This paper introduces OrthoReg, a simple yet effective Graph-regularized MLP model for semi-supervised node representation learning. We first demonstrate, through empirical observations and theoretical analysis, that node embeddings learned from conventional GR-MLPs suffer from the over-correlation issue. This issue arises when a few dominant singular values overwhelm the embedding space, leading to the limited expressive power of the learned node representations. To mitigate this problem, we propose a novel GR-MLP model called OrthoReg. By incorporating a soft regularization loss on the correlation matrix of node embeddings, OrthoReg explicitly encourages orthogonal node representations, effectively avoiding over-correlated representations. Compared to the currently popular GNN models, our OrthoReg possesses two distinct advantages: 1) Much faster inference speed, particularly for large-scale graphs. 2) Significantly superior performance in inductive cold-start settings. Experiments on semi-supervised node classification tasks, together with the extensive ablation studies, have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed designs.

The knowledge graph (KG) enhanced recommendation system has shown superior performance and attracted considerable attention. In recent years, researchers have attempted to apply graph neural networks (GNNs) and build end-to-end knowledge graph enhanced recommendation systems. Although several methods are proposed, it is still challenging to apply GNNs to solve the problem of KG enhanced recommendation due to the heterogeneous, redundant, and large-scale nature of KG versus the homogeneous nature of GNNs. To address the limitations of existing techniques, we propose a transformed heterogeneous graph neural network (TRANSGNN), an item-centric and GNN-powered framework that can better explore the heterogeneous, redundant, and large-scale relations among items in KG for an effective and efficient KG enhanced top- K recommendation. In particular, we propose an item-centric graph transformation module to transform the heterogeneous KG into a homogeneous item-item graph. This scheme allows us to distill the knowledge from the KG and encode the heterogeneous, redundant, and large-scale item-item relationship into a smaller, compact, homogeneous graph, better fitting the GNNs architecture that prefers homogeneous and small-scale graph input. We further introduce a collaborative graph fusion module to fuse the item-wise KG relational signals and the collaborative signals by augmenting the collaborative graph with the transformed item-item graph. Next, we propose to use a graph collaborative encoder over the augmented graph to propagate information along with high-order connectivity. The proposed framework is general and can be easily extended with advanced KG embedding and GNN models. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in significantly (up to 23%) improving the KG enhanced recommendation performance over the state-of-the-art methods, such as KGIN, KGAT, KGNN-LS in both regular and cold-start settings. The proposed approach is also efficient with significantly (up to 31%) fewer parameters.

Graph Neural Network (GNN), as a powerful representation learning model on graph data, attracts much attention across various disciplines. However, recent studies show that GNN is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. How to make GNN more robust? What are the key vulnerabilities in GNN? How to address the vulnerabilities and defend GNN against the adversarial attacks? Adversarial training has shown to be effective in improving the robustness of traditional Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). However, existing adversarial training works mainly focus on the image data, which consists of continuous features, while the features and structures of graph data are often discrete. Moreover, rather than assuming each sample is independent and identically distributed as in DNN, GNN leverages the contextual information across the graph (e.g., neighborhoods of a node). Thus, existing adversarial training techniques cannot be directly applied to defend GNN.In this paper, we propose ContrastNet, an effective adversarial defense framework for GNN. In particular, we propose an adversarial contrastive learning method to train the GNN over the adversarial space. To further improve the robustness of GNN, we investigate the latent vulnerabilities in every component of a GNN encoder and propose corresponding refining strategies. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ContrastNet in improving the robustness of popular GNN variants, such as Graph Convolutional Network and GraphSage, under various types of adversarial attacks.

Knowledge graph (KG) enhanced recommendation has demonstrated improved performance in the recommendation system (RecSys) and attracted considerable research interest. Recently the literature has adopted neural graph networks (GNNs) on the collaborative knowledge graph and built an end-to-end KG-enhanced RecSys. However, the majority of these approaches have three limitations: (1) treat the collaborative knowledge graph as a homogeneous graph and overlook the highly heterogeneous relationships among items, (2) lack of design to explicitly leverage the rich side information, and (3) overlook the rich knowledge in user preference.To fill this gap, in this paper, we explore the rich, heterogeneous relationship among items and propose a new KG-enhanced recommendation model called Collaborative Meta-Knowledge Enhanced Recommender System (MetaKRec). In particular, we focus on modeling the rich, heterogeneous semantic relationships among items and construct several collaborative Meta-KGs to explicitly depict the relatedness of the items under the guidance of meta-knowledge. In addition to the knowledge obtained from KG, we leverage user knowledge that extracts from user preference to construct the Meta-KGs. The constructed Meta-KGs can capture the knowledge from both the knowledge graph and user preference. Furthermore. we utilize a light convolution encoder to recursively integrate the item relationship in each collaborative Meta-KGs. This scheme allows us to explicitly gather the heterogeneous semantic relationships among items and encode them into the representations of items. In addition, we propose channel attention to fuse the item and user representations from different Meta-KGs. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world benchmark datasets, demonstrating significant gains over the state-of-the-art baselines on both regular and cold-start recommendation settings.

