Jia Li 0009

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39ranked-venue papers in the field
6as first author
35since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-6362-4385ORCID · conflict

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

Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 19 (3 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 12 (3 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 8
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 GalaxyRAG: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Enterprise Knowledge Systems
Bing Tong, Chen Zhang 0013, Zhaojie Yin, Jia Li 0009
ICDE5
2026 Merchant Category Identification in Weixin Pay
Aochuan Chen, Haihong Zhao, Simin Huang, Xuan Zong 0001, Jia Li 0009
KDD (1)6
2026 ChannelMTS: A Multi-modal Time-Series Framework for High-Speed Railway Channel Prediction
abstract
Accurate channel prediction is crucial for high-speed railway communications, especially in the 5G/6G era. Existing single-modality methods struggle to capture the intricate temporal and environmental dynamics, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose ChannelMTS, a novel multi-modal time-series framework that integrates both channel and environmental information to enhance prediction accuracy. First, ChannelMTS represents environmental conditions as snapshots, which are subsequently enhanced by a retrieval-augmented statistical channel module and embedded into an environmental time-series space using a transformer. Then, it aligns the channel and environmental time-series distributions to reduce the modality disparity. Finally, it adaptively fuses both modalities to achieve accurate channel prediction. This design can effectively leverage the complementary strengths of both modalities to enrich single-modality channel time series. Extensive experiments on real-world channel datasets show that ChannelMTS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, online A/B testing reveals a significant 70%-90% performance improvement, and real-world deployment confirms its practical value.
Haihong Zhao, Zinan Zheng, Chenyi Zi, Jia Li 0009
KDD (1)4
2026 Topology-Aware Feature Sorting Enables Universal Modeling on Homophilic and Heterophilic Graphs
abstract
Recently, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a central focus in the field of graph learning due to their strong generalizability to various unseen graphs. However, existing GFMs typically work under the homophily assumption, and the exploration of universality on heterophilic graphs is still in its early stages. In fact, even in homophilic graphs, there exists limited yet informative heterophilic information that is not fully exploited by current GFMs. Moreover, due to the requirement for universality, the heterophily issue faced by GFMs is more challenging than in classical graph learning, as it requires training a single model to adapt to varying structures, features, and tasks. Classic heterophilic graph learning methods primarily based on the node-level homophily or heterophily. However, we highlight that homophily and heterophily exist not only at the node semantic level, but also at a finer granularity across individual feature dimensions. This finding enables GFMs to adapt to heterophilic graphs and better utilize the small amount of heterophilic information in homophilic graphs. Based on this, we propose Topology-aware Feature Sorting Graph Foundation Model (TFSGFM), which employs a feature-level topology-aware sorting strategy and a dual-channel graph neural network framework, enabling unified modeling of both feature and structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate the strong generalizability of TFSGFM. The source code is available at https://github.com/hedongxiao-tju/TFSGFM.
Jitao Zhao, Dongxiao He, Jia Li 0009, Zhiyong Feng 0002
WWW4
2026 GraphRAG-R1: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Process-Constrained Reinforcement Learning
abstract
Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) has shown great effectiveness in enhancing the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging graph structures for knowledge representation and modeling complex real-world relationships. However, existing GraphRAG methods still face significant bottlenecks when handling complex problems that require multi-hop reasoning, as their query and retrieval phases are largely based on pre-defined heuristics and do not fully utilize the reasoning potentials of LLMs. To address this problem, we propose GraphRAG-R1, an adaptive GraphRAG framework by training LLMs with process-constrained outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance the multi-hop reasoning ability. Our method can decompose complex problems, autonomously invoke retrieval tools to acquire necessary information, and perform effective reasoning. Specifically, we utilize a modified version of Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) that supports rollout-with-thinking capability to train the model. Next, we design two process-constrained reward functions. To handle the shallow retrieval problem, we design a Progressive Retrieval Attenuation (PRA) reward to encourage essential retrievals. Then, to handle the over-thinking problem, we design a Cost-Aware F1 (CAF) reward to balance the model performance with computational costs. We further design a phase-dependent training strategy, containing three training stages corresponding to cold start and these two rewards. These stages empower GraphRAG with format following, behavior shaping, and smartness optimization abilities, respectively. Lastly, our method adopts a hybrid graph-textual retrieval to improve the reasoning capacity. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GraphRAG-R1 significantly boosts LLM capabilities in solving complex reasoning problems compared to state-of-the-art GraphRAG methods on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Furthermore, our framework can be flexibly integrated with various existing retrieval methods, consistently delivering performance improvements.
Chuanyue Yu, Kuo Zhao, Yuhan Li 0001, Heng Chang, Mingjian Feng, Xiangzhe Jiang, Jia Li 0009, Qingyun Sun, Jianxin Li 0002, Ziwei Zhang 0001
WWW8
2025 GCoder: Improving Large Language Model for Generalized Graph Reasoning
Qifan Zhang 0001, Xiaobin Hong 0002, Nuo Chen 0001, Yuhan Li 0001, Jing Tang 0004, Jia Li 0009
CIKM8
2025 GalaxyView: Property Graph Transformation for Materialized View Generation
abstract
In the practical use of graph databases, storing graphs separately enhances maintainability, while integrating them into a unified graph facilitates advanced analytics. To address these dual needs, we present a GQL-compatible framework for creating graph views across multiple property graphs. Leveraging insights from commercial graph database environments and user-driven requirements, we identify two key graph transformations—merging and expansion—that significantly boost query efficiency. By incorporating these transformations into view generation, we effectively minimize redundant queries. Furthermore, we streamline view creation through implicit edge creation and automated property merging. To ensure views meet user expectations before full generation, we introduce a preview feature that uses sampling to effectively represent the graph structure. We assess the performance of GalaxyView across diverse workloads, with comprehensive experiments on real-world graphs demonstrating significant improvements in query performance and operational efficiency.
