Individual fairness (IF) in graph neural networks (GNNs), which emphasizes the need for similar individuals should receive similar outcomes from GNNs, has been a critical issue. Despite its importance, research in this area has been largely unexplored in terms of (1) a clear understanding of what induces individual unfairness in GNNs and (2) a comprehensive consideration of identifying similar individuals. To bridge these gaps, we conduct a preliminary analysis to explore the underlying reason for individual unfairness and observe correlations between IF andsimilarity consistency, a concept introduced to evaluate the discrepancy in identifying similar individuals based on graph structure versus node features. Inspired by our observations, we introduce two metrics to assess individual similarity from two distinct perspectives: topology fusion and feature fusion. Building upon these metrics, we proposeSimilarity-awareGNNs forIndividualFairness, namedSaGIF. The key insight behind SaGIF is the integration of individual similarities by independently learning similarity representations, leading to an improvement of IF in GNNs. Our experiments on several real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed metrics and SaGIF. Specifically, SaGIF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art IF methods while maintaining utility performance.

In recent years, a large number of on-chain attacks have emerged in the blockchain empowered Web3 ecosystem. In the year of 2023 alone, on-chain attacks have caused losses of over 585 million. Attackers use blockchain transactions to carry out on-chain attacks, for example, exploiting vulnerabilities or business logic flaws in Web3 applications. A wealth of efforts have been devoted to detecting on-chain attack transactions through expert patterns and machine learning techniques. However, in this ever-evolving ecosystem, the performance of current methods is limited in detecting new on-chain attacks, due to the obsoleting of attack recognition patterns or the reliance on on-chain attack samples. In this paper, we propose a universal approach for detecting on-chain attacks even when there are few or even no new on-chain attack samples. Specifically, an in-depth analysis of the transaction characteristics is conducted, and we propose a new insight to train a generic attack transaction detecting model, i.e., transaction reconstruction. Particularly, to overcome the over-fitting in the transaction reconstruction task, we use the web-scale function comments related to transactions as supervision information, rather than expert-confirmed labels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach surpasses the supervised state-of-the-art by 13% in AUC, with just 30 known on-chain attack samples. Moreover, without any known attack samples, our method can still detect new on-chain attacks in the wild (with a precision of 61.83%). Among attacks detected in the wild, we confirm 1,692 address poisoning attacks, a new type of on-chain attack targeting token holders. Our code is available at: https://github.com/wuzhy1ng/attack_trans_detection_www25.

Unsupervised multi-source domain transfer in federated scenario has become an emerging research direction, which can help unlabeled target domain to obtain the adapted model through source domains under privacy-preserving. However, when local data are graph, the difference of domains (or data heterogeneity) mainly originates from the difference in node attributes and sub-graph structures, leading to serious model drift, which is not considered by the existing related algorithms. Currently, there are two challenges in this scenario: (1) The node representations extracted directly through conventional GNNs lack inter-domain generalized and consistent information, making it difficult to apply existing federated learning algorithms. (2) The knowledge of source domains has quality differences, which may lead to negative transfer. To address these issues, we propose a novel two-phase Federated Graph Transfer Learning (FGTL) framework. In the generalization phase, FGTL utilizes local contrastive learning and global context embedding to force node representations to capture the inter-domain generalized and consistent information, lightly alleviating model drift. In the transfer phase, FGTL utilizes consensus knowledge to force the decision bound of classifier to adapt to the target client. In addition, FGTL+ exploits model grouping to make consensus knowledge generation more efficient, further enhancing the scalability of FGTL. Extensive experiments show that FGTL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art related methods, while FGTL+ further enhances privacy protection and reduces both communication and computation overhead.

Message passing (MP) is a popular paradigm for designing graph neural networks (GNNs), which iteratively aggregates neighbor information and updates node embeddings. However, this paradigm suffers from several issues: First, long-range information struggles to be fully utilized, known as over-squashing. Second, excessive MP layers lead to indistinguishable representations, referred to as over-smoothing. Finally, vanilla MPNNs fail to meet the ability of training in heterophilic graphs. In this paper, we provide a unified insight into these defects: node embeddings are sent to neighbors at a constant "pace" and are aggregated immediately. Such synchronicity causes embeddings closer to the output to be more important, i.e. local priority, manifesting the aforementioned issues. Based on this, Asyn-MPNN, an asynchronous framework that customizes the speed of information aggregation, is proposed, which can unify many popular GNNs. We further propose the automated asynchronous (a Asyn) layer, which achieves effects similar to Asyn-MPNN but without introducing extra hyperparameters and can be integrated into any GNN. aAsyn-MPNN validates its performance through extensive experiments on both graph-level and node-level tasks and achieves leading results on tasks from long-range graph benchmark.

Recently, stateless blockchains have been proposed to alleviate the storage overhead for nodes. A stateless blockchain achieves storage-consensus parallelism, where storage workloads are offloaded from on-chain consensus, enabling more resource-constraint nodes to participate in the consensus. However, existing stateless blockchains still suffer from limited throughput. In this paper, we present Porygon, a novel stateless blockchain with three-dimensional (3D) parallelism. First, Porygon separates the storage and consensus of transactions as the stateless blockchain, achieving the storage-consensus parallelism. This first-dimensional parallelism divides the processing of transactions into several stages and scales the network by supporting more nodes in the system. Based on such a design, we then propose a pipeline mechanism to achieve second-dimensional inter-block parallelism, where relevant stages of processing transactions are pipelined efficiently, thereby reducing transaction latency. Finally, Porygon presents a sharding mechanism to achieve third-dimensional inner-block parallelism. By sharding the executions of transactions of a block and adopting a lightweight cross-shard coordination mechanism, Porygon can effectively execute both intra-shard and cross-shard transactions, consequently achieving outstanding transaction throughput. We evaluate the performance of Porygon by extensive experiments on an implemented prototype and large-scale simulations. Compared with existing blockchains, Porygon boosts throughput by up to 20x, reduces network usage by more than 50%, and simultaneously requires only 5MB of storage consumption per node.

Recent studies have highlighted fairness issues in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), where they produce discriminatory predictions against specific protected groups categorized by sensitive attributes such as race and age. While various efforts to enhance GNN fairness have made significant progress, these approaches are often tailored to specific sensitive attributes. Consequently, they necessitate retraining the model from scratch to accommodate changes in the sensitive attribute requirement, resulting in high computational costs. To gain deeper insights into this issue, we approach the graph fairness problem from a causal modeling perspective, where we identify the confounding effect induced by the sensitive attribute as the underlying reason. Motivated by this observation, we formulate the fairness problem in graphs from an invariant learning perspective, which aims to learn invariant representations across environments. Accordingly, we propose a graph fairness framework based on invariant learning, namely FairINV, which enables the training of fair GNNs to accommodate various sensitive attributes within a single training session. Specifically, FairINV incorporates sensitive attribute partition and trains fair GNNs by eliminating spurious correlations between the label and various sensitive attributes. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate that FairINV significantly outperforms state-of-the-art fairness approaches, underscoring its effectiveness. Our code is available via: https://github.com/ZzoomD/FairINV/.

