Dynamical networks are essential for understanding how network structures interact with dynamic processes over them. For example, in adaptive social networks, individuals' opinions influence and are influenced by their connections, leading to co-evolutionary patterns. Similarly, in neuroscience, the plasticity of neural networks dynamically reshapes their structure in response to activity. The topology of these networks profoundly impacts behavior, making their analysis critical in understanding stability, synchronization, or cascading failures.Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in dynamical networks addresses the challenges posed by incomplete or noisy knowledge of network structure, parameters, and external influences. For instance, fluctuating edge weights, evolving node connections, or stochastic interactions introduce uncertainties that affect predictions. In epidemiology, unknown contact patterns or varying transmission rates can significantly impact outbreak modeling, while in power systems, uncertainties in demand and renewable energy integration challenge reliability assessments. UQ systematically evaluates these uncertainties, offering techniques to quantify their effects and develop robust predictions. This 3-hour tutorial bridges the study of dynamical networks with the systematic framework of UQ, providing a comprehensive understanding of their interplay and practical applications.The tutorial begins with an introduction to dynamical networks, exploring their structural and behavioral characteristics through real-world examples in epidemiology, neuroscience, and engineering. It then transitions to UQ, covering foundational methods such as probabilistic simulations, sensitivity analysis, and stochastic modeling. Advanced topics, including machine learning-based surrogate modeling for computationally efficient UQ, will be discussed. The session concludes with an exploration of open challenges, such as integrating data-driven and physics-based models, and strategies for scaling UQ techniques to high-dimensional systems.

The Vesicular Stomatitis virus (VSV) causes cases of livestock disease that occur every year in regions in Mexico. Every few years, VSV spreads northwards into the U.S. in large outbreak events affecting hundreds of livestock premises across multiple states, leading to significant economic losses due to quarantines, trade restrictions, and veterinary expenses. VSV cases are mainly driven by biting arthropod vectors from multiple genera with different ecologies, making outbreak control challenging. The sporadic nature of outbreaks and limited understanding of transmission dynamics further hinder containment efforts, reducing the effectiveness of preemptive measures. In this paper, we propose an interpretable model to elucidate the key rules governing the spread of VSV. This model employs a sparse symbolic regression model, SINDy (Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems), to identify the most significant ecological variables in spread dynamics, considering both spatial and temporal factors. Since many counties did not have VSV cases during the study period, counties were clustered into 40 regions incorporating static environmental variables land cover, soil properties, livestock density, and climate data and using spatially constrained Agglomerative Clustering based on geographic adjacency, resulting in an average region size of approximately 90 counties. Ecological variables included dynamic and static variables such as temperature, humidity, wind, soil characteristics, and altitude associated with vectors and hosts (cattle, horses, and mules). The change in cases from month to month by region was modeled using two SINDy variants: a baseline model with only ecological features (Normal) and an extended model incorporating spatially derived graph features (Graph).Each alpha was chosen to minimize CV-MSE while retaining less than 11 terms. Graphical features greatly reduced model error, and the SINDy model with select graphical features had a slightly better CV-MSE score than when all graphical features were included. All models identified the infected species as important in capturing the dynamics of case differences between regions.

Network interdiction problems, arising in critical applications from military strategy to disease control, involve a complex attacker-defender dynamic: one player optimizes a network-based objective, while the other strategically modifies the network to impede that objective. The inherent bi-level optimization and combinatorial nature of these problems pose a significant computational challenge, often rendering traditional exact solvers impractical and hindering the development of effective heuristics. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated promise in solving single-level combinatorial optimization problems on graphs, their direct application to bi-level interdiction problems remains limited. In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a novel approach that leverages the power of GNNs to learn Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) formulations of network interdiction problems. By representing the problem in this structured mathematical form, we empower a multipartite GNN with the representational capacity to effectively capture the complex interplay between the two players. This approach aligns the neural network with the underlying mathematical structure of interdiction problems, leading to improved performance. Through extensive experiments on two network interdiction tasks, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over both baseline GNN models and traditional exact solvers, showcasing its potential for real-world applications.

