Can we design effective recommender systems free from users, IDs, and GNNs? Recommender systems are central to personalized content delivery across domains, with top-K item recommendation being a fundamental task to retrieve the most relevant items from historical interactions. Existing methods rely on entrenched design conventions, often adopted without reconsideration, such as storing per-user embeddings (user-dependent), initializing features from raw IDs (ID-dependent), and employing graph neural networks (GNN-dependent). These dependencies incur several limitations, including high memory costs, cold-start and over-smoothing issues, and poor generalization to unseen interactions.

How can we accurately predict the signs of unseen links in partially observed signed graphs? Signed graphs are widely used to represent complex relationships in areas such as social and biological networks. Although prior methods enhance representation learning by extending Graph Neural Networks with social theories, they rely on the unrealistic assumption that all link signs are known. In practice, however, link signs are often only partially labeled due to the high cost or difficulty of obtaining ground-truth annotations. For example, in the Bitcoin transaction network, only a subset of interactions can be labeled as trusted or untrusted, while many remain unlabeled. In this work, we propose PIGLET (PROBABILISTIC MESSAGE PASSING FOR SEMI-SUPERVISED LINK SIGN PREDICTION), a novel approach for accurate link sign prediction on signed graphs with partially observed sign labels. The main idea is to probabilistically interpret unlabeled links as both positive and negative based on a soft-labeling strategy, allowing information to be propagated through both types of edges. To mitigate the effect of uncertain predictions, we use confidence-based weights to downplay unreliable edges. PIGLET balances the importance of edges with relation-aware attention scores as well. PIGLET establishes a theoretical connection between the ExpectationMaximization (EM) algorithm and its iterative refinement of node embeddings and soft labels. Extensive experiments show that PIGLET consistently outperforms existing methods on realworld datasets under semi-supervised setting.

Abstract Many real-world data from various domains can be represented as tensors, and a significant portion of them is large scale. Thus, tensor compression is crucial for their storage and transmission. Recently, deep learning-based methods have emerged to enhance compression performance. However, they require considerable compression time to fulfill their performance. In this work, to achieve both speed and performance, we develop ELiCiT, an effective and lightweight lossy tensor compression method. When designing ELiCiT, we avoid deep auto-regressive neural networks and index reordering, which incur high computational costs of deep learning-based tensor compression. Specifically, instead of using the orders of indices as parameters, we introduce a feature-based model for indices, which enhances the model’s expressive capacity and simplifies the overall end-to-end training procedure. Moreover, to reduce the size of the parameters and computational cost for inference, we adopt end-to-end clustering-based quantization, as an alternative to deep auto-regressive architecture. As a result, ELiCiT becomes easy to optimize with enhanced expressiveness. We prove that it (partially) generalizes deep learning-based methods and also traditional ones. Using eight real-world tensors, we show that ELiCiT yields compact outputs that fit the input tensor accurately. Compared to the best competitor with similar fitness, it offers 1.51 $$-$$ - 5.05 $$\times $$ × smaller outputs. Moreover, compared to deep learning-based compression methods, ELiCiT is 11.8 $$-$$ - 96.0 $$\times $$ × faster with 5–48% better fitness for a similarly sized output. We also demonstrate that ELiCiT is extended to matrix completion, neural network compression , and tensor stream summarization, providing the best trade-offs between model size and application performance.

Abstract Many real-world datasets are represented as tensors, i.e., multi-dimensional arrays of numerical values. Storing them without compression often requires substantial space, which grows exponentially with the order. While many tensor compression algorithms are available, many of them rely on strong data assumptions regarding its order, sparsity, rank, and smoothness. In this work, we propose TensorCodec, a lossy compression algorithm for general tensors that do not necessarily adhere to strong input data assumptions.TensorCodec incorporates three key ideas. The first idea is neural tensor-train decomposition (NTTD) where we integrate a recurrent neural network into Tensor-Train Decomposition to enhance its expressive power and alleviate the limitations imposed by the low-rank assumption. Another idea is to fold the input tensor into a higher-order tensor to reduce the space required by NTTD. Finally, the mode indices of the input tensor are reordered to reveal patterns that can be exploited by NTTD for improved approximation. In addition, we extend TensorCodec to enable the lossy compression of tensors with missing entries, often found in real-world datasets. Our analysis and experiments on 8 real-world datasets demonstrate that TensorCodec is (a) Concise: it gives up to $$7.38 \times $$ 7.38 × more compact compression than the best competitor with similar reconstruction error, (b) Accurate: given the same budget for compressed size, it yields up to $$3.33\times $$ 3.33 × more accurate reconstruction than the best competitor, (c) Scalable: Its empirical compression time is linear in the number of tensor entries, and it reconstructs each entry in logarithmic time. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/kbrother/TensorCodec .

