Real-world user behaviors are often noisy due to factors such as human errors, uncertainty, and behavioral ambiguity, which can lead to degraded recommendation performance. To address this issue, recent approaches widely adopt self-supervised learning (SSL), particularly contrastive learning, by generating perturbed views of user interaction sequences and maximizing their mutual information to improve model robustness. However, these methods heavily rely on their pre-defined static augmentation strategies~(where the augmentation type remains fixed once chosen) to construct augmented views, leading to two critical challenges: (1) the optimal augmentation type can vary significantly across different scenarios; (2) inappropriate augmentations may even degrade recommendation performance, limiting the effectiveness of SSL. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive augmentation framework. We first unify existing basic augmentation operations into a unified formulation via structured transformation matrices. Building on this formulation, we introduce AsarRec, an Adaptive Sequential Augmentation for Robust Sequential Recommendation. To enable stable end-to-end optimization of discrete and strongly constrained augmentations, AsarRec learns to generate transformation matrices by encoding user sequences into probabilistic transition matrices and projecting them into hard semi-doubly stochastic matrices via a differentiable Semi-Sinkhorn algorithm. To ensure that the learned augmentations benefit downstream performance, we jointly optimize three objectives: diversity (encouraging distinct views), semantic invariance (preserving semantic consistency among views), and informativeness (identifying augmentations most beneficial to recommendation). Extensive experiments on four benchmarks under varying noise levels validate the effectiveness of AsarRec, demonstrating its superior robustness and consistent improvements.

Multi-personality generation for LLMs, enabling simultaneous embodiment of multiple personalization attributes, is a fundamental challenge. Existing retraining-based approaches are costly and poorly scalable, while decoding-time methods often rely on external models or heuristics, limiting flexibility and robustness. In this paper, we propose a novel Multi-Personality Generation (MPG) framework under the decoding-time combination paradigm. It flexibly controls multi-personality without relying on scarce multi-dimensional models or extra training, leveraging implicit density ratios in single-dimensional models as a ''free lunch'' to reformulate the task as sampling from a target strategy aggregating these ratios. To implement MPG efficiently, we design Speculative Chunk-level based Rejection sampling (SCR), which generates responses in chunks and parallelly validates them via estimated thresholds within a sliding window. This significantly reduces computational overhead while maintaining high-quality generation. Experiments on MBTI personality and Role-Playing demonstrate the effectiveness of MPG, showing improvements up to 16%–18%. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Libra117/MPG.

As an important graph pre-training method, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) continues to play a crucial role in the ongoing surge of research on graph foundation models or LLM as enhancer for graphs. Traditional GCL optimizes InfoNCE by using augmentations to define self-supervised tasks, treating augmented pairs as positive samples and others as negative. However, this leads to semantically similar pairs being classified as negative, causing significant sampling bias and limiting performance. In this paper, we argue that GCL is essentially a Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning problem, where the definition of self-supervised tasks should be semantically guided, i.e., augmented samples with similar semantics are considered positive, while others, with unknown semantics, are treated as unlabeled. From this perspective, the key lies in how to extract semantic information. To achieve this, we propose IFL-GCL, using InfoNCE as a "free lunch" to extract semantic information. Specifically, We first prove that under InfoNCE, the representation similarity of node pairs aligns with the probability that the corresponding contrastive sample is positive. Then we redefine the maximum likelihood objective based on the corrected samples, leading to a new InfoNCE loss function. Extensive experiments on both the graph pretraining framework and LLM as an enhancer show significantly improvements of IFL-GCL in both IID and OOD scenarios, achieving up to a 9.05% improvement, validating the effectiveness of semantically guided. Code for IFL-GCL is publicly available at: https://github.com/Camel-Prince/IFL-GCL.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across various domains, yet their tendency to generate hallucinations remains a critical barrier to their practical reliability.Confidence calibration addresses this challenge by aligning a model's confidence with its actual accuracy, improving self-evaluation and trustworthiness.However, traditional confidence calibration, operating at response level, are inadequate for long-form generation, which involve complex outputs composed of multiple atomic facts, each with varying confidence, correctness, and relevance to the query.To overcome this limitation, we propose a fact-level confidence calibration framework that evaluates and adjusts confidence at the granularity of individual facts, incorporating both relevance and correctness.This framework identifies finer-grained calibration discrepancies, reduces overconfidence, and reveals confidence variance.Based on this framework, we introduce CARE (Confidence-Aware Fact Correction), a method that leverages high-confidence facts to iteratively refine and correct low-confidence ones.Experimental results demonstrate that our CARE effectively improves the quality of generated content.Our code is available at this link.

While implicit feedback is foundational to modern recommender systems, factors such as human error, uncertainty, and ambiguity in user behavior inevitably introduce significant noise into this feedback, adversely affecting the accuracy and robustness of recommendations. To address this issue, existing methods typically aim to reduce the training weight of noisy feedback or discard it entirely, based on the observation that noisy interactions often exhibit higher losses in the overall loss distribution. However, we identify two key issues: (1) there is a significant overlap between normal and noisy interactions in the overall loss distribution, and (2) this overlap becomes even more pronounced when transitioning from pointwise loss functions (e.g., BCE loss) to pairwise loss functions (e.g., BPR loss). This overlap leads traditional methods to misclassify noisy interactions as normal, and vice versa. To tackle these challenges, we further investigate the loss overlap and find that for a given user, there is a clear distinction between normal and noisy interactions in the user's personal loss distribution. Based on this insight, we propose a resampling strategy to Denoise using the user's Personal Loss distribution, named PLD, which reduces the probability of noisy interactions being optimized. Specifically, during each optimization iteration, we create a candidate item pool for each user and resample the items from this pool based on the user's personal loss distribution, prioritizing normal interactions. Additionally, we conduct a theoretical analysis to validate PLD's effectiveness and suggest ways to further enhance its performance. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate PLD's efficacy and robustness.

Community search is a personalized community discovery problem designed to identify densely connected subgraphs containing the query node. Recently, community search in heterogeneous information networks (HINs) has received considerable attention. Existing methods typically focus on modeling relationships in HINs through predefined meta-paths or user-specified relational constraints. However, metapath-based methods are primarily designed to identify single-type communities with nodes of the same type rather than multi-type communities involving nodes of different types. Constraint-based methods require users to have a good understanding of community patterns to define a suitable set of relational constraints, which increases the burden on users. In this paper, we propose FCS-HGNN, a novel method for flexibly identifying both single-type and multi-type communities in HINs. Specifically, FCS-HGNN extracts complementary information from different views and dynamically considers the contribution of each relation instead of treating them equally, thereby capturing more fine-grained heterogeneous information. Furthermore, to improve efficiency on large-scale graphs, we further propose LS-FCS-HGNN, which incorporates i) the neighbor sampling strategy to improve training efficiency, and ii) the depth-based heuristic search strategy to improve query efficiency. We conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed methods over state-of-the-art methods, achieving average improvements of 14.3% and 11.1% on single-type and multi-type communities, respectively.

Community search is a personalized community discovery problem aimed at finding densely-connected subgraphs containing the query vertex. In particular, the search for com-munities with high-importance vertices has recently received a great deal of attention. However, existing works mainly focus on conventional homogeneous networks where vertices are of the same type, but are not applicable to heterogeneous information networks (HINs) composed of multi-typed vertices and different semantic relations, such as bibliographic networks. In this paper, we study the problem of high-importance community search in HINs. A novel community model is introduced, named heterogeneous significant community (HSC), to unravel the closely connected vertices of the same type with high attribute values through multiple semantic relationships. An HSC not only maximizes the exploration of indirect relationships across entities of the anchor-type but incorporates their significance. To search the HSCs, we first develop online algorithms by exploiting both segmented-based meta-path expansion and significance incrernent. Specially, a solution space reuse strategy based on structural nesting is designed to boost the efficiency. In addition, we further devise a two-level index to support searching HSCs in optimal time, based on which a space-efficient compact index is proposed. Extensive experiments on real-world large-scale HINs demonstrate that our solutions are effective and efficient for searching HSCs, and the index-based algorithms are 2–4 orders of magnitude faster than online algorithms.

Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR) is a new video retrieval task aimed at retrieving a relevant moment from a large corpus of untrimmed videos using a text query. The relevance between the video and query is partial, mainly evident in two aspects: (1) Scope: The untrimmed video contains many frames, but not all are relevant to the query. Strong relevance is typically observed only within the relevant moment. (2) Modality: The relevance of the query varies with different modalities. Action descriptions align more with visual elements, while character conversations are more related to textual information. Existing methods often treat all video contents equally, leading to sub-optimal moment retrieval. We argue that effectively capturing the partial relevance between the query and video is essential for the VCMR task. To this end, we propose a Partial Relevance Enhanced Model (PREM) to improve VCMR. VCMR involves two sub-tasks: video retrieval and moment localization. To align with their distinct objectives, we implement specialized partial relevance enhancement strategies. For video retrieval, we introduce a multi-modal collaborative video retriever, generating different query representations for the two modalities by modality-specific pooling, ensuring a more effective match. For moment localization, we propose the focus-then-fuse moment localizer, utilizing modality-specific gates to capture essential content. We also introduce relevant content-enhanced training methods for both retriever and localizer to enhance the ability of model to capture relevant content. Experimental results on TVR and DiDeMo datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the baselines, achieving a new state-of-the-art of VCMR. The code is available at https://github.com/hdy007007/PREM.

Recent studies have demonstrated the vulnerability of recommender systems to data poisoning attacks, where adversaries inject carefully crafted fake user interactions into the training data of recommenders to promote target items. Current attack methods involve iteratively retraining a surrogate recommender on the poisoned data with the latest fake users to optimize the attack. However, this repetitive retraining is highly time-consuming, hindering the efficient assessment and optimization of fake users. To mitigate this computational bottleneck and develop a more effective attack in an affordable time, we analyze the retraining process and find that a change in the representation of one user/item will cause a cascading effect through the user-item interaction graph. Under theoretical guidance, we introduce Gradient Passing (GP), a novel technique that explicitly passes gradients between interacted user-item pairs during backpropagation, thereby approximating the cascading effect and accelerating retraining. With just a single update, GP can achieve effects comparable to multiple original training iterations. Under the same number of retraining epochs, GP enables a closer approximation of the surrogate recommender to the victim. This more accurate approximation provides better guidance for optimizing fake users, ultimately leading to enhanced data poisoning attacks. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our proposed GP.

Recommender systems play a pivotal role in mitigating information overload in various fields. Nonetheless, the inherent openness of these systems introduces vulnerabilities, allowing attackers to insert fake users into the system’s training data to skew the exposure of certain items, known as poisoning attacks. Adversarial training has emerged as a notable defense mechanism against such poisoning attacks within recommender systems. Existing adversarial training methods apply perturbations of the same magnitude across all users to enhance system robustness against attacks. Yet, in reality, we find that attacks often affect only a subset of users who are vulnerable. These perturbations of indiscriminate magnitude make it difficult to balance effective protection for vulnerable users without degrading recommendation quality for those who are not affected. To address this issue, our research delves into understanding user vulnerability. Considering that poisoning attacks pollute the training data, we note that the higher degree to which a recommender system fits users’ training data correlates with an increased likelihood of users incorporating attack information, indicating their vulnerability. Leveraging these insights, we introduce the Vulnerability-aware Adversarial Training (VAT), designed to defend against poisoning attacks in recommender systems. VAT employs a novel vulnerability-aware function to estimate users’ vulnerability based on the degree to which the system fits them. Guided by this estimation, VAT applies perturbations of adaptive magnitude to each user, not only reducing the success ratio of attacks but also preserving, and potentially enhancing, the quality of recommendations. Comprehensive experiments confirm VAT’s superior defensive capabilities across different recommendation models and against various types of attacks.

How does the graph change if we summarize it by merging nodes? How can we summarize the graph while preserving its spectral characteristics? Graph summarization aims to present a graph in a compact summary graph form while keeping its important structural information. Existing methods primarily focus on preserving the adjacency matrix. In contrast, spectral graph theory provides a powerful tool to describe the characteristics of a graph. In this paper, we propose a novel graph summarization method that preserves the spectral characteristics, including spectral moments and heat traces. We analyze the change of the spectral characteristics after summarization and design a simple yet effective summarization method based on agglomerative clustering. Our approach is extensively evaluated on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our method excels in preserving the spectral characteristics and obtains better performance on the subsequent graph classification task.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL), standing as the dominant paradigm in the realm of graph pre-training, has yielded considerable progress. Nonetheless, its capacity for out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization has been relatively underexplored. In this work, we point out that the traditional optimization of InfoNCE in GCL restricts the cross-domain pairs only to be negative samples, which inevitably enlarges the distribution gap between different domains. This violates the requirement of domain invariance under OOD scenario and consequently impairs the model's OOD generalization performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel strategy ''Negative as Positive'', where the most semantically similar cross-domain negative pairs are treated as positive during GCL. Our experimental results, spanning a wide array of datasets, confirm that this method substantially improves the OOD generalization performance of GCL.

With the application of generation models, internet is increasingly inundated with AI-generated content (AIGC), causing both real and AI-generated content indexed in corpus for search. This paper explores the impact of AI-generated images on text-image search in this scenario. Firstly, we construct a benchmark consisting of both real and AI-generated images for this study. In this benchmark, AI-generated images possess visual semantics sufficiently similar to real images. Experiments on this benchmark reveal that text-image retrieval models tend to rank the AI-generated images higher than the real images, even though the AI-generated images do not exhibit more visually relevant semantics to the queries than real images. We call this bias as invisible relevance bias. This bias is detected across retrieval models with different training data and architectures. Further exploration reveals that mixing AI-generated images into the training data of retrieval models exacerbates the invisible relevance bias. These problems cause a vicious cycle in which AI-generated images have a higher chance of exposing from massive data, which makes them more likely to be mixed into the training of retrieval models and such training makes the invisible relevance bias more and more serious. To mitigate this bias and elucidate the potential causes of the bias, firstly, we propose an effective method to alleviate this bias. Subsequently, we apply our proposed debiasing method to retroactively identify the causes of this bias, revealing that the AI-generated images induce the image encoder to embed additional information into their representation. This information makes the retriever estimate a higher relevance score. We conduct experiments to support this assertion.

Sequential recommender systems stand out for their ability to capture users' dynamic interests and the patterns of item transitions. However, the inherent openness of sequential recommender systems renders them vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where fraudsters are injected into the training data to manipulate learned patterns. Traditional defense methods predominantly depend on predefined assumptions or rules extracted from specific known attacks, limiting their generalizability to unknown attacks. To solve the above problems, considering the rich open-world knowledge encapsulated in Large Language Models (LLMs), we attempt to introduce LLMs into defense methods to broaden the knowledge beyond limited known attacks. We propose LoRec, an innovative framework that employs LLM-Enhanced Calibration to strengthen the robustness of sequential Recommender systems against poisoning attacks. LoRec integrates an LLM-enhanced CalibraTor (LCT) that refines the training process of sequential recommender systems with knowledge derived from LLMs, applying a user-wise reweighting to diminish the impact of attacks. Incorporating LLMs' open-world knowledge, the LCT effectively converts the limited, specific priors or rules into a more general pattern of fraudsters, offering improved defenses against poisons. Our comprehensive experiments validate that LoRec, as a general framework, significantly strengthens the robustness of sequential recommender systems.

The flourishing of knowledge graph (KG) applications has driven the need for entity alignment (EA) across KGs. However, the heterogeneity of practical KGs, characterized by differing scales, structures, and limited overlapping entities, greatly surpasses that of existing EA datasets. This discrepancy highlights an oversimplified heterogeneity in current EA datasets, which obstructs the exploration of the EA application. In this paper, we study the performance of EA methods on the alignment of highly heterogeneous KGs (HHKGs). Firstly, we address the oversimplified heterogeneity settings of current datasets and propose two new HHKG datasets that closely mimic practical EA scenarios. Then, based on these datasets, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate previous representative EA methods. Our findings reveal that, in aligning HHKGs, valuable structure information can hardly be exploited, which leads to inferior performance of existing EA methods, especially those based on GNNs. These findings shed light on the potential problems associated with the conventional application of GNN-based methods as a panacea for all EA datasets. Consequently, to elucidate what EA methodology is genuinely beneficial in practical scenarios, we undertake an in-depth analysis by implementing a simple but effective approach: Simple-HHEA. Our experiment results conclude that the key to the future EA model design in practice lies in their adaptability and efficiency to varying information quality conditions, as well as their capability to capture patterns across HHKGs. The datasets and source code are available at https://github.com/IDEA-FinAI/Simple-HHEA.