Video understanding plays a fundamental role for content moderation on short video platforms, enabling the detection of inappropriate content. While classification remains the dominant approach for content moderation, it often struggles in scenarios requiring rapid and cost-efficient responses, such as trend adaptation and urgent escalations. To address this issue, we introduce an Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) method designed to complement traditional classification approaches. We first leverage a Supervised Contrastive Learning (SCL) framework to train a suite of foundation embedding models, including both single-modal and multi-modal architectures. Our models demonstrate superior performance over established contrastive learning methods such as CLIP and MoCo. Building on these embedding models, we design and implement the embedding-based retrieval system that integrates embedding generation and video retrieval to enable efficient and effective trend handling. Comprehensive offline experiments on 25 diverse emerging trends show that EBR improves ROC-AUC from 0.85 to 0.99 and PR-AUC from 0.35 to 0.95. Further online experiments reveal that EBR increases action rates by 10.32% and reduces operational costs by over 80%, while also enhancing interpretability and flexibility compared to classification-based solutions.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have attracted considerable attention. However, the rapid emergence of diverse GNN models, each grounded in different theoretical foundations, complicates the model selection process, as these models are not easily understood within a unified framework. Initial GNNs were constructed using spectral theory, while others were developed based on spatial theory. This theoretical divergence makes direct comparisons difficult. Furthermore, the variety of models within each theoretical domain further complicates their evaluation. In this tutorial, we explore state-of-the-art GNNs and present a comprehensive framework that bridges the spatial and spectral domains, clarifying their interrelationship. This framework deepens our understanding of GNN operations. The tutorial delves into key paradigms, such as spatial and spectral methods, through a synthesis of spectral graph theory and approximation theory. We conduct an in-depth analysis of recent research advancements, addressing emerging issues like over-smoothing, using well-established GNN models to illustrate the universality of our framework.

Forecasting citations of scientific patents and publications is a crucial task for understanding the evolution and development of technological domains and for foresight into emerging technologies. By construing citations as a time series, the task can be cast into the domain of temporal point processes. Most existing work on forecasting with temporal point processes, both conventional and neural network-based, only performs single-step forecasting. In citation forecasting, however, the more salient goal is n -step forecasting: predicting the arrival of the next n citations. In this article, we propose Dynamic Multi-Context Attention Networks (DMA-Nets), a novel deep learning sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model with a novel hierarchical dynamic attention mechanism for long-term citation forecasting. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model learns better representations of conditional dependencies over historical sequences compared to state-of-the-art counterparts and thus achieves significant performance for citation predictions.

This work develops a node-edge co-evolution model for attributed graph transformation, where both the node and edge attributes undergo changes due to complex interactions. Due to two fundamental obstacles, learning and approximating attributed graph transformation have not been thoroughly explored: 1) the difficulty of jointly considering four types of atomic interactions including nodes-to-edges, nodes-to-nodes, edges-to-nodes, and edges-to-edges interactions. 2) the difficulty of capturing iterative long-range interactions between nodes and edges. To solve these issues, we offer a novel and scalable equilibrium model, NEC∞, with node-edge message passing and edge-node message passing. Additionally, we propose an efficient optimization algorithm that is based on implicit gradient theorem and includes a theoretical analysis of NEC∞. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed model have been demonstrated through extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world data sets.

