Many internet companies operate multiple flagship applications, each of which can be regarded as a distinct business domain, covering areas such as video, reading, and gaming. Within each domain, diverse recommendation scenarios coexist, and users engage in various tasks with heterogeneous behaviors. In our industrial setting, we observe three key phenomena that existing methods rarely address: (i) users' Cross-Domain Interests (CDI) are weakly exploited, since behavior sequences are often pooled for efficiency, losing transferable cross-domain dependencies; (ii) multi-domain, scenario, and task variations are under-modeled, making it difficult to capture fine-grained complementarities; and (iii) multimodal features remain misaligned with ID features, especially when different domains emphasize different modalities. These gaps hinder cross-product collaboration.

Generative Recommenders (GRs), exemplified by the Hierarchical Sequential Transduction Unit (HSTU), have emerged as a powerful paradigm for modeling long user interaction sequences. However, we observe that their ''flat-sequence'' assumption overlooks the rich, intrinsic structure of user behavior. This leads to two key limitations: a failure to capture the temporal hierarchy of session-based engagement, and computational inefficiency, as dense attention introduces significant noise that obscures true preference signals within semantically sparse histories, which deteriorates the quality of the learned representations. To this end, we propose a novel framework named HPGR (Hierarchical and Preference-aware Generative Recommender), built upon a two-stage paradigm that injects these crucial structural priors into the model to handle the drawback. Specifically, HPGR comprises two synergistic stages. First, a structure-aware pre-training stage employs a session-based Masked Item Modeling (MIM) objective to learn a hierarchically-informed and semantically rich item representation space. Second, a preference-aware fine-tuning stage leverages these powerful representations to implement a Preference-Guided Sparse Attention mechanism, which dynamically constrains computation to only the most relevant historical items, enhancing both efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio. Empirical experiments on a large-scale proprietary industrial dataset from APPGallery and an online A/B test verify that HPGR achieves state-of-the-art performance over multiple strong baselines, including HSTU and MTGR.

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.

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.

The combination of temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) and relative positional features is effective for dynamic link prediction tasks because it improves the modeling of relationships between nodes. We summarize the positional feature as Temporal Relative Positional Encoding (TRPE), which incorporates local subgraph computation and temporal decay effects compared to RPE in static graph learning. However, existing dynamic graph learning methods with TRPE are limited by high computational costs and poor scalability due to information loss in neighborhood compression. To address this, we introduce a scalable framework that enhances TRPE computation by integrating it with temporal clusters. Our method replaces high-order relative position information with cluster-based computation to reduce computation costs. Each node is assigned to a cluster based on its structural role, rather than just randomly sketched, reducing information loss during neighborhood compression. TGNNs with our proposed framework are more expressive than existing dynamic graph learning methods and offer greater scalability than existing TRPE models. Our experimental results on seven standard temporal link prediction benchmarks demonstrate that our proposed model achieves comparable or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models.

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly influenced advancements in sequential recommendation. Nevertheless, the integration and alignment of LLMs with sequence recommenders is often underexploited in current research. Existing LLM-based sequential recommenders mostly rely on textual descriptions, neglecting user visual preferences and suffering from LLM hallucination, which can result in suboptimal recommendations. To address these challenges, we propose AlmostRec, a novel framework that incorporates multimodal information, including historical interaction IDs, textual descriptions, and images of items into large foundation models, to facilitate controllable predictions. Instead of employing a textual LLM, AlmostRec utilizes a large multimodal model (LMM) as a backbone, complemented by a content-behavior guidance module to align multimodal information. The framework's ID prediction objective, enhanced via the parameter-efficient LoRA approach, ensures a principal alignment with the sequential recommendation and is not swayed by hallucinations. AlmostRec effectively bridges the gap between large vision-language models with sequential recommenders, offering contextually relevant predictions in multimodal scenarios. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of AlmostRec compared to both traditional and recent LLM-based recommendation approaches.

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.

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.