Multi-behavior recommender systems, rapidly advancing across various domains, utilize plentiful auxiliary interactions on a variety of user behaviors to enhance recommendations for the target behavior, such as purchases. While previous methods have made strides in leveraging such interactions with advanced machine learning methods, they still face challenges in adequately using multi-faceted relationships among behaviors and handling uncertain auxiliary interactions that could potentially lead to purchases or not. In this paper, we propose MuLe (Multi-Grained Graph Learning), a novel graph-based model designed to address these limitations. We design a multi-grained graph learning strategy to capture diverse aspects of behaviors, ranging from unified to specific, and then to target-related behavior interactions. To handle uncertain interactions, we use graph attention, weighting the importance of those interactions related to the target behavior. Afterward, we use an attention mechanism to effectively aggregate diverse behavior embeddings obtained from the multi-grained graph encoders. Extensive experiments show that MuLe significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, achieving improvements of up to 44.6% in HR@10 and 52.9% in NDCG@10, respectively. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/geonwooko/MULE.

Many real-world data from various domains can be represented as tensors, and a significant portion of them is large-scale. Thus, tensor compression is crucial for their storage and transmission. Recently, deep-learning-based methods have emerged to enhance compression performance. However, they require considerable compression time to fulfill their performance. In this work, to achieve both speed and performance, we develop ELICIT, an effective and lightweight lossy tensor compression method. When designing ELICIT, we avoid deep auto-regressive neural networks and index reordering, which incur high computational costs of deep-learning-based tensor compression. Specifically, instead of using the orders of indices as parameters, we introduce a feature-based model for indices, which enhances the model's expressive capacity and simplifies the overall end-to-end training procedure. Moreover, to reduce the size of the parameters and computational cost for inference, we adopt end-to-end clustering-based quantization, as an alter-native to deep auto-regressive architecture. As a result, ELICIT becomes easy to optimize with enhanced expressiveness. We prove that it (partially) generalizes deep-learning-based methods and also traditional ones. Using eight real-world tensors, we show that ELICIT yields compact outputs that fit the input tensor accurately. Compared to the best competitor with similar fitness, it offers 1.51-5.05 × smaller outputs. Moreover, compared to deep-learning-based compression methods, ELICIT is 11.8-96.0 × faster with 5-48% better fitness for a similarly sized output. We also demonstrate that ELICIT is extended to matrix completion and neural network compression, providing the best tradeoffs between model size and application performance.

An irregular tensor is a collection of matrices with different numbers of rows. Real-world data from diverse domains, including medical and stock data, are effectively represented as irregular tensors due to the inherent variations in data length. For their analysis, various tensor decomposition methods (e.g., PARAFAC2) have been devised. While they are expected to be effective in compressing large-scale irregular tensors, akin to regular tensor decomposition methods, our analysis reveals that their compression performance is limited due to the larger number of first mode factor matrices.

Many real-world datasets are represented as tensors, i.e., multi-dimensional arrays of numerical values. Storing them without compression often requires substantial space, which grows exponentially with the order. While many tensor compression algorithms are available, many of them rely on strong data assumptions regarding its order, sparsity, rank, and smoothness. In this work, we propose TENSORCODEC, a lossy compression algorithm for general tensors that do not necessarily adhere to strong input data assumptions. TENSORCODEC incorporates three key ideas. The first idea is Neural Tensor-Train Decomposition (NTTD) where we integrate a recurrent neural network into Tensor-Train Decomposition to enhance its expressive power and alleviate the limitations imposed by the low-rank assumption. Another idea is to fold the input tensor into a higher-order tensor to reduce the space required by NTTD. Finally, the mode indices of the input tensor are reordered to reveal patterns that can be exploited by NTTD for improved approximation. Our analysis and experiments on 8 real-world datasets demonstrate that TENSORCODEC is (a) Concise: it gives up to $7.38 \times$ more compact compression than the best competitor with similar reconstruction error, (b) Accurate: given the same budget for compressed size, it yields up to $3.33 \times$ more accurate reconstruction than the best competitor, (c) Scalable: its empirical compression time is linear in the number of tensor entries, and it reconstructs each entry in logarithmic time. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/kbrother/TensorCodec.