Bing Tong, Chen Zhang 0013, Jia Li 0009, Lei Chen 0002
ICDE5
2025 Advancing Graph Foundation Models: A Data-Centric Perspective
abstract
Recently, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have emerged as a significant research topic in graph machine learning. Compared with traditional graph neural networks, GFMs demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization across different domains and tasks through large-scale pre-training on extensive and diverse graph data. Despite the initial success of pre-training, existing GFMs face challenges such as extreme time consumption and the presence of redundancy and noise in pre-training data. To alleviate these issues, we present the first exploration of data-centric GFM, which aims to optimize pre-training data (i.e., a set of subgraphs) to establish a more efficient GFM while maintaining robust performance across various downstream tasks. We propose DCGFM, a plug-and-play approach for Data-Centric GFM that incorporates the idea of data pruning to remove redundant and less informative subgraphs from the pre-training data, thereby improving both efficiency and effectiveness. Specifically, DCGFM consists of two components: (1) a model-agnostic hard pruning module that filters out subgraphs with lower informativity scores by considering both the semantics and structures of subgraphs; and (2) a model-aware soft pruning module that dynamically prunes subgraphs with lower loss values in each pre-training epoch with a gradient rescaling strategy. Extensive experiments on representative GFM backbones demonstrate DCGFM's efficiency and effectiveness. Remarkably, DCGFM achieves even better performance using only 30% of the pre-training data. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Yuhan1i/DCGFM.
Yuhan Li 0001, Heng Chang, Yuxiang Ren, Jia Li 0009
KDD (2)6
2025 Equivariant and Invariant Message Passing for Global Subseasonal-to-seasonal Forecasting
abstract
Accurate weather forecasting on Subseasonal-to-Seasonal (S2S) timescale is critical to human society such as agriculture planning and extreme weather preparation. Although data-driven models have become alternatives to computationally intensive Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems, existing Transformer-based approaches suffer from biases due to planar projections distorting the spherical geometry and inadequate handling of vector-scalar variable interactions (e.g., wind velocity vs. temperature). To address these limitations, we propose a graph-based Equivariant and Invariant Message Passing (EIMP) framework that directly processes spherical grid data. It maintains SO(3) equivariant embeddings for vector data and SO(3) invariant embeddings for scalar data, which are interacted by a shared invariant message embedding. Guaranteed equivariant and invariant message aggregation functions are proposed to update embeddings under strict symmetry constraints. Extensive experiments on the Earth Reanalysis 5 (ERA5) reanalysis dataset of 41 years demonstrate the proposed model achieves significant improvement over advanced data-driven models and skillful numerical ECMWF systems. Additionally, we empirically show that EIMP demonstrates geometrically superior predictions and conduct ablation studies to validate the efficacy of its design.
Yang Liu 0245, Zinan Zheng, Yu Rong 0001, Deli Zhao, Hong Cheng 0001, Jia Li 0009
KDD (2)6
2025 Mini-Game Lifetime Value Prediction in WeChat
abstract
The LifeTime Value (LTV) prediction, which endeavors to forecast the cumulative purchase contribution of a user to a particular item, remains a vital challenge that advertisers are keen to resolve. A precise LTV prediction system enhances the alignment of user interests with meticulously designed advertisements, thereby generating substantial profits for advertisers. Nonetheless, this issue is complicated by the paucity of data typically observed in real-world advertising scenarios. The purchase rate among registered users is often as critically low as 0.1%, resulting in a dataset where the majority of users make only several purchases. Consequently, there is insufficient supervisory signal for effectively training the LTV prediction model. An additional challenge emerges from the interdependencies among tasks with high correlation. It is a common practice to estimate a user's contribution to a game over a specified temporal interval. Varying the lengths of these intervals corresponds to distinct predictive tasks, which are highly correlated. For instance, predictions over a 7-day period are heavily reliant on forecasts made over a 3-day period, where exceptional cases can adversely affect the accuracy of both tasks. In order to comprehensively address the aforementioned challenges, we introduce an innovative framework denoted as Graph-Represented Pareto-Optimal LifeTime Value prediction (GRePO-LTV). Graph representation learning is initially employed to address the issue of data scarcity. Subsequently, Pareto-Optimization is utilized to manage the interdependence of prediction tasks. Our method is evaluated using a proprietary offline mini-game recommendation dataset in conjunction with an online A/B test. The implementation of our method results in a significant enhancement within the offline dataset. Moreover, the A/B test demonstrates encouraging outcomes, increasing average Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) by 8.4%.
