Yixin Liu 0001

dblp:140/7348-1 · DBLP profile ↗
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17ranked-venue papers in the field
7as first author
17since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-4309-5076ORCID · conflict

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 6 (2 first)Information Retrieval & Web Search · 6 (2 first)Database Systems & Data Management · 5 (3 first)
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 IAMRec: Intent-Adaptive Multimodal Recommendation with Collaborative-Modality Disentanglement
Xin Zheng 0008, Yixin Liu 0001, Yongqiang Guo, Shirui Pan
PAKDD (1)3
2026 OFA-MAS: One-for-All Multi-Agent System Topology Design based on Mixture-of-Experts Graph Generative Models
abstract
Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) offer a powerful paradigm for solving complex problems, yet their performance is critically dependent on the design of their underlying collaboration topology. As MAS become increasingly deployed in web services (e.g., search engines), designing adaptive topologies for diverse cross-domain user queries becomes essential. Current graph learning-based design methodologies often adhere to a ''one-for-one'' paradigm, where a specialized model is trained for each specific task domain. This approach suffers from poor generalization to unseen domains and fails to leverage shared structural knowledge across different tasks. To address this, we propose OFA-MAS, a one-for-all framework that generates adaptive collaboration graphs for any task described in natural language through a single universal model. Our approach integrates a Task-Aware Graph State Encoder (TAGSE) that filters task-relevant node information via sparse gating, and a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that dynamically selects specialized sub-networks to drive node and edge prediction. We employ a three-stage training strategy: unconditional pre-training on canonical topologies for structural priors, large-scale conditional pre-training on LLM-generated datasets for task-topology mappings, and supervised fine-tuning on empirically validated graphs. Experiments across six diverse benchmarks show that OFA-MAS significantly outperforms specialized one-for-one models, generating highly adaptive MAS topologies. Code: https://github.com/Shiy-Li/OFA-MAS.
Shiyuan Li 0001, Yixin Liu 0001, Yu Zheng 0013, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung, Shirui Pan
WWW2
2026 From Few-Shot to Zero-Shot: Towards Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection
Yixin Liu 0001, Shiyuan Li 0001, Yu Zheng 0013, Qingfeng Chen, Chengqi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Shirui Pan
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2026 Graph Neural Networks for Graphs With Heterophily: A Survey
abstract
Recent years have witnessed fast developments of graph neural networks (GNNs) that have benefited myriad graph analytic tasks and applications. Most GNNs rely on the homophily assumption that nodes belonging to the same class are more likely to be connected. However, as a ubiquitous graph property in numerous real-world scenarios, heterophily, i.e., nodes with different labels tend to be linked, significantly limits the performance of tailor-made homophilic GNNs. Hence, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">GNNs for heterophilic graphs</i> are gaining increasing research attention to enhance graph learning with heterophily. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of GNNs for heterophilic graphs. Specifically, we propose a systematic taxonomy that governs existing heterophilic GNN models, along with general summaries and detailed analyses. Furthermore, we discuss the relationship between heterophily and various graph research domains, aiming to facilitate the development of more effective GNNs across a spectrum of practical applications and learning tasks in the graph research community. In the end, we point out potential directions to advance and inspire future research and applications on heterophilic graph learning with GNNs.
Xin Zheng 0008, Yixin Liu 0001, Ming Li 0065, Miao Zhang 0022, Di Jin 0001, Philip S. Yu, Shirui Pan
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2025 FreeGAD: A Training-Free yet Effective Approach for Graph Anomaly Detection
abstract
Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) aims to identify nodes that deviate from the majority within a graph, playing a crucial role in applications such as social networks and e-commerce. Despite the current advancements in deep learning-based GAD, existing approaches often suffer from high deployment costs and poor scalability due to their complex and resource-intensive training processes. Surprisingly, our empirical findings suggest that the training phase of deep GAD methods, commonly perceived as crucial, may actually contribute less to anomaly detection performance than expected. Inspired by this, we propose FreeGAD, a novel training-free yet effective GAD method. Specifically, it leverages an affinity-gated residual encoder to generate anomaly-aware representations. Meanwhile, FreeGAD identifies anchor nodes as pseudo-normal and anomalous guides, followed by calculating anomaly scores through anchor-guided statistical deviations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FreeGAD achieves superior anomaly detection performance, efficiency, and scalability on multiple benchmark datasets from diverse domains, without any training or iterative optimization.