Many real-world data are naturally represented as a sparse reorderable matrix, whose rows and columns can be arbitrarily ordered (e.g., the adjacency matrix of a bipartite graph). Storing a sparse matrix in conventional ways requires an amount of space linear in the number of non-zeros, and lossy compression of sparse matrices (e.g., Truncated SVD) typically requires an amount of space linear in the number of rows and columns. In this work, we propose NeuKron for compressing a sparse reorderable matrix into a constant-size space. NeuKron generalizes Kronecker products using a recurrent neural network with a constant number of parameters. NeuKron updates the parameters so that a given matrix is approximated by the product and reorders the rows and columns of the matrix to facilitate the approximation. The updates take time linear in the number of non-zeros in the input matrix, and the approximation of each entry can be retrieved in logarithmic time. We also extend NeuKron to compress sparse reorderable tensors (e.g. multi-layer graphs), which generalize matrices. Through experiments on ten real-world datasets, we show that NeuKron is (a) Compact: requiring up to five orders of magnitude less space than its best competitor with similar approximation errors, (b) Accurate: giving up to 10 × smaller approximation error than its best competitors with similar size outputs, and (c) Scalable: successfully compressing a matrix with over 230 million non-zero entries.

Given a graph with partial observations of node features, how can we estimate the missing features accurately? Feature estimation is a crucial problem for analyzing real-world graphs whose features are commonly missing during the data collection process. Accurate estimation not only provides diverse information of nodes but also supports the inference of graph neural networks that require the full observation of node features. However, designing an effective approach for estimating high-dimensional features is challenging, since it requires an estimator to have large representation power, increasing the risk of overfitting. In this work, we propose SVGA (Structured Variational Graph Autoencoder), an accurate method for feature estimation. SVGA applies strong regularization to the distribution of latent variables by structured variational inference, which models the prior of variables as Gaussian Markov random field based on the graph structure. As a result, SVGA combines the advantages of probabilistic inference and graph neural networks, achieving state-of-the-art performance in real datasets.

Static knowledge graphs (KGs), despite their wide usage in relational reasoning and downstream tasks, fall short of realistic modeling of knowledge and facts that are only temporarily valid. Compared to static knowledge graphs, temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) inherently reflect the transient nature of real-world knowledge. Naturally, automatic TKG completion has drawn much research interests for a more realistic modeling of relational reasoning. However, most of the existing models for TKG completion extend static KG embeddings that do not fully exploit TKG structure, thus lacking in 1) accounting for temporally relevant events already residing in the local neighborhood of a query, and 2) path-based inference that facilitates multi-hop reasoning and better interpretability. In this paper, we propose T-GAP, a novel model for TKG completion that maximally utilizes both temporal information and graph structure in its encoder and decoder. T-GAP encodes query-specific substructure of TKG by focusing on the temporal displacement between each event and the query timestamp, and performs path-based inference by propagating attention through the graph. Our empirical experiments demonstrate that T-GAP not only achieves superior performance against state-of-the-art baselines, but also competently generalizes to queries with unseen timestamps. Through extensive qualitative analyses, we also show that T-GAP enjoys transparent interpretability, and follows human intuition in its reasoning process.

Given multiple time series data, how can we efficiently find latent patterns in an arbitrary time range? Singular value decomposition (SVD) is a crucial tool to discover hidden factors in multiple time series data, and has been used in many data mining applications including dimensionality reduction, principal component analysis, recommender systems, etc. Along with its static version, incremental SVD has been used to deal with multiple semi-infinite time series data and to identify patterns of the data. However, existing SVD methods for the multiple time series data analysis do not provide functionality for detecting patterns of data in an arbitrary time range: standard SVD requires data for all intervals corresponding to a time range query, and incremental SVD does not consider an arbitrary time range.

Given a large graph, how can we determine similarity between nodes in a fast and accurate way? Random walk with restart (RWR) is a popular measure for this purpose and has been exploited in numerous data mining applications including ranking, anomaly detection, link prediction, and community detection. However, previous methods for computing exact RWR require prohibitive storage sizes and computational costs, and alternative methods which avoid such costs by computing approximate RWR have limited accuracy. In this paper, we propose TPA, a fast, scalable, and highly accurate method for computing approximate RWR on large graphs. TPA exploits two important properties in RWR: 1) nodes close to a seed node are likely to be revisited in following steps due to block-wise structure of many real-world graphs, and 2) RWR scores of nodes which reside far from the seed node are proportional to their PageRank scores. Based on these two properties, TPA divides approximate RWR problem into two subproblems called neighbor approximation and stranger approximation. In the neighbor approximation, TPA estimates RWR scores of nodes close to the seed based on scores of few early steps from the seed. In the stranger approximation, TPA estimates RWR scores for nodes far from the seed using their PageRank. The stranger and neighbor approximations are conducted in the preprocessing phase and the online phase, respectively. Through extensive experiments, we show that TPA requires up to 3.5× less time with up to 40× less memory space than other state-of-the-art methods for the preprocessing phase. In the online phase, TPA computes approximate RWR up to 30× faster than existing methods while maintaining high accuracy.