Aochuan Chen, Yifan Niu, Shoujun Liu, Yang Liu 0245, Jia Li 0009
KDD (2)8
2025 Rewarding Graph Reasoning Process makes LLMs more Generalized Reasoners
abstract
Despite significant advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), developing advanced reasoning capabilities in LLMs remains a key challenge. Process Reward Models (PRMs) have demonstrated exceptional promise in enhancing reasoning by providing step-wise feedback, particularly in the context of mathematical reasoning. However, their application to broader reasoning domains remains understudied, largely due to the high costs associated with manually creating step-level supervision. In this work, we explore the potential of PRMs in graph reasoning problems - a domain that demands sophisticated multi-step reasoning and offers opportunities for automated step-level data generation using established graph algorithms. We introduce GraphSilo, the largest dataset for graph reasoning problems with fine-grained step-wise label, built using automated Task-oriented Trajectories and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to generate detailed reasoning steps with step-wise labels. Building upon this dataset, we train GraphPRM, the first PRM designed for graph reasoning problems, and evaluate its effectiveness in two key settings: inference-time scaling and reinforcement learning via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Experimental results show that GraphPRM significantly improves LLM performance across 13 graph reasoning tasks, delivering a 9% gain for Qwen2.5-7B and demonstrating transferability to new graph reasoning datasets and new reasoning domains like mathematical problem-solving. Notably, GraphPRM enhances LLM performance on GSM8K and MATH500, underscoring the cross-domain applicability of graph-based reasoning rewards. Our findings highlight the potential of PRMs in advancing reasoning across diverse domains, paving the way for more versatile and effective LLMs.
Miao Peng, Nuo Chen 0001, Zongrui Suo, Jia Li 0009
KDD (2)4
2025 BatteryLife: A Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Battery Life Prediction
abstract
Battery Life Prediction (BLP), which relies on time series data produced by battery degradation tests, is crucial for battery utilization, optimization, and production. Despite impressive advancements, this research area faces three key challenges. Firstly, the limited size of existing datasets impedes insights into modern battery life data. Secondly, most datasets are restricted to small-capacity lithium-ion batteries tested under a narrow range of diversity in labs, raising concerns about the generalizability of findings. Thirdly, inconsistent and limited benchmarks across studies obscure the effectiveness of baselines and leave it unclear if models popular in other time series fields are effective for BLP. To address these challenges, we propose BatteryLife, a comprehensive dataset and benchmark for BLP. BatteryLife integrates 16 datasets, offering a 2.5 times sample size compared to the previous largest dataset, and provides the most diverse battery life resource with batteries from 8 formats, 59 chemical systems, 9 operating temperatures, and 421 charge/discharge protocols, including both laboratory and industrial tests. Notably, BatteryLife is the first to release battery life datasets of zinc-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries, and industry-tested large-capacity lithium-ion batteries. With the comprehensive dataset, we revisit the effectiveness of baselines popular in this and other time series fields. Furthermore, we propose CyclePatch, a plug-in technique that can be employed in various neural networks. Extensive benchmarking of 18 methods reveals that models popular in other time series fields can be unsuitable for BLP, and CyclePatch consistently improves model performance establishing state-of-the-art benchmarks. Moreover, BatteryLife evaluates model performance across aging conditions and domains. BatteryLife is available at https://github.com/Ruifeng-Tan/BatteryLife.
Ruifeng Tan, Weixiang Hong 0002, Jiayue Tang, Xibin Lu, Jia Li 0009, Jiaqiang Huang, Tong-Yi Zhang
KDD (2)7
2025 Heterophilic Graph Neural Networks Optimization with Causal Message-passing
abstract
In this work, we discover that causal inference provides a promising approach to capture heterophilic message-passing in Graph Neural Network (GNN). By leveraging cause-effect analysis, we can discern heterophilic edges based on asymmetric node dependency. The learned causal structure offers more accurate relationships among nodes. To reduce the computational complexity, we introduce intervention-based causal inference in graph learning. We first simplify causal analysis on graphs by formulating it as a structural learning model and define the optimization problem within the Bayesian scheme. We then present an analysis of decomposing the optimization target into a consistency penalty and a structure modification based on cause-effect relations. We then estimate this target by conditional entropy and present insights into how conditional entropy quantifies the heterophily. Accordingly, we propose CausalMP, a causal message-passing discovery network for heterophilic graph learning, that iteratively learns the explicit causal structure of input graphs. We conduct extensive experiments in both heterophilic and homophilic graph settings. The result demonstrates that the our model achieves superior link prediction performance. Training on causal structure can also enhance node representation in classification task across different base models.
Jia Li 0009, Heng Chang, Keli Zhang, Fugee Tsung
WSDM2
2025 G-Refer: Graph Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model for Explainable Recommendation
abstract
Explainable recommendation has demonstrated significant advantages in informing users about the logic behind recommendations, thereby increasing system transparency, effectiveness, and trustworthiness. To provide personalized and interpretable explanations, existing works often combine the generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with collaborative filtering (CF) information. CF information extracted from the user-item interaction graph captures the user behaviors and preferences, which is crucial for providing informative explanations. However, due to the complexity of graph structure, effectively extracting the CF information from graphs still remains a challenge. Moreover, existing methods often struggle with the integration of extracted CF information with LLMs due to its implicit representation and the modality gap between graph structures and natural language explanations. To address these challenges, we propose G-Refer, a framework using Graph Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) for explainable recommendation. Specifically, we first employ a hybrid graph retrieval mechanism to retrieve explicit CF signals from both structural and semantic perspectives. The retrieved CF information is explicitly formulated as human-understandable text by the proposed graph translation and accounts for the explanations generated by LLMs. To bridge the modality gap, we introduce knowledge pruning and retrieval-augmented fine-tuning to enhance the ability of LLMs to process and utilize the retrieved CF information to generate explanations. Extensive experiments show that G-Refer achieves superior performance compared with existing methods in both explainability and stability. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Yuhan1i/G-Refer.