Yixin Liu 0001, Shiyuan Li 0001, Qingfeng Chen, Yu Zheng 0013, Shirui Pan
CIKM2
2025 SpecG: A Spectral-Based Framework for Effective Graph Pretraining and Knowledge Transfer
Zizhe Jin, Yizhen Zheng, Linhao Luo, Yixin Liu 0001, Xin Zheng 0008, Xuefei Yin, Vincent Lee, Shirui Pan
PAKDD (2)4
2024 Self-Supervision Improves Diffusion Models for Tabular Data Imputation
abstract
The ubiquity of missing data has sparked considerable attention and focus on tabular data imputation methods. Diffusion models, recognized as the cutting-edge technique for data generation, demonstrate significant potential in tabular data imputation tasks. However, in pursuit of diversity, vanilla diffusion models often exhibit sensitivity to initialized noises, which hinders the models from generating stable and accurate imputation results. Additionally, the sparsity inherent in tabular data poses challenges for diffusion models in accurately modeling the data manifold, impacting the robustness of these models for data imputation. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces an advanced diffusion model named S elf-supervised imp utation D iffusion M odel (SimpDM for brevity), specifically tailored for tabular data imputation tasks. To mitigate sensitivity to noise, we introduce a self-supervised alignment mechanism that aims to regularize the model, ensuring consistent and stable imputation predictions. Furthermore, we introduce a carefully devised state-dependent data augmentation strategy within SimpDM, enhancing the robustness of the diffusion model when dealing with limited data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SimpDM matches or outperforms state-of-the-art imputation methods across various scenarios.
Yixin Liu 0001, Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan, Hisham Husain, Vu Nguyen 0001
CIKM1
2024 Noise-Resilient Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning via Multi-Hop Feature Quality Estimation
abstract
Unsupervised graph representation learning (UGRL) based on graph neural networks (GNNs), has received increasing attention owing to its efficacy in handling graph-structured data. However, existing UGRL methods ideally assume that the node features are noise-free, which makes them fail to distinguish between useful information and noise when applied to real data with noisy features, thus affecting the quality of learned representations. This urges us to take node noisy features into account in real-world UGRL. With empirical analysis, we reveal that feature propagation, the essential operation in GNNs, acts as a "double-edged sword" in handling noisy features - it can both denoise and diffuse noise, leading to varying feature quality across nodes, even within the same node at different hops. Building on this insight, we propose a novel UGRL method based on Multi-hop feature Quality Estimation (MQE for short). Unlike most UGRL models that directly utilize propagation-based GNNs to generate representations, our approach aims to learn representations through estimating the quality of propagated features at different hops. Specifically, we introduce a Gaussian model that utilizes a learnable "meta-representation" as a condition to estimate the expectation and variance of multi-hop propagated features via neural networks. In this way, the ''meta representation'' captures the semantic and structural information underlying multiple propagated features but is naturally less susceptible to interference by noise, thereby serving as high-quality node representations beneficial for downstream tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that MQE in learning reliable node representations in scenarios with diverse types of feature noise.
Shiyuan Li 0001, Yixin Liu 0001, Qingfeng Chen, Geoffrey I. Webb, Shirui Pan
CIKM2
2024 Divide and Denoise: Empowering Simple Models for Robust Semi-Supervised Node Classification against Label Noise
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) based on message passing have achieved remarkable performance in graph machine learning. By combining it with the power of pseudo labeling, one can further push forward the performance on the task of semi-supervised node classification. However, most existing works assume that the training node labels are purely noise-free, while this strong assumption usually does not hold in practice. GNNs will overfit the noisy training labels and the adverse effects of mislabeled nodes can be exaggerated by being propagated to the remaining nodes through the graph structure, exacerbating the model failure. Worse still, the noisy pseudo labels could also largely undermine the model's reliability without special treatment. In this paper, we revisit the role of (1) message passing and (2) pseudo labels in the studied problem and try to address two denoising subproblems from the model architecture and algorithm perspective, respectively. Specifically, we first develop a label-noise robust GNN that discards the coupled message-passing scheme. Despite its simple architecture, this learning backbone prevents overfitting to noisy labels and also inherently avoids the noise propagation issue. Moreover, we propose a novel reliable graph pseudo labeling algorithm that can effectively leverage the knowledge of unlabeled nodes while mitigating the adverse effects of noisy pseudo labels. Based on those novel designs, we can attain exceptional effectiveness and efficiency in solving the studied problem. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets for semi-supervised node classification with different levels of label noise and show new state-of-the-art performance. The code is available at https://github.com/DND-NET/DND-NET.