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.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) seeks to utilize knowledge from different domains to alleviate the problem of data sparsity in the target recommendation domain, and has been gaining more attention in recent years. Although there have been notable advances in this area, most current methods represent users and items in Euclidean space, which is not ideal for handling long-tail distributed data in recommendation systems. Additionally, adding data from other domains can worsen the long-tail characteristics of the entire dataset, making it harder to train CDR models effectively. Recent studies have shown that hyperbolic methods are particularly suitable for modeling long-tail distributions, which has led us to explore hyperbolic representations for users and items in CDR scenarios. However, due to the distinct characteristics of the different domains, applying hyperbolic representation learning to CDR tasks is quite challenging. In this paper, we introduce a new framework called Hyperbolic Contrastive Learning (HCTS), designed to capture the unique features of each domain while enabling efficient knowledge transfer between domains. We achieve this by embedding users and items from each domain separately and mapping them onto distinct hyperbolic manifolds with adjustable curvatures for prediction. To improve the representations of users and items in the target domain, we develop a hyperbolic contrastive learning module for knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that hyperbolic manifolds are a promising alternative to Euclidean space for CDR tasks. The codes are available at https://github.com/EnkiXin/hcts.

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

Graph Neural Architecture Search (GNAS) has achieved superior performance on various graph-structured tasks. However, existing GNAS studies overlook the applications of GNAS in resource-constraint scenarios. This paper proposes to design a joint graph data and architecture mechanism, which identifies important sub-architectures via the valuable graph data. To search for optimal lightweight Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), we propose a Lightweight Graph Neural Architecture Search with Graph SparsIfication and Network Pruning (GASSIP) method. In particular, GASSIP comprises an operation-pruned architecture search module to enable efficient lightweight GNN search. Meanwhile, we design a novel curriculum graph data sparsification module with an architecture-aware edge-removing difficulty measurement to help select optimal sub-architectures. With the aid of two differentiable masks, we iteratively optimize these two modules to efficiently search for the optimal lightweight architecture. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of GASSIP. Particularly, our method achieves on-par or even higher node classification performance with half or fewer model parameters of searched GNNs and a sparser graph.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in the task of graph classification and its diverse downstream real-world applications. Despite the huge success in learning graph representations, current GNN models have demonstrated their vulnerability to potentially existent adversarial examples on graph-structured data. Existing approaches are either limited to structure attacks or restricted to local informatio, urging for the design of a more general attack framework on graph classification, which faces significant challenges due to the complexity of generatinglocal-node-leveladversarial examples using theglobal-graph-levelinformation. To address this ”global-to-local” attack challenge, we present a novel and general frameworkCAMAto generate adversarial examples via manipulating graph structure and node features. Specifically, we make use of Graph Class Activation Mapping and its variant to produce node-level importance corresponding to the graph classification task. Then through a heuristic design of algorithms, we can perform both feature and structure attacks under unnoticeable perturbation budgets with the help of both node-level and subgraph-level importance. Experiments towards attacking four state-of-the-art graph classification models on six real-world benchmarks verify the flexibility and effectiveness of our framework.

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.

With the success of the graph embedding model in both academic and industry areas, the robustness of graph embedding against adversarial attack inevitably becomes a crucial problem in graph learning. Existing works usually perform the attack in a white-box fashion: they need to access the predictions/labels to construct their adversarial loss. However, the inaccessibility of predictions/labels makes the white-box attack impractical for a real graph learning system. This paper promotes current frameworks in a more general and flexible sense -- we consider the ability of various types of graph embedding models to remain resilient against black-box driven attacks. We investigate the theoretical connection between graph signal processing and graph embedding models, and formulate the graph embedding model as a general graph signal process with a corresponding graph filter. Therefore, we design a generalized adversarial attack framework: GF-Attack. Without accessing any labels and model predictions, GF-Attack can perform the attack directly on the graph filter in a black-box fashion. We further prove that GF-Attack can perform an effective attack without assumption on the number of layers/window-size of graph embedding models. To validate the generalization of GF-Attack, we construct GF-Attack on five popular graph embedding models. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of GF-Attack on several benchmark datasets.

Variants of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for representation learning have been proposed recently and achieved fruitful results in various fields. Among them, Graph Attention Network (GAT) first employs a self-attention strategy to learn attention weights for each edge in the spatial domain. However, learning the attentions over edges can only focus on the local information of graphs and greatly increases the computational costs. In this paper, we first introduce the attention mechanism in the spectral domain of graphs and present Spectral Graph Attention Network (SpGAT) that learns representations for different frequency components regarding weighted filters and graph wavelets bases. In this way, SpGAT can better capture global patterns of graphs in an efficient manner with much fewer learned parameters than that of GAT. Further, to reduce the computational cost of SpGAT brought by the eigen-decomposition, we propose a fast approximation variant SpGAT-Cheby. We thoroughly evaluate the performance of SpGAT and SpGAT-Cheby in semi-supervised node classification tasks and verify the effectiveness of the learned attentions in the spectral domain.