Yuhan Li 0001, Xinni Zhang, Linhao Luo, Heng Chang, Yuxiang Ren, Irwin King, Jia Li 0009
WWW7
2025 The LDBC Financial Benchmark: Transaction Workload
abstract
Graph databases play a pivotal role in the FinTech industry. However, existing graph benchmarks fail to capture the unique characteristics of financial datasets and workloads, rendering them inadequate for evaluating graph databases in financial scenarios. This paper presents the LDBC Financial Benchmark (FinBench) Transaction Workload, a novel benchmark that adopts a choke point-driven design methodology, emphasizing performance bottlenecks, and incorporates distinct features such as dataset skewness, edge multiplicity, temporal window filtering, recursive path filtering, read-write query patterns, and truncation on hub vertices. Key contributions include a scalable data generator that synthesizes datasets with financial-specific features, a parameter generator that leverages bucketed data statistics for runtime consistency across queries, and a scalable benchmark driver that biases query execution by time windows. Experimental evaluations on graph databases demonstrate the benchmark's capability to reveal novel choke points and provide insights into system performance in financial scenarios.
Shipeng Qi, Bing Tong, Jiatao Hu, Heng Lin, Yue Pang 0001, Songlin Lyu, Zhihui Guo, Xujin Ba, Youren Shen, Jia Li 0009, Lei Zou 0001, Yongwei Wu 0001, Gábor Szárnyas, Xiaowei Zhu 0001, Chuntao Hong
Proc. VLDB Endow.15
2025 Fused Gromov-Wasserstein Alignment for Graph Edit Distance Computation and Beyond
abstract
Graph Edit Distance (GED) is a widely recognized metric for measuring graph similarity, yet its NP-complete nature poses challenges for fast and accurate computation. This paper introduces FGWAlign, an Optimal Transport (OT)-based approach for graph alignment and GED computation. We take the first step to theoretically demonstrate and that computing GED can be transformed into optimizing a particular OT variant—the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance. Tailored to the GED problem structure, we further implement three key enhancements to the standard FGW solver: (1) a random exploration scheme to better locate the global optimum, (2) a diverse projection strategy for post-processing the transportation plan to escape local optima, and (3) a novel extension to accommodate multi-relational graphs with edge labels. With O (| V || E |) time complexity and O (| V | 2 ) space complexity, where | V | and | E | are the maximum number of nodes and edges between the two compared graphs, FGWAlign achieves a superior balance of efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Empirical results show that, compared with 12 representative GED computation methods across different categories on 4 real-world graph datasets, FGWAlign reduces computation errors by over 80% and achieves 15–60× speedup. It also demonstrates promising resutls on downstream applications including labeled graph alignment and graph-level anomaly detection, highlighting its versatility. FGWAlign opens up promising avenues for future applications in graph data management.
Xi Zhao 0006, Lemin Kong, Xiaofang Zhou 0001, Jia Li 0009
Proc. VLDB Endow.5
2024 Hierarchical Graph Latent Diffusion Model for Conditional Molecule Generation
abstract
Recently, generative models based on the diffusion process have emerged as a promising direction for automating the design of molecules. However, directly adding continuous Gaussian noise to discrete graphs leads to the problem that the generated data do not conform to the discrete graph data distribution in the training set. Current graph diffusion models either corrupt discrete data through a transition matrix or relax the discrete data to continuous space for the diffusion process. These approaches make it hard to perform extensible conditional generation, such as adapting to text-based conditions, due to the lack of embedding representations and require significant computation resources due to the diffusion process of the bond type matrix. This paper introduces the Hierarchical Graph Latent Diffusion Model (HGLDM), a novel variant of latent diffusion models that overcomes the problem of applying continuous diffusion models directly to discrete graph data. Meanwhile, based on the latent diffusion framework, HGLDM avoids the issues of computational consumption and lack of embeddings for extensible conditional generation. In addition, by comparing the HGLDM with its variant, the Graph Latent Diffusion Model (GLDM), which only has graph-level embeddings, we validate the advantage of the hierarchical graph structure for capturing the relationship between structure information and molecular properties. We evaluate the performance of our model through various conditional generation tasks, demonstrating its superior performance.
Tian Bian, Yifan Niu, Heng Chang, Divin Yan, Junzhou Huang, Yu Rong 0001, Tingyang Xu, Jia Li 0009, Hong Cheng 0001
CIKM8
2024 Data Imputation from the Perspective of Graph Dirichlet Energy
abstract
Data imputation is a crucial task due to the widespread occurrence of missing data. Many methods adopt a two-step approach: initially crafting a preliminary imputation (the "draft") and then refining it to produce the final missing data imputation result, commonly referred to as "draft-then-refine". In our study, we examine this prevalent strategy through the lens of graph Dirichlet energy. We observe that a basic "draft"imputation tends to decrease the Dirichlet energy. Therefore, a subsequent "refine"step is necessary to restore the overall energy balance. Existing refinement techniques, such as the Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), often result in further energy reduction. To address this, we introduce a new framework, the Graph Laplacian Pyramid Network (GLPN). GLPN incorporates a U-shaped autoencoder and residual networks to capture both global and local details effectively. Through extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, GLPN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across three different missing data mechanisms. The code is available at https://github.com/liguanlue/GLPN.