Between matrix factorization or Random Walk with Restart (RWR), which method works better for recommender systems? Which method handles explicit or implicit feedback data better? Does additional information help recommendation? Recommender systems play an important role in many ecommerce services such as Amazon and Netflix to recommend new items to a user. Among various recommendation strategies, collaborative filtering has shown good performance by using rating patterns of users. Matrix factorization and random walk with restart are the most representative collaborative filtering methods. However, it is still unclear which method provides better recommendation performance despite their extensive utility. In this paper, we provide a comparative study of matrix factorization and RWR in recommender systems. We exactly formulate each correspondence of the two methods according to various tasks in recommendation. Especially, we newly devise an RWR method using global bias term which corresponds to a matrix factorization method using biases. We describe details of the two methods in various aspects of recommendation quality such as how those methods handle cold-start problem which typically happens in collaborative filtering. We extensively perform experiments over real-world datasets to evaluate the performance of each method in terms of various measures. We observe that matrix factorization performs better with explicit feedback ratings while RWR is better with implicit ones. We also observe that exploiting global popularities of items is advantageous in the performance and that side information produces positive synergy with explicit feedback but gives negative effects with implicit one.

How can we measure similarity between nodes quickly and accurately on large graphs? Random walk with restart (RWR) provides a good measure, and has been used in various data mining applications including ranking, recommendation, link prediction and community detection. However, existing methods for computing RWR do not scale to large graphs containing billions of edges; iterative methods are slow in query time, and preprocessing methods require too much memory.

How can we rank users in signed social networks? Relationships between nodes in a signed network are represented as positive (trust) or negative (distrust) edges. Many social networks have adopted signed networks to express trust between users. Consequently, ranking friends or enemies in signed networks has received much attention from the data mining community. The ranking problem, however, is challenging because it is difficult to interpret negative edges. Traditional random walk based methods such as PageRank and Random Walk with Restart cannot provide effective rankings in signed networks since they assume only positive edges. Although several methods have been proposed by modifying traditional ranking models, they also fail to account for proper rankings due to the lack of ability to consider complex edge relations. In this paper, we propose Signed Random Walk with Restart, a novel model for personalized ranking in signed networks. We introduce a signed random surfer so that she considers negative edges by changing her sign for walking. Our model provides proper rankings reflecting signed edges based on the signed surfer. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that SRWR achieves the best accuracy (up to 87%) for sign prediction, and predicts trolls 4× more accurately than other ranking models.

Given a large graph, how can we calculate the relevance between nodes fast and accurately? Random walk with restart (RWR) provides a good measure for this purpose and has been applied to diverse data mining applications including ranking, community detection, link prediction, and anomaly detection. Since calculating RWR from scratch takes a long time, various preprocessing methods, most of which are related to inverting adjacency matrices, have been proposed to speed up the calculation. However, these methods do not scale to large graphs because they usually produce large dense matrices that do not fit into memory. In addition, the existing methods are inappropriate when graphs dynamically change because the expensive preprocessing task needs to be computed repeatedly. In this article, we propose B ear , a fast, scalable, and accurate method for computing RWR on large graphs. B ear has two versions: a preprocessing method B ear S for static graphs and an incremental update method B ear D for dynamic graphs. B ear S consists of the preprocessing step and the query step. In the preprocessing step, B ear S reorders the adjacency matrix of a given graph so that it contains a large and easy-to-invert submatrix, and precomputes several matrices including the Schur complement of the submatrix. In the query step, B ear S quickly computes the RWR scores for a given query node using a block elimination approach with the matrices computed in the preprocessing step. For dynamic graphs, B ear D efficiently updates the changed parts in the preprocessed matrices of B ear S based on the observation that only small parts of the preprocessed matrices change when few edges are inserted or deleted. Through extensive experiments, we show that B ear S significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of preprocessing and query speed, space efficiency, and accuracy. We also show that B ear D quickly updates the preprocessed matrices and immediately computes queries when the graph changes.

Given a large graph, how can we calculate the relevance between nodes fast and accurately? Random walk with restart (RWR) provides a good measure for this purpose and has been applied to diverse data mining applications including ranking, community detection, link prediction, and anomaly detection. Since calculating RWR from scratch takes long, various preprocessing methods, most of which are related to inverting adjacency matrices, have been proposed to speed up the calculation. However, these methods do not scale to large graphs because they usually produce large and dense matrices which do not fit into memory.