Xiangguo Sun

dblp:224/0873 · DBLP profile ↗
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24ranked-venue papers in the field
6as first author
23since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-2224-4634ORCID · verified

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Information Retrieval & Web Search · 10 (1 first)Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 8 (2 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 5 (3 first)Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 FROG: Fair Removal on Graph
abstract
With growing emphasis on privacy regulations, machine unlearning has become increasingly critical in real-world applications such as social networks and recommender systems, many of which are naturally represented as graphs. However, existing graph unlearning methods often modify nodes or edges indiscriminately, overlooking their impact on fairness. For instance, forgetting links between users of different genders may inadvertently exacerbate group disparities. To address this issue, we propose a novel framework that jointly optimizes both the graph structure and the model to achieve fair unlearning. Our method rewires the graph by removing redundant edges that hinder forgetting while preserving fairness through targeted edge augmentation. We further introduce a worst-case evaluation mechanism to assess robustness under challenging scenarios. Experiments on real-world datasets show that our approach achieves more effective and fair unlearning than existing baselines.
Ziheng Chen 0002, Jiali Cheng, Hadi Amiri, Kaushiki Nag, Lu Lin 0001, Sijia Liu 0001, Gabriele Tolomei, Xiangguo Sun
CIKM8
2025 Urban Region Pre-training and Prompting: A Graph-based Approach
abstract
Urban region representation is crucial for various urban downstream tasks. However, despite the proliferation of methods and their success, acquiring general urban region knowledge and adapting to different tasks remains challenging. Existing work pays limited attention to the fine-grained functional layout semantics in urban regions, limiting their ability to capture transferable knowledge across regions. Further, inadequate handling of the unique features and relationships required for different downstream tasks may also hinder effective task adaptation. In this paper, we propose a Graph-based Urban Region Pre-training and Prompting framework (GURPP) for region representation learning. Specifically, we first construct an urban region graph and develop a subgraph-centric urban region pre-training model to capture the heterogeneous and transferable patterns of entity interactions. This model pre-trains knowledge-rich region embeddings using contrastive learning and multi-view learning methods. To further refine these representations, we design two graph-based prompting methods: a manually-defined prompt to incorporate explicit task knowledge and a task-learnable prompt to discover hidden knowledge, which enhances the adaptability of these embeddings to different tasks. Extensive experiments on various urban region prediction tasks and different cities demonstrate the superior performance of our framework.
Jiahui Jin 0001, Yifan Song 0003, Dong Kan, Haojia Zhu, Xiangguo Sun, Xigang Sun, Jinghui Zhang 0001
KDD (2)5
2025 Hierarchical Graph Information Bottleneck for Multi-Behavior Recommendation
abstract
In real-world recommendation scenarios, users typically engage with platforms through multiple types of behavioral interactions. Multi-behavior recommendation algorithms aim to leverage various auxiliary user behaviors to enhance prediction for target behaviors of primary interest (e.g., buy), thereby overcoming performance limitations caused by data sparsity in target behavior records. Current state-of-the-art approaches typically employ hierarchical design following either cascading (e.g., view$\rightarrow$cart$\rightarrow$buy) or parallel (unified$\rightarrow$behavior$\rightarrow$specific components) paradigms, to capture behavioral relationships. However, these methods still face two critical challenges: (1) severe distribution disparities across behaviors, and (2) negative transfer effects caused by noise in auxiliary behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel model-agnostic Hierarchical Graph Information Bottleneck (HGIB) framework for multi-behavior recommendation to effectively address these challenges. Following information bottleneck principles, our framework optimizes the learning of compact yet sufficient representations that preserve essential information for target behavior prediction while eliminating task-irrelevant redundancies. To further mitigate interaction noise, we introduce a Graph Refinement Encoder (GRE) that dynamically prunes redundant edges through learnable edge dropout mechanisms. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three real-world public datasets, which demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our framework. Beyond these widely used datasets in the academic community, we further expand our evaluation on several real industrial scenarios and conduct an online A/B testing, showing again a significant improvement in multi-behavior recommendations. The source code of our proposed HGIB is available at https://github.com/zhy99426/HGIB.
