Current machine-learning based software vulnerability detection methods are primarily conducted at the function-level. However, a key limitation of these methods is that they do not indicate the specific lines of code contributing to vulnerabilities. This limits the ability of developers to efficiently inspect and interpret the predictions from a learnt model, which is crucial for integrating machine-learning based tools into the software development work-flow. Graph-based models have shown promising performance in function-level vulnerability detection, but their capability for statement-level vulnerability detection has not been extensively explored. While interpreting function-level predictions through explainable AI is one promising direction, we herein consider the statement-level software vulnerability detection task from a fully supervised learning perspective. We propose a novel deep learning framework, LineVD, which formulates statement-level vulnerability detection as a node classification task. LineVD leverages control and data dependencies between statements using graph neural networks, and a transformer-based model to encode the raw source code tokens. In particular, by addressing the conflicting outputs between function-level and statement-level information, LineVD significantly improve the prediction performance without vulnerability status for function code. We have conducted extensive experiments against a large-scale collection of real-world C/C++ vulnerabilities obtained from multiple real-world projects, and demonstrate an increase of 105% in F1-score over the current state-of-the-art.

Existing recommender systems in the e-commerce domain primarily focus on generating a set of relevant items as recommendations; however, few existing systems utilize underlying item attributes as a key organizing principle in presenting recommendations to users. Mining important attributes of items from customer perspectives and presenting them along with item sets as recommendations can provide users more explainability and help them make better purchase decision. In this work, we generalize the attribute-aware item-set recommendation problem, and develop a new approach to generate sets of items (recommendations) with corresponding important attributes (explanations) that can best justify why the items are recommended to users. In particular, we propose a system that learns important attributes from historical user behavior to derive item set recommendations, so that an organized view of recommendations and their attribute-driven explanations can help users more easily understand how the recommendations relate to their preferences. Our approach is geared towards real world scenarios: we expect a solution to be scalable to billions of items, and be able to learn item and attribute relevance automatically from user behavior without human annotations. To this end, we propose a multi-step learning-based framework called Extract-Expect-Explain (EX3), which is able to adaptively select recommended items and important attributes for users. We experiment on a large-scale real-world benchmark and the results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by an 11.35% increase on NDCG with adaptive explainability for item set recommendation.

Online recommendation is an essential functionality across a variety of services, including e-commerce and video streaming, where items to buy, watch, or read are suggested to users. Justifying recommendations, i.e., explaining why a user might like the recommended item, has been shown to improve user satisfaction and persuasiveness of the recommendation. In this paper, we develop a method for generating post-hoc justifications that can be applied to the output of any recommendation algorithm. Existing post-hoc methods are often limited in providing diverse justifications, as they either use only one of many available types of input data, or rely on the predefined templates. We address these limitations of earlier approaches by developing J-Recs, a method for producing concise and diverse justifications. J-Recs is a recommendation model-agnostic method that generates diverse justifications based on various types of product and user data (e.g., purchase history and product attributes). The challenge of jointly processing multiple types of data is addressed by designing a principled graph-based approach for justification generation. In addition to theoretical analysis, we present an extensive evaluation on synthetic and real-world data. Our results show that J-Recs satisfies desirable properties of justifications, and efficiently produces effective justifications, matching user preferences up to 20% more accurately than baselines.

Can one build a knowledge graph (KG) for all products in the world? Knowledge graphs have firmly established themselves as valuable sources of information for search and question answering, and it is natural to wonder if a KG can contain information about products offered at online retail sites. There have been several successful examples of generic KGs, but organizing information about products poses many additional challenges, including sparsity and noise of structured data for products, complexity of the domain with millions of product types and thousands of attributes, heterogeneity across large number of categories, as well as large and constantly growing number of products.

Taxonomies have found wide applications in various domains, especially online for item categorization, browsing, and search. Despite the prevalent use of online catalog taxonomies, most of them in practice are maintained by humans, which is labor-intensive and difficult to scale. While taxonomy construction from scratch is considerably studied in the literature, how to effectively enrich existing incomplete taxonomies remains an open yet important research question. Taxonomy enrichment not only requires the robustness to deal with emerging terms but also the consistency between existing taxonomy structure and new term attachment. In this paper, we present a self-supervised end-to-end framework, Octet, for Online Catalog Taxonomy EnrichmenT. Octet leverages heterogeneous information unique to online catalog taxonomies such as user queries, items, and their relations to the taxonomy nodes while requiring no other supervision than the existing taxonomies. We propose to distantly train a sequence labeling model for term extraction and employ graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture the taxonomy structure as well as the query-item-taxonomy interactions for term attachment. Extensive experiments in different online domains demonstrate the superiority of Octet over state-of-the-art methods via both automatic and human evaluations. Notably, Octet enriches an online catalog taxonomy in production to 2 times larger in the open-world evaluation.

Given multiple input signals, how can we infer node importance in a knowledge graph (KG)? Node importance estimation is a crucial and challenging task that can benefit a lot of applications including recommendation, search, and query disambiguation. A key challenge towards this goal is how to effectively use input from different sources. On the one hand, a KG is a rich source of information, with multiple types of nodes and edges. On the other hand, there are external input signals, such as the number of votes or pageviews, which can directly tell us about the importance of entities in a KG. While several methods have been developed to tackle this problem, their use of these external signals has been limited as they are not designed to consider multiple signals simultaneously. In this paper, we develop an end-to-end model MultiImport, which infers latent node importance from multiple, potentially overlapping, input signals. MultiImport is a latent variable model that captures the relation between node importance and input signals, and effectively learns from multiple signals with potential conflicts. Also, MultiImport provides an effective estimator based on attentive graph neural networks. We ran experiments on real-world KGs to show that MultiImport handles several challenges involved with inferring node importance from multiple input signals, and consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving up to 23.7% higher [email protected] than the state-of-the-art method.

How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher [email protected] than the state of the art.

Blockmodelling is an important technique in social network analysis for discovering the latent structure in graphs. A blockmodel partitions the set of vertices in a graph into groups, where there are either many edges or few edges between any two groups. For example, in the reply graph of a question and answer forum, blockmodelling can identify the group of experts by their many replies to questioners, and the group of questioners by their lack of replies among themselves but many replies from experts.

Existing graph compression techniquesmostly focus on static graphs. However for many practical graphs such as social networks the edge weights frequently change over time. This phenomenon raises the question of how to compress dynamic graphs while maintaining most of their intrinsic structural patterns at each time snapshot. In this paper we show that the encoding cost of a dynamic graph is proportional to the heterogeneity of a three dimensional tensor that represents the dynamic graph. We propose an effective algorithm that compresses a dynamic graph by reducing the heterogeneity of its tensor representation, and at the same time also maintains a maximum lossy compression error at any time stamp of the dynamic graph. The bounded compression error benefits compressed graphs in that they retain good approximations of the original edge weights, and hence properties of the original graph (such as shortest paths) are well preserved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that compresses weighted dynamic graphs with bounded lossy compression error at any time snapshot of the graph.