Knowledge graph enhanced information retrieval systems have attracted considerable attention due to their ability to improve performance and provide additional explainability. As the knowledge graphs usually include fruitful facts, they are also good sources of side information. However, recent studies have shown that the usefulness of knowledge graphs depends highly on their representation, e.g., the embeddings of entities and relations. Embedding entities and relations in low-dimensional space is a successful knowledge graph representation solution. Most of the works lie in modeling symmetry/asymmetry/composition/inversion relations but pay less attention to the hierarchical relations. Recent studies have observed the fact that there exist rich semantic hierarchical relations in knowledge graphs such as Freebase (entities are connected in a taxonomic hierarchy) and WordNet (entities are synsets linked together in a hierarchy).To address the above problems, we propose Hierarchical Hyperbolic Neural Graph Embedding (H2E), a new knowledge graph representation approach, which is able to better preserve hierarchical relations. Specifically, the entities/relations representations are learned in a hyperbolic polar embedding space. In a hyperbolic polar embedding space, the entity and relation are modeled as a dual-embedding with modulus embedding part and phase embedding part, enabling the explicitly modeling of two types of hierarchies: inter-level hierarchy and intra-level hierarchy. As the polar embedding is defined i n hyperbolic space, the ability of modeling and inferring hierarchical relations are mutual enhanced. In addition, by noticing the existence of the rich relational context, we propose an attentional neural context aggregation to adaptively integrate the relational context for further enhancing the ability to preserve the hierarchical relations. The empirical study on three benchmark datasets for the link prediction task demonstrates significant performance gains compared to some existing state-of-the-art methods and verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method on hierarchical relations.

The sequential patterns within the user interactions are pivotal for representing the user's preference and capturing latent relationships among items. The recent advancements of sequence modeling by Transformers advocate the community to devise more effective encoders for the sequential recommendation. Most existing sequential methods assume users are deterministic. However, item-item transitions might fluctuate significantly in several item aspects and exhibit randomness of user interests. This stochastic characteristics brings up a solid demand to include uncertainties in representing sequences and items. Additionally, modeling sequences and items with uncertainties expands users' and items' interaction spaces, thus further alleviating cold-start problems.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have gradually become valuable assets for many AI applications. In a KG, a node denotes an entity, and an edge (or link) denotes a relationship between the entities represented by the nodes. Knowledge graph completion infers and predicts missing edges in a KG automatically. Knowledge graph embeddings have shed light on addressing this task. Recent research embeds KGs in hyperbolic (negatively curved) space instead of conventional Euclidean (zero curved) space and is effective in capturing hierarchical structures. However, as multi-relational graphs, KGs are not structured uniformly and display intrinsic heterogeneous structures. They usually contain rich types of structures, such as hierarchical and cyclic typed structures. Embedding KGs in single-curvature space, such as Euclidean or hyperbolic space, overlooks the intrinsic heterogeneous structures of KGs, and therefore cannot accurately capture their structures. To address this issue, we propose Mixed-Curvature Multi-Relational Graph Neural Network (M2GNN), a generic approach that embeds multi-relational KGs in a mixed-curvature space for knowledge graph completion. Specifically, we define and construct a mixed-curvature space through a product manifold combining multiple single-curvature spaces (e.g., spherical, hyperbolic, or Euclidean) with the purpose of modeling a variety of structures. However, constructing a mixed-curvature space typically requires manually defining the fixed curvatures, which needs domain knowledge and additional data analysis. Improperly defined curvature space also cannot capture the structures of KGs accurately. To address this problem, we set mixed-curvatures as trainable parameters to better capture the underlying structures of the KGs. Furthermore, we propose a Graph Neural Updater by leveraging the heterogeneous relational context in mixed-curvature space to improve the quality of the embedding. Experiments on three KG datasets demonstrate that the proposed M2GNN can outperform its single geometry counterpart as well as state-of-the-art embedding methods on the KG completion task.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are becoming a modish way for education, which provides a large-scale and open-access learning opportunity for students to grasp the knowledge. To attract students' interest, the recommendation system is applied by MOOCs providers to recommend courses to students. However, as a course usually consists of a number of video lectures, with each one covering some specific knowledge concepts, directly recommending courses overlook students' interest to some specific knowledge concepts. To fill this gap, in this paper, we study the problem of knowledge concept recommendation. We propose an end-to-end graph neural network based approach calledAttentional Heterogeneous Graph Convolutional Deep Knowledge Recommender (ACKRec) for knowledge concept recommendation in MOOCs. Like other recommendation problems, it suffers from sparsity issue. To address this issue, we leverage both content information and context information to learn the representation of entities via graph convolution network. In addition to students and knowledge concepts, we consider other types of entities (e.g., courses, videos, teachers) and construct a heterogeneous information network (HIN) to capture the corresponding fruitful semantic relationships among different types of entities and incorporate them into the representation learning process. Specifically, we use meta-path on the HIN to guide the propagation of students' preferences. With the help of these meta-paths, the students' preference distribution with respect to a candidate knowledge concept can be captured. Furthermore, we propose an attention mechanism to adaptively fuse the context information from different meta-paths, in order to capture the different interests of different students. To learn the parameters of the proposed model, we propose to utilize extended matrix factorization (MF). A series of experiments are conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness of ACKRec across multiple popular metrics compared with state-of-the-art baseline methods. The promising results show that the proposed ACKRec is able to effectively recommend knowledge concepts to students pursuing online learning in MOOCs.

Information systems have widely been the target of malware attacks. Traditional signature-based malicious program detection algorithms can only detect known malware and are prone to evasion techniques such as binary obfuscation, while behavior-based approaches highly rely on the malware training samples and incur prohibitively high training cost. To address the limitations of existing techniques, we propose MatchGNet, a heterogeneous Graph Matching Network model to learn the graph representation and similarity metric simultaneously based on the invariant graph modeling of the program's execution behaviors. We conduct a systematic evaluation of our model and show that it is accurate in detecting malicious program behavior and can help detect malware attacks with less false positives. MatchGNet outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in malware detection by generating 50% less false positives while keeping zero false negatives.

Program or process is an integral part of almost every IT/OT system. Can we trust the identity/ID (e.g., executable name) of the program? To avoid detection, malware may disguise itself using the ID of a legitimate program, and a system tool (e.g., PowerShell) used by the attackers may have the fake ID of another common software, which is less sensitive. However, existing intrusion detection techniques often overlook this critical program reidentification problem (i.e., checking the program's identity). In this paper, we propose an attentional heterogeneous graph neural network model (DeepHGNN) to verify the program's identity based on its system behaviors. The key idea is to leverage the representation learning of the heterogeneous program behavior graph to guide the reidentification process. We formulate the program reidentification as a graph classification problem and develop an effective attentional heterogeneous graph embedding algorithm to solve it. Extensive experiments — using real-world enterprise monitoring data and real attacks — demonstrate the effectiveness of DeepHGNN across multiple popular metrics and the robustness to the normal dynamic changes like program version upgrades.

The financial contagion describes a widespread phenomenon of the interdependency for pairs of stock time series during the market abnormality periods. Since the interdependency rule between stocks varies in different periods, it is difficult to capture the interdependency rule for stocks related to the market status effectively. We define this interdependency rule as, the co-movement pattern, a high-dimensional co-varying relationship between pairs of stock time series and propose a Co-movement Attention Model (CAM) to discover the co-movement patterns for the stocks related to the market status. With the discovered patterns, CAM focuses on the stock-level abnormality periods by the co-movement attention automatically. CAM is trained under the supervision of the stock sector label information. CAM has the ability to model financial contagion and detect global market abnormality periods, by modeling co-movement patterns on every pair-wise stocks. We verify our methods on the real-world stock data and compare it with state of the art methods. The experimental result shows that our method not only captures the co-movement attentions with better quantitative metric values but also covers more real market abnormalities than the other alternatives.

Mining from neuroimaging data is becoming increasingly popular in the field of healthcare and bioinformatics, due to its potential to discover clinically meaningful structure patterns that could facilitate the understanding and diagnosis of neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. Most recent research concentrates on applying subgraph mining techniques to discover connected subgraph patterns in the brain network. However, the underlying brain network structure is complicated. As a shallow linear model, subgraph mining cannot capture the highly non-linear structures, resulting in sub-optimal patterns. Therefore, how to learn representations that can capture the highly non-linearity of brain networks and preserve the underlying structures is a critical problem.