Multimodal Entity Alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities across different data modalities, enabling structural data integration that in turn improves the performance of various large language model applications. To lift the requirement of labeled seed pairs that are difficult to obtain, recent methods shifted to an unsupervised paradigm using pseudo-alignment seeds. However, unsupervised entity alignment in multimodal settings remains underexplored, mainly because the incorporation of multimodal information often results in imbalanced coverage of pseudo-seeds within the knowledge graph. To overcome this, we propose PSQE (Pseudo-Seed Quality Enhancement) to improve the precision and graph coverage balance of pseudo seeds via multimodal information and clustering-resampling. Theoretical analysis reveals the impact of pseudo seeds on existing contrastive learning-based MMEA models. In particular, pseudo seeds can influence the attraction and the repulsion terms in contrastive learning at once, whereas imbalanced graph coverage causes models to prioritize high-density regions, thereby weakening their learning capability for entities in sparse regions. Experimental results validate our theoretical findings and show that PSQE as a plug-and-play module can improve the performance of baselines by considerable margins.

Cross-modal retrieval (CMR) has advanced considerably by mapping image and text features into a shared embedding space; however, these approaches still face two persistent challenges: (1) semantic sparsity, where discriminative cues are confined to localized regions, making it difficult to identify implicit visual evidence; and (2) ranking uncertainty under semantic ambiguity, where models struggle to maintain the correct retrieval order when candidates share similar contexts. To address these issues, we propose the Dual-Branch Multi-Granularity Network (DBMG) with Structured Contrastive Ranking, which enriches visual semantics by leveraging a multimodal large language model to generate auxiliary descriptions, aligns sparse cues through a dual-branch architecture capturing both global and local interactions, and enforces ranking consistency via a three-stage contrastive objective that progressively optimizes category clustering, instance alignment, and margin-based ranking. Extensive experiments on four standard CMR benchmarks demonstrate that DBMG outperforms 12 strong baselines, achieving an average 15.91% improvement in mAP, establishing a new state-of-the-art. The code is available at https://github.com/DMiC-Lab-HFUT/DBMG.

Cognitive diagnosis (CD) is an important task in the field of intelligent education, aiming to discover the proficiency of students on knowledge concepts with response logs. In applications, different users of the tutoring system demand for a diagnosis of knowledge concepts at different granularities. However, recent methods assume that the concepts are of the same granularity and use explicit correlations between same-granularity concepts to improve the diagnosis performance. If required for diagnosing multi-granularity concepts, these methods will face diminished performance or partial invalidation. To this end, we make the first attempt for multiple-granularity cognitive diagnosis, i.e., diagnosis on coarse- and fine-grained concepts simultaneously. Specifically, in a skillful way, the same-granularity correlations are captured and embedded into concept representations in view of concept semantics and cross-granularity correlations to model the proficiency influence between concepts implicitly. Then, the specific loss for single-granularity diagnosis and the general loss for the consistency of multi-granularity are designed to train the model jointly, achieving multiple-granularity diagnosis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on both coarse- and fine-grained concepts.

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find the same entities in different knowledge graphs. Existing EA methods assume the supervised aligned pairs without noise. In applications, noisy pairs lead to degradation of EA performance. To this end, a robust EA method based on knowledge distillation is proposed for noisy pairs. Firstly, the dual-teacher model with online distillation is designed, in which, noise discriminator is performed to improve the noise resistance of teacher models. Secondly, a student model is offline distilled from the dual-teacher model without using the noisy supervised pairs, further enhancing the robustness of student model. In addition, the entity structure is combined with entity representation for alignment inference to alleviate the bias of entity representation in noisy environment. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In educational data mining, knowledge tracing (KT) aims to model learning performance based on student knowledge mastery. Deep-learning-based KT models perform remarkably better than traditional KT and have attracted considerable attention. However, most of them lack interpretability, making it challenging to explain why the model performed well in the prediction. In this paper, we propose an interpretable deep KT model, referred to as fuzzy deep knowledge tracing (FDKT) via fuzzy reasoning. Specifically, we formalize continuous scores into several fuzzy scores using the fuzzification module. Then, we input the fuzzy scores into the fuzzy reasoning module (FRM). FRM is designed to deduce the current cognitive ability, based on which the future performance was predicted. FDKT greatly enhanced the intrinsic interpretability of deep-learning-based KT through the interpretation of the deduction of student cognition. Furthermore, it broadened the application of KT to continuous scores. Improved performance with regard to both the advantages of FDKT was demonstrated through comparisons with the state-of-the-art models.

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation, pivotal for guiding users to their next interested locale, grapples with the persistent challenge of data sparsity. Whereas knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a favored tool to mitigate the issue, existing KG-based methods tend to overlook two crucial elements: the intention steering users’ location choices and the high-order topological structure within the KG. In this paper, we craft an Intention-aware Knowledge Graph (IKG) that harmonizes users’ visit histories, movement trajectories, and location categories to model user intentions. Building upon IKG, our novel Intention-aware Knowledge Graph Network (IKGN) delves deeper into the POI recommendation by weighing and propagating node embeddings through an attention mechanism, capturing the unique locational intent of each user. A sequential model like GRU is then employed to ensure a comprehensive representation of users’ short- and long-term location preferences. An empirical study on two real-world datasets validates the effectiveness of our proposed IKGN, with it markedly outshining seven benchmark rival models in both Recall and NDCG metrics. The code of IKGN is available at https://github.com/Jungle123456/IKGN.

Exercise recommendation is a fundamental and important task