[HN Gopher] Topological Deep Learning: A Survey on Topological N...
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       Topological Deep Learning: A Survey on Topological Neural Networks
        
       Author : dil8
       Score  : 100 points
       Date   : 2023-04-23 22:46 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | liorben-david wrote:
       | The paper seems to be using homology as the topological feature
       | here. I've done some work in Topological Data Analysis before and
       | it feels like the hidden issue is that computing homology is
       | generally very inefficient(Since it usually amounts to reducing
       | an nxn matrix).
       | 
       | It definitely feels like graphs/topology should be helpful tools
       | to work with data(Since graph-like structures are good
       | representations of the real world), but we need to solve this
       | efficiency issue before this can be possible.
       | 
       | Also to address the confusion on how category theory comes into
       | it, category theory studies abstract structures where you have
       | objects and relationships between these objects. A lot of
       | algebraic topology(Which is the sort of topology relevant here)
       | is built in the language of category theory(Either by neccesity
       | or by convention).
        
         | chaxor wrote:
         | I think most people in the field recognize this efficiency
         | issue and focus on very small NNs. As of yet I have seen very
         | little promising work on improving efficiency, other than work
         | outside of NNs, e.g. Eirene for PH (which is actually a mess
         | under the hood - someone needs to clean up the code base last
         | time I checked - 9 deep nested for loops, really?). There are
         | several options for topological NN layers out there now, but
         | all of them are excruciatingly slow and blow up RAM (CPU run
         | NNs, since typically >500 GB for fairly small problems) very
         | quickly when I have tried them out.
        
           | liorben-david wrote:
           | Completely Agree. Part of the issue feels like that the
           | people working on this are far more on the Math side than on
           | the CS side. Like Gunnar Carlson's textbook and papers about
           | Persistent Homology are geared towards algebraic topologists
           | when there is probably a way to explain Persistent Homology
           | that does not rely on category theory, polynomial rings, etc
        
           | lmcinnes wrote:
           | For suitable specialized cases thins can be quite efficient.
           | For persistent H_0 of VR-complexes in low-dimensional space
           | there is an O(N log(N)) algorithm for N data points; that's
           | decently fast. If you want H_1 I believe (but cannot prove)
           | that there exists an O(N^2 log(N)) algorithm. Beyond H_1
           | things get painful. Since most PH software is written for
           | general cases they don't tend to avail themselves of these
           | special case shortcuts. Given that H_0 and H_1 of VR-
           | complexes of low dimensional data covers a vast amount of the
           | use cases I think specialized code for this would be
           | worthwhile.
        
       | dpflan wrote:
       | I am not well versed in topological deep learning; but can
       | topological concepts be learned by a graph neural network -- like
       | can there a be topological layer(s) that learns the topology of
       | the graphs, like how it's easy to visualize how a CNN
       | architecture can see different hierarchical patterns at deep
       | depths, seemingly learning the greater complexities of a image
       | representation and understanding?
        
         | chaxor wrote:
         | Yeah this is being done by several groups across the field
         | Check out the work by Gunnar Carlsson and Bastien Reick. If
         | those are enjoyable also check out Micheal Bronstein and Petar
         | Velolickovic, although not directly related to your question.
        
           | mplemay wrote:
           | Do you mind linking the homepage, google scholar, etc. of
           | "Petar Velolickovic"? The only reference to the name on
           | google search appears to be this post.
        
             | dpflan wrote:
             | - https://geometricdeeplearning.com/ -- group of
             | researchers presenting the paradigm
             | 
             | - https://petar-v.com/ - Petar's homepage
             | 
             | - https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=kcTK_FAAAAAJ&
             | hl=... - Petar's Google Scholar
             | 
             | - https://www.linkedin.com/in/petarvelickovic/ - Petar's LI
        
               | dpflan wrote:
               | GAT is particularly interesting at the moment: https://sc
               | holar.google.co.uk/citations?view_op=view_citation...
        