Making the contents generated by Large Language Model (LLM), accurate, credible and traceable is crucial, especially in complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require multi-step reasoning and each step needs knowledge to solve. Retrieval-augmented generation is good potential to solve this problem. However, where and how to introduce Information Retrieval (IR) to LLM is a big challenge. Previous work has the problems that wrong knowledge retrieved by IR misleads the LLM and interaction between IR and LLM breaks the reasoning chain of LLM. This paper proposes a novel framework named Search-in-the-Chain (SearChain) for the interaction between LLM and IR to solve the challenges. First, LLM generates the reasoning chain named Chain-of-Query (CoQ) where each node consists of an IR-oriented query-answer pair. Second, IR verifies the answer of each node of CoQ. It corrects the answer that is not consistent with the retrieved information when IR gives high confidence, which improves the credibility. Third, LLM can indicate its missing knowledge in CoQ and rely on IR to provide this knowledge to LLM. These operations improve the accuracy in terms of reasoning and knowledge. Finally, SearChain generates the reasoning process and marks references to supporting documents for each reasoning step, which improves traceability. Interaction with IR in SearChain forms a novel reasoning path based on a tree, which enables LLM to dynamically modify the direction of reasoning. Experiments show that SearChain outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on complex knowledge-intensive tasks including multi-hop Q&A, slot filling, fact checking, and long-form Q&A.

The results of information retrieval (IR) are usually presented in the form of a ranking list of candidate documents, such as web search for humans and retrieval-augmented generation for large language models (LLMs). List-aware retrieval aims to capture the list-level contextual features to return a better list, mainly including reranking and truncation. Reranking finely re-scores the documents in the list. Truncation dynamically determines the cut-off point of the ranked list to achieve the trade-off between overall relevance and avoiding misinformation from irrelevant documents. Previous studies treat them as two separate tasks and model them separately. However, the separation is not optimal. First, it is hard to share the contextual information of the ranking list between the two tasks. Second, the separate pipeline usually meets the error accumulation problem, where the small error from the reranking stage can largely affect the truncation stage. To solve these problems, we propose a Reranking-Truncation joint model (GenRT) that can perform the two tasks concurrently. GenRT integrates reranking and truncation via a generative paradigm based on an encoder-decoder architecture with novel loss functions for joint optimization to learn both tasks. Sharing parameters by the joint model is conducive to making full use of the common modeling information of the two tasks. Besides, the two tasks are performed concurrently and co-optimized to solve the error accumulation problem between separate stages. Experiments on public learning-to-rank benchmarks and open-domain Q&A tasks show that our method achieves SOTA performance on both reranking and truncation tasks for web search and retrieval-augmented LLMs.

Graph summarization is a useful tool for analyzing large-scale graphs. Some works tried to preserve original node embeddings encoding rich structural information of nodes on the summary graph. However, their algorithms are designed heuristically and not theoretically guaranteed. In this article, we theoretically study the problem of preserving node embeddings on summary graph. We prove that three matrix-factorization-based node embedding methods of the original graph can be approximated by that of the summary graph, and we propose a novel graph summarization method, named HCSumm , based on this analysis. Extensive experiments are performed on real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in preserving node embeddings.

Despite achieving great success, graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Existing defenses focus on developing adversarial training or model modification. In this paper, we propose and formulategraph adversarial immunization, i.e., vaccinating part of graph structure to improve certifiable robustness of graph against any admissible adversarial attack. We first propose edge-level immunization to vaccinate node pairs. Unfortunately, such edge-level immunization cannot defend against emerging node injection attacks, since it only immunizes existing node pairs. To this end, we further propose node-level immunization. To avoid computationally intensive combinatorial optimization associated with adversarial immunization, we developAdvImmune-EdgeandAdvImmune-Nodealgorithms to effectively obtain the immune node pairs or nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of AdvImmune methods. In particular, AdvImmune-Node remarkably improves the ratio of robust nodes by 79$\%$, 294$\%$, and 100$\%$, after immunizing only 5$\%$of nodes. Furthermore, AdvImmune methods show excellent defensive performance against various attacks, outperforming state-of-the-art defenses. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to improve certifiable robustness from graph data perspective without losing performance on clean graphs, providing new insights into graph adversarial learning.

Information retrieval aims to find information that meets users’ needs from the corpus. Different needs correspond to different IR tasks such as document retrieval, open-domain question answering, retrieval-based dialogue, and so on, while they share the same schema to estimate the relationship between texts. It indicates that a good IR model can generalize to different tasks and domains. However, previous studies indicate that state-of-the-art neural information retrieval (NIR) models, e.g., pre-trained language models (PLMs) are hard to generalize. It is mainly because the end-to-end fine-tuning paradigm makes the model overemphasize task-specific signals and domain biases but loses the ability to capture generalized essential signals. To address this problem, we propose a novel NIR training framework named NIR-Prompt for retrieval and reranking stages based on the idea of decoupling signal capturing and combination. NIR-Prompt exploits Essential Matching Module (EMM) to capture the essential matching signals and gets the description of tasks by Matching Description Module (MDM). The description is used as task-adaptation information to combine the essential matching signals to adapt to different tasks. Experiments under in-domain multi-task, out-of-domain multi-task, and new task adaptation settings show that NIR-Prompt can improve the generalization of PLMs in NIR for both retrieval and reranking stages compared with baselines.

Current natural language understanding (NLU) models have been continuously scaling up, both in terms of model size and input context, introducing more hidden and input neurons. While this generally improves performance on average, the extra neurons do not yield a consistent improvement for all instances. This is because some hidden neurons are redundant, and the noise mixed in input neurons tends to distract the model. Previous work mainly focuses on extrinsically reducing low-utility neurons by additional post- or pre-processing, such as network pruning and context selection, to avoid this problem. Beyond that, can we make the model reduce redundant parameters and suppress input noise by intrinsically enhancing the utility of each neuron? If a model can efficiently utilize neurons, no matter which neurons are ablated (disabled), the ablated submodel should perform no better than the original full model. Based on such a comparison principle between models, we propose a cross-model comparative loss for a broad range of tasks. Comparative loss is essentially a ranking loss on top of the task-specific losses of the full and ablated models, with the expectation that the task-specific loss of the full model is minimal. We demonstrate the universal effectiveness of comparative loss through extensive experiments on 14 datasets from three distinct NLU tasks based on five widely used pre-trained language models and find it particularly superior for models with few parameters or long input.

The data-hungry problem, characterized by insufficiency and low-quality of data, poses obstacles for deep learning models. Transfer learning has been a feasible way to transfer knowledge from high-quality external data of source domains to limited data of target domains, which follows a domain-level knowledge transfer to learn a shared posterior distribution. However, they are usually built on strong assumptions, e.g., the domain invariant posterior distribution, which is usually unsatisfied and may introduce noises, resulting in poor generalization ability on target domains. Inspired by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that aggregate information from neighboring nodes, we redefine the paradigm as learning a knowledge-enhanced posterior distribution for target domains, namely Knowledge Bridge Learning (KBL). KBL first learns the scope of knowledge transfer by constructing a Bridged-Graph that connects knowledgeable samples to each target sample and then performs sample-wise knowledge transfer via GNNs.KBL is free from strong assumptions and is robust to noises in the source data. Guided by KBL, we propose the Bridged-GNN including an Adaptive Knowledge Retrieval module to build Bridged-Graph and a Graph Knowledge Transfer module. Comprehensive experiments on both un-relational and relational data-hungry scenarios demonstrate the significant improvements of Bridged-GNN compared with SOTA methods

Most existing methods that address out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization for node classification on graphs primarily focus on a specific type of data biases, such as label selection bias or structural bias. However, anticipating the type of bias in advance is extremely challenging, and designing models solely for one specific type may not necessarily improve overall generalization performance. Moreover, limited research has focused on the impact of mixed biases, which are more prevalent and demanding in real-world scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Causality and Independence Enhancement (CIE) framework, applicable to various graph neural networks (GNNs). Our approach estimates causal and spurious features at the node representation level and mitigates the influence of spurious correlations through the backdoor adjustment. Meanwhile, independence constraint is introduced to improve the discriminability and stability of causal and spurious features in complex biased environments. Essentially, CIE eliminates different types of data biases from a unified perspective, without the need to design separate methods for each bias as before. To evaluate the performance under specific types of data biases, mixed biases, and low-resource scenarios, we conducted comprehensive experiments on five publicly available datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach CIE not only significantly enhances the performance of GNNs but outperforms state-of-the-art debiased node classification methods.