Given its vast application on online social networks, Influence Maximization (IM) has garnered considerable attention over the last couple of decades. Due to the intricacy of IM, most current research concentrates on estimating the first-order contribution of the nodes to select a seed set, disregarding the higher-order interplay between different seeds. Consequently, the actual influence spread frequently deviates from expectations, and it remains unclear how the seed set quantitatively contributes to this deviation. To address this deficiency, this work dissects the influence exerted on individual seeds and their higher-order interactions utilizing the Sobol index, a variance-based sensitivity analysis. To adapt to IM contexts, seed selection is phrased as binary variables and split into distributions of varying orders. Based on our analysis with various Sobol indices, an IM algorithm dubbed SIM is proposed to improve the performance of current IM algorithms by over-selecting nodes followed by strategic pruning. A case study is carried out to demonstrate that the explanation of the impact effect can dependably identify the key higher-order interactions among seeds. SIM is empirically proved to be superior in effectiveness and competitive in efficiency by experiments on synthetic and real-world graphs.

Modeling the spatiotemporal nature of the spread of infectious diseases can provide useful intuition in understanding the time-varying aspect of the disease spread and the underlying complex spatial dependency observed in people's mobility patterns. Besides, the county level multiple related time series information can be leveraged to make a forecast on an individual time series. Adding to this challenge is the fact that real-time data often deviates from the unimodal Gaussian distribution assumption and may show some complex mixed patterns. Motivated by this, we develop a deep learning-based time-series model for probabilistic forecasting called Auto-regressive Mixed Density Dynamic Diffusion Network (ARM3Dnet), which considers both people's mobility and disease spread as a diffusion process on a dynamic directed graph. The Gaussian Mixture Model layer is implemented to consider the multimodal nature of the realtime data while learning from multiple related time series. We show that our model, when trained with the best combination of dynamic covariate features and mixture components, can outperform both traditional statistical and deep learning models in forecasting the number of Covid-19 deaths and cases at the county level in the United States.

Predicting the impact of traffic i ncidents b ased on traffic s ensor d ata i s a n e ssential r esearch t opic i n t he fi eld of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Tackling the problem of estimating the durations of incidents from their early stages is a challenge due to the variable nature of such incidents and the complex structure of modern road networks. Existing studies on forecasting the incident duration from sensor data are mostly incapable of modeling 1) the spatiotemporal correlations of traffic s ensors a nd a rterial r oads a nd 2 ) t he hierarchical topology of the traffic sensor and road networks. In this paper, we propose the Hierarchical Attention-based Spatiotemporal Graph Convolutional Network model (HastGCN) to solve the incident duration forecasting problem by formulating the spatiotemporal correlation and traffic p atterns o n b oth t he s ensor l evel and the road level in their natural hierarchical manner. At the sensor level, we propose a spatiotemporal attention mechanism followed by graph convolutions to model the local correlations and patterns between traffic s ensors o n t he s ame a rterial road. At the road level, a connectivity-aware attention mechanism is designed to learn the global spatial relatedness between each arterial road. Traffic-condition a ware g raph c onvolutions are then applied to understand the target incident representation for the incident duration forecasting.

Spatial optimization problems (SOPs) are characterized by spatial relationships governing the decision variables, objectives and/or constraint functions. These are mostly combinatorial problems (NP-hard) due to the presence of discrete spatial units. Hence, exact optimization methods cannot solve them optimally under practical time constraints, especially for large-sized instances. Motivated by this challenge, we explore the use of population-based metaheuristics for solving SOPs. To this end, we observe that the search moves employed by these methods are suited to real-parameter continuous search space rather. To adapt them to the SOPs, we explore the role of domain knowledge in designing spatially-aware search operators that can efficiently search for an optimal solution in discrete search space while respecting the spatial constraints. These modifications result in a simple yet highly effective spatial hybrid metaheuristic called SPATIAL, which is applied to the problem of school boundary formation (also called school redistricting). Experimental findings on real-world datasets reveal the efficacy of our algorithm in obtaining superior quality solutions in comparison to traditional baseline methods. Additionally, we perform an in-depth study of the individual components of our framework and highlight the flexibility of our method in assimilating other search operators as well as in adapting it to related SOPs.

