# Loss calculation¶

The training process aims at finding the embeddings for the entities so that the scores of the positive edges are higher than the scores of the negative edges. When unpacking what this means, three different aspects come into play:

• One must first determine which edges are to be considered as positive and negative samples.
• Then, once the scores of all the samples have been determined, one must decide how to aggregate them in a single loss value.
• Finally, one must decide how to go about optimizing that loss.

This chapter will dive into each of these issues.

## Negative sampling¶

The edges provided in the input data are known to be positives but, as PBG operates under the open-world assumption, the edges that are not in the input are not necessarily negatives. However, as PBG is designed to perform on large sparse graphs, it relies on the approximation that any random edge is a negative with very high probability.

The goal of sampling negatives is to produce a set of negative edges for each positive edge of a batch. Usual downstream applications (ranking, classification, …) are interested in comparing the score of an edge $$(x, r, y_1)$$ with the score of an edge $$(x, r, y_2)$$. Therefore, PBG produces negative samples for a given positive edge by corrupting the entity on one of its sides, keeping the other side and the relation type intact. This makes the sampling more suited to the task.

For performance reasons, the set of entities used to corrupt the positive edges in order to produce the negative samples may be shared across several positive edges. The way this usually happens is that positive edges are split into “chunks”, a single set of entities is sampled for each chunk, and all edges in that chunk are corrupted using that set of entities.

PBG supports several ways of sampling negatives:

### All negatives¶

The most straightforward way is to use, for each positive edge, all its possible negatives. What this means is that for a positive $$(x, r, y)$$ (where $$x$$ and $$y$$ are the left- and right-hand side negatives respectively and $$r$$ is the relation type), its negatives will be $$(x', r, y)$$ for all $$x'$$ of the same entity type as $$x$$ and $$(x, r, y')$$ for $$y'$$ of the same entity type as $$y$$. (Due to technical reasons this is in fact restricted to only the $$x'$$ in the same partition as $$x$$, and similarly for $$y'$$, as negative sampling always operates within the current bucket.)

As one can imagine, this method generates a lot of negatives and thus doesn’t scale to graphs of any significant size. It should not be used in practice, and is provided in PBG mainly for “academic” reasons. It is mainly useful to get more accurate results during evaluation on small graphs.

This method is activated on a per-relation basis, by turning on the all_negs config flag. When it’s enabled, this mode takes precedence and overrides any other mode.

### Same-batch negatives¶

This negative sampling method produces negatives for a given positive edge of a batch by sampling from the other edges of the same batch. This is done by first splitting the batch into so-called chunks (beware that the name “chunks” is overloaded, and these chunks are different than the edge chunks explained in Batch preparation). Then the set of negatives for a positive edge $$(x, r, y)$$ contains the edges $$(x', r, y)$$ for all entities $$x'$$ that are on left-hand side of another edge in the chunk, and the edges $$(x, r, y')$$ with $$y'$$ satisfying the same condition for the right-hand side.

For a single positive edge, this means that the entities used to construct its negatives are sampled from the current partition proportionally to their degree, a.k.a., according to the data distribution. This helps counteract the effects of a very skewed distribution of degrees, which might cause the embeddings to just capture that distribution.

The size of the chunks is controlled by the global num_batch_negs parameter. To disable this sampling mode, set that parameter to zero.

### Uniformly-sampled negatives¶

This last method is perhaps the most natural approximation of the “all negatives” method that scales to arbitrarily large graphs. Instead of using all the entities on either side to produce negative edges (thus having the number of negatives scale linearly withe the size of the graph), a fixed given number of these entities is sampled uniformly with replacement. Thus the set of negatives remains of constant size no matter how large the graph is. As with the “all negatives” method, the sampling here is restricted to the entities that have the same type and that belong to the same partition as the entity of the positive edge.

This method interacts with the same-batch method, as all the edges in a chunk receive the same set of uniformly sampled negatives. This caveat means that the uniform negatives of two different positives are independent and uncorrelated only if they belong to different chunks.

This method is controlled by the num_uniform_negs parameter, which controls how many negatives are sampled for each chunk. If num_batch_negs is zero, the batches will be split into chunks of size num_uniform_negs.

## Loss functions¶

Once positive and negative samples have been determined and their scores have been computed by the model, the scores’ suitability for a certain application must be assessed, which is done by aggregating them into a single real value, the loss. What loss function is most appropriate depends on what operations the embeddings will be used for.

In all cases, the loss function’s input will be a series of scores for positive samples and, for each of them, a set of scores for corresponding negative samples. For simplicity, suppose all these sets are of the same size (if they are not, they can be padded with “negative infinity” values, as these are the “ideal” scores for negative edges and should thus induce no loss).

### Ranking loss¶

The ranking loss compares each positive score with each of its corresponding negatives. For each such pair, no loss is introduced if the positive score is greater than the negative one by at least a given margin. Otherwise the incurred loss is the amount by which that inequality is violated. This is the hinge loss on the difference between the positive and negative score. Formally, for a margin $$m$$, a positive score $$s_i$$ and a negative score $$t_{i,j}$$, the loss is $$\max(0, m - s_i + t_{i,j})$$. The total loss is the sum of the losses over all pairs of positive and negative scores, i.e., over all $$i$$ and $$j$$.

This loss function is chosen by setting the loss_fn parameter to ranking, and the target margin is specified by the margin parameter.

This loss function is suitable when the setting requires to rank some entities by how likely they are to be related to another given entity.

### Logistic loss¶

The logistic loss instead interprets the scores as the probabilities that the edges exist. It does so by first passing each score (whose domain is the entire real line) through the logistic function ($$x \mapsto 1 / (1 + e^{-x})$$, which maps it to a value between 0 and 1). This value is taken as the probability $$p$$ and the loss will be its binary cross entropy with the “target” probability, i.e., 1 for positive edges and 0 for negative ones. In formulas, the loss for positives is $$- \log p$$ whereas for negatives it’s $$- \log (1 - p)$$. The total loss of due to the negatives is renormalized so it compares with the one of the positives.

One can see this as the cross entropy between two distributions on the values “edge exists” and “edge doesn’t exist”. One is given by the score (passed through the logistic function), the other has all the mass on “exists” for positives or all the mass on “doesn’t exist” for negatives.

This loss function is parameterless and is enabled by setting loss_fn to logistic.

### Softmax loss¶

The last loss function is designed for when one wants a distribution on the probabilities of some entities being related to a given entity (contrary to just wanting a ranking, as with the ranking loss). For a certain positive $$i$$, its score $$s_i$$ and the score $$t_{i,j}$$ of all the corresponding negatives $$j$$ are first converted to probabilities by performing a softmax: $$p_i \propto e^{s_i}$$ and $$q_{i,j} \propto e^{t_{i,j}}$$, normalized so that they sum up to 1. Then the loss is the cross entropy between this distribution and the “target” one, i.e., the one that puts all the mass on the positive sample. So, in full, the loss for a single $$i$$ is $$- \log p_i$$, i.e., $$- s_i + \log \sum_j e^{t_{i,j}}$$.

This loss is activated by setting loss_fn to softmax.

## Optimizers¶

Adagrad parameters are updated asynchronously across worker threads with no explicit synchronization. Asynchronous updates to the Adagrad state (the total squared gradient) appear stable, likely because each element of the state tensor only accumulates positives updates. Optimization is further stabilized by performing a short period of training with a single thread before beginning Hogwild! training, which is tuned by the hogwild_delay parameter.