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has emerged as a representative paradigm in graph self-supervised learning, where negative samples are commonly regarded as the key to preventing model collapse and producing distinguishable representations. Recent studies have shown that GCL without negative samples can achieve state-of-the-art performance as well as scalability improvement, with bootstrapped graph latent (BGRL) as a prominent step forward. However, BGRL relies on a complex architecture to maintain the ability to scatter representations, and the underlying mechanisms enabling the success remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce an instance-level decorrelation perspective to tackle the aforementioned issue and leverage it as a springboard to reveal the potential unnecessary model complexity within BGRL. Based on our findings, we present SGCL, a simple yet effective GCL framework that utilizes the outputs from two consecutive iterations as positive pairs, eliminating the negative samples. SGCL only requires a single graph augmentation and a single graph encoder without additional parameters. Extensive experiments conducted on various graph benchmarks demonstrate that SGCL can achieve competitive performance with fewer parameters, lower time and space costs, and significant convergence speedup.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are being increasingly used in many high-stakes tasks, and as a result, there is growing attention on their fairness recently. GNNs have been shown to be unfair as they tend to make discriminatory decisions toward certain demographic groups, divided by sensitive attributes such as gender and race. While recent works have been devoted to improving their fairness performance, they often require accessible demographic information. This greatly limits their applicability in real-world scenarios due to legal restrictions. To address this problem, we present a demographic-agnostic method to learn fair GNNs via knowledge distillation, namely FairGKD. Our work is motivated by the empirical observation that training GNNs on partial data (i.e., only node attributes or topology data) can improve their fairness, albeit at the cost of utility. To make a balanced trade-off between fairness and utility performance, we employ a set of fairness experts (i.e., GNNs trained on different partial data) to construct the synthetic teacher, which distills fairer and informative knowledge to guide the learning of the GNN student. Experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate that FairGKD, which does not require access to demographic information, significantly improves the fairness of GNNs by a large margin while maintaining their utility.\footnoteOur code is available via: \code.

In recent years, money laundering crimes on blockchain, especially on Ethereum, have become increasingly rampant, resulting in substantial losses. The unique features of money laundering on Ethereum, such as decentralization and pseudonymity, pose new challenges for Ethereum anti-money laundering. Specifically, the existence of dense and extensive laundering gangs and intricate multilayered laundering pathways makes it exceptionally challenging for regulators to identify suspicious accounts and trace money flows. To address this issue, we propose an innovative DenseFlow framework that effectively identifies and traces money laundering activities by finding dense subgraphs and applying the maximum flow idea. We conduct multiple experiments on four datasets from Ethereum to validate the effectiveness of our approach. The precision of our DenseFlow is 16.34% higher than the start-of-the-art comparison methods on average, highlighting its distinctive contribution to tackling money laundering issues on blockchain.

Group fairness for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which emphasizes algorithmic decisions neither favoring nor harming certain groups defined by sensitive attributes (e.g., race and gender), has gained considerable attention. In particular, the objective of group fairness is to ensure that the decisions made by GNNs are independent of the sensitive attribute. To achieve this objective, most existing approaches involve eliminating sensitive attribute information in node representations or algorithmic decisions. However, such ways may also eliminate task-related information due to its inherent correlation with the sensitive attribute, leading to a sacrifice in utility. In this work, we focus on improving the fairness of GNNs while preserving task-related information and propose a fair GNN framework named FairSAD. Instead of eliminating sensitive attribute information, FairSAD enhances the fairness of GNNs via Sensitive Attribute Disentanglement (SAD), which separates the sensitive attribute-related information into an independent component to mitigate its impact. Additionally, FairSAD utilizes a channel masking mechanism to adaptively identify the sensitive attribute-related component and subsequently decorrelates it. Overall, FairSAD minimizes the impact of the sensitive attribute on GNN outcomes rather than eliminating sensitive attributes, thereby preserving task-related information associated with the sensitive attribute. Furthermore, experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate that FairSAD outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in terms of both fairness and utility performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ZzoomD/FairSAD.

Abstract Anomaly detection on attributed graphs is a crucial topic for practical applications. Existing methods suffer from semantic mixture and imbalance issue because they commonly optimize the model based on the loss function for anomaly discrimination, mainly focusing on anomaly discrimination and ignoring representation learning. Graph Neural networks based techniques usually tend to map adjacent nodes into close semantic space. However, anomalous nodes commonly connect with numerous normal nodes directly, conflicting with the assortativity assumption. Additionally, there are far fewer anomalous nodes than normal nodes, leading to the imbalance problem. To address these challenges, a unique algorithm, decoupled self-supervised learning for anomaly detection (DSLAD), is proposed in this paper. DSLAD is a self-supervised method with anomaly discrimination and representation learning decoupled for anomaly detection. DSLAD employs bilinear pooling and masked autoencoder as the anomaly discriminators. By decoupling anomaly discrimination and representation learning, a balanced feature space is constructed, in which nodes are more semantically discriminative, as well as imbalance issue can be resolved. Experiments conducted on various six benchmark datasets reveal the effectiveness of DSLAD.

Most multi-view clustering methods based on shallow models are limited in sound nonlinear information perception capability, or fail to effectively exploit complementary information hidden in different views. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel Subspace-Contrastive Multi-View Clustering (SCMC) approach. Specifically, SCMC utilizes a set of view-specific auto-encoders to map the original multi-view data into compact features capturing its nonlinear structures. Considering the large semantic gap of data from different modalities, we project multiple heterogeneous features into a joint semantic space, namely the embedded compact features are passed through the self-expression layers to learn the subspace representations, respectively. In order to enhance the discriminability and efficiently excavate the complementarity of various subspace representations, we use the contrastive strategy to maximize the similarity between positive pairs while differentiate negative pairs. Thus, the graph regularization is employed to encode the local geometric structure within varying subspaces for optimizing the consistent affinity matrix. Furthermore, to endow the proposed SCMC with the ability of handling the multi-view out-of-samples, we develop a consistent sparse representation (CSR) learning mechanism over the in-samples. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct a large number of comparative experiments on ten challenging datasets, and the experimental results show that SCMC outperforms existing shallow and deep multi-view clustering methods. In addition, the experimental results on out-of-samples illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed CSR.

