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Xing Han

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6 papers

2 author rows

TMLR Journal 2025 Journal Article

Between Linear and Sinusoidal: Rethinking the Time Encoder in Dynamic Graph Learning

Hsing-Huan Chung
Shravan S Chaudhari
Xing Han
Yoav Wald
Suchi Saria
Joydeep Ghosh

Dynamic graph learning is essential for applications involving temporal networks and requires effective modeling of temporal relationships. Seminal attention-based models like TGAT and DyGFormer rely on sinusoidal time encoders to capture temporal dependencies between edge events. Prior work justified sinusoidal encodings because their inner products depend on the time spans between events, which are crucial features for modeling inter-event relations. However, sinusoidal encodings inherently lose temporal information due to their many-to-one nature and therefore require high dimensions. In this paper, we rigorously study a simpler alternative: the linear time encoder, which avoids temporal information loss caused by sinusoidal functions and reduces the need for high-dimensional time encoders. We show that the self-attention mechanism can effectively learn to compute time spans between events from linear time encodings and extract relevant temporal patterns. Through extensive experiments on six dynamic graph datasets, we demonstrate that the linear time encoder improves the performance of TGAT and DyGFormer in most cases. Moreover, the linear time encoder can lead to significant savings in model parameters with minimal performance loss. For example, compared to a 100-dimensional sinusoidal time encoder, TGAT with a 2-dimensional linear time encoder saves 43% of parameters and achieves higher average precision on five datasets. While both encoders can be used simultaneously, our study highlights the often-overlooked advantages of linear time features in modern dynamic graph models. These findings can positively impact the design choices of various dynamic graph learning architectures and eventually benefit temporal network applications such as recommender systems, communication networks, and traffic forecasting. The experimental code is available at: https://github.com/hsinghuan/dg-linear-time.git.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

WATCH: Adaptive Monitoring for AI Deployments via Weighted-Conformal Martingales

Drew Prinster
Xing Han
Anqi Liu 0001
Suchi Saria

Responsibly deploying artificial intelligence (AI) / machine learning (ML) systems in high-stakes settings arguably requires not only proof of system reliability, but also continual, post-deployment monitoring to quickly detect and address any unsafe behavior. Methods for nonparametric sequential testing—especially conformal test martingales (CTMs) and anytime-valid inference—offer promising tools for this monitoring task. However, existing approaches are restricted to monitoring limited hypothesis classes or “alarm criteria” (e. g. , detecting data shifts that violate certain exchangeability or IID assumptions), do not allow for online adaptation in response to shifts, and/or cannot diagnose the cause of degradation or alarm. In this paper, we address these limitations by proposing a weighted generalization of conformal test martingales (WCTMs), which lay a theoretical foundation for online monitoring for any unexpected changepoints in the data distribution while controlling false-alarms. For practical applications, we propose specific WCTM algorithms that adapt online to mild covariate shifts (in the marginal input distribution), quickly detect harmful shifts, and diagnose those harmful shifts as concept shifts (in the conditional label distribution) or extreme (out-of-support) covariate shifts that cannot be easily adapted to. On real-world datasets, we demonstrate improved performance relative to state-of-the-art baselines.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

FuseMoE: Mixture-of-Experts Transformers for Fleximodal Fusion

Xing Han
Huy Nguyen
Carl Harris
Nhat Ho
Suchi Saria

As machine learning models in critical fields increasingly grapple with multimodal data, they face the dual challenges of handling a wide array of modalities, often incomplete due to missing elements, and the temporal irregularity and sparsity of collected samples. Successfully leveraging this complex data, while overcoming the scarcity of high-quality training samples, is key to improving these models' predictive performance. We introduce ``FuseMoE'', a mixture-of-experts framework incorporated with an innovative gating function. Designed to integrate a diverse number of modalities, FuseMoE is effective in managing scenarios with missing modalities and irregularly sampled data trajectories. Theoretically, our unique gating function contributes to enhanced convergence rates, leading to better performance in multiple downstream tasks. The practical utility of FuseMoE in the real world is validated by a diverse set of challenging prediction tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Designing Robust Transformers using Robust Kernel Density Estimation

Xing Han
Tongzheng Ren
Tan Nguyen
Khai Nguyen
Joydeep Ghosh
Nhat Ho

Transformer-based architectures have recently exhibited remarkable successes across different domains beyond just powering large language models. However, existing approaches typically focus on predictive accuracy and computational cost, largely ignoring certain other practical issues such as robustness to contaminated samples. In this paper, by re-interpreting the self-attention mechanism as a non-parametric kernel density estimator, we adapt classical robust kernel density estimation methods to develop novel classes of transformers that are resistant to adversarial attacks and data contamination. We first propose methods that down-weight outliers in RKHS when computing the self-attention operations. We empirically show that these methods produce improved performance over existing state-of-the-art methods, particularly on image data under adversarial attacks. Then we leverage the median-of-means principle to obtain another efficient approach that results in noticeably enhanced performance and robustness on language modeling and time series classification tasks. Our methods can be combined with existing transformers to augment their robust properties, thus promising to impact a wide variety of applications.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Architecture Agnostic Federated Learning for Neural Networks

Disha Makhija
Xing Han
Nhat Ho
Joydeep Ghosh

With growing concerns regarding data privacy and rapid increase in data volume, Federated Learning (FL) has become an important learning paradigm. However, jointly learning a deep neural network model in a FL setting proves to be a non-trivial task because of the complexities associated with the neural networks, such as varied architectures across clients, permutation invariance of the neurons, and presence of non-linear transformations in each layer. This work introduces a novel framework, Federated Heterogeneous Neural Networks (FedHeNN), that allows each client to build a personalised model without enforcing a common architecture across clients. This allows each client to optimize with respect to local data and compute constraints, while still benefiting from the learnings of other (potentially more powerful) clients. The key idea of FedHeNN is to use the instance-level representations obtained from peer clients to guide the simultaneous training on each client. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the FedHeNN framework is capable of learning better performing models on clients in both the settings of homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures across clients.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Certified Monotonic Neural Networks

Xingchao Liu
Xing Han
Na Zhang
Qiang Liu

Learning monotonic models with respect to a subset of the inputs is a desirable feature to effectively address the fairness, interpretability, and generalization issues in practice. Existing methods for learning monotonic neural networks either require specifically designed model structures to ensure monotonicity, which can be too restrictive/complicated, or enforce monotonicity by adjusting the learning process, which cannot provably guarantee the learned model is monotonic on selected features. In this work, we propose to certify the monotonicity of the general piece-wise linear neural networks by solving a mixed integer linear programming problem. This provides a new general approach for learning monotonic neural networks with arbitrary model structures. Our method allows us to train neural networks with heuristic monotonicity regularizations, and we can gradually increase the regularization magnitude until the learned network is certified monotonic. Compared to prior work, our method does not require human-designed constraints on the weight space and also yields more accurate approximation. Empirical studies on various datasets demonstrate the efficiency of our approach over the state-of-the-art methods, such as Deep Lattice Networks

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