Graph Neural Networks: Techniques and Applications
| dc.contributor.author | Chen, Zhiqian | en |
| dc.contributor.committeechair | Lu, Chang-Tien | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Chen, Feng | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Chen, Ing-Ray | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Ramakrishnan, Naren | en |
| dc.contributor.committeemember | Haghighat, Alireza | en |
| dc.contributor.department | Computer Science | en |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2020-08-26T08:00:37Z | en |
| dc.date.available | 2020-08-26T08:00:37Z | en |
| dc.date.issued | 2020-08-25 | en |
| dc.description.abstract | Effective information analysis generally boils down to the geometry of the data represented by a graph. Typical applications include social networks, transportation networks, the spread of epidemic disease, brain's neuronal networks, gene data on biological regulatory networks, telecommunication networks, knowledge graph, which are lying on the non-Euclidean graph domain. To describe the geometric structures, graph matrices such as adjacency matrix or graph Laplacian can be employed to reveal latent patterns. This thesis focuses on the theoretical analysis of graph neural networks and the development of methods for specific applications using graph representation. Four methods are proposed, including rational neural networks for jump graph signal estimation, RemezNet for robust attribute prediction in the graph, ICNet for integrated circuit security, and CNF-Net for dynamic circuit deobfuscation. For the first method, a recent important state-of-art method is the graph convolutional networks (GCN) nicely integrate local vertex features and graph topology in the spectral domain. However, current studies suffer from drawbacks: graph CNNs rely on Chebyshev polynomial approximation which results in oscillatory approximation at jump discontinuities since Chebyshev polynomials require degree $Omega$(poly(1/$epsilon$)) to approximate a jump signal such as $|x|$. To reduce complexity, RatioanlNet is proposed to integrate rational function and neural networks for graph node level embeddings. For the second method, we propose a method for function approximation which suffers from several drawbacks: non-robustness and infeasibility issue; neural networks are incapable of extracting analytical representation; there is no study reported to integrate the superiorities of neural network and Remez. This work proposes a novel neural network model to address the above issues. Specifically, our method utilizes the characterizations of Remez to design objective functions. To avoid the infeasibility issue and deal with the non-robustness, a set of constraints are imposed inspired by the equioscillation theorem of best rational approximation. The third method proposes an approach for circuit security. Circuit obfuscation is a recently proposed defense mechanism to protect digital integrated circuits (ICs) from reverse engineering. Estimating the deobfuscation runtime is a challenging task due to the complexity and heterogeneity of graph-structured circuit, and the unknown and sophisticated mechanisms of the attackers for deobfuscation. To address the above-mentioned challenges, this work proposes the first graph-based approach that predicts the deobfuscation runtime based on graph neural networks. The fourth method proposes a representation for dynamic size of circuit graph. By analyzing SAT attack method, a conjunctive normal form (CNF) bipartite graph is utilized to characterize the complexity of this SAT problem. To overcome the difficulty in capturing the dynamic size of the CNF graph, an energy-based kernel is proposed to aggregate dynamic features. | en |
| dc.description.abstractgeneral | Graph data is pervasive throughout most fields, including pandemic spread network, social network, transportation roads, internet, and chemical structure. Therefore, the applications modeled by graph benefit people's everyday life, and graph mining derives insightful opinions from this complex topology. This paper investigates an emerging technique called graph neural newton (GNNs), which is designed for graph data mining. There are two primary goals of this thesis paper: (1) understanding the GNNs in theory, and (2) apply GNNs for unexplored and values real-world scenarios. For the first goal, we investigate spectral theory and approximation theory, and a unified framework is proposed to summarize most GNNs. This direction provides a possibility that existing or newly proposed works can be compared, and the actual process can be measured. Specifically, this result demonstrates that most GNNs are either an approximation for a function of graph adjacency matrix or a function of eigenvalues. Different types of approximations are analyzed in terms of physical meaning, and the advantages and disadvantages are offered. Beyond that, we proposed a new optimization for a highly accurate but low efficient approximation. Evaluation of synthetic data proves its theoretical power, and the tests on two transportation networks show its potentials in real-world graphs. For the second goal, the circuit is selected as a novel application since it is crucial, but there are few works. Specifically, we focus on a security problem, a high-value real-world problem in industry companies such as Nvidia, Apple, AMD, etc. This problem is defined as a circuit graph as apply GNN to learn the representation regarding the prediction target such as attach runtime. Experiment on several benchmark circuits shows its superiority on effectiveness and efficacy compared with competitive baselines. This paper provides exploration in theory and application with GNNs, which shows a promising direction for graph mining tasks. Its potentials also provide a wide range of innovations in graph-based problems. | en |
| dc.description.degree | Doctor of Philosophy | en |
| dc.format.medium | ETD | en |
| dc.identifier.other | vt_gsexam:26945 | en |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10919/99848 | en |
| dc.publisher | Virginia Tech | en |
| dc.rights | In Copyright | en |
| dc.rights.uri | http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ | en |
| dc.subject | graph neural network | en |
| dc.subject | graph mining | en |
| dc.subject | approximation theory | en |
| dc.subject | spectral graph | en |
| dc.subject | circuit deobfuscation | en |
| dc.title | Graph Neural Networks: Techniques and Applications | en |
| dc.type | Dissertation | en |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Computer Science and Applications | en |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University | en |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | en |
| thesis.degree.name | Doctor of Philosophy | en |