With the development of multi-view learning, multi-view outlier detection has received increasing attention in recent years. However, the current research still faces two challenges: (1) The current research lacks theoretical analysis tools for multi-view outliers. (2) Most current multi-view outlier detection algorithms are based on shallow structural assumptions of the data, such as cluster assumptions and subspace assumptions, thus they are not suitable for more complex data distributions. In addressing these two issues, this article proposes three occurrence mechanisms of multi-view outlier, which serve as foundational theoretical analysis tools for multi-view outliers. Utilizing proposed mechanisms, we analyze the impact of multi-view outliers and the information structure of multi-view data and validate our findings through experiments. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm referred to as Information-Aware Multi-View Outlier Detection (IAMOD). In contrast to other methods, IAMOD focuses on the information structure of multi-view data without relying on shallow structural assumptions. By learning a compact representation of the sample that is semantically rich and non-redundant, IAMOD can accurately identify multi-view outliers by comparing the consistency of the representations’ neighbors and views. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art multi-view outlier detection methods.

Federated Learning (FL) provides a novel paradigm for privacy-preserving machine learning, enabling multiple clients to collaborate on model training without sharing private data. To handle multi-source heterogeneous data, Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has been extensively investigated. However, in the context of VFL, the label information tends to be kept in one authoritative client and is very limited. This poses two challenges for model training in the VFL scenario. On the one hand, a small number of labels cannot guarantee to train a well VFL model with informative network parameters, resulting in unclear boundaries for classification decisions. On the other hand, the large amount of unlabeled data is dominant and should not be discounted, and it is worthwhile to focus on how to leverage them to improve representation modeling capabilities. To address the preceding two challenges, we first introduce supervised contrastive loss to enhance the intra-class aggregation and inter-class estrangement, which is to deeply explore label information and improve the effectiveness of downstream classification tasks. Then, for unlabeled data, we introduce a pseudo-label-guided consistency mechanism to induce the classification results coherent across clients, which allows the representations learned by local networks to absorb the knowledge from other clients, and alleviates the disagreement between different clients for classification tasks. We conduct sufficient experiments on four commonly used datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods, especially in the low-label rate scenario, and the improvement becomes more significant.

As special information carriers containing both structure and feature information, graphs are widely used in graph mining, e.g., Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, graph data are stored separately in multiple distributed parties in some practical scenarios, which may not be directly shared due to conflicts of interest. Hence, federated graph neural networks are proposed to address such data silo issues while preserving each party’s privacy (or client). Nevertheless, different graph data distributions of various parties, which is known as the statistical heterogeneity, may degrade the performance of naive federated learning algorithms like FedAvg. In this article, we propose FedEgo, a federated graph learning framework based on ego-graphs to tackle the challenges above, in which each client will train their local models while also contributing to the training of a global model. FedEgo applies GraphSAGE over ego-graphs to make full use of the structure information and utilizes Mixup for privacy concerns. To deal with the statistical heterogeneity, we integrate personalization into learning and propose an adaptive mixing coefficient strategy that enables clients to achieve their optimal personalization. Extensive experimental results and in-depth analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of FedEgo.

Being the largest Initial Coin Offering project, EOSIO has attracted great interest in cryptocurrency markets. Despite its popularity and prosperity (e.g., 26,311,585,008 token transactions occurred from June 8, 2018 to Aug. 5, 2020), there is almost no work investigating the EOSIO token ecosystem. To fill this gap, we are the first to conduct a systematic investigation of the EOSIO token ecosystem by conducting a comprehensive graph analysis of the entire on-chain EOSIO data (nearly 135 million blocks). We construct token-creator graphs, token-contract creator graphs, token-holder graphs, and token-transfer graphs to characterize token creators, holders, and transfer activities. Through graph analysis, we have obtained many insightful findings and observed some abnormal trading patterns. Moreover, we propose a fake-token detection algorithm to identify tokens generated by fake users or fake transactions and analyze their corresponding manipulation behaviors. Evaluation results also demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Graph contrastive learning defines a contrastive task to pull similar instances close and push dissimilar instances away. It learns discriminative node embeddings without supervised labels, which has aroused increasing attention in the past few years. Nevertheless, existing methods of graph contrastive learning ignore the differences between diverse semantics existed in graphs, which learn coarse-grained node embeddings and lead to sub-optimal performances on downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose a novelFine-grainedSemantics enhancedGraphContrastiveLearning (FSGCL) in this paper. Concretely, FSGCL first introduces a motif-based graph construction, which employs graph motifs to extract diverse semantics existed in graphs from the perspective of input data. Then, the semantic-level contrastive task is explored to further enhance the utilization of fine-grained semantics from the perspective of model training. Experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed FSGCL over state-of-the-art methods. To make the results reproducible, we will make our codes public on GitHub after this paper is accepted.

In the stock market, a successful investment requires a good balance between profits and risks. Based on the learning to rank paradigm, stock recommendation has been widely studied in quantitative finance to recommend stocks with higher return ratios for investors. Despite the efforts to make profits, many existing recommendation approaches still have some limitations in risk control, which may lead to intolerable paper losses in practical stock investing. To effectively reduce risks, we draw inspiration from adversarial learning and propose a novel Split Variational Adversarial Training (SVAT) method for risk-aware stock recommendation. Essentially, SVAT encourages the stock model to be sensitive to adversarial perturbations of risky stock examples and enhances the model’s risk awareness by learning from perturbations. To generate representative adversarial examples as risk indicators, we devise a variational perturbation generator to model diverse risk factors. Particularly, the variational architecture enables our method to provide a rough risk quantification for investors, showing an additional advantage of interpretability. Experiments on several real-world stock market datasets demonstrate the superiority of our SVAT method. By lowering the volatility of the stock-recommendation model, SVAT effectively reduces investment risks and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by more than 30% in terms of risk-adjusted profits. All the experimental data and source code are available at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/14AdM7WENEvIp5x5bV3zV_i4Aev21C9g6?usp=sharing .