         | zwaps wrote:
         | The proposed use cases (folding, social networks) correspond to
         | what was previously termed "Geometric Deep Learning". Here,
         | things like Graph Neural Networks were understood in terms of
         | (pairwise?) relations to be learned under the assumption of
         | symmetry/equivariance. It can be shown that not all relations
         | that fit in a graph can be learned by such GNNs. Further, not
         | all relations can be modeled with a (symmetric) graph.
         | 
         | Hence, these people moved on the using Category Theory, which
         | may or may not lead to the use of GNNs.
         | 
         | Reading the first part of the present paper, the Topological DL
         | would instead move beyond the idea of "pairwise relation".
        
           | dpflan wrote:
           | Thank you. "Reading the first part of the present paper, the
           | Topological DL would instead move beyond the idea of
           | "pairwise relation". -- interesting. It seems to make sense
           | intuitively, given difficulties in GNNs, to look at a higher
           | order representations -- which may lead to understanding the
           | underlying graph properties too. But I had assumed that such
           | higher orders of graph would be part of the GNN learning
           | process, even representations that are not really "human
           | mathematically understood yet".
           | 
           | That is also interesting me regarding Geometric Deep
           | Learning, which got some hype and interest recently, and
           | seemed like a good start for more formal representation of
           | different deep learning models (finding connections and
           | mathematical steps between the model zoo). Something more
           | mathematically rigorous does seem needed to truly make
           | informed engineering improvements and scientific
           | understanding.
        
             | zwaps wrote:
             | I agree that it's exciting to move toward a mathematical
             | approach to characterize what can, and what can not be
             | learned by a DNN!
             | 
             | Maybe someone else has the knowledge to give you some more
             | precise answers.
             | 
             | As far as I understand we need to differentiate between
             | higher order relations that can be learned by message
             | parsing and those that cannot. Some higher order
             | relationships can be represented in a graph (of pairwise
             | relations) and, furthermore, can be learned by iterating
             | out from a focal node through the paths (think centrality).
             | GNNs can learn those.
             | 
             | But GNNs can't learn all Graphs because not all such
             | relations are amendable to message parsing. So, not all
             | higher order information contained in a graph are learned
             | by GNNs.
             | 
             | In the present case, the authors seem to make the point
             | that there are higher-order relations (say, node-set) which
             | are also not representable by a graph (or a collection of
             | graphs).
             | 
             | I actually do not know whether that is obviously true. For
             | instance, hypergraphs can be modeled as a collection of
             | graphs. But if the claim stands, then we'd need topological
             | deep learning to move further. Otherwise, like you say, it
             | is maybe a more general framework to understand information
             | processing in DL - or more efficient to learn node-node or
             | node-set information.
             | 
             | Either way, I have not yet quite figured out how Category
             | Theory and Topological DL relate to each other (each
             | generalising Geometric Deep Learning).
        
               | lmeyerov wrote:
               | Agreed, the definitions here of what a GNN is (=> cannot
               | do) seem pedantically narrow & extreme, and then throws
               | the baby out w the bath water
               | 
               | See last ~2 years of work by Michael Bronstein's teams
               | (who moonlights as Twitter's ex? GNN r&d lead) that
               | address 2+ of the points here
               | 
               | It's true they are not the end-all, but our issues in
               | practice aren't the above, but more like how to best
               | combine temporal deep learning techniques w graph ones
               | (it is not just another continuous dimension)
               | 
               | Worth noting: TDA methods & UMAP are largely the same
               | under-the-hood & in practice, and we find UMAP (incl
               | neural) _highly_ effective, and typically reach for it
               | before GNNs. UMAP has been an admirably rare mix of
               | theory  & practicality..
        
               | dpflan wrote:
               | Interesting. Could one graph be the topological
               | representation, let's say like SCC? So there are
               | heterogenous graphs with meta-graphs connected to
               | them...?
        
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