Kaize Ding, Xiaoxiao Ma 0002, Yixin Liu 0001, Shirui Pan
KDD3
2023 PREM: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Node-Level Graph Anomaly Detection
abstract
Node-level graph anomaly detection (GAD) plays a critical role in identifying anomalous nodes from graph-structured data in various domains such as medicine, social networks, and e-commerce. However, challenges have arisen due to the diversity of anomalies and the dearth of labeled data. Existing methodologies - reconstruction-based and contrastive learning - while effective, often suffer from efficiency issues, stemming from their complex objectives and elaborate modules. To improve the efficiency of GAD, we introduce a simple method termed PREprocessing and Matching (PREM for short). Our approach streamlines GAD, reducing time and memory consumption while maintaining powerful anomaly detection capabilities. Comprising two modules - a pre-processing module and an ego-neighbor matching module - PREM eliminates the necessity for message-passing propagation during training, and employs a simple contrastive loss, leading to considerable reductions in training time and memory usage. Moreover, our method demonstrated robustness and effectiveness in five datasets. Notably, when validated on the ACM dataset, PREM achieved a 5% improvement in AUC, a 9-fold increase in training speed, and sharply reduce memory usage compared to the most efficient baseline.
JunJun Pan, Yixin Liu 0001, Yizhen Zheng, Shirui Pan
ICDM2
2023 Learning Strong Graph Neural Networks with Weak Information
abstract
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have exhibited impressive performance in many graph learning tasks. Nevertheless, the performance of GNNs can deteriorate when the input graph data suffer from weak information, i.e., incomplete structure, incomplete features, and insufficient labels. Most prior studies, which attempt to learn from the graph data with a specific type of weak information, are far from effective in dealing with the scenario where diverse data deficiencies exist and mutually affect each other. To fill the gap, in this paper, we aim to develop an effective and principled approach to the problem of graph learning with weak information (GLWI). Based on the findings from our empirical analysis, we derive two design focal points for solving the problem of GLWI, i.e., enabling long-range propagation in GNNs and allowing information propagation to those stray nodes isolated from the largest connected component. Accordingly, we propose D2PT, a dual-channel GNN framework that performs long-range information propagation not only on the input graph with incomplete structure, but also on a global graph that encodes global semantic similarities. We further develop a prototype contrastive alignment algorithm that aligns the class-level prototypes learned from two channels, such that the two different information propagation processes can mutually benefit from each other and the finally learned model can well handle the GLWI problem. Extensive experiments on eight real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods in various GLWI scenarios.
Yixin Liu 0001, Kaize Ding, Jianling Wang, Vincent Cheng-Siong Lee, Huan Liu 0001, Shirui Pan
KDD1
2023 GOOD-D: On Unsupervised Graph Out-Of-Distribution Detection
abstract
Most existing deep learning models are trained based on the closed-world assumption, where the test data is assumed to be drawn i.i.d. from the same distribution as the training data, known as in-distribution (ID). However, when models are deployed in an open-world scenario, test samples can be out-of-distribution (OOD) and therefore should be handled with caution. To detect such OOD samples drawn from unknown distribution, OOD detection has received increasing attention lately. However, current endeavors mostly focus on grid-structured data and its application for graph-structured data remains under-explored. Considering the fact that data labeling on graphs is commonly time-expensive and labor-intensive, in this work we study the problem of unsupervised graph OOD detection, aiming at detecting OOD graphs solely based on unlabeled ID data. To achieve this goal, we develop a new graph contrastive learning framework GOOD-D for detecting OOD graphs without using any ground-truth labels. By performing hierarchical contrastive learning on the augmented graphs generated by our perturbation-free graph data augmentation method, GOOD-D is able to capture the latent ID patterns and accurately detect OOD graphs based on the semantic inconsistency in different granularities (i.e., node-level, graph-level, and group-level). As a pioneering work in unsupervised graph-level OOD detection, we build a comprehensive benchmark to compare our proposed approach with different state-of-the-art methods. The experiment results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over different methods on various datasets.
Yixin Liu 0001, Kaize Ding, Huan Liu 0001, Shirui Pan
WSDM1
2023 Graph Self-Supervised Learning: A Survey
abstract
Deep learning on graphs has attracted significant interests recently. However, most of the works have focused on (semi-) supervised learning, resulting in shortcomings including heavy label reliance, poor generalization, and weak robustness. To address these issues, self-supervised learning (SSL), which extracts informative knowledge through well-designed pretext tasks without relying on manual labels, has become a promising and trending learning paradigm for graph data. Different from SSL on other domains like computer vision and natural language processing, SSL on graphs has an exclusive background, design ideas, and taxonomies. Under the umbrella of graph self-supervised learning, we present a timely and comprehensive review of the existing approaches which employ SSL techniques for graph data. We construct a unified framework that mathematically formalizes the paradigm of graph SSL. According to the objectives of pretext tasks, we divide these approaches into four categories: generation-based, auxiliary property-based, contrast-based, and hybrid approaches. We further describe the applications of graph SSL across various research fields and summarize the commonly used datasets, evaluation benchmark, performance comparison and open-source codes of graph SSL. Finally, we discuss the remaining challenges and potential future directions in this research field.