In recent years, federated learning has achieved remarkable results in the medical and financial fields, but various attacks have always plagued federated learning. Data poisoning attack and defense research in horizontal federated learning are sufficient, yet vertical federated data poisoning attack and defense remains an open area due to two challenges: (1) Complex data distributions lead to immense attack possibilities, and (2) defense methods are insufficient for complex data distributions. We have discovered that from the perspective of information theory, the above challenges can be addressed elegantly and succinctly with a solution. We first reveal the information-theoretic mechanisms underlying vertical federated data poisoning attacks and then propose an unsupervised vertical federated data poisoning defense method (VFedAD) based on information theory. VFedAD learns semantic-rich client data representations through contrastive learning task and cross-client prediction task to identify anomalies. Experiments show VFedAD effectively detects vertical federated anomalies, protecting subsequent algorithms from vertical federated data poisoning attacks.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have been shown to be vulnerable to small adversarial perturbations, which becomes a severe threat and largely limits their applications in security-critical scenarios. To mitigate such a threat, considerable research efforts have been devoted to increasing the robustness of GCNs against adversarial attacks. However, current defense approaches are typically designed to prevent GCNs from untargeted adversarial attacks and focus on overall performance, making it challenging to protect important local nodes from more powerful targeted adversarial attacks. Additionally, a trade-off between robustness and performance is often made in existing research. Such limitations highlight the need for developing an effective and efficient approach that can defend local nodes against targeted attacks, without compromising the overall performance of GCNs. In this work, we present a simple yet effective method, named Graph Universal AdveRsarial Defense (GUARD). Unlike previous works, GUARD protects each individual node from attacks with a universal defensive patch, which is generated once and can be applied to any node (node-agnostic) in a graph. GUARD is fast, straightforward to implement without any change to network architecture nor any additional parameters, and is broadly applicable to any GCNs. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that GUARD significantly improves robustness for several established GCNs against multiple adversarial attacks and outperforms state-of-the-art defense methods by large margins.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in representation learning for graphs recently. However, the effectiveness of GNNs, which capitalize on the key operation of message propagation, highly depends on the quality of the topology structure. Most of the graphs in real-world scenarios follow a long-tailed distribution on their node degrees, that is, a vast majority of the nodes in the graph are tail nodes with only a few connected edges. GNNs produce inferior node representations for tail nodes due to the lack of sufficient structural information. In the pursuit of promoting the performance of GNNs for tail nodes, we explore how the deficiency of structural information deteriorates the performance of tail nodes and propose a general structural augmentation based tailno de representation learning framework, dubbed as øurs, which can jointly learn to augment the graph structure and extract more informative representations for tail nodes. Extensive experiments on six public benchmark datasets demonstrate that øurs outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for tail node representation learning.

Personalized recommendation is becoming increasingly important in online information systems in the current era of information explosion. In real-world scenarios, when a user considers which items to consume, the decision choice may be affected by her friends. For example, she may ask her friends for suggestions or be attracted by products purchased by one friend. As such, to provide satisfactory recommendation service, it is important to account for the evidence in social relations when they are available to use. Several prior efforts have been made to leverage social relations to build the recommender system and verified their utility. However, most existing methods, such as the well-known TrustSVD, leverage only first-order social relations, i.e., the direct neighbors that are connected to the target user. The high-order social relations, e.g., the friends of friends, which are very informative to reveal user preference, have been largely ignored.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) play a critical role in improving the performance of collaborative filtering. They leverage the concept of aggregating neighbor information to capture user preferences on bipartite graphs by stacking multiple convolutional layers. However, this requirement for layer stacking often leads to a long training time for convergence, and results in indistinguishable representations with significant performance deterioration due to the problem of oversmoothing. Additionally, the noise of interactions will be amplified by the stacking of convolutional layers through message passing. To address these issues, we propose a simple, plug-and-play-Neighborhood Structure -Embedding approach, named NSE, which utilizes first-order adjacency information to construct structural embeddings. By explicitly incorporating local topologically statistical information before message passing, the embeddings propagated at GCNs have better topology-structure awareness. This leads to an improved optimization path and greater robustness against noise propagation. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance improvements by employing our proposed NSE in graph collaborative filtering models. Particularly, the NSE-enhanced LGCN shows performance gains of 5.06% and 4.86% on the Yelp and Amazon-Books datasets, respectively. The average training convergence speed is improved by 204.8%. NSE-enhanced graph collaborative filtering has also demonstrated excellent robustness against both noise and oversmoothing.

The last years have witnessed the emergence of a promising self-supervised learning strategy, referred to as masked autoencoding. However, there is a lack of theoretical understanding of how masking matters on graph autoencoders (GAEs). In this work, we present masked graph autoencoder (MaskGAE), a self-supervised learning framework for graph-structured data. Different from standard GAEs, MaskGAE adopts masked graph modeling (MGM) as a principled pretext task - masking a portion of edges and attempting to reconstruct the missing part with partially visible, unmasked graph structure. To understand whether MGM can help GAEs learn better representations, we provide both theoretical and empirical evidence to comprehensively justify the benefits of this pretext task. Theoretically, we establish close connections between GAEs and contrastive learning, showing that MGM significantly improves the self-supervised learning scheme of GAEs. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on a variety of graph benchmarks, demonstrating the superiority of MaskGAE over several state-of-the-arts on both link prediction and node classification tasks.

Web3, based on blockchain technology, is the evolving next generation Internet of value. Massive active applications on Web3, e.g. DeFi and NFT, usually rely on blockchain transactions to achieve value transfer as well as complex and diverse custom logic and intentions. Various risky or illegal behaviors such as financial fraud, hacking, money laundering are currently rampant in the blockchain ecosystem, and it is thus important to understand the intent behind the pseudonymous transactions. To reveal the intent of transactions, much effort has been devoted to extracting some particular transaction semantics through specific expert experiences. However, the limitations of existing methods in terms of effectiveness and generalization make it difficult to extract diverse transaction semantics in the rapidly growing and evolving Web3 ecosystem. In this paper, we propose the Motif-based Transaction Semantics representation method (MoTS), which can capture the transaction semantic information in the real-time transaction data workflow. To the best of our knowledge, MoTS is the first general semantic extraction method in Web3 blockchain ecosystem. Experimental results show that MoTS can effectively distinguish different transaction semantics in real-time, and can be used for various downstream tasks, giving new insights to understand the Web3 blockchain ecosystem. Our codes are available at https://github.com/wuzhy1ng/MoTS.

We focus on multi-step ahead time series forecasting with the multi-output strategy. From the perspective of multi-task learning (MTL), we recognize imbalanced uncertainties between prediction tasks of different future time steps. Unexpectedly, trained by the standard summed Mean Squared Error (MSE) loss, existing multi-output forecasting models may suffer from performance drops due to the inconsistency between the loss function and the imbalance structure. To address this problem, we reformulate each prediction task as a distinct Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and derive a multi-level Gaussian mixture loss function to better fit imbalanced uncertainties in multi-output time series forecasting. Instead of using the two-step Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, we apply the self-attention mechanism on the task-specific parameters to learn the correlations between different prediction tasks and generate the weight distribution for each GMM component. In this way, our method jointly optimizes the parameters of the forecasting model and the mixture model simultaneously in an end-to-end fashion, avoiding the need of two-step optimization. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our multi-level Gaussian mixture loss compared to models trained with the standard summed MSE loss function. All the experimental data and source code are available at https://github.com/smallGum/GMM-FNN .