Guanlue Li, Jia Li 0009, Fugee Tsung
CIKM4
2024 GraphWiz: An Instruction-Following Language Model for Graph Computational Problems
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive success across various domains, but their capability in understanding and resolving complex graph problems is less explored. To bridge this gap, we introduce GraphInstruct, a novel instruction-tuning dataset aimed at enabling language models to tackle a broad spectrum of graph problems through explicit reasoning paths. Utilizing GraphInstruct, we build GraphWiz, an open-source language model capable of solving various graph computational problems while generating clear reasoning processes. To further enhance the model's performance and reliability, we integrate the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework within the graph problem-solving context. The improved model, GraphWiz-DPO, achieves an average accuracy of 65% across nine tasks with different complexity levels, surpassing GPT-4 which has an average accuracy of 43.8%. Our study also investigates the relationship between training data volume and model performance, emphasizing the risk of overfitting as data volume increases. Additionally, we explore the transferability of the proposed model across different tasks and datasets, demonstrating its robust zero-shot generalization capability. GraphWiz offers a new blueprint and valuable insights for developing LLMs specialized in graph reasoning and problem-solving.
Nuo Chen 0001, Yuhan Li 0001, Jia Li 0009
KDD4
2024 ZeroG: Investigating Cross-dataset Zero-shot Transferability in Graphs
abstract
With the development of foundation models such as large language models, zero-shot transfer learning has become increasingly significant. This is highlighted by the generative capabilities of NLP models like GPT-4, and the retrieval-based approaches of CV models like CLIP, both of which effectively bridge the gap between seen and unseen data. In the realm of graph learning, the continuous emergence of new graphs and the challenges of human labeling also amplify the necessity for zero-shot transfer learning, driving the exploration of approaches that can generalize across diverse graph data without necessitating dataset-specific and label-specific fine-tuning. In this study, we extend such paradigms to Zero-shot transferability in Graphs by introducing ZeroG, a new framework tailored to enable cross-dataset generalization. Addressing the inherent challenges such as feature misalignment, mismatched label spaces, and negative transfer, we leverage a language model to encode both node attributes and class semantics, ensuring consistent feature dimensions across datasets. We also propose a prompt-based subgraph sampling module that enriches the semantic information and structure information of extracted subgraphs using prompting nodes and neighborhood aggregation, respectively. We further adopt a lightweight fine-tuning strategy that reduces the risk of overfitting and maintains the zero-shot learning efficacy of the language model. The results underscore the effectiveness of our model in achieving significant cross-dataset zero-shot transferability, opening pathways for the development of graph foundation models.
Yuhan Li 0001, Peisong Wang 0002, Zhixun Li, Jeffrey Xu Yu, Jia Li 0009
KDD5
2024 Path-based Explanation for Knowledge Graph Completion
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) by modelling how entities and relations interact in recent years. However, the explanation of the predicted facts has not caught the necessary attention. Proper explanations for the results of GNN-based KGC models increase model transparency and help researchers develop more reliable models. Existing practices for explaining KGC tasks rely on instance/subgraph-based approaches, while in some scenarios, paths can provide more user-friendly and interpretable explanations. Nonetheless, the methods for generating path-based explanations for KGs have not been well-explored. To address this gap, we propose Power-Link, the first path-based KGC explainer that explores GNN-based models. We design a novel simplified graph-powering technique, which enables the generation of path-based explanations with a fully parallelisable and memory-efficient training scheme. We further introduce three new metrics for quantitative evaluation of the explanations, together with a qualitative human evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Power-Link outperforms the SOTA baselines in interpretability, efficiency, and scalability. The code is available at https://github.com/OUTHIM/power-link
Heng Chang, Jiangnan Ye 0003, Alejo Lopez-Avila, Jinhua Du, Jia Li 0009
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
KDD1
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
KDD5
2024 Relaxing Continuous Constraints of Equivariant Graph Neural Networks for Broad Physical Dynamics Learning
abstract
Incorporating Euclidean symmetries (e.g. rotation equivariance) as inductive biases into graph neural networks has improved their generalization ability and data efficiency in unbounded physical dynamics modeling. However, in various scientific and engineering applications, the symmetries of dynamics are frequently discrete due to the boundary conditions. Thus, existing GNNs either over-look necessary symmetry, resulting in suboptimal representation ability, or impose excessive equivariance, which fails to generalize to unobserved symmetric dynamics. In this work, we propose a general Discrete Equivariant Graph Neural Network (DEGNN) that guarantees equivariance to a given discrete point group. Specifically, we show that such discrete equivariant message passing could be constructed by transforming geometric features into permutation-invariant embeddings. Through relaxing continuous equivariant constraints, DEGNN can employ more geometric feature combinations to approximate unobserved physical object interaction functions. Two implementation approaches of DEGNN are proposed based on ranking or pooling permutation-invariant functions. We apply DEGNN to various physical dynamics, ranging from particle, molecular, crowd to vehicle dynamics. In twenty scenarios, DEGNN significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, we show that DEGNN is data efficient, learning with less data, and can generalize across scenarios such as unobserved orientation.