Hengyu Zhang 0001, Chunxu Shen, Xiangguo Sun, Jie Tan 0001, Yanchao Tan, Yu Rong 0001, Hong Cheng 0001, Lingling Yi
RecSys3
2025 Adaptive Graph Integration for Cross-Domain Recommendation via Heterogeneous Graph Coordinators
abstract
In the digital era, users typically interact with diverse items across multiple domains (e.g., e-commerce, streaming platforms, and social networks), generating intricate heterogeneous interaction graphs. Leveraging multi-domain data can improve recommendation systems by enriching user insights and mitigating data sparsity in individual domains. However, integrating such multi-domain knowledge for cross-domain recommendation remains challenging due to inherent disparities in user behavior and item characteristics and the risk of negative transfer, where irrelevant or conflicting information from the source domains adversely impacts the target domain's performance. To tackle these challenges, we propose HAGO, a novel framework with Heterogeneous Adaptive Graph coOrdinators, which dynamically integrates multi-domain graphs into a cohesive structure. HAGO adaptively adjusts the connections between coordinators and multi-domain graph nodes to enhance beneficial inter-domain interactions while alleviating negative transfer. Furthermore, we introduce a universal multi-domain graph pre-training strategy alongside HAGO to collaboratively learn high-quality node representations across domains. Being compatible with various graph-based models and pre-training techniques, HAGO demonstrates broad applicability and effectiveness. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cross-domain recommendation scenarios, underscoring its potential for real-world applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhy99426/HAGO.
Hengyu Zhang 0001, Chunxu Shen, Xiangguo Sun, Jie Tan 0001, Yu Rong 0001, Chengzhi Piao, Hong Cheng 0001, Lingling Yi
SIGIR3
2024 When LLM Meets Hypergraph: A Sociological Analysis on Personality via Online Social Networks
abstract
Individual personalities significantly influence our perceptions, decisions, and social interactions, which is particularly crucial for gaining insights into human behavior patterns in online social network analysis. Many psychological studies have observed that personalities are strongly reflected in their social behaviors and social environments. Unfortunately, psychological traits like one's personality are high-level and hidden in the innermost corner of data, which is intractable to be uncovered by traditional data mining approaches; The data quality of online social networks is far from sufficient to support such profound psychological analysis, because user behavior records and their attributes are usually very fragmented, missing lots of key information to understand a person in depth; In addition, the social environments in online networks are very complicated, making the interaction patterns between users and their environments underexplored.
Zhiyao Shu, Xiangguo Sun, Hong Cheng 0001
CIKM2
2024 DDIPrompt: Drug-Drug Interaction Event Prediction based on Graph Prompt Learning
abstract
Drug combinations can cause adverse drug-drug interactions(DDIs). Identifying specific effects is crucial for developing safer therapies. Previous works on DDI event prediction have typically been limited to using labels of specific events as supervision, which renders them insufficient to address two significant challenges: (1) the bias caused by highly imbalanced event distribution where certain interaction types are vastly underrepresented. (2) the scarcity of labeled data for rare events, a pervasive issue where rare yet potentially critical interactions are often overlooked or under-explored due to limited available data. In response, we offer "DDIPrompt", an innovative solution inspired by the recent advancements in graph prompt learning. Our framework aims to address these issues by leveraging the intrinsic knowledge from pre-trained models, which can be efficiently deployed with minimal downstream data. Specifically, to solve the first challenge, DDIPrompt features a hierarchical pre-training strategy to foster a generalized and comprehensive understanding of drug properties. It captures intra-molecular structures through augmented links based on structural proximity between drugs, further learns inter-molecular interactions emphasizing edge connections rather than concrete catagories. For the second challenge, we implement a prototype-enhanced prompting mechanism during inference. This mechanism, refined by few-shot examples from each category, effectively harnesses the rich pre-training knowledge to enhance prediction accuracy, particularly for these rare but crucial interactions. Comprehensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets demonstrate DDIPrompt's SOTA performance, especially for those rare DDI events.