With the rapidly growing attention to multi-view data in recent years, multi-view outlier detection has become a rising field with intense research. These researches have made some success, but still exist some issues that need to be solved. First, many multi-view outlier detection methods can only handle datasets that conform to the cluster structure but are powerless for complex data distributions such as manifold structures. This overly restrictive data assumption limits the applicability of these methods. In addition, almost the majority of multi-view outlier detection algorithms cannot solve the online detection problem of multi-view outliers. To address these issues, we propose a new detection method based on the local similarity relation and data reconstruction, i.e., the Self-Representation Method with Local Similarity Preserving for fast multi-view outlier detection (SRLSP). By using the local similarity structure, the proposed method fully utilizes the characteristics of outliers and detects outliers with an applicable objective function. Besides, a well-designed optimization algorithm is proposed, which completes each iteration with linear time complexity and can calculate each instance parallelly. Also, the optimization algorithm can be easily extended to the online version, which is more suitable for practical production environments. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method on both performance and time complexity.

Recent studies demonstrate that Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to slight but adversarially designed perturbations, known asadversarial examples. To address this issue, robust training methods against adversarial examples have received considerable attention in the literature.Adversarial Training (AT)is a successful approach to learning a robust model using adversarially perturbed training samples. Existing AT methods on GNNs typically construct adversarial perturbations in terms of graph structures or node features. However, they are less effective and fraught with challenges on graph data due to the discreteness of graph structure and the relationships between connected examples. In this work, we seek to address these challenges and proposeSpectralAdversarialTraining (SAT), a simple yet effective adversarial training approach for GNNs. SAT first adopts a low-rank approximation of the graph structure based on spectral decomposition, and then constructs adversarial perturbations in the spectral domain rather than directly manipulating the original graph structure. To investigate its effectiveness, we employ SAT on three widely used GNNs. Experimental results on four public graph datasets demonstrate that SAT significantly improves the robustness of GNNs against adversarial attacks without sacrificing classification accuracy and training efficiency.

Recent studies have shown that graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable against perturbations due to lack of robustness and can therefore be easily fooled. Currently, most works on attacking GNNs are mainly using gradient information to guide the attack and achieve outstanding performance. However, the high complexity of time and space makes them unmanageable for large scale graphs and becomes the major bottleneck that prevents the practical usage. We argue that the main reason is that they have to use the whole graph for attacks, resulting in the increasing time and space complexity as the data scale grows. In this work, we propose an efficient Simplified Gradient-based Attack (SGA) method to bridge this gap. SGA can cause the GNNs to misclassify specific target nodes through a multi-stage attack framework, which needs only a much smaller subgraph. In addition, we present a practical metric named Degree Assortativity Change (DAC) to measure the impacts of adversarial attacks on graph data. We evaluate our attack method on four real-world graph networks by attacking several commonly used GNNs. The experimental results demonstrate that SGA can achieve significant time and memory efficiency improvements while maintaining competitive attack performance compared to state-of-art attack techniques.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) aims at exploiting the consistent features within different views to divide samples into different clusters. Existing subspace-based MVC algorithms usually assume linear subspace structures and two-stage similarity matrix construction strategies, thereby posing challenges in imprecise low-dimensional subspace representation and inadequacy of exploring consistency. This paper presents a novel hierarchical representation for MVC method via the integration of intra-sample, intra-view, and inter-view representation learning models. In particular, we first adopt the deep autoencoder to adaptively map the original high-dimensional data into the latent low-dimensional representation of each sample. Second, we use the self-expression of the latent representation to explore the global similarity between samples of each view and obtain the subspace representation coefficients. Third, we construct the third-order tensor by arranging multiple subspace representation matrices and impose the tensor low-rank constraint to sufficiently explore the consistency among views. Being incorporated into a unified framework, these three models boost each other to achieve a satisfactory clustering result. Moreover, an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm is developed to solve the challenging optimization problem. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world multi-view datasets show the superiority of the proposed method over eight state-of-the-art baselines.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have exhibited their powerful ability of tackling nontrivial problems on graphs. However, as an extension of deep learning models to graphs, GNNs are vulnerable to noise or adversarial attacks due to the underlying perturbations propagating in message passing scheme, which can affect the ultimate performances dramatically. Thus, it's vital to study a robust GNN framework to defend against various perturbations. In this paper, we propose a Robust Tensor Graph Convolutional Network (RT-GCN) model to improve the robustness. On the one hand, we utilize multi-view augmentation to reduce the augmentation variance and organize them as a third-order tensor, followed by the truncated T-SVD to capture the low-rankness of the multi-view augmented graph, which improves the robustness from the perspective of graph preprocessing. On the other hand, to effectively capture the inter-view and intra-view information on the multi-view augmented graph, we propose tensor GCN (TGCN) framework and analyze the mathematical relationship between TGCN and vanilla GCN, which improves the robustness from the perspective of model architecture. Extensive experimental results have verified the effectiveness of RT-GCN on various datasets, demonstrating the superiority to the state-of-the-art models on diverse adversarial attacks for graphs.

Federated learning is increasingly attractive, however as the number of training samples on a single device is too small and the training tasks of the devices are different, it faces the few-shot multitask learning problem. Moreover, federated learning frameworks are usually vulnerable to malicious attacks of the central server and diverse clients. To address these problems, we propose a decentralized federated meta-learning framework (DFMLF) for few-shot multitask learning. In DFMLF, the devices take the rapid adaptation as objective and learn the meta-knowledge shared by tasks to deal with the few-shot multitask problem. In addition, DFMLF conducts cross-validation and secure aggregation mechanism by a small number of committee nodes, which not only eliminates the central server to avoid the security risks brought by the malicious central server, but also avoids the attack of malicious devices. Moreover, to address the extra communication cost brought by the committee strategy, we propose a communication-efficient method to make the training and aggregation carried out in parallel. We conduct extensive experiments based on real-world data sets, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of our framework.

Meta-path-based random walk strategy has attracted tremendous attention in heterogeneous network representation, which can capture network semantics with heterogeneous neighborhoods of nodes. Despite the success of meta-path-based random walk strategy in plain heterogeneous networks which contain no attributes, it remains unexplored how meta-path-based random walk strategy could be utilized on attributed heterogeneous networks to simultaneously capture structural heterogeneity and attribute proximity. Moreover, the importance of node attributes and structural relations generally varies across data sets, thus requiring careful considerations when they are incorporated into representations. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel method, Attributed Heterogeneous Network embedding based on Aggregate-path (AHNA), which generates aggregate-path-based random walks on attributed heterogeneous networks and adaptively fuses topological structures and node attributes based on the learned importance. Specifically, AHNA first converts node attributes to additional links in the network to deal with the heterogeneity of structures and attributes, which is followed by an adaptive random walk strategy to strike the importance balance between node attributes and topological structures, thereby generating high-quality representations. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world data sets, where AHNA outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by up to 22.7%, 2.6%, and 2.3% on link prediction, community detection, and node classification, respectively. Moreover, our qualitative analysis indicates that AHNA can capture different balances of topological structures and node attributes on various data sets and thus boost the quality of node representations.