Zinan Zheng, Yang Liu 0245, Jia Li 0009, Jianhua Yao 0001, Yu Rong 0001
KDD3
2024 GAD-NR: Graph Anomaly Detection via Neighborhood Reconstruction
abstract
Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is a technique used to identify abnormal nodes within graphs, finding applications in network security, fraud detection, social media spam detection, and various other domains. A common method for GAD is Graph Auto-Encoders (GAEs), which encode graph data into node representations and identify anomalies by assessing the reconstruction quality of the graphs based on these representations. However, existing GAE models are primarily optimized for direct link reconstruction, resulting in nodes connected in the graph being clustered in the latent space. As a result, they excel at detecting cluster-type structural anomalies but struggle with more complex structural anomalies that do not conform to clusters. To address this limitation, we propose a novel solution called GAD-NR, a new variant of GAE that incorporates neighborhood reconstruction for graph anomaly detection. GAD-NR aims to reconstruct the entire neighborhood of a node, encompassing the local structure, self-attributes, and neighbor attributes, based on the corresponding node representation. By comparing the neighborhood reconstruction loss between anomalous nodes and normal nodes, GAD-NR can effectively detect any anomalies. Extensive experimentation conducted on six real-world datasets validates the effectiveness of GAD-NR, showcasing significant improvements (by up to 30%↑ in AUC) over state-of-the-art competitors. The source code for GAD-NR is openly available. Importantly, the comparative analysis reveals that the existing methods perform well only in detecting one or two types of anomalies out of the three types studied. In contrast, GAD-NR excels at detecting all three types of anomalies across the datasets, demonstrating its comprehensive anomaly detection capabilities.
Amit Roy, Juan Shu, Jia Li 0009, Carl Yang 0001, Olivier Elshocht, Jeroen Smeets, Pan Li 0005
WSDM3
2024 Weakly Supervised Anomaly Detection via Knowledge-Data Alignment
abstract
Anomaly detection (AD) plays a pivotal role in numerous web-based applications, including malware detection, anti-money laundering, device failure detection, and network fault analysis. Most methods, which rely on unsupervised learning, are hard to reach satisfactory detection accuracy due to the lack of labels. Weakly Supervised Anomaly Detection (WSAD) has been introduced with a limited number of labeled anomaly samples to enhance model performance. Nevertheless, it is still challenging for models, trained on an inadequate amount of labeled data, to generalize to unseen anomalies. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework, Knowledge-Data Alignment (KDAlign), to integrate rule knowledge, typically summarized by human experts, to supplement the limited labeled data. Specifically, we transpose these rules into the knowledge space and subsequently recast the incorporation of knowledge as the alignment of knowledge and data. To facilitate this alignment, we employ the Optimal Transport (OT) technique. We then incorporate the OT distance as an additional loss term to the original objective function of WSAD methodologies. Comprehensive experimental results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed KDAlign framework markedly surpasses its state-of-the-art counterparts, achieving superior performance across various anomaly types. Our codes are released at https://github.com/cshhzhao/KDAlign.
Haihong Zhao, Chenyi Zi, Yang Liu 0245, Chen Zhang 0013, Jia Li 0009
WWW6
2024 Galaxybase: A High Performance Native Distributed Graph Database for HTAP
abstract
We introduce Galaxybase, a native distributed graph database that addresses the increasing demands for processing large volumes of graph data in diverse industries like finance, manufacturing, and government. Designed to handle the requirements of both transactional and analytical workloads, Galaxybase stands out with its novel data storage and transaction mechanisms. At its core, Galaxybase utilizes a Log-Structured Adjacency List coupled with an Edge Page structure, optimizing read-write operations across a spectrum of tasks such as graph traversals and single edge queries. A notable aspect of Galaxybase is its execution of custom distributed transaction modes tailored for HTAP transactions, allowing for the facilitation of bidirectional and interactive transactions. It ensures data integrity and minimal latency while enabling simultaneous processing of OLTP and OLAP workloads without blocking. Experimental results show that Galaxybase achieves high throughput and low latency in both OLTP and OLAP workloads, across various graph query scenarios and resource conditions. Galaxybase has been deployed in leading banks, education, telecommunication and energy sectors in China, consistently maintaining robust performance for HTAP workloads over the years.
Bing Tong, Chen Zhang 0013, Jing Tang 0004, Leihong Yang, Qiye Li, Manwu Lin, Zhongxin Bao, Jia Li 0009, Lei Chen 0002
Proc. VLDB Endow.10
2023 A Co-training Approach for Noisy Time Series Learning
abstract
In this work, we focus on robust time series representation learning. Our assumption is that real-world time series is noisy and complementary information from different views of the same time series plays an important role while analyzing noisy input. Based on this, we create two views for the input time series through two different encoders. We conduct co-training based contrastive learning iteratively to learn the encoders. Our experiments demonstrate that this co-training approach leads to a significant improvement in performance. Especially, by leveraging the complementary information from different views, our proposed TS-CoT method can mitigate the impact of data noise and corruption. Empirical evaluations on four time series benchmarks in unsupervised and semi-supervised settings reveal that TS-CoT outperforms existing methods. Furthermore, the representations learned by TS-CoT can transfer well to downstream tasks through fine-tuning1.