Yun Xiong, Xixi Wu, Xiangguo Sun, Jiawei Zhang 0001, Guangyong Zheng
CIKM4
2024 Graph Condensation for Open-World Graph Learning
abstract
The burgeoning volume of graph data presents significant computational challenges in training graph neural networks (GNNs), critically impeding their efficiency in various applications. To tackle this challenge, graph condensation (GC) has emerged as a promising acceleration solution, focusing on the synthesis of a compact yet representative graph for efficiently training GNNs while retaining performance. Despite the potential to promote scalable use of GNNs, existing GC methods are limited to aligning the condensed graph with merely the observed static graph distribution. This limitation significantly restricts the generalization capacity of condensed graphs, particularly in adapting to dynamic distribution changes. In real-world scenarios, however, graphs are dynamic and constantly evolving, with new nodes and edges being continually integrated. Consequently, due to the limited generalization capacity of condensed graphs, applications that employ GC for efficient GNN training end up with sub-optimal GNNs when confronted with evolving graph structures and distributions in dynamic real-world situations. To overcome this issue, we propose open-world graph condensation (OpenGC), a robust GC framework that integrates structure-aware distribution shift to simulate evolving graph patterns and exploit the temporal environments for invariance condensation. This approach is designed to extract temporal invariant patterns from the original graph, thereby enhancing the generalization capabilities of the condensed graph and, subsequently, the GNNs trained on it. Furthermore, to support the periodic re-condensation and expedite condensed graph updating in life-long graph learning, OpenGC reconstructs the sophisticated optimization scheme with kernel ridge regression and non-parametric graph convolution, significantly accelerating the condensation process while ensuring the exact solutions. Extensive experiments on both real-world and synthetic evolving graphs demonstrate that OpenGC outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) GC methods in adapting to dynamic changes in open-world graph environments.
Xinyi Gao 0001, Tong Chen 0005, Wentao Zhang 0001, Yayong Li, Xiangguo Sun, Hongzhi Yin
KDD5
2024 Graph Intelligence with Large Language Models and Prompt Learning
abstract
Graph plays a significant role in representing and analyzing complex relationships in real-world applications such as citation networks, social networks, and biological data. Graph intelligence is rapidly becoming a crucial aspect of understanding and exploiting the intricate interconnections within graph data. Recently, large language models (LLMs) and prompt learning techniques have pushed graph intelligence forward, outperforming traditional Graph Neural Network (GNN) pre-training methods and setting new benchmarks for performance. In this tutorial, we begin by offering a comprehensive review and analysis of existing methods that integrate LLMs with graphs. We introduce existing works based on a novel taxonomy that classifies them into three distinct categories according to the roles of LLMs in graph tasks: as enhancers, predictors, or alignment components. Secondly, we introduce a new learning method that utilizes prompting on graphs, offering substantial potential to enhance graph transfer capabilities across diverse tasks and domains. We discuss existing works on graph prompting within a unified framework and introduce our developed tool for executing a variety of graph prompting tasks. Additionally, we discuss the applications of combining Graphs, LLMs, and prompt learning across various tasks, such as urban computing, recommendation systems, and anomaly detection. This lecture-style tutorial is an extension of our original work published in IJCAI 2024[44] and arXiv[77] with the invitation of KDD24.
Jia Li 0009, Xiangguo Sun, Yuhan Li 0001, Zhixun Li, Hong Cheng 0001, Jeffrey Xu Yu
KDD2
2024 All in One and One for All: A Simple yet Effective Method towards Cross-domain Graph Pretraining
abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the fields of computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP). One of the most notable advancements of LLMs is that a single model is trained on vast and diverse datasets spanning multiple domains -- a paradigm we term 'All in One'. This methodology empowers LLMs with super generalization capabilities, facilitating an encompassing comprehension of varied data distributions. Leveraging these capabilities, a single LLM demonstrates remarkable versatility across a variety of domains -- a paradigm we term 'One for All'. However, applying this idea to the graph field remains a formidable challenge, with cross-domain pretraining often resulting in negative transfer. This issue is particularly important in few-shot learning scenarios, where the paucity of training data necessitates the incorporation of external knowledge sources. In response to this challenge, we propose a novel approach called Graph COordinators for PrEtraining (GCOPE), that harnesses the underlying commonalities across diverse graph datasets to enhance few-shot learning. Our novel methodology involves a unification framework that amalgamates disparate graph datasets during the pretraining phase to distill and transfer meaningful knowledge to target tasks. Extensive experiments across multiple graph datasets demonstrate the superior efficacy of our approach. By successfully leveraging the synergistic potential of multiple graph datasets for pretraining, our work stands as a pioneering contribution to the realm of graph foundational model. Code available at https://github.com/cshhzhao/GCOPE.
