Versatile Ordering Network: An Attention-based Neural Network for Ordering Across Scales and Quality Metrics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yu, Zehua, Zhang, Weihan, Pan, Sihan, Tao, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yu, Zehua
Zhang, Weihan
Pan, Sihan
Tao, Jun
author_facet Yu, Zehua
Zhang, Weihan
Pan, Sihan
Tao, Jun
contents Ordering has been extensively studied in many visualization applications, such as axis and matrix reordering, for the simple reason that the order will greatly impact the perceived pattern of data. Many quality metrics concerning data pattern, perception, and aesthetics are proposed, and respective optimization algorithms are developed. However, the optimization problems related to ordering are often difficult to solve (e.g., TSP is NP-complete), and developing specialized optimization algorithms is costly. In this paper, we propose Versatile Ordering Network (VON), which automatically learns the strategy to order given a quality metric. VON uses the quality metric to evaluate its solutions, and leverages reinforcement learning with a greedy rollout baseline to improve itself. This keeps the metric transparent and allows VON to optimize over different metrics. Additionally, VON uses the attention mechanism to collect information across scales and reposition the data points with respect to the current context. This allows VONs to deal with data points following different distributions. We examine the effectiveness of VON under different usage scenarios and metrics. The results demonstrate that VON can produce comparable results to specialized solvers. The code is available at https://github.com/sysuvis/VON.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12759
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Versatile Ordering Network: An Attention-based Neural Network for Ordering Across Scales and Quality Metrics
Yu, Zehua
Zhang, Weihan
Pan, Sihan
Tao, Jun
Machine Learning
I.2.6
Ordering has been extensively studied in many visualization applications, such as axis and matrix reordering, for the simple reason that the order will greatly impact the perceived pattern of data. Many quality metrics concerning data pattern, perception, and aesthetics are proposed, and respective optimization algorithms are developed. However, the optimization problems related to ordering are often difficult to solve (e.g., TSP is NP-complete), and developing specialized optimization algorithms is costly. In this paper, we propose Versatile Ordering Network (VON), which automatically learns the strategy to order given a quality metric. VON uses the quality metric to evaluate its solutions, and leverages reinforcement learning with a greedy rollout baseline to improve itself. This keeps the metric transparent and allows VON to optimize over different metrics. Additionally, VON uses the attention mechanism to collect information across scales and reposition the data points with respect to the current context. This allows VONs to deal with data points following different distributions. We examine the effectiveness of VON under different usage scenarios and metrics. The results demonstrate that VON can produce comparable results to specialized solvers. The code is available at https://github.com/sysuvis/VON.
title Versatile Ordering Network: An Attention-based Neural Network for Ordering Across Scales and Quality Metrics
topic Machine Learning
I.2.6
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12759