Neural Relational Inference with Node-Specific Information

Ershad Banijamali

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks, Variational Inference, Trajectory Prediction

Abstract: Inferring interactions among entities is an important problem in studying dynamical systems, which greatly impacts the performance of downstream tasks, such as prediction. In this paper, we tackle the relational inference problem in a setting where each entity can potentially have a set of individualized information that other entities cannot have access to. Specifically, we represent the system using a graph in which the individualized information become node-specific information (NSI). We build our model in the framework of Neural Relation Inference (NRI), where the interaction among entities are uncovered using variational inference. We adopt NRI model to incorporate the individualized information by introducing private nodes in the graph that represent NSI. Such representation enables us to uncover more accurate relations among the agents and therefore leads to better performance on the downstream tasks. Our experiment results over real-world datasets validate the merit of our proposed algorithm.

One-sentence Summary: We use variational inference to uncover relations among agents in a multi-agent system, given that the agents can have access to some private information