Traffic prediction is a challenging task due to the time-varying nature of traffic patterns and the complex spatial dependency of road networks. Adding to the challenge, there are a number of errors introduced in traffic sensor reporting, including bias and noise. However, most of the previous works treat the sensor observations as exact measures ignoring the effect of unknown noise. To model the spatial and temporal dependencies, existing studies combine graph neural networks (GNNs) with other deep learning techniques but their equal weighting of different dependencies limits the models' ability to capture the real dynamics in the traffic network. To deal with the above issues, we propose a novel deep learning framework called Deep Kalman Filtering Network (DKFN) to forecast the network-wide traffic state by modeling the self and neighbor dependencies as two streams, and their predictions are fused under the statistical theory and optimized through the Kalman filtering network. First, the reliability of each stream is evaluated using variances. Then, the Kalman filter is leveraged to properly fuse noisy observations in terms of their reliability. Experimental results reflect the superiority of the proposed method over baseline models on two real-world traffic datasets in the speed prediction task.

Due to constant shifts in population and changing demographics, school boundary processes take place to make adjustments to school attendance zones. This spatial problem has multiple criteria like locations of schools, their capacity utilization, proximity, presence of geographical/ man-made barriers, etc. In this paper, we formulate the problem of designing school boundaries as a spatially-constrained clustering/ regionalization problem and propose an automated approach called REGAL for solving it. REGAL is two-stage framework that starts by creating a candidate solution with regard to domain constraints such as school locations and spatial contiguity. Then a local search method improves the quality of the candidate solution by optimizing population balance and compactness of school zones while satisfying problem constraints. Experimentally, we demonstrate the efficacy of the REGAL framework on actual datasets from two school districts in the US.

One can infer from the broken window theory that the perception of a city street's safety level relies significantly on the visual appearance of the street. Previous works have addressed the feasibility of using computer vision algorithms to classify urban scenes. Most of the existing urban perception predictions focus on binary outcomes such as safe or dangerous, wealthy or poor. However, binary predictions are not representative and cannot provide informative inferences such as the potential crime types in certain areas. In this paper, we explore the connection between urban perception and crime inferences. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) - StreetNet to learn crime rankings from street view images. The learning process is formulated on the basis of preference learning and label ranking settings. We design a street view images retrieval algorithm to improve the representation of urban perception. A data-driven, spatiotemporal algorithm is proposed to find unbiased label mappings between the street view images and the crime ranking records. Extensive evaluations conducted on images from different cities and comparisons with baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

For node level graph encoding, a recent important state-of-art method is the graph convolutional networks (GCN), which nicely integrate local vertex features and graph topology in the spectral domain. However, current studies suffer from several drawbacks: (1) graph CNNs rely on Chebyshev polynomial approximation which results in oscillatory approximation at jump discontinuities; (2) Increasing the order of Chebyshev polynomial can reduce the oscillations issue, but also incurs unaffordable computational cost; (3) Chebyshev polynomials require degree Ω(poly(1/ε)) to approximate a jump signal such as |x|, while rational function only needs O(poly log(1/ε)). However, it is non-trivial to apply rational approximation without increasing computational complexity due to the denominator. In this paper, the superiority of rational approximation is exploited for graph signal recovering. RatioanlNet is proposed to integrate rational function and neural networks. We show that the rational function of eigenvalues can be rewritten as a function of graph Laplacian, which can avoid multiplication by the eigenvector matrix. Focusing on the analysis of approximation on graph convolution operation, a graph signal regression task is formulated. Under graph signal regression task, its time complexity can be significantly reduced by graph Fourier transform. To overcome the local minimum problem of neural networks model, a relaxed Remez algorithm is utilized to initialize the weight parameters. Convergence rate of RatioanlNet and polynomial based methods on a jump signal is analyzed for a theoretical guarantee. The extensive experimental results demonstrated that our approach could effectively characterize the jump discontinuities, outperforming competing methods by a substantial margin on both synthetic and real-world graphs.