Yixin Liu 0001, Ming Jin 0005, Shirui Pan, Chuan Zhou 0001, Yu Zheng 0013, Feng Xia 0001, Philip S. Yu
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 Anomaly Detection in Dynamic Graphs via Transformer
abstract
Detecting anomalies for dynamic graphs has drawn increasing attention due to their wide applications in social networks, e-commerce, and cybersecurity. Recent deep learning-based approaches have shown promising results over shallow methods. However, they fail to address two core challenges of anomaly detection in dynamic graphs: the lack of informative encoding for unattributed nodes and the difficulty of learning discriminate knowledge from coupled spatial-temporal dynamic graphs. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we present a novelTransformer-basedAnomalyDetection framework forDYnamic graphs (TADDY). Our framework constructs a comprehensive node encoding strategy to better represent each node’s structural and temporal roles in an evolving graphs stream. Meanwhile, TADDY captures informative representation from dynamic graphs with coupled spatial-temporal patterns via a dynamic graph transformer model. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposed TADDY framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on six real-world datasets.
Yixin Liu 0001, Shirui Pan, Yu Guang Wang 0001, Liang Wang 0017, Qingfeng Chen, Vincent Cheng-Siong Lee
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.1
2023 Generative and Contrastive Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection
abstract
Anomaly detection from graph data has drawn much attention due to its practical significance in many critical applications including cybersecurity, finance, and social networks. Existing data mining and machine learning methods are either shallow methods that could not effectively capture the complex interdependency of graph data or graph autoencoder methods that could not fully exploit the contextual information as supervision signals for effective anomaly detection. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel method, Self-Supervised Learning for Graph Anomaly Detection (SL-GAD). Our method constructs different contextual subgraphs (views) based on a target node and employs two modules,generative attribute regressionandmulti-view contrastive learningfor anomaly detection. While thegenerative attribute regressionmodule allows us to capture the anomalies in the attribute space, themulti-view contrastive learningmodule can exploit richer structure information from multiple subgraphs, thus abling to capture the anomalies in the structure space, mixing of structure, and attribute information. We conduct extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.
Yu Zheng 0013, Ming Jin 0005, Yixin Liu 0001, Lianhua Chi, Khoa Tran Phan, Yi-Ping Phoebe Chen
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2022 Towards Unsupervised Deep Graph Structure Learning
abstract
In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a successful tool in a variety of graph-related applications. However, the performance of GNNs can be deteriorated when noisy connections occur in the original graph structures; besides, the dependence on explicit structures prevents GNNs from being applied to general unstructured scenarios. To address these issues, recently emerged deep graph structure learning (GSL) methods propose to jointly optimize the graph structure along with GNN under the supervision of a node classification task. Nonetheless, these methods focus on a supervised learning scenario, which leads to several problems, i.e., the reliance on labels, the bias of edge distribution, and the limitation on application tasks. In this paper, we propose a more practical GSL paradigm, unsupervised graph structure learning, where the learned graph topology is optimized by data itself without any external guidance (i.e., labels). To solve the unsupervised GSL problem, we propose a novel StrUcture Bootstrapping contrastive LearnIng fraMEwork (SUBLIME for abbreviation) with the aid of self-supervised contrastive learning. Specifically, we generate a learning target from the original data as an “anchor graph”, and use a contrastive loss to maximize the agreement between the anchor graph and the learned graph. To provide persistent guidance, we design a novel bootstrapping mechanism that upgrades the anchor graph with learned structures during model learning. We also design a series of graph learners and post-processing schemes to model the structures to learn. Extensive experiments on eight benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant effectiveness of our proposed SUBLIME and high quality of the optimized graphs.
Yixin Liu 0001, Yu Zheng 0013, Daokun Zhang, Hongxu Chen 0002, Hao Peng 0001, Shirui Pan
WWW1
2021 ANEMONE: Graph Anomaly Detection with Multi-Scale Contrastive Learning
abstract
Anomaly detection on graphs plays a significant role in various domains, including cybersecurity, e-commerce, and financial fraud detection. However, existing methods on graph anomaly detection usually consider the view in a single scale of graphs, which results in their limited capability to capture the anomalous patterns from different perspectives. Towards this end, we introduce a novel graph anomaly detection framework, namely ANEMONE, to simultaneously identify the anomalies in multiple graph scales. Concretely, ANEMONE first leverages a graph neural network backbone encoder with multi-scale contrastive learning objectives to capture the pattern distribution of graph data by learning the agreements between instances at the patch and context levels concurrently. Then, our method employs a statistical anomaly estimator to evaluate the abnormality of each node according to the degree of agreement from multiple perspectives. Experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.
Ming Jin 0005, Yixin Liu 0001, Yu Zheng 0013, Lianhua Chi, Yuan-Fang Li, Shirui Pan
CIKM2