The importance of social bot detection has been increasingly recognized due to its profound impact on information dissemination. Existing methodologies can be categorized into feature engineering and deep learning-based methods, which mainly focus on static features, e.g., post characteristics and user profiles.However, existing methods often overlook the burst phenomena when distinguishing social bots and genuine users, i.e, the sudden and intense activity or behavior of bots after prolonged inter. Through comprehensive analysis, we find that both burst behavior and static features play pivotal roles in social bot detection. To capture such properties, the dual-channel GNN (DCGNN) is proposed which consists of a burst-aware channel with an adaptive-pass filter and a static-aware channel with a low-pass filter to model user characteristics effectively. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of this method over competitive baselines.

Privacy concerns on social networks have received extensive attention in recent years. The task of user identity linkage (UIL), which aims to identify corresponding users across different social networks, poses a threat to privacy if applied unethically. Sensitive user information would be inferred with cross-network identity linkages. A feasible solution to this issue is to design an adversarial strategy that degrades the matching performance of UIL models. Nevertheless, most of the current adversarial attacks on graphs are tailored towards models working within a single network, failing to account for the challenges presented by cross-network learning tasks such as UIL. Also, in real-world scenarios, the adversarial strategy against UIL has more constraints as service providers can only add perturbations to their own networks. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a novel poisoning strategy to prevent nodes in a target network from being linked to other networks by UIL algorithms. Specifically, the UIL problem is formalized in the kernelized topology consistency perspective, and the objective is formulated as maximizing the structural variations in the target network before and after modifications. To achieve this, a novel graph kernel is defined based on earth mover's distance (EMD) in the edge-embedding space. In terms of efficiency, a fast attack strategy is proposed using greedy searching and a lower bound approximation of EMD. Results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms six baselines and reaches a balance between effectiveness and imperceptibility while being efficient.

Social network alignment is widely applied in web applications for identifying corresponding nodes across different networks, such as linking users across two social networks. Existing methods for social network alignment primarily rely on alignment consistency, assuming that nodes with similar attributes and neighbors are more likely to be aligned. However, distributional discrepancies in node attributes and neighbors across different networks would bring biases in alignment consistency, leading to inferior alignment performance. To address this issue, we conduct a causal analysis of alignment consistency. Based on this analysis, we propose a novel model called CANA that uses causal inference approaches to mitigate biases and enhance social network alignment. Firstly, we disentangle observed node attributes into endogenous features and exogenous features with multi-task learning. Only endogenous features are retained to overcome node attribute discrepancies. To eliminate biases caused by neighbors discrepancies, we propose causal-aware attention mechanisms and integrate them in graph neural network to reweight contributions of different neighbors in alignment consistency comparison. Additionally, backdoor adjustment is applied to reduce confounding effects and estimate unbiased alignment probability. Through experimental evaluation on four real-world datasets, the proposed method demonstrates superior performance in terms of alignment accuracy and top-k hits precision.

Graph domain adaptation models have become instrumental in addressing cross-network learning problems due to their ability to transfer abundant label and structural knowledge from source graphs to target graphs. A crucial step in transfer involves measuring domain discrepancy, which refers to distribution shifts between graphs from source and target domains. While conventional models simply provide a node-level measurement, exploiting information from different levels of network hierarchy is intuitive. As each hierarchical level characterizes distinct and meaningful properties or functionalities of the original graph, integrating domain discrepancy based on such hierarchies should contribute to a more precise domain discrepancy measurement. Moreover, class conditional distribution shift is often overlooked in node classification tasks, which could potentially lead to sub-optimal performance. To address the above limitations, we propose a new graph domain adaptation model and apply it to cross-network node classification tasks. Specifically, a hierarchical pooling model to extract meaningful and adaptive hierarchical structures is designed, where both marginal and class conditional distribution shifts on each hierarchical level are jointly minimized. The effectiveness is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and experimental studies across various datasets.

Graph domain adaptation models are widely adopted in cross-network learning tasks to transfer labeling or structural knowledge. Currently, there mainly exist two limitations in evaluating graph domain adaptation models. On one side, they are primarily tested for the specific cross-network node classification task, leaving tasks at edge-level and graph-level largely under-explored. Moreover, they are primarily examined in limited scenarios, such as social networks or citation networks, needing more validation in richer scenarios. As comprehensively assessing models could enhance model practicality in real-world applications, we propose a benchmark known as OpenGDA. It provides abundant pre-processed and unified datasets for different types of tasks (node, edge, graph). They originate from diverse scenarios, covering web information systems, urban systems and natural systems. Furthermore, it integrates state-of-the-art models with standardized and end-to-end pipelines. Overall, OpenGDA provides a user-friendly, scalable and reproducible benchmark for evaluating graph domain adaptation models. The benchmark experiments highlight the challenges of applying GDA models to real-world applications with consistent good performance, and they potentially provide insights to future research. As an emerging project, OpenGDA will be regularly updated with new datasets and models. It could be accessed from https://github.com/Skyorca/OpenGDA.

Unsupervised representation learning for dynamic graphs has attracted a lot of research attention in recent years. Compared with static graph, the dynamic graph is a comprehensive embodiment of both the intrinsic stable characteristics of nodes and the time-related dynamic preference. However, existing methods generally mix these two types of information into a single representation space, which may lead to poor explanation, less robustness, and a limited ability when applied to different downstream tasks. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a novel disenTangled representation learning framework for discrete-time Dynamic graphs, namely DyTed. We specially design a temporal-clips contrastive learning task together with a structure contrastive learning to effectively identify the time-invariant and time-varying representations respectively. To further enhance the disentanglement of these two types of representation, we propose a disentanglement-aware discriminator under an adversarial learning framework from the perspective of information theory. Extensive experiments on Tencent and five commonly used public datasets demonstrate that DyTed, as a general framework that can be applied to existing methods, achieves state-of-the-art performance on various downstream tasks, as well as be more robust against noise.

"Transaction fraud" complaint verification, i.e., verifying whether a transaction corresponding to a complaint is fraudulent, is particularly critical to prevent economic loss. Compared with traditional fraud pre-transaction detection, complaint verification puts forward higher requirements: 1)an individual tends to exhibit different identities in different complaints, e.g., complainant or respondent, requiring the model to capture identity-related representations corresponding to the complaint; 2)the fraud ways evolve frequently to confront detection, requiring the model to perform stably under different fraud ways. Previous methods mainly focused on fraud pre-transaction detection, utilizing the historical information of users or conduct message passing based GNNs on relationship networks. However, they rarely consider capturing various identity-related representations and ignore the evolution of fraud ways, leading to failure in complaint verification. To address the above challenges, we propose the mutual information based dual level graph neural network, namely MIDLG, which defines a complaint as a super-node consisting of involved individuals, and characterizes the individual over node-level and super-node-level. Furthermore, the mutual information minimization objective is proposed based on "complaint verification-causal graph" to decouple the model prediction from relying on specific fraud ways, and thus achieve stability. MIDLG achieves SOTA results through extensive experiments in complaint verification on WeChat Finance, one online payment service serving more than 600 million users in China.

Recommender systems often suffer from popularity bias, where popular items are overly recommended while sacrificing unpopular items. Existing researches generally focus on ensuring the number of recommendations (exposure) of each item is equal or proportional, using inverse propensity weighting, causal intervention, or adversarial training. However, increasing the exposure of unpopular items may not bring more clicks or interactions, resulting in skewed benefits and failing in achieving real reasonable popularity debiasing. In this paper, we propose a new criterion for popularity debiasing, i.e., in an unbiased recommender system, both popular and unpopular items should receive Interactions Proportional to the number of users who Like it, namely IPL criterion. Under the guidance of the criterion, we then propose a debiasing framework with IPL regularization term which is theoretically shown to achieve a win-win situation of both popularity debiasing and recommendation performance. Experiments conducted on four public datasets demonstrate that when equipping two representative collaborative filtering models with our framework, the popularity bias is effectively alleviated while maintaining the recommendation performance.