The scarcity of potable water is a critical challenge in many regions around the world. Previous studies have shown that knowledge of device-level water usage can lead to significant conservation. Although there is considerable interest in determining discriminative features via sparse coding for water disaggregation to separate whole-house consumption into its component appliances, existing methods lack a mechanism for fitting coefficient distributions and are thus unable to accurately discriminate parallel devices’ consumption. This article proposes a Bayesian discriminative sparse coding model, referred to as Virtual Metering (VM), for this disaggregation task. Mixture-of-Gammas is employed for the prior distribution of coefficients, contributing two benefits: (i) guaranteeing the coefficients’ sparseness and non-negativity, and (ii) capturing the distribution of active coefficients. The resulting method effectively adapts the bases to aggregated consumption to facilitate discriminative learning in the proposed model, and devices’ shape features are formalized and incorporated into Bayesian sparse coding to direct the learning of basis functions. Compact Gibbs Sampling (CGS) is developed to accelerate the inference process by utilizing the sparse structure of coefficients. The empirical results obtained from applying the new model to large-scale real and synthetic datasets revealed that VM significantly outperformed the benchmark methods.

In the era of information overload, people are struggling to make sense of complex story events in massive social media data. Most existing approaches are designed to address event extraction in news reports, documents and abstracts, but such approaches are not suitable for Twitter data streams due to their unstructured language, short-length messages, and heterogeneous features; few existing approach generates a story by considering both the shared topics throughout the story and the smooth connection between successive nodes simultaneously. In this paper, a novel Twitter stoRy generation framework via shAred subspaCe and tEmporal Smoothness called TRACES is proposed. Given a query of an ongoing event, a novel multi-task clustering method integrated with shared subspace and temporal smoothness (STMTC) is proposed to generate the event stories. Extensive experimental evaluations of data sets for different events demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach.

In today's era of information overload, people are struggling to detect the evolution of hot topics from massive news media and microblogs such as Twitter. Reports from mainstream news agencies and discussions from microblogs could complement each other to form a complete picture of major events. Existing work has generally focused on a single source, seldom attempting to combine multiple sources to track the evolution of topics: emerging, evolving and fading phrases as this would require a considerably more sophisticated model. This paper proposes a novel story discovery model that integrates evolutionary topics in news and Twitter data sources using an incremental algorithm by 1) discovering complementary information from news and microblogs that provides a more complete view of major events; 2) modeling emerging, evolving and fading topics and features throughout ongoing events; and 3) creating a scalable algorithm that is capable of handling massive data from news and social media. The parameters of the new model are optimized using a novel algorithm based on the alternative direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Extensive experimental evaluations on multiple datasets from different domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach.

FusionGAN is a novel genre fusion framework for music generation that integrates the strengths of generative adversarial networks and dual learning. In particular, the proposed method offers a dual learning extension that can effectively integrate the styles of the given domains. To efficiently quantify the difference among diverse domains and avoid the vanishing gradient issue, FusionGAN provides a Wasserstein based metric to approximate the distance between the target domain and the existing domains. Adopting the Wasserstein distance, a new domain is created by combining the patterns of the existing domains using adversarial learning. Experimental results on public music datasets demonstrated that our approach could effectively merge two genres.

Connecting the dots between diverse entities such as people and organizations is a vital task for forming hypotheses and uncovering latent relationships among complex and large datasets. Most existing approaches are designed to address the relationship of entities in news reports, documents and abstracts, but such approaches are not suitable for Twitter data streams due to their unstructured languages, short-length messages, heterogeneous features and massive size. The sheer size of Twitter data requires more efficient algorithms to connect the dots within a short period of time. We present a system that automatically constructs stories by connecting entities in Twitter datasets. An entity similarity model is designed that combines both traditional entity-related features and social network attributes and a novel story generation algorithm applied on the similarity model is proposed to cope with the massive Twitter datasets. Extensive experimental evaluations were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach.