Preprint
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We present GraphSL, a novel library designed for investigating the graph source localization problem. Our library facilitates the exploration of various graph diffusion models for simulating information spread and enables the evaluation of cutting-edge source localization approaches on established benchmark datasets. The source code of GraphSL is m...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, analyzing the explanation for the prediction of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has attracted increasing attention. Despite this progress, most existing methods do not adequately consider the inherent uncertainties stemming from the randomness of model parameters and graph data, which may lead to overconfidence and misguiding explanat...
Article
The widespread consumer-grade 3D printers and learning resources online enable novices to self-train in remote settings. While troubleshooting plays an essential part of 3D printing, the process remains challenging for many remote novices even with the help of well-developed online sources, such as online troubleshooting archives and online communi...
Article
Designing and generating new data under targeted properties has been attracting various critical applications such as molecule design, image editing and speech synthesis. Traditional hand-crafted approaches heavily rely on expertise experience and intensive human efforts, yet still suffer from the insufficiency of scientific knowledge and low throu...
Article
As the societal impact of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) grows, the goals for advancing DNNs become more complex and diverse, ranging from improving a conventional model accuracy metric to infusing advanced human virtues such as fairness, accountability, transparency (FaccT), and unbiasedness. Recently, techniques in Explainable Artificial Intelligenc...
Article
Full-text available
Background Lung cancer is the deadliest and second most common cancer in the United States due to the lack of symptoms for early diagnosis. Pulmonary nodules are small abnormal regions that can be potentially correlated to the occurrence of lung cancer. Early detection of these nodules is critical because it can significantly improve the patient's...
Article
Forecasting spatiotemporal social events has significant benefits for society to provide the proper amounts and types of resources to manage catastrophes and any accompanying societal risks. Nevertheless, forecasting event subtypes are far more complex than merely extending binary prediction to cover multiple subtypes because of spatial heterogenei...
Conference Paper
Identifying anomalous human spatial trajectory patterns can indicate dynamic changes in mobility behavior with applications in domains like infectious disease monitoring and elderly care. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to reason in a manner akin to humans. This presents significant potential for...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Spatial networks are networks whose graph topology is constrained by their embedded spatial space. Understanding the coupled spatial-graph properties is crucial for extracting powerful representations from spatial networks. Therefore, merely combining individual spatial and network representations cannot reveal the underlying interaction mechanism...
Article
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Numerous networks in the real world change with time, producing dynamic graphs such as human mobility networks and brain networks. Typically, the “dynamics on graphs” (e.g., changing node attribute values) are visible, and they may be connected to and suggestive of the “dynamics of graphs” (e.g., evolution of the graph topology). Due to two fundame...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in representing data with dependencies by recursively propagating and aggregating messages along the edges. However, edges in real-world graphs often have varying degrees of difficulty, and some edges may even be noisy to the downstream tasks. Therefore, existing GNNs may lead to suboptimal l...
Article
Deep learning’s performance has been extensively recognized recently. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are designed to deal with graph-structural data that classical deep learning does not easily manage. Since most GNNs were created using distinct theories, direct comparisons are impossible. Prior research has primarily concentrated on categorizing exi...
Article
The local explanation provides heatmaps on images to explain how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) derive their output. Due to its visual straightforwardness, the method has been one of the most popular explainable AI (XAI) methods for diagnosing CNNs. Through our formative study (S1), however, we captured ML engineers' ambivalent perspective ab...
Preprint
Online health communities (OHCs) are forums where patients with similar conditions communicate their experiences and provide moral support. Social support in OHCs plays a crucial role in easing and rehabilitating patients. However, many time-sensitive questions from patients often remain unanswered due to the multitude of threads and the random nat...
Preprint
Full-text available
Open Information Extraction (OIE) task aims at extracting structured facts from unstructured text, typically in the form of (subject, relation, object) triples. Despite the potential of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as a general task solver, they lag behind state-of-the-art (supervised) methods in OIE tasks due to two key issues. First,...
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite the recent success of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to train GNNs on large-scale graphs due to neighbor explosions. As a remedy, distributed computing becomes a promising solution by leveraging abundant computing resources (e.g., GPU). However, the node dependency of graph data increases the difficulty of achieving hi...
Conference Paper
Effectively mining anomalous subgraphs in networks is crucial for various applications, including disease outbreak detection, financial fraud detection, and activity monitoring in social networks. However, identifying anomalous subgraphs poses significant challenges due to their complex topological structures, high-dimensional attributes, multiple...
Preprint
Full-text available
Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of natural language processing (NLP), providing a highly useful, task-agnostic foundation for a wide range of applications. However, directly applying LLMs to solve sophisticated problems in specific domains meets many hurdles, caused by the heterogeneity of domain data, the sophist...
Preprint
The local explanation provides heatmaps on images to explain how Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) derive their output. Due to its visual straightforwardness, the method has been one of the most popular explainable AI (XAI) methods for diagnosing CNNs. Through our formative study (S1), however, we captured ML engineers' ambivalent perspective ab...
Article
Spatial prediction is to predict the values of the targeted variable, such as PM2.5 values and temperature, at arbitrary locations based on the collected geospatial data. It greatly affects the key research topics in geoscience in terms of obtaining heterogeneous spatial information (e.g., soil conditions, precipitation rates, wheat yields) for geo...
Preprint
The decoding of brain neural networks has been an intriguing topic in neuroscience for a well-rounded understanding of different types of brain disorders and cognitive stimuli. Integrating different types of connectivity, e.g., Functional Connectivity (FC) and Structural Connectivity (SC), from multi-modal imaging techniques can take their compleme...
Preprint
In the era of big data, there has been a surge in the availability of data containing rich spatial and temporal information, offering valuable insights into dynamic systems and processes for applications such as weather forecasting, natural disaster management, intelligent transport systems, and precision agriculture. Graph neural networks (GNNs) h...
Preprint
Full-text available
Graph transformation that predicts graph transition from one mode to another is an important and common problem. Despite much progress in developing advanced graph transformation techniques in recent years, the fundamental assumption typically required in machine-learning models that the testing and training data preserve the same distribution does...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Influence maximization (IM) is formulated as selecting a set of initial users from a social network to maximize the expected number of influenced users. Researchers have made great progresses to design various traditional methods, and their theoretical design and performance gain are close to a limit. In the past few years, learning-based IM method...
Preprint
Full-text available
Influence maximization (IM) is formulated as selecting a set of initial users from a social network to maximize the expected number of influenced users. Researchers have made great progress in designing various traditional methods, and their theoretical design and performance gain are close to a limit. In the past few years, learning-based IM metho...
Article
Full-text available
The complex systems in the real-world are commonly associated with multiple types of objects and relations, and heterogeneous graphs are ubiquitous data structures that can inherently represent multi-modal interactions between objects. Generating high-quality heterogeneous graphs allows us to understand the implicit distribution of heterogeneous gr...
Chapter
Spatiotemporal graph generation has realistic social significance since it unscrambles the underlying distribution of spatiotemporal graphs from another perspective and fuels substantial spatiotemporal data mining tasks. Generative models for temporal and spatial networks respectively cannot be easily generalized to spatiotemporal graph generation...
Preprint
Full-text available
Mining anomalous subgraphs in networks is a crucial task in various application scenarios, such as disease outbreak detection, financial fraud detection, and activity monitoring in social networks. However , identifying anomalous subgraphs is a challenging problem due to their complex topological structures, high-dimensional attributes, various not...
Preprint
Full-text available
Knowledge-enhanced neural machine reasoning has garnered significant attention as a cutting-edge yet challenging research area with numerous practical applications. Over the past few years, plenty of studies have leveraged various forms of external knowledge to augment the reasoning capabilities of deep models, tackling challenges such as effective...
Preprint
Full-text available
Continual Learning is considered a key step toward next-generation Artificial Intelligence. Among various methods, replay-based approaches that maintain and replay a small episodic memory of previous samples are one of the most successful strategies against catastrophic forgetting. However, since forgetting is inevitable given bounded memory and un...
Article
Full-text available
While graph neural networks (GNNs) are popular in the deep learning community, they suffer from several challenges including over-smoothing, over-squashing, and gradient vanishing. Recently, a series of models have attempted to relieve these issues by first augmenting the node features and then imposing node-wise functions based on multilayer perce...
Preprint
Full-text available
Interpretation of chemistry on an atomic scale improves with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). The parts of the molecule with the most significant influence on the chemical property of interest can be visualized with atomwise and bondwise attributions. Nonetheless, the attributions from different XAI methods regularly disagree substantiall...
Preprint
Full-text available
Interpretation of chemistry on an atomic scale improves with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI). The parts of the molecule with the most significant influence on the chemical property of interest can be visualized with atomwise and bondwise attributions. Nonetheless, the attributions from different XAI methods regularly disagree substantiall...
Preprint
Full-text available
As the societal impact of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) grows, the goals for advancing DNNs become more complex and diverse, ranging from improving a conventional model accuracy metric to infusing advanced human virtues such as fairness, accountability, transparency (FaccT), and unbiasedness. Recently, techniques in Explainable Artificial Intelligenc...