Graphs consisting of vocal nodes ("the vocal minority") and silent nodes ("the silent majority"), namely VS-Graph, are ubiquitous in the real world. The vocal nodes tend to have abundant features and labels. In contrast, silent nodes only have incomplete features and rare labels, e.g., the description and political tendency of politicians (vocal) are abundant while not for ordinary civilians (silent) on the twitter’s social network. Predicting the silent majority remains a crucial yet challenging problem. However, most existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) assume that all nodes belong to the same domain, without considering the missing features and distribution-shift between domains, leading to poor ability to deal with VS-Graph. To combat the above challenges, we propose Knowledge Transferable Graph Neural Network (KTGNN), which models distribution-shifts during message passing and learns representation by transferring knowledge from vocal nodes to silent nodes. Specifically, we design the domain-adapted "feature completion and message passing mechanism" for node representation learning while preserving domain difference. And a knowledge transferable classifier based on KL-divergence is followed. Comprehensive experiments on real-world scenarios (i.e., company financial risk assessment and political elections) demonstrate the superior performance of our method. Our source code has been open-sourced1.

Time series data naturally exist in many domains including medical data analysis, infrastructure sensor monitoring, and motion tracking. However, a very small portion of anomalous time series can be observed, comparing to the whole data. Most existing approaches are based on the supervised classification model requiring representative labels for anomaly class(es), which is challenging in real-world problems. So can we learn how to detect anomalous time ticks in an effective yet efficient way, given mostly normal time series data? Therefore, we propose an unsupervised reconstruction model named BeatGAN which learns to detect anomalies based on normal data, or data which majority of samples are normal. BeatGAN provides a framework to adversarially learn to reconstruct, which can cooperate with both 1-d CNN and RNN. Rarely observed anomalies can result in larger reconstruction errors, which are then detected based on extreme value theory. Moreover, data augmentation with dynamic time warping regularizes reconstruction and provides robustness. In the experiments, effectiveness and sensitivity are studied in both synthetic data and various real-world time series. BeatGAN achieves better accuracy and fast inference.

Text matching is a fundamental technique in both information retrieval and natural language processing. Text matching tasks share the same paradigm that determines the relationship between two given texts. The relationships vary from task to task, e.g. relevance in document retrieval, semantic alignment in paraphrase identification and answerable judgment in question answering. However, the essential signals for text matching remain in a finite scope, i.e. exact matching, semantic matching, and inference matching. Ideally, a good text matching model can learn to capture and aggregate these signals for different matching tasks to achieve competitive performance, while recent state-of-the-art text matching models, e.g. Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), are hard to generalize. It is because the end-to-end supervised learning on task-specific dataset makes model overemphasize the data sample bias and task-specific signals instead of the essential matching signals, which ruins the generalization of model to different tasks. To overcome this problem, we adopt a specialization-generalization training strategy and refer to it as Match-Prompt. In specialization stage, descriptions of different matching tasks are mapped to only a few prompt tokens. In generalization stage, text matching model explores the essential matching signals by being trained on diverse multiple matching tasks. High diverse matching tasks avoid model fitting the data sample bias on a specific task, so that model can focus on learning the essential matching signals. Meanwhile, the prompt tokens obtained in the first step are added to the corresponding tasks to help the model distinguish different task-specific matching signals, as well as to form the basis prompt tokens for a new matching task. In this paper, we consider five common text matching tasks including document retrieval, open-domain question answering, retrieval-based dialogue, paraphrase identification, and natural language inference. Experimental results on eighteen public datasets show that Match-Prompt can improve multi-task generalization capability of PLMs in text matching and yield better in-domain multi-task, out-of-domain multi-task and new task adaptation performance than multi-task and task-specific models trained by previous fine-tuning paradigm.

Company financial risk is ubiquitous and early risk assessment for listed companies can avoid considerable losses. Traditional methods mainly focus on the financial statements of companies and lack the complex relationships among them. However, the financial statements are often biased and lagged, making it difficult to identify risks accurately and timely. To address the challenges, we redefine the problem as company financial risk assessment on tribe-style graph by taking each listed company and its shareholders as a tribe and leveraging financial news to build inter-tribe connections. Such tribe-style graphs present different patterns to distinguish risky companies from normal ones. However, most nodes in the tribe-style graph lack attributes, making it difficult to directly adopt existing graph learning methods (e.g., Graph Neural Networks(GNNs)). In this paper, we propose a novel Hierarchical Graph Neural Network (TH-GNN) for Tribe-style graphs via two levels, with the first level to encode the structure pattern of the tribes with contrastive learning, and the second level to diffuse information based on the inter-tribe relations, achieving effective and efficient risk assessment. Extensive experiments on the real-world company dataset show that our method achieves significant improvements on financial risk assessment over previous competing methods. Also, the extensive ablation studies and visualization comprehensively show the effectiveness of our method.

Stance detection aims to identify whether the author of a text is in favor of, against, or neutral to a given target. The main challenge of this task comes two-fold: few-shot learning resulting from the varying targets and the lack of contextual information of the targets. Existing works mainly focus on solving the second issue by designing attention-based models or introducing noisy external knowledge, while the first issue remains under-explored. In this paper, inspired by the potential capability of pre-trained language models (PLMs) serving as knowledge bases and few-shot learners, we propose to introduce prompt-based fine-tuning for stance detection. PLMs can provide essential contextual information for the targets and enable few-shot learning via prompts. Considering the crucial role of the target in stance detection task, we design target-aware prompts and propose a novel verbalizer. Instead of mapping each label to a concrete word, our verbalizer maps each label to a vector and picks the label that best captures the correlation between the stance and the target. Moreover, to alleviate the possible defect of dealing with varying targets with a single hand-crafted prompt, we propose to distill the information learned from multiple prompts. Experimental results show the superior performance of our proposed model in both full-data and few-shot scenarios.

Collaborative filtering is one of the most common scenarios and popular research topics in recommender systems. Among existing methods, latent factor models, i.e., learning a specific embedding for each user/item by reconstructing the observed interaction matrix, have shown excellent performances. However, such user-specific and item-specific embeddings are intrinsically transductive, making it difficult for them to deal with new users and new items unseen during training. Besides, the number of model parameters heavily depends on the number of all users and items, restricting their scalability to real-world applications. To solve the above challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel model-agnostic and scalable Inductive Embedding Module for collaborative filtering, namely INMO. INMO generates the inductive embeddings for users (items) by characterizing their interactions with some template items (template users), instead of employing an embedding lookup table. Under the theoretical analysis, we further propose an effective indicator for the selection of template users and template items. Our proposed INMO can be attached to existing latent factor models as a pre-module, inheriting the expressiveness of backbone models, while bringing the inductive ability and reducing model parameters. We validate the generality of INMO by attaching it to Matrix Factorization (MF) and LightGCN, which are two representative latent factor models for collaborative filtering. Extensive experiments on three public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of INMO in both transductive and inductive recommendation scenarios.

Pseudo-relevance feedback (PRF) has proven to be an effective query reformulation technique to improve retrieval accuracy. It aims to alleviate the mismatch of linguistic expressions between a query and its potential relevant documents. Existing PRF methods independently treat revised queries originating from the same query but using different numbers of feedback documents, resulting in severe query drift. Without comparing the effects of two different revisions from the same query, a PRF model may incorrectly focus on the additional irrelevant information increased in the more feedback, and thus reformulate a query that is less effective than the revision using the less feedback. Ideally, if a PRF model can distinguish between irrelevant and relevant information in the feedback, the more feedback documents there are, the better the revised query will be. To bridge this gap, we propose the Loss-over-Loss (LoL) framework to compare the reformulation losses between different revisions of the same query during training. Concretely, we revise an original query multiple times in parallel using different amounts of feedback and compute their reformulation losses. Then, we introduce an additional regularization loss on these reformulation losses to penalize revisions that use more feedback but gain larger losses. With such comparative regularization, the PRF model is expected to learn to suppress the extra increased irrelevant information by comparing the effects of different revised queries. Further, we present a differentiable query reformulation method to implement this framework. This method revises queries in the vector space and directly optimizes the retrieval performance of query vectors, applicable for both sparse and dense retrieval models. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our method for two typical sparse and dense retrieval models.

Unsupervised opinion summarization techniques are designed to condense the review data and summarize informative and salient opinions in the absence of golden references. Existing dominant methods generally follow a two-stage framework: first creating the synthetic "review-summary" paired datasets and then feeding them into the generative summary model for supervised training. However, these methods mainly focus on semantic similarity in synthetic dataset creation, ignoring the consistency of aspects and sentiments in synthetic pairs. Such inconsistency also brings a gap to the training and inference of the summarization model.

User identity linkage aims to link users with the same identities across different social networks. Recently, re- searchers model the similarities of users’ behaviors such as Point of Interests(PoIs) or User Generated Contents(UGCs) to predict the identities of users. However, it is non-trivial to solve the problem due to the following challenges: 1) PoIs are always sparse in the non-location-based social platforms, and it is impractical to measure the similarities of users solely with PoIs; 2) The similarities of hierarchical are hierarchical from the view of word, phrase, and sentence. How to model the hierarchical structure remains a key challenge; 3) The unreliable semantics of words. Two different words may refer to the same physical appearance of users, indicating that users are with the same identities.To tackle the above problems, we propose UGCLink, a knowledge distillation framework that models UGCs to predict user identities. Two main components are included in the framework, where the student network aims to model the similarities of UGCs and the teacher network guides the student network to learn better word embeddings that reveal the physical appearance of users. Besides, the teacher network, a document classification model that classifies UGCs into the categories of PoIs, is trained to guide the word embedding learning process in the student network to circumvent the unreliable semantic problem. We demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state- of-the-art methods by more than 11% in terms of AUC score.

Signed networks are such social networks having both positive and negative links. A lot of theories and algorithms have been developed to model such networks (e.g., balance theory). However, previous work mainly focuses on the unipartite signed networks where the nodes have the same type. Signed bipartite networks are different from classical signed networks, which contain two different node sets and signed links between two node sets. Signed bipartite networks can be commonly found in many fields including business, politics, and academics, but have been less studied. In this work, we firstly define the signed relationship of the same set of nodes and provide a new perspective for analyzing signed bipartite networks. Then we do some comprehensive analysis of balance theory from two perspectives on several real-world datasets. Specifically, in the peer review dataset, we find that the ratio of balanced isomorphism in signed bipartite networks increased after rebuttal phases. Guided by these two perspectives, we propose a novel Signed Bipartite Graph Neural Networks (SBGNNs) to learn node embeddings for signed bipartite networks. SBGNNs follow most GNNs message-passing scheme, but we design new message functions, aggregation functions, and update functions for signed bipartite networks. We validate the effectiveness of our model on four real-world datasets on Link Sign Prediction task, which is the main machine learning task for signed networks. Experimental results show that our SBGNN model achieves significant improvement compared with strong baseline methods, including feature-based methods and network embedding methods.

Nowadays, users are encouraged to activate across multiple online social networks simultaneously. User identity linkage, which aims to reveal the correspondence among different accounts across networks, has been regarded as a fundamental problem for user profiling, marketing, cybersecurity, and recommendation. Existing methods mainly address the prediction problem by utilizing profile, content, or structural features of users in symmetric ways. However, encouraged by online services, information from different social platforms may also be asymmetric, such as geo-locations and texts. It leads to an emerged challenge in aligning users with asymmetric information across networks. Instead of similarity evaluation applied in previous works, we formalize correlation between geo-locations and texts and propose a novel user identity linkage framework for matching users across networks. Moreover, our model can alleviate the label scarcity problem by introducing external text-location pairs. Experimental results on real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Node injection attack on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is an emerging and practical attack scenario that the attacker injects malicious nodes rather than modifying original nodes or edges to affect the performance of GNNs. However, existing node injection attacks ignore extremely limited scenarios, namely the injected nodes might be excessive such that they may be perceptible to the target GNN. In this paper, we focus on an extremely limited scenario of single node injection evasion attack, i.e., the attacker is only allowed to inject one single node during the test phase to hurt GNN's performance. The discreteness of network structure and the coupling effect between network structure and node features bring great challenges to this extremely limited scenario. We first propose an optimization-based method to explore the performance upper bound of single node injection evasion attack. Experimental results show that 100%, 98.60%, and 94.98% nodes on three public datasets are successfully attacked even when only injecting one node with one edge, confirming the feasibility of single node injection evasion attack. However, such an optimization-based method needs to be re-optimized for each attack, which is computationally unbearable. To solve the dilemma, we further propose a Generalizable Node Injection Attack model, namely G-NIA, to improve the attack efficiency while ensuring the attack performance. Experiments are conducted across three well-known GNNs. Our proposed G-NIA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and is 500 times faster than the optimization-based method when inferring.

Given a large graph, how can we summarize it with fewer nodes and edges while maintaining its key properties, e.g.node degrees and graph spectrum?As a solution, graph summarization, which aims to find the compact representation for optimally describing and reconstructing a given graph, has received much attention, and numerous methods have been developed for it.However, many existing methods adopt the uniform reconstruction scheme, which is an unrealistic assumption as most real-world graphs have highly skewed node degrees, even within communities.Therefore we propose a degree-preserving graph summarization model, DPGS, with a novel reconstruction scheme based on the configuration model.To optimize the Minimum Description Length of our model, we deisgn a linearly scalable algorithm using hashing techniques.We theoretically show that the minimized reconstruction error bounds the perturbation of graph spectral information.Extensive experiments on realworld datasets show that DPGS yields more accurate summary graphs than several well-known baselines.Moreover, our reduced summary graphs can effectively train graph neural networks (GNNs) while saving computational cost.

Knowledge Graph (KG) reasoning that predicts missing facts for incomplete KGs has been widely explored. However, reasoning over Temporal KG (TKG) that predicts facts in the future is still far from resolved. The key to predict future facts is to thoroughly understand the historical facts. A TKG is actually a sequence of KGs corresponding to different timestamps, where all concurrent facts in each KG exhibit structural dependencies and temporally adjacent facts carry informative sequential patterns. To capture these properties effectively and efficiently, we propose a novel Recurrent Evolution network based on Graph Convolution Network (GCN), called RE-GCN, which learns the evolutional representations of entities and relations at each timestamp by modeling the KG sequence recurrently. Specifically, for the evolution unit, a relation-aware GCN is leveraged to capture the structural dependencies within the KG at each timestamp. In order to capture the sequential patterns of all facts in parallel, the historical KG sequence is modeled auto-regressively by the gate recurrent components. Moreover, the static properties of entities, such as entity types, are also incorporated via a static graph constraint component to obtain better entity representations. Fact prediction at future timestamps can then be realized based on the evolutional entity and relation representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the RE-GCN model obtains substantial performance and efficiency improvement for the temporal reasoning tasks on six benchmark datasets. Especially, it achieves up to 11.46% improvement in MRR for entity prediction with up to 82 times speedup compared to the state-of-the-art baseline.

Despite achieving strong performance in semi-supervised node classification task, graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, similar to other deep learning models. Existing researches focus on developing either robust GNN models or attack detection methods against adversarial attacks on graphs. However, little research attention is paid to the potential and practice of immunization to adversarial attacks on graphs. In this paper, we propose and formulate the graph adversarial immunization problem, i.e., vaccinating an affordable fraction of node pairs, connected or unconnected, to improve the certifiable robustness of graph against any admissible adversarial attack. We further propose an effective algorithm, called AdvImmune, which optimizes with meta-gradient in a discrete way to circumvent the computationally expensive combinatorial optimization when solving the adversarial immunization problem. Experiments are conducted on two citation networks and one social network. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed AdvImmune method remarkably improves the ratio of robust nodes by 12%, 42%, 65%, with an affordable immune budget of only 5% edges.

Information gathered from multiple sources on the Web often exhibits conflicts. This phenomenon motivates the need of truth discovery, which aims to automatically find the true claim among multiple conflicting claims. Existing truth discovery methods are mainly based on iterative updates, optimization or probabilistic models. Although these methods have shown their own effectiveness, they have a common limitation. These methods do not model relationships between each pair of source and target such that they do not well capture the underlying interactions in the data. In this paper, we propose a new model for truth discovery, learning the representations of sources and claims automatically from the interactions between sources and targets. Our model first constructs a heterogenous network including source-claim, source-source and truth-claim relationships. It then embeds the network into a low dimensional space such that trustworthy sources and true claims are close. In this way, truth discovery can be conveniently performed in the embedding space. Moreover, our model can be implemented in both semi-supervised and un-supervised manners to deal with the label scarcity problem in practical truth discovery. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for truth discovery.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve remarkable success in graph-based semi-supervised node classification, leveraging the information from neighboring nodes to improve the representation learning of target node. The success of GNNs at node classification depends on the assumption that connected nodes tend to have the same label. However, such an assumption does not always work, limiting the performance of GNNs at node classification. In this paper, we propose label-consistency based graph neural network (LC-GNN), leveraging node pairs unconnected but with the same labels to enlarge the receptive field of nodes in GNNs. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the proposed LC-GNN outperforms traditional GNNs in graph-based semi-supervised node classification. We further show the superiority of LC-GNN in sparse scenarios with only a handful of labeled nodes.

Predicting the popularity of online content on social platforms is an important task for both researchers and practitioners. Previous methods mainly leverage demographics, temporal and structural patterns of early adopters for popularity prediction. However, most existing methods are less effective to precisely capture the cascading effect in information diffusion, in which early adopters try to activate potential users along the underlying network. In this paper, we consider the problem of network-aware popularity prediction, leveraging both early adopters and social networks for popularity prediction. We propose to capture the cascading effect explicitly, modeling the activation state of a target user given the activation state and influence of his/her neighbors. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel method, namely CoupledGNN, which uses two coupled graph neural networks to capture the interplay between node activation states and the spread of influence. By stacking graph neural network layers, our proposed method naturally captures the cascading effect along the network in a successive manner. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-world Sina Weibo datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for popularity prediction.

Graphs are the universal data structures for representing the relationships between interconnected objects. They are ubiquitous in a variety of disciplines and domains ranging from computer science, social science, economics, medicine, to bioinformatics. In Recent years, extensive studies have been conducted on the graph analysis techniques. One of the most fundamental challenges of analyzing graphs is effectively representing graphs, which largely determines the performance of many follow-up tasks. This workshop aims to provide a forum for industry and academia to discuss the latest progress on graph representation learning and their applications in different fields. We hope more advanced technologies can be proposed or inspired, and also we expect that the direction of graph representation learning can catch much more attention in both academic and industry.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) by learning from the wisdom of crowds has become one of the most important approaches to recommender systems research, and various CF models have been designed and applied to different scenarios. However, a challenging task is how to select the most appropriate CF model for a specific recommendation task. In this paper, we propose a Unified Collaborative Filtering framework based on Graph Embeddings (UGrec for short) to solve the problem. Specifically, UGrec models user and item interactions within a graph network, and sequential recommendation path is designed as a basic unit to capture the correlations between users and items. Mathematically, we show that many representative recommendation approaches and their variants can be mapped as a recommendation path in the graph. In addition, by applying a carefully designed attention mechanism on the recommendation paths, UGrec can determine the significance of each sequential recommendation path so as to conduct automatic model selection. Compared with state-of-the-art methods, our method shows significant improvements for recommendation quality. This work also leads to a deeper understanding of the connection between graph embeddings and recommendation algorithms.

Answer selection is an important problem in community question answering (CQA), as it enables the distilling of reliable information and knowledge. Most existing approaches tackle this problem as a text matching task. However, they ignore the influence of the community in voting the best answers. Answer quality is highly correlated with semantic relevance and user expertise in CQA. In this paper, we formalize the answer selection problem from the user expertise view, considering both the semantic relevance in question-answer pair and user expertise in question-user pair. We design a novel matching function, explicitly modeling the influence of user expertise in community acceptance. Moreover, we introduce latent user vectors into the representation learning of answer, capturing the implicit topic interests in learned user vectors. Extensive experiments on two datasets from real world CQA sites demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for answer selection in CQA. Furthermore, the user representations learned by our model provide us a quantitative way to understand both the authority and topic-sensitive interests of users.

Users are usually involved in multiple social networks, without explicit anchor links that reveal the correspondence among different accounts of the same user across networks. Anchor link prediction aims to identify the hidden anchor links, which is a fundamental problem for user profiling, information cascading, and cross-domain recommendation. Although existing methods perform well in the accuracy of anchor link prediction, the pairwise search manners on inferring anchor links suffer from big challenge when being deployed in practical systems. To combat the challenges, in this paper we propose a novel embedding and matching architecture to directly learn binary hash code for each node. Hash codes offer us an efficient index to filter out the candidate node pairs for anchor link prediction. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real world large-scale datasets demonstrate that our proposed method has high time efficiency without loss of competitive prediction accuracy in anchor link prediction.

How to quantify influences between users, seeing that social network users influence each other in their temporal behaviors? Previous work has directly defined an independent model parameter to capture the interpersonal influence between each pair of users. To do so, these models need a parameter for each pair of users, which results in high-dimensional models becoming easily trapped into the overfitting problem. However, such models do not consider how influences depend on each other if influences are sent from the same user or if influences are received by the same user. Therefore, we propose a model that defines parameters for every user with a latent influence vector and a susceptibility vector, opposite to define influences on user pairs. Such low-dimensional representations naturally cause the interpersonal influences involving the same user to be coupled with each other, thus reducing the model’s complexity. Additionally, the model can easily consider the temporal information and sentimental polarities of users’ messages. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world Microblog datasets, showing that our model with such representations achieves best performance on three prediction tasks, compared to the state-of-the-art and pair-wise baselines.

Online social media remarkably facilitates the production and delivery of information, intensifying the competition among vast information for users' attention and highlighting the importance of predicting the popularity of information. Existing approaches for popularity prediction fall into two paradigms: feature-based approaches and generative approaches. Feature-based approaches extract various features (e.g., user, content, structural, and temporal features), and predict the future popularity of information by training a regression/classification model. Their predictive performance heavily depends on the quality of hand-crafted features. In contrast, generative approaches devote to characterizing and modeling the process that a piece of information accrues attentions, offering us high ease to understand the underlying mechanisms governing the popularity dynamics of information cascades. But they have less desirable predictive power since they are not optimized for popularity prediction. In this paper, we propose DeepHawkes to combat the defects of existing methods, leveraging end-to-end deep learning to make an analogy to interpretable factors of Hawkes process --- a widely-used generative process to model information cascade. DeepHawkes inherits the high interpretability of Hawkes process and possesses the high predictive power of deep learning methods, bridging the gap between prediction and understanding of information cascades. We verify the effectiveness of DeepHawkes by applying it to predict retweet cascades of Sina Weibo and citation cascades of a longitudinal citation dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that DeepHawkes outperforms both feature-based and generative approaches.

Information gathered from multiple sources on the Web often exhibits conflicts. This phenomenon motivates the need of truth discovery, which aims to automatically find the true claim among multiple conflicting claims. Existing truth discovery methods are mainly based on iterative updates or probabilistic models. In particular, iterative methods specify rules that govern how credibility flows from sources to claims and then back to sources. However, these manually-defined rules tend to be ad hoc and are difficult to adapt and analyze. Probabilistic methods model a few latent factors that impact how sources make claims, such as randomly choosing, guessing, or mistaking. However, these manually-defined factors may not well reflect the underlying data distributions. Given these limitations, we propose a new, unsupervised model for truth discovery in this paper. Our model first constructs a heterogenous network that exploits both source-claim and source-source relationships. It then embeds the network into a low dimensional space through a principled algorithm such that trustworthy sources and true claims (meanwhile, unreliable sources and false claims) are close. In this way, truth discovery can be conveniently performed in the embedding space. Compared with existing methods, our model does not need manually-defined rules or factors. Rather, it learns the embeddings automatically from data. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for truth discovery.

Community detection or graph clustering is crucial to understanding the structure of complex networks and extracting relevant knowledge from networked data. Latent factor model, e.g., non-negative matrix factorization and mixed membership block model, is one of the most successful methods for community detection. Latent factor models for community detection aim to find a distributed and generally low-dimensional representation, or coding, that captures the structural regularity of network and reflects the community membership of nodes. Existing latent factor models are mainly based on reconstructing a network from the representation of its nodes, namely network decoder, while constraining the representation to have certain desirable properties. These methods, however, lack an encoder that transforms nodes into their representation. Consequently, they fail to give a clear explanation about the meaning of a community and suffer from undesired computational problems. In this paper, we propose a non-negative symmetric encoder-decoder approach for community detection. By explicitly integrating a decoder and an encoder into a unified loss function, the proposed approach achieves better performance over state-of-the-art latent factor models for community detection task. Moreover, different from existing methods that explicitly impose the sparsity constraint on the representation of nodes, the proposed approach implicitly achieves the sparsity of node representation through its symmetric and non-negative properties, making the optimization much easier than competing methods based on sparse matrix factorization.

There is always a lack of a cluster validity function and optimization strategy to find out clusters and catch the evolution trend of cluster structures on a categorical data stream. Therefore, this paper presents an optimization model for clustering categorical data streams. In the model, a cluster validity function is proposed as the objective function to evaluate the effectiveness of the clustering model while each new input data subset is flowing. It simultaneously considers the certainty of the clustering model and the continuity with the last clustering model in the clustering process. An iterative optimization algorithm is proposed to solve an optimal solution of the objective function with some constraints. Furthermore, we strictly derive a detection index for drifting concepts from the optimization model. We propose a detection method that integrates the detection index and the optimization model to catch the evolution trend of cluster structures on a categorical data stream. The new method can effectively avoid ignoring the effect of the clustering validity on the detection result. Finally, using the experimental studies on several real data sets, we illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in clustering categorical data streams, compared with existing data-streams clustering algorithms.

Data sparsity is a long-standing challenge for recommender systems based on collaborative filtering. A promising solution for this problem is multi-context recommendation, i.e., leveraging users' explicit or implicit feedback from multiple contexts. In multi-context recommendation, various types of interactions between entities (users and items) are combined to alleviate data sparsity of a single context in a collective manner. Two issues are crucial for multi-context recommendation: (1) How to differentiate context-specific factors from entity-intrinsic factors shared across contexts? (2) How to capture the salient phenomenon that some entities are insensitive to contexts while others are remarkably context-dependent? Previous methods either do not consider context-specific factors, or assume that a context imposes equal influence on different entities, limiting their capability of combating data sparsity problem by taking full advantage of multiple contexts.

Influence maximization, fundamental for word-of-mouth marketing and viral marketing, aims to find a set of seed nodes maximizing influence spread on social network. Early methods mainly fall into two paradigms with certain benefits and drawbacks: (1) Greedy algorithms, selecting seed nodes one by one, give a guaranteed accuracy relying on the accurate approximation of influence spread with high computational cost; (2) Heuristic algorithms, estimating influence spread using efficient heuristics, have low computational cost but unstable accuracy. We first point out that greedy algorithms are essentially finding a self-consistent ranking, where nodes' ranks are consistent with their ranking-based marginal influence spread. This insight motivates us to develop an iterative ranking framework, i.e., IMRank, to efficiently solve influence maximization problem under independent cascade model. Starting from an initial ranking, e.g., one obtained from efficient heuristic algorithm, IMRank finds a self-consistent ranking by reordering nodes iteratively in terms of their ranking-based marginal influence spread computed according to current ranking. We also prove that IMRank definitely converges to a self-consistent ranking starting from any initial ranking. Furthermore, within this framework, a last-to-first allocating strategy and a generalization of this strategy are proposed to improve the efficiency of estimating ranking-based marginal influence spread for a given ranking. In this way, IMRank achieves both remarkable efficiency and high accuracy by leveraging simultaneously the benefits of greedy algorithms and heuristic algorithms. As demonstrated by extensive experiments on large scale real-world social networks, IMRank always achieves high accuracy comparable to greedy algorithms, while the computational cost is reduced dramatically, about 10-100 times faster than other scalable heuristics.

Influence maximization, defined as a problem of finding a set of seed nodes to trigger a maximized spread of influence, is crucial to viral marketing on social networks. For practical viral marketing on large scale social networks, it is required that influence maximization algorithms should have both guaranteed accuracy and high scalability. However, existing algorithms suffer a scalability-accuracy dilemma: conventional greedy algorithms guarantee the accuracy with expensive computation, while the scalable heuristic algorithms suffer from unstable accuracy

Sentiment classification is an important problem in tweets mining. There lack labeled data and rating mechanism for generating them in Twitter service. And topics in Twitter are more diverse while sentiment classifiers always dedicate themselves to a specific domain or topic. Thus it is a challenge to make sentiment classification adaptive to diverse topics without sufficient labeled data. Therefore we formally propose an adaptive multiclass SVM model which transfers an initial common sentiment classifier to a topic-adaptive one. To tackle the tweet sparsity, non-text features are explored besides the conventional text features, which are intuitively split into two views. An iterative algorithm is proposed for solving this model by alternating among three steps: optimization, unlabeled data selection and adaptive feature expansion steps. The algorithm alternatively minimizes the margins of two independent objectives on different views to learn coefficient matrices, which are collaboratively used for unlabeled tweets selection from the topic that the algorithm is adapting to. And then topic-adaptive sentiment words are expended based on the above selection, in turn to help the first two steps find more confident and unlabeled tweets and boost the final performance. Comparing with the well-known supervised sentiment classifiers and semi-supervised approaches, our algorithm achieves promising increases in accuracy averagely on the 6 topics from public tweet corpus.

Word-of-mouth has proven an effective strategy for promoting products through social relations. Particularly, existing studies have convincingly demonstrated that word-of-mouth recommendations can boost users' prior expectation and hence encourage them to adopt a certain innovation, such as buying a book or watching a movie. However, less attention has been paid to studying the posterior effect of word-of-mouth recommendations, i.e., whether or not word-of-mouth recommendations can influence users' posterior evaluation on the products or services recommended to them, the answer to which is critical to estimating user satisfaction when proposing a word-of-mouth marketing strategy. In order to fill this gap, in this paper we empirically study the above issue and verify that word-of-mouth recommendations are strongly associated with users' posterior evaluation. Through elaborately designed statistical hypothesis tests we prove the causality that word-of-mouth recommendations directly prompt the posterior evaluation of receivers. Finally, we propose a method for investigating users' social influence, namely, their ability to affect followers' posterior evaluation via word-of-mouth recommendations, by examining the number of their followers and their sensitivity of discovering good items. The experimental results on real datasets show that our method can successfully identify 78% influential friends with strong social influence.

Query recommendation has been considered as an effective way to help search users in their information seeking activities. Traditional approaches mainly focused on recommending alternative queries with close search intent to the original query. However, to only take relevance into account may generate redundant recommendations to users. It is better to provide diverse as well as relevant query recommendations, so that we can cover multiple potential search intents of users and minimize the risk that users will not be satisfied. Besides, previous query recommendation approaches mostly relied on measuring the relevance or similarity between queries in the Euclidean space. However, there is no convincing evidence that the query space is Euclidean. It is more natural and reasonable to assume that the query space is a manifold. In this paper, therefore, we aim to recommend diverse and relevant queries based on the intrinsic query manifold. We propose a unified model, named manifold ranking with stop points, for query recommendation. By turning ranked queries into stop points on the query manifold, our approach can generate query recommendations by simultaneously considering both diversity and relevance in a unified way. Empirical experimental results on a large scale query log of a commercial search engine show that our approach can effectively generate highly diverse as well as closely related query recommendations.

Query recommendation has been recognized as an important mean to help users search and also improve the usability of search engines. Existing approaches mainly focus on helping users refine their search queries and the recommendations typically stick to users' search intent, named search interests in this paper. However, users may also have some vague or delitescent interests which they are unaware of until they are faced with one, named exploratory interests. These interests may be provoked within a search session when users read a web page from search results or even follow links on the page. By considering exploratory interests in query recommendation, we attract more user clicks on recommendations. This type of query recommendation has not been explicitly addressed in previous work. In this paper, we propose to recommend queries in a structured way for better satisfying both search and exploratory interests of users. Specifically, we construct a query relation graph from query logs and social annotation data which capture two types of interests respectively. Based on the query relation graph, we employ hitting time to rank possible recommendations, leverage a modularity based approach to group top recommendations into clusters, and label each cluster with social tags. Empirical experimental results indicate that our structured approach to query recommendation with social annotation data can better satisfy users' interests and significantly enhance users' click behavior on recommendations.

This paper addresses the problem of query classification (QC), which aims to classify Web search queries into one or more predefined categories. The state-of-the-art solution for QC is to employ a bridging classifier via an intermediate taxonomy. In this paper, we advanced the bridging method by leveraging probabilistic topic models. The topic model, referred as RCTM (Regularized Correlated Topic Model), is an extension of the conventional CTM (Correlated Topic Model). RCTM learns a topic model by leveraging weak supervision from existing annotated data rather than in an unsupervised fashion, and thus it can effectively address the problem in topic modeling while the topics are predefined. The experimental evaluations show that our QC approach outperforms other baseline methods.