The prevalence of online social network makes it compulsory to study how social relations affect user choice. However, most existing methods leverage only first-order social relations, that is, the direct neighbors that are connected to the target user. The high-order social relations, e.g., the friends of friends, which are very informative to reveal user preference, have been largely ignored. In this work, we focus on modeling the indirect influence from the high-order neighbors in social networks to improve the performance of item recommendation. Distinct from mainstream social recommenders that regularize the model learning with social relations, we instead propose to directly factor social relations in the predictive model, aiming at learning better user embeddings to improve recommendation. To address the challenge that high-order neighbors increase dramatically with the order size, we propose to recursively “propagate” embeddings along the social network, effectively injecting the influence of high-order neighbors into user representation. We conduct experiments on two real datasets of Yelp and Douban to verify ourHigh-Order Social Recommender(HOSR) model. Empirical results show that our HOSR significantly outperforms recent graph regularization-based recommenders NSCR and IF-BPR$^+$, and graph convolutional network-based social influence prediction model DeepInf, achieving new state-of-the-arts of the task.

Graph contrastive representation learning aims to learn discriminative node representations by contrasting positive and negative samples. It helps models learn more generalized representations to achieve better performances on downstream tasks, which has aroused increasing research interest in recent years. Simultaneously, signed graphs consisting of both positive and negative links have become ubiquitous with the growing popularity of social media. However, existing works on graph contrastive representation learning are only proposed for unsigned graphs (containing only positive links) and it remains unexplored how they could be applied to signed graphs due to the distinct semantics and complex relations between positive and negative links. Therefore we propose a novel Signed Graph Contrastive Learning model (SGCL) to bridge this gap, which to the best of our knowledge is the first research to employ graph contrastive representation learning on signed graphs. Concretely, we design two types of graph augmentations specific to signed graphs based on a significant signed social theory, i.e., balance theory. Besides, inter-view and intra-view contrastive learning are proposed to learn discriminative node representations from perspectives of graph augmentations and signed structures respectively. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods on both real-world social datasets and online game datasets.

Cross-domain recommendation technique is a promising way to alleviate data sparsity issues by transferring knowledge from an auxiliary domain to a target domain. However, most existing works focus on utilizing the same users among different domains, while ignoring domain-specific users which forms the majority in real-world circumstances. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-domain learning approach--Relation Expansion based Cross-Domain Recommendation (ReCDR) to improve recommendation accuracies on small-overlapped domains. ReCDR first models the interactions in each domain as a local graph. It then forms a shared network by expanding out relationships using pre-trained node similarities. On the enhanced graph, ReCDR adopts a hierarchical attention mechanism. The output embedding will finally be combined with the local feature to balance the result for dual-target task. The proposed model is thoroughly evaluated on three real-world datasets. Experiments demonstrate superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.

Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) has been widely used in graph learning tasks. However, GCN-based models (GCNs) are inherently coupled training frameworks repetitively conducting the recursive neighborhood aggregation, which leads to high computational and memory overheads when processing large-scale graphs. To tackle these issues, we present Node2Grids, a cost-efficient uncoupled training framework that leverages the independent mapped data for obtaining the embedding. Instead of directly processing the coupled nodes as GCNs, Node2Grids supports a more efficacious method in practice, mapping the coupled graph data into the independent grid-like data which can be fed into the uncoupled models as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). This simple but valid strategy significantly saves memory and computational resources while achieving comparable results with the leading GCN-based models. Specifically, in order to support a general and convenient mapping approach, Node2Grids selects the most influential neighborhood with central node fusion information to construct the grid-like data. To further improve the downstream tasks' efficiency, a simple CNN-based neural network is employed to capture the significant information from the mapped grid-like data. Moreover, the grid-level attention mechanism is implemented, which enables implicitly specifying the different weights for the extracted grids of CNN. In addition to the typical transductive and inductive learning tasks, we also verify our framework on million-scale graphs to demonstrate the superiority of cost performance against the state-of-the-art GCN-based approaches. The codes are available on the GitHub link.

The sequential recommendation has been widely used to predict users' preferences in the near future by utilizing their dynamic interactions with items. However, existing methods only consider single-typed interactions (e.g., purchase), ignoring the rich heterogeneous information such as multi-typed interactions (e.g., click, purchase) and item attributes (e.g, category), which leads to a suboptimal model. We can integrate this rich information by introducing Dynamic Heterogeneous Information Networks (DHINs). Our solution contains three special designs: 1) Static Initialization; 2) Heterogeneous User Memory Network; 3) Two-level attention mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets show that our model outperforms other state-of-the-art solutions. Furthermore, we provide some insights into parameter settings and model interpretability.

Blockchain performance cannot meet the requirement nowadays. One of the crucial ways to improve performance is sharding. However, most blockchain sharding research focuses on public blockchain. As for consortium blockchain, previous studies cannot support high cross-shard efficiency, cross-contract flexibility, shard availability, and strict transaction atomicity, which are the essential requirements but also the challenges in consortium blockchain systems. Facing these challenges, we propose Meepo, a systematic study on sharded consortium blockchain. Meepo enhances cross-shard efficiency via the cross-epoch and cross-call. Moreover, a partial cross-call merging strategy is designed to handle the multi-state dependency in contract calls, achieving cross-contract flexibility. Meepo employs a replay-epoch to ensure strict transaction atomicity, and it also uses a backup algorithm called shadow shard based recovery to improve the shard robustness. We implement Meepo on the AliCloud, using 32 shards in maximum, achieving more than 120,000 cross-shard TPS under the workload of 100,000,000 asset transactions.

Heterogeneous information networks consist of multiple types of edges and nodes, which have a strong ability to represent the rich semantics underpinning network structures. Recently, the dynamics of networks has been studied in many tasks such as social media analysis and recommender systems. However, existing methods mainly focus on the static networks or dynamic homogeneous networks, which are incapable or inefficient in modeling dynamic heterogeneous information networks. In this paper, we propose a method named Dynamic Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding (DyHINE), which can update embeddings when the network evolves. The method contains two key designs: (1) A dynamic time-series embedding module which employs a hierarchical attention mechanism to aggregate neighbor features and temporal random walks to capture dynamic interactions; (2) An online real-time updating module which efficiently updates the computed embeddings via a dynamic operator. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model compared with state-of-the-art methods on the task of temporal link prediction.

Intent recommendation, as a new type of recommendation service, is to recommend a predicted query to a user in the search box when the user lands on the homepage of an application without any input. Such an intent recommendation service has been widely used in e-commerce applications, such as Taobao and Amazon. The most difficult part is to accurately predict user’s search intent, so as to improve user’s search experience and reduce tedious typing especially on mobile phones. Existing methods mainly rely on user’s historical search behaviors to estimate user’s current intent, but they do not make full use of the feedback information between the user and the intent recommendation system. Essentially, feedback information is the key factor for capturing dynamics of user search intents in real time. Therefore, we propose a feedback interactive neural network (FINN) to estimate user’s potential search intent more accurately, by making full use of the feedback interaction with the following three parts: 1) Both positive feedback (PF) and negative feedback (NF) information are collected simultaneously. PF includes user’s search intent information that the user is interested in, such as the query used and the title clicked. NF indicates user’s search intent information that the user is not interested in, such as the query recommended by the system but not clicked by the user. 2) A filter-attention (FAT) structure is proposed to filter out the noisy feedback and get more accurate positive and negative intentions of users. 3) A multi-task learning is designed to match the correlation between the user’s search intent and query candidates, which can learn and recommend query candidates from user interests and disinterests associated with each user. Finally, extensive experiments have been conducted by comparing with state-of-the-art methods, and it shows that our FINN method can achieve the best performance using the Taobao mobile application dataset. In addition, online experimental results also show that our method improves the CTR by 8% and attracts more than 7.98% of users than the baseline.

The proliferation of Web services makes it difficult for users to select the most appropriate one among numerous functionally identical or similar service candidates. Quality-of-Service (QoS) describes the non-functional characteristics of Web services, and it has become the key differentiator for service selection. However, users cannot invoke all Web services to obtain the corresponding QoS values due to high time cost and huge resource overhead. Thus, it is essential to predict unknown QoS values. Although various QoS prediction methods have been proposed, few of them have taken outliers into consideration, which may dramatically degrade the prediction performance. To overcome this limitation, we propose an outlier-resilient QoS prediction method in this paper. Our method utilizes Cauchy loss to measure the discrepancy between the observed QoS values and the predicted ones. Owing to the robustness of Cauchy loss, our method is resilient to outliers. We further extend our method to provide time-aware QoS prediction results by taking the temporal information into consideration. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on both static and dynamic datasets. The results demonstrate that our method is able to achieve better performance than state-of-the-art baseline methods.

Recently, deep learning-based models have been widely studied for click-through rate (CTR) prediction and lead to improved prediction accuracy in many industrial applications. However, current research focuses primarily on building complex network architectures to better capture sophisticated feature interactions and dynamic user behaviors. The increased model complexity may slow down online inference and hinder its adoption in real-time applications. Instead, our work targets at a new model training strategy based on knowledge distillation (KD). KD is a teacher-student learning framework to transfer knowledge learned from a teacher model to a student model. The KD strategy not only allows us to simplify the student model as a vanilla DNN model but also achieves significant accuracy improvements over the state-of-the-art teacher models. The benefits thus motivate us to further explore the use of a powerful ensemble of teachers for more accurate student model training. We also propose some novel techniques to facilitate ensembled CTR prediction, including teacher gating and early stopping by distillation loss. We conduct comprehensive experiments against 12 existing models and across three industrial datasets. Both offline and online A/B testing results show the effectiveness of our KD-based training strategy.

Factorization machines (FMs) have been widely adopted to model the discrete feature interactions in recommender systems. Despite their great success, currently there is no study of their robustness to discrete adversarial perturbations. Whether modifying a certain number of the discrete input features has a dramatic effect on the FM's prediction? Although there exist robust training methods for FMs, they neglect the discrete property of input features and lack of an effective mechanism to verify the model robustness.

The birth of Bitcoin ushered in the era of cryptocurrency, which has now become a financial market attracted extensive attention worldwide. The phenomenon of startups launching Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to raise capital led to thousands of tokens being distributed on blockchains. Many studies have analyzed this phenomenon from an economic perspective. However, little is know about the characteristics of participants in the ecosystem. To fill this gap and considering over 80% of ICOs launched based on ERC20 token on Ethereum, in this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation on the whole Ethereum ERC20 token ecosystem to characterize the token creator, holder, and transfer activity. By downloading the whole blockchain and parsing the transaction records and event logs, we construct three graphs, namely token creator graph, token holder graph, and token transfer graph. We obtain many observations and findings by analyzing these graphs. Besides, we propose an algorithm to discover potential relationships between tokens and other accounts. The reported case shows that our algorithm can effectively reveal entities and the complex relationship between various accounts in the token ecosystem.

Network embedding which aims to learn the low-dimensional representations for vertices in networks has been extensively studied in recent years. Although there are various models designed for networks with different properties and different structures for different tasks, most of them are only applied to normal networks which only contain pairwise relationships between vertices. In many realistic cases, relationships among objects are not pairwise and such relationships can be better modeled by a hyper-network in which each edge can connect an uncertain number of vertices. In this article, we focus on two properties of hyper-networks: nonuniform and dual property. In order to make full use of these two properties, we firstly propose a flexible model called Hyper2vec to learn the embeddings of hyper-networks by applying a biased second order random walk strategy to hyper-networks in the framework of Skip-gram. Then, we combine the features of hyperedges by considering the dual hyper-networks to build a further model called NHNE based on 1D convolutional neural networks, and train a tuplewise similarity function for the nonuniform relationships in hyper-networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the significant effectiveness of our methods for hyper-network embedding.

In order to make the query retrieve much more related products, some query rewrite methods have been proposed to obtain a set of candidate queries which can infer users' search intents and reduce the vocabulary gap between the original query and title of related products. However, previous studies ignore that some candidate queries may change users' search intents and retrieve irrelevant products. As a result, users' search experience will be impacted significantly. To reduce this influence, we need to design a semantic matching model to determine whether the candidate query change the original query's search intents (semantics). In addition, building a semantic matching model faces the following challenges: 1) Queries are usually very short and have limited information. It is very hard to learn an effective semantic matching model with the textual information of queries and candidate queries. 2) In order to get a generalized and effective mode, sufficient data samples are required to train the model. However, the cost of labeling is very huge. In order to address the above challenges, we propose an active and deep semantic matching framework (ActiveMatch) which is composed of two components. One component is the deep semantic matching (DSM) model which can make full use of the search log information to enhance the representation of queries and candidate queries. Then, it can estimate the semantic similarity between the original query and the candidate query more accurately. The other component is an uncertainty and novelty sampling (UNS) strategy which selects the samples to label based on the difficulty of the model estimating and the probability of the occurrence of new words. It not only reduces the cost of labeling but also ensures the effectiveness of the model. The experimental results on the Taobao e-commercial search platform verify the effectiveness of our framework.