Haihong Zhao, Aochuan Chen, Xiangguo Sun, Hong Cheng 0001, Jia Li 0009
KDD3
2024 Attention Is Not the Only Choice: Counterfactual Reasoning for Path-Based Explainable Recommendation
abstract
Compared with only pursuing recommendation accuracy, the explainability of a recommendation model has drawn more attention in recent years. Many graph-based recommendations resort to informative paths with the attention mechanism for the explanation. Unfortunately, these attention weights are intentionally designed for model accuracy but not explainability. Recently, some researchers have started to question attention-based explainability because the attention weights are unstable for different reproductions, and they may not always align with human intuition. Inspired by the counterfactual reasoning from causality learning theory, we propose a novel explainable framework targeting path-based recommendations, wherein the explainable weights of paths are learned to replace attention weights. Specifically, we design two counterfactual reasoning algorithms from both path representation and path topological structure perspectives. Moreover, unlike traditional case studies, we also propose a package of explainability evaluation solutions with both qualitative and quantitative methods. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets, the results of which further demonstrate the effectiveness and reliability of our method.
Yicong Li 0001, Xiangguo Sun, Hongxu Chen 0002, Sixiao Zhang, Yu Yang 0012, Guandong Xu
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.2
2024 Counter-Empirical Attacking Based on Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Time-Relevant Scoring System
abstract
Scoring systems are commonly seen for platforms in the era of Big Data. From credit scoring systems in financial services to membership scores in E-commerce shopping platforms, platform managers use such systems to guide users towards the encouraged activity pattern, and manage resources more effectively and efficiently. To establish such scoring systems, several “empirical criteria” are first determined, followed by a dedicated top-down design for each score factor, which usually requires enormous effort to adjust and tune the scoring function in the new application scenario. What's worse, many fresh projects usually have no ground truth or any experience to evaluate a reasonable scoring system, making the designing even harder. To reduce the effort of manual adjustment of the scoring function in every new scoring system, we innovatively study the scoring system from the preset empirical criteria without any ground truth and propose a novel framework to improve the system from scratch. In this paper, we propose a “counter-empirical attacking” mechanism that can generate “attacking” behavior traces and try to break the empirical rules of the scoring system. Then an adversarial “enhancer” is applied to evaluate the scoring system and find the improvement strategy. By training the adversarial learning problem, a proper scoring function can be learned to be robust to the attacking activity traces that are trying to violate the empirical criteria. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two scoring systems, including a shared computing resource platform and a financial credit system. The experimental results have validated the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
Xiangguo Sun, Hong Cheng 0001, Hang Dong 0004, Bo Qiao 0001, Si Qin, Qingwei Lin
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 All in One: Multi-Task Prompting for Graph Neural Networks
abstract
Recently, "pre-training and fine-tuning'' has been adopted as a standard workflow for many graph tasks since it can take general graph knowledge to relieve the lack of graph annotations from each application. However, graph tasks with node level, edge level, and graph level are far diversified, making the pre-training pretext often incompatible with these multiple tasks. This gap may even cause a "negative transfer'' to the specific application, leading to poor results. Inspired by the prompt learning in natural language processing (NLP), which has presented significant effectiveness in leveraging prior knowledge for various NLP tasks, we study the prompting topic for graphs with the motivation of filling the gap between pre-trained models and various graph tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task prompting method for graph models. Specifically, we first unify the format of graph prompts and language prompts with the prompt token, token structure, and inserting pattern. In this way, the prompting idea from NLP can be seamlessly introduced to the graph area. Then, to further narrow the gap between various graph tasks and state-of-the-art pre-training strategies, we further study the task space of various graph applications and reformulate downstream problems to the graph-level task. Afterward, we introduce meta-learning to efficiently learn a better initialization for the multi-task prompt of graphs so that our prompting framework can be more reliable and general for different tasks. We conduct extensive experiments, results from which demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Xiangguo Sun, Hong Cheng 0001, Jia Li 0009, Bo Liu 0004, Jihong Guan
KDD1
2023 Generating Counterfactual Hard Negative Samples for Graph Contrastive Learning
abstract
Graph contrastive learning has emerged as a powerful unsupervised graph representation learning tool. The key to the success of graph contrastive learning is to acquire high-quality positive and negative samples as contrasting pairs to learn the underlying structural semantics of the input graph. Recent works usually sample negative samples from the same training batch with the positive samples or from an external irrelevant graph. However, a significant limitation lies in such strategies: the unavoidable problem of sampling false negative samples. In this paper, we propose a novel method to utilize Counterfactual mechanism to generate artificial hard negative samples for Graph Contrastive learning, namely CGC. We utilize a counterfactual mechanism to produce hard negative samples, ensuring that the generated samples are similar but have labels that differ from the positive sample. The proposed method achieves satisfying results on several datasets. It outperforms some traditional unsupervised graph learning methods and some SOTA graph contrastive learning methods. We also conducted some supplementary experiments to illustrate the proposed method, including the performances of CGC with different hard negative samples and evaluations for hard negative samples generated with different similarity measurements. The implementation code is available online to ease reproducibility1.
Haoran Yang 0001, Hongxu Chen 0002, Sixiao Zhang, Xiangguo Sun, Qian Li 0003, Xiangyu Zhao 0001, Guandong Xu
WWW4
2023 Event-based incremental recommendation via factors mixed Hawkes process
Zhihong Cui, Xiangguo Sun, Li Pan 0001, Shijun Liu, Guandong Xu
Inf. Sci.2
2023 Computing Graph Edit Distance via Neural Graph Matching
abstract
Graph edit distance (GED) computation is a fundamental NP-hard problem in graph theory. Given a graph pair ( G 1 , G 2 ), GED is defined as the minimum number of primitive operations converting G 1 to G 2 . Early studies focus on search-based inexact algorithms such as A*-beam search, and greedy algorithms using bipartite matching due to its NP-hardness. They can obtain a sub-optimal solution by constructing an edit path (the sequence of operations that converts G 1 to G 2 ). Recent studies convert the GED between a given graph pair ( G 1 , G 2 ) into a similarity score in the range (0, 1) by a well designed function. Then machine learning models (mostly based on graph neural networks) are applied to predict the similarity score. They achieve a much higher numerical precision than the sub-optimal solutions found by classical algorithms. However, a major limitation is that these machine learning models cannot generate an edit path. They treat the GED computation as a pure regression task to bypass its intrinsic complexity, but ignore the essential task of converting G 1 to G 2 . This severely limits the interpretability and usability of the solution. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework that solves the GED problem in a two-step manner: 1) The proposed graph neural network GEDGNN is in charge of predicting the GED value and a matching matrix; and 2) A post-processing algorithm based on k -best matching is used to derive k possible node matchings from the matching matrix generated by GEDGNN. The best matching will finally lead to a high-quality edit path. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real graph data sets and synthetic power-law graphs to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Compared to the best result of existing GNN-based models, the mean absolute error (MAE) on GED value prediction decreases by 4.9% ~ 74.3%. Compared to the state-of-the-art searching algorithm Noah, the MAE on GED value based on edit path reduces by 53.6% ~ 88.1%.
Chengzhi Piao, Tingyang Xu, Xiangguo Sun, Yu Rong 0001, Kangfei Zhao, Hong Cheng 0001
Proc. VLDB Endow.3
2023 Self-Supervised Hypergraph Representation Learning for Sociological Analysis
abstract
Modern sociology has profoundly uncovered many convincing social criteria for behavioral analysis. Unfortunately, many of them are too subjective to be measured and very challenging to be presented in online social networks (OSNs) for the large data volume and complicated environments to be explored. On the other hand, data mining techniques can better find data patterns but many of them leave behind unnatural understanding to humans. Although there are some works trying to integrate social observations for specific tasks, they are still hard to be applied to more general cases. In this paper, we propose a fundamental methodology to support the further fusion of data mining techniques and sociological behavioral criteria. Our highlights are three-fold: First, we propose an effective hypergraph awareness and a fast line graph construction framework. The hypergraph can more profoundly indicate the interactions between individuals and their environments because each edge in the hypergraph (a.k.a hyperedge) contains more than two nodes, which is perfect to describe social. A line graph treats each social environment as a super node with the underlying influence between different environments. In this way, we go beyond traditional pair-wise relations and explore richer patterns under various sociological criteria; Second, we propose a novel hypergraph-based neural network to learn social influence flowing from users to users, users to environments, environment to users, and environments to environments. The neural network can be learned via a task-free method, making our model very flexible to support various data mining tasks and sociological analysis; Third, we propose both qualitative and quantitive solutions to effectively evaluate the most common sociological criteria like social conformity, social equivalence, environmental evolving and social polarization. Our extensive experiments show that our framework can better support both data mining tasks for online user behaviors and sociological analysis.
Xiangguo Sun, Hong Cheng 0001, Bo Liu 0004, Jia Li 0009, Hongyang Chen 0001, Guandong Xu, Hongzhi Yin
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 Structure Learning Via Meta-Hyperedge for Dynamic Rumor Detection
abstract
Online social networks have greatly facilitated our lives but have also propagated the spreading of rumours. Traditional works mostly find rumors from content, but content can be strategically manipulated to evade such detection, making these methods brittle. To improve the accuracy and robustness of rumor detection, we propose to integrate and exploit the content, propagation structure, and temporal relations because information in the networks always spreads dynamically with significant structures. In this paper, we propose a novel rumor detection framework in online temporal networks via structure learning. Specifically, to exploit the propagation structure, we propose a novel hyperedge walking strategy on a meta-hyperedge graph to learn the representations of sub-structures in the networks. Then a hyperedge expansion method is proposed to generate more global structural features. The expanded hyperedges are more hierarchical, making the learned structural embeddings more expressive. To make full use of content, we design a hypergraph learning model using hyperedge expansion to fuse node content with structural features and generate comprehensive representations for the entire graph. To exploit temporal relations, we design a masked temporal attention unit for learning the evolving patterns of the network. Extensive evaluations with six state-of-the-art baselines on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our solution.
Xiangguo Sun, Hongzhi Yin, Bo Liu 0004, Qing Meng, Jiuxin Cao, Alexander Zhou 0001, Hongxu Chen 0002
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 Recognize News Transition from Collective Behavior for News Recommendation
abstract
In the news recommendation, users are overwhelmed by thousands of news daily, which makes the users’ behavior data have high sparsity. Therefore, only considering a single user’s personalized preferences cannot support the news recommendation. How to improve the relatedness of news and users and reduce data sparsity has become a hot issue. Recent studies have attempted to use graph models to enrich the relationship between users and news, but they are still limited to modeling the historical behaviors of a single user. To fill the gap, we integrate user-news relationships and the overall user historical clicked news sequences to construct a global heterogeneous transition graph. And a refinement approach is proposed to recognize the news transition patterns in the graph. Based on the global heterogeneous transition graph, we propose a heterogeneous transition graph attention network to capture the common behavior patterns of most users to enhance the representation of user interest. Fusing the users’ personalized and common interest, we propose the GAINRec model to recommend news effectively. Extensive experiments are conducted on two public news recommendation datasets, and the results show the superiority of the proposed GAINRec model compared with the state-of-the-art news recommendation models. The implementation of our model is available at https://github.com/newsrec/GAINRec .
Qing Meng, Bo Liu 0004, Xiangguo Sun, Mingrui Hu, Jiuxin Cao
ACM Trans. Inf. Syst.4
2022 Unsupervised Graph Poisoning Attack via Contrastive Loss Back-propagation
abstract
Graph contrastive learning is the state-of-the-art unsupervised graph representation learning framework and has shown comparable performance with supervised approaches. However, evaluating whether the graph contrastive learning is robust to adversarial attacks is still an open problem because most existing graph adversarial attacks are supervised models, which means they heavily rely on labels and can only be used to evaluate the graph contrastive learning in a specific scenario. For unsupervised graph representation methods such as graph contrastive learning, it is difficult to acquire labels in real-world scenarios, making traditional supervised graph attack methods difficult to be applied to test their robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised gradient-based adversarial attack that does not rely on labels for graph contrastive learning. We compute the gradients of the adjacency matrices of the two views and flip the edges with gradient ascent to maximize the contrastive loss. In this way, we can fully use multiple views generated by the graph contrastive learning models and pick the most informative edges without knowing their labels, and therefore can promisingly support our model adapted to more kinds of downstream tasks. Extensive experiments show that our attack outperforms unsupervised baseline attacks and has comparable performance with supervised attacks in multiple downstream tasks including node classification and link prediction. We further show that our attack can be transferred to other graph representation models as well.
Sixiao Zhang, Hongxu Chen 0002, Xiangguo Sun, Yicong Li 0001, Guandong Xu
WWW3
2021 Hyperbolic Hypergraphs for Sequential Recommendation
abstract
Hypergraphs have been becoming a popular choice to model complex, non-pairwise, and higher-order interactions for recommender systems. However, compared with traditional graph-based methods, the constructed hypergraphs are usually much sparser, which leads to a dilemma when balancing the benefits of hypergraphs and the modelling difficulty. Moreover, existing sequential hypergraph recommendation overlooks the temporal modelling among user relationships, which neglects rich social signals from the recommendation data. To tackle the above shortcomings of the existing hypergraph-based sequential recommendations, we propose a novel architecture named Hyperbolic Hypergraph representation learning method for Sequential Recommendation (H2SeqRec) with the pre-training phase. Specifically, we design three self-supervised tasks to obtain the pre-training item embeddings to feed or fuse into the following recommendation architecture (with two ways to use the pre-trained embeddings). In the recommendation phase, we learn multi-scale item embeddings via a hierarchical structure to capture multiple time-span information. To alleviate the negative impact of sparse hypergraphs, we utilize a hyperbolic space-based hypergraph convolutional neural network to learn the dynamic item embeddings. Also, we design an item enhancement module to capture dynamic social information at each timestamp to improve effectiveness. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets to prove the effectiveness and high performance of the model.
Yicong Li 0001, Hongxu Chen 0002, Xiangguo Sun, Zhenchao Sun, Lin Li 0001, Li-Zhen Cui 0001, Philip S. Yu, Guandong Xu
CIKM3
2021 Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation
abstract
Recent advances in path-based explainable recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention thanks to the rich information provided by knowledge graphs. Most existing explainable recommendation only utilizes static knowledge graph and ignores the dynamic user-item evolutions, leading to less convincing and inaccurate explanations. Although there are some works that realize that modelling user's temporal sequential behaviour could boost the performance and explainability of the recommender systems, most of them either only focus on modelling user's sequential interactions within a path or independently and separately of the recommendation mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation (TMER), which utilizes well-designed item-item path modelling between consecutive items with attention mechanisms to sequentially model dynamic user-item evolutions on dynamic knowledge graph for explainable recommendations. Compared with existing works that use heavy recurrent neural networks to model temporal information, we propose simple but effective neural networks to capture users' historical item features and path-based context to characterise next purchased item. Extensive evaluations of TMER on three real-world benchmark datasets show state-of-the-art performance compared against recent strong baselines.
Hongxu Chen 0002, Yicong Li 0001, Xiangguo Sun, Guandong Xu, Hongzhi Yin
WSDM3
2021 Heterogeneous Hypergraph Embedding for Graph Classification
abstract
Recently, graph neural networks have been widely used for network embedding because of their prominent performance in pairwise relationship learning. In the real world, a more natural and common situation is the coexistence of pairwise relationships and complex non-pairwise relationships, which is, however, rarely studied. In light of this, we propose a graph neural network-based representation learning framework for heterogeneous hypergraphs, an extension of conventional graphs, which can well characterize multiple non-pairwise relations. Our framework first projects the heterogeneous hypergraph into a series of snapshots and then we take the Wavelet basis to perform localized hypergraph convolution. Since the Wavelet basis is usually much sparser than the Fourier basis, we develop an efficient polynomial approximation to the basis to replace the time-consuming Laplacian decomposition. Extensive evaluations have been conducted and the experimental results show the superiority of our method. In addition to the standard tasks of network embedding evaluation such as node classification, we also apply our method to the task of spammers detection and the superior performance of our framework shows that relationships beyond pairwise are also advantageous in the spammer detection. To make our experiment repeatable, source codes and related datasets are available at https://xiangguosun.mystrikingly.com
Xiangguo Sun, Hongzhi Yin, Bo Liu 0004, Hongxu Chen 0002, Jiuxin Cao, Yingxia Shao, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung
WSDM1
2021 Multi-level Hyperedge Distillation for Social Linking Prediction on Sparsely Observed Networks
abstract
Social linking prediction is one of the most fundamental problems in online social networks and has attracted researchers’ persistent attention. Most of the existing works predict unobserved links using graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn node embeddings upon pair-wise relations. Despite promising results given enough observed links, these models are still challenging to achieve heart-stirring performance when observed links are extremely limited. The main reason is that they only focus on the smoothness of node representations on pair-wise relations. Unfortunately, this assumption may fall when the networks do not have enough observed links to support it. To this end, we go beyond pair-wise relations and propose a new and novel framework using hypergraph neural networks with multi-level hyperedge distillation strategies. To break through the limitations of sparsely observed links, we introduce the hypergraph to uncover higher-level relations, which is exceptionally crucial to deduce unobserved links. A hypergraph allows one edge to connect multiple nodes, making it easier to learn better higher-level relations for link prediction. To overcome the restrictions of manually designed hypergraphs, which is constant in most hypergraph researches, we propose a new method to learn high-quality hyperedges using three novel hyperedges distillation strategies automatically. The generated hyperedges are hierarchical and follow the power-law distribution, which can significantly improve the link prediction performance. To predict unobserved links, we present a novel hypergraph neural networks named HNN. HNN takes the multi-level hypergraphs as input and makes the node embeddings smooth on hyperedges instead of pair-wise links only. Extensive evaluations on four real-world datasets demonstrate our model’s superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines, especially when the observed links are extremely reduced.
Xiangguo Sun, Hongzhi Yin, Bo Liu 0004, Hongxu Chen 0002, Qing Meng, Wang Han, Jiuxin Cao
WWW1
2020 Multi-level Graph Convolutional Networks for Cross-platform Anchor Link Prediction
abstract
Cross-platform account matching plays a significant role in social network analytics, and is beneficial for a wide range of applications. However, existing methods either heavily rely on high-quality user generated content (including user profiles) or suffer from data insufficiency problem if only focusing on network topology, which brings researchers into an insoluble dilemma of model selection. In this paper, to address this problem, we propose a novel framework that considers multi-level graph convolutions on both local network structure and hypergraph structure in a unified manner. The proposed method overcomes data insufficiency problem of existing work and does not necessarily rely on user demographic information. Moreover, to adapt the proposed method to be capable of handling large-scale social networks, we propose a two-phase space reconciliation mechanism to align the embedding spaces in both network partitioning based parallel training and account matching across different social networks. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two large-scale real-life social networks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models with a big margin.
Hongxu Chen 0002, Hongzhi Yin, Xiangguo Sun, Tong Chen 0005, Bogdan Gabrys, Katarzyna Musial
KDD3