Jia Li 0009, Fugee Tsung
CIKM3
2023 Decision Support System for Chronic Diseases Based on Drug-Drug Interactions
abstract
Many patients with chronic diseases resort to multiple medications to relieve various symptoms, which raises concerns about the safety of multiple medication use, as severe drug-drug antagonism can lead to serious adverse effects or even death. This paper presents a Decision Support System, called DSSDDI, based on drug-drug interactions to support doctors prescribing decisions. DSSDDI contains three modules, Drug-Drug Interaction (DDI) module, Medical Decision (MD) module and Medical Support (MS) module. The DDI module learns safer and more effective drug representations from the drug-drug interactions. To capture the potential causal relationship between DDI and medication use, the MD module considers the representations of patients and drugs as context, DDI and patients’ similarity as treatment, and medication use as outcome to construct counterfactual links for the representation learning. Furthermore, the MS module provides drug candidates to doctors with explanations. Experiments on the chronic data collected from the Hong Kong Chronic Disease Study Project and a public diagnostic data MIMIC-III demonstrate that DSSDDI can be a reliable reference for doctors in terms of safety and efficiency of clinical diagnosis, with significant improvements compared to baseline methods. Source code of the proposed DSSDDI is publicly available at https://github.com/TianBian95/DSSDDI.
Tian Bian, Yuli Jiang, Jia Li 0009, Tingyang Xu, Yu Rong 0001, Timothy C. Y. Kwok, Helen M. Meng, Hong Cheng 0001
ICDE3
2023 Robust Attributed Graph Alignment via Joint Structure Learning and Optimal Transport
abstract
Graph alignment, which aims at identifying corresponding entities across multiple networks, has been widely applied in various domains. As the graphs to be aligned are usually constructed from different sources, the inconsistency issues of structures and features between two graphs are ubiquitous in real-world applications. Most existing methods follow the "embed-then-cross-compare" paradigm which computes node embeddings in each graph and then processes node correspondences based on cross-graph embedding comparison. However, we find these methods are unstable and sub-optimal when structure or feature inconsistency appears. To this end, we propose SLOTAlign, an unsupervised graph alignment framework that jointly performs Structure Learning and Optimal Transport Alignment. We convert graph alignment to an optimal transport problem between two intra-graph matrices without the requirement of cross-graph comparison. We further incorporate multi-view structure learning to enhance graph representation power and reduce the effect of structure and feature inconsistency inherited across graphs. Moreover, an alternating scheme based algorithm has been developed to address the joint optimization problem in SLOTAlign and the provable convergence result are also established. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on six unsupervised graph alignment datasets and the DBP15K knowledge graph (KG) alignment benchmark dataset. The proposed SLOTAlign shows superior performance and strongest robustness over seven unsupervised graph alignment methods and five specialized KG alignment methods.1
Kangfei Zhao, Fugee Tsung, Jia Li 0009
ICDE6
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
KDD3
2023 Warpformer: A Multi-scale Modeling Approach for Irregular Clinical Time Series
abstract
Irregularly sampled multivariate time series are ubiquitous in various fields, particularly in healthcare, and exhibit two key characteristics: intra-series irregularity and inter-series discrepancy. Intra-series irregularity refers to the fact that time-series signals are often recorded at irregular intervals, while inter-series discrepancy refers to the significant variability in sampling rates among diverse series. However, recent advances in irregular time series have primarily focused on addressing intra-series irregularity, overlooking the issue of inter-series discrepancy. To bridge this gap, we present Warpformer, a novel approach that fully considers these two characteristics. In a nutshell, Warpformer has several crucial designs, including a specific input representation that explicitly characterizes both intra-series irregularity and inter-series discrepancy, a warping module that adaptively unifies irregular time series in a given scale, and a customized attention module for representation learning. Additionally, we stack multiple warping and attention modules to learn at different scales, producing multi-scale representations that balance coarse-grained and fine-grained signals for downstream tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on widely used datasets and a new large-scale benchmark built from clinical databases. The results demonstrate the superiority of Warpformer over existing state-of-the-art approaches.
Jiawen Zhang 0001, Shun Zheng 0001, Wei Cao 0007, Jiang Bian 0002, Jia Li 0009
KDD5
2023 Knowledge Graph Completion with Counterfactual Augmentation
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated great success in Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) by modeling how entities and relations interact in recent years. However, most of them are designed to learn from the observed graph structure, which appears to have imbalanced relation distribution during the training stage. Motivated by the causal relationship among the entities on a knowledge graph, we explore this defect through a counterfactual question: “would the relation still exist if the neighborhood of entities became different from observation?”. With a carefully designed instantiation of a causal model on the knowledge graph, we generate the counterfactual relations to answer the question by regarding the representations of entity pair given relation as context, structural information of relation-aware neighborhood as treatment, and validity of the composed triplet as the outcome. Furthermore, we incorporate the created counterfactual relations with the GNN-based framework on KGs to augment their learning of entity pair representations from both the observed and counterfactual relations. Experiments on benchmarks show that our proposed method outperforms existing methods on the task of KGC, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Moreover, we demonstrate that the proposed counterfactual relations-based augmentation also enhances the interpretability of the GNN-based framework through the path interpretations of predictions.
Heng Chang, Jia Li 0009
WWW3
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.4
2021 Mask-GVAE: Blind Denoising Graphs via Partition
abstract
We present Mask-GVAE, a variational generative model for blind denoising large discrete graphs, in which ”blind denoising” means we don’t require any supervision from clean graphs. We focus on recovering graph structures via deleting irrelevant edges and adding missing edges, which has many applications in real-world scenarios, for example, enhancing the quality of connections in a co-authorship network. Mask-GVAE makes use of the robustness in low eigenvectors of graph Laplacian against random noise and decomposes the input graph into several stable clusters. It then harnesses the huge computations by decoding probabilistic smoothed subgraphs in a variational manner. On a wide variety of benchmarks, Mask-GVAE outperforms competing approaches by a significant margin on PSNR and WL similarity.
Jia Li 0009, Mengzhou Liu, Pengyun Wang, Yong Wen, Lujia Pan, Hong Cheng 0001
WWW1
2020 Adversarial Attack on Community Detection by Hiding Individuals
abstract
It has been demonstrated that adversarial graphs, i.e., graphs with imperceptible perturbations added, can cause deep graph models to fail on node/graph classification tasks. In this paper, we extend adversarial graphs to the problem of community detection which is much more difficult. We focus on black-box attack and aim to hide targeted individuals from the detection of deep graph community detection models, which has many applications in real-world scenarios, for example, protecting personal privacy in social networks and understanding camouflage patterns in transaction networks. We propose an iterative learning framework that takes turns to update two modules: one working as the constrained graph generator and the other as the surrogate community detection model. We also find that the adversarial graphs generated by our method can be transferred to other learning based community detection models.
Jia Li 0009, Zhichao Han 0003, Yu Rong 0001, Hong Cheng 0001, Junzhou Huang
WWW1
2019 Predicting Path Failure In Time-Evolving Graphs
abstract
In this paper we use a time-evolving graph which consists of a sequence of graph snapshots over time to model many real-world networks. We study the path classification problem in a time-evolving graph, which has many applications in real-world scenarios, for example, predicting path failure in a telecommunication network and predicting path congestion in a traffic network in the near future. In order to capture the temporal dependency and graph structure dynamics, we design a novel deep neural network named Long Short-Term Memory R-GCN (LRGCN). LRGCN considers temporal dependency between time-adjacent graph snapshots as a special relation with memory, and uses relational GCN to jointly process both intra-time and inter-time relations. We also propose a new path representation method named self-attentive path embedding (SAPE), to embed paths of arbitrary length into fixed-length vectors. Through experiments on a real-world telecommunication network and a traffic network in California, we demonstrate the superiority of LRGCN to other competing methods in path failure prediction, and prove the effectiveness of SAPE on path representation.
Jia Li 0009, Zhichao Han 0003, Hong Cheng 0001, Jiao Su, Pengyun Wang, Lujia Pan
KDD1
2019 Semi-Supervised Graph Classification: A Hierarchical Graph Perspective
abstract
Node classification and graph classification are two graph learning problems that predict the class label of a node and the class label of a graph respectively. A node of a graph usually represents a real-world entity, e.g., a user in a social network, or a protein in a protein-protein interaction network. In this work, we consider a more challenging but practically useful setting, in which a node itself is a graph instance. This leads to a hierarchical graph perspective which arises in many domains such as social network, biological network and document collection. For example, in a social network, a group of people with shared interests forms a user group, whereas a number of user groups are interconnected via interactions or common members. We study the node classification problem in the hierarchical graph where a “node” is a graph instance, e.g., a user group in the above example. As labels are usually limited in real-world data, we design two novel semi-supervised solutions named SEmi-supervised grAph cLassification via Cautious/Active Iteration (or SEAL-C/AI in short). SEAL-C/AI adopt an iterative framework that takes turns to build or update two classifiers, one working at the graph instance level and the other at the hierarchical graph level. To simplify the representation of the hierarchical graph, we propose a novel supervised, self-attentive graph embedding method called SAGE, which embeds graph instances of arbitrary size into fixed-length vectors. Through experiments on synthetic data and Tencent QQ group data, we demonstrate that SEAL-C/AI not only outperform competing methods by a significant margin in terms of accuracy/Macro-F1, but also generate meaningful interpretations of the learned representations.
Jia Li 0009, Yu Rong 0001, Hong Cheng 0001, Helen M. Meng, Wenbing Huang 0001, Junzhou Huang
WWW1
2018 TATC: Predicting Alzheimer's Disease with Actigraphy Data
abstract
With the increase of elderly population, Alzheimer's Disease (AD), as the most common cause of dementia among the elderly, is affecting more and more senior people. It is crucial for a patient to receive accurate and timely diagnosis of AD. Current diagnosis relies on doctors' experience and clinical test, which, unfortunately, may not be performed until noticeable AD symptoms are developed. In this work, we present our novel solution named time-aware TICC and CNN (TATC), for predicting AD from actigraphy data. TATC is a multivariate time series classification method using a neural attention-based deep learning approach. It not only performs accurate prediction of AD risk, but also generates meaningful interpretation of daily behavior pattern of subjects. TATC provides an automatic, low-cost solution for continuously monitoring the change of physical activity of subjects in daily living environment. We believe the future deployment of TATC can benefit both doctors and patients in early detection of potential AD risk.
Jia Li 0009, Yu Rong 0001, Helen M. Meng, Zhihui Lu 0003, Timothy C. Y. Kwok, Hong Cheng 0001
KDD1