Community detection is of significant importance in understanding the structures and functions of networks. Recently, overlapping community detection has drawn much attention due to the ubiquity of overlapping community structures in real-world networks. Nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), as an emerging standard framework, has been widely employed for overlapping community detection, which obtains nodes' soft community memberships by factorizing the adjacency matrix into low-rank factor matrices. However, in order to determine the ultimate community memberships, we have to post-process the real-valued factor matrix by manually specifying a threshold on it, which is undoubtedly a difficult task. Even worse, a unified threshold may not be suitable for all nodes. To circumvent the cumbersome post-processing step, we propose a novel discrete overlapping community detection approach, i.e., Discrete Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (DNMF), which seeks for a discrete (binary) community membership matrix directly. Thus DNMF is able to assign explicit community memberships to nodes without post-processing. Moreover, DNMF incorporates a pseudo supervision module into it to exploit the discriminative information in an unsupervised manner, which further enhances its robustness. We thoroughly evaluate DNMF using both synthetic and real-world networks. Experiments show that DNMF has the ability to outperform state-of-the-art baseline approaches.

Heterogeneous Information Network(HIN) has been employed in recommender system to represent heterogeneous types of data, and meta path has been proposed to capture semantic relationship among objects. When applying HIN to the recommendation, there are two problems: how to extract features from meta paths and how to properly fuse these features to further improve recommendations. Some recent work has employed deep neural network to learn user and item representation, and attention mechanism has been explored to integrate information for recommendation. Inspired by these work, in this paper, we propose Heterogeneous Neural Attentive Factorization Machine(HNAFM) to solve above problems. Specifically, we first calculate the commuting matrices based on meta paths and use multilayer perceptrons to learn user and item features. A hierarchical attention mechanism is employed to find the meta path that best describes user's preference and item's property. Comprehensive experiments based on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed HNAFM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art rating prediction methods.

Community structure is ubiquitous in real-world complex networks. The task of community detection over these networks is of paramount importance in a variety of applications. Recently, nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) has been widely adopted for community detection due to its great interpretability and its natural fitness for capturing the community membership of nodes. However, the existing NMF-based community detection approaches are shallow methods. They learn the community assignment by mapping the original network to the community membership space directly. Considering the complicated and diversified topology structures of real-world networks, it is highly possible that the mapping between the original network and the community membership space contains rather complex hierarchical information, which cannot be interpreted by classic shallow NMF-based approaches. Inspired by the unique feature representation learning capability of deep autoencoder, we propose a novel model, named Deep Autoencoder-like NMF (DANMF), for community detection. Similar to deep autoencoder, DANMF consists of an encoder component and a decoder component. This architecture empowers DANMF to learn the hierarchical mappings between the original network and the final community assignment with implicit low-to-high level hidden attributes of the original network learnt in the intermediate layers. Thus, DANMF should be better suited to the community detection task. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that DANMF can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art NMF-based community detection approaches.

The task of community detection has become a fundamental research problem in complex network analysis. Intuitively, similar nodes are more likely to be contained in the same community. However, most existing community detection methods cannot extract the intrinsic similarity between nodes. Thus, they may fail to identify the real community structures. In this paper, we propose to learn an affinity matrix adaptively, which can capture the intrinsic similarity between nodes accurately, and therefore benefit the community detection results. Specifically, the proposed model first embeds each node into a low-dimensional space through a transformation matrix with the community structures being preserved. Then, our model learns the affinity matrix in this low-dimensional space. The affinity matrix is further utilized to guide the learning of the community membership matrix via manifold regularization. The above three matrices are learned simultaneously and updated iteratively under the framework of Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Extensive experiments show that our model can outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.

Given a scientific collaboration network, how can we find a group of collaborators with high research indicator (e.g., h-index) and diverse research interests? Given a social network, how can we identify the communities that have high influence (e.g., PageRank) and also have similar interests to a specified user? In such settings, the network can be modeled as a multi-valued network where each node has d ($d \ge 1$) numerical attributes (i.e., h-index, diversity, PageRank, similarity score, etc.). In the multi-valued network, we want to find communities that are not dominated by the other communities in terms of d numerical attributes. Most existing community search algorithms either completely ignore the numerical attributes or only consider one numerical attribute of the nodes. To capture d numerical attributes, we propose a novel community model, called skyline community, based on the concepts of k-core and skyline. A skyline community is a maximal connected k-core that cannot be dominated by the other connected k-cores in the d-dimensional attribute space. We develop an elegant space-partition algorithm to efficiently compute the skyline communities. Two striking advantages of our algorithm are that (1) its time complexity relies mainly on the size of the answer s (i.e., the number of skyline communities), thus it is very efficient if s is small; and (2) it can progressively output the skyline communities, which is very useful for applications that only require part of the skyline communities. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate the efficiency, scalability, and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Blockchain technology becomes increasingly popular. It also attracts scams, for example, Ponzi scheme, a classic fraud, has been found making a notable amount of money on Blockchain, which has a very negative impact. To help dealing with this issue, this paper proposes an approach to detect Ponzi schemes on blockchain by using data mining and machine learning methods. By verifying smart contracts on Ethereum, we first extract features from user accounts and operation codes of the smart contracts and then build a classification model to detect latent Ponzi schemes implemented as smart contracts. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve high accuracy for practical use. More importantly, the approach can be used to detect Ponzi schemes even at the moment of its creation. By using the proposed approach, we estimate that there are more than 400 Ponzi schemes running on Ethereum. Based on these results, we propose to build a uniform platform to evaluate and monitor every created smart contract for early warning of scams.

Due to the popularity of service-oriented architectures for various distributed systems, an increasing number of Web services have been deployed all over the world. Recently, Web service recommendation became a hot research topic, one that aims to accurately predict the quality of functional satisfactory services for each end user. Generally, the performance of Web service changes over time due to variations of service status and network conditions. Instead of employing the conventional temporal models, we propose a novel spatial-temporal QoS prediction approach for time-aware Web service recommendation, where a sparse representation is employed to model QoS variations. Specifically, we make a zero-mean Laplace prior distribution assumption on the residuals of the QoS prediction, which corresponds to a Lasso regression problem. To effectively select the nearest neighbor for the sparse representation of temporal QoS values, the geo-location of web service is employed to reduce searching range while improving prediction accuracy. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-art methods with more than 10% improvement on the accuracy of temporal QoS prediction for time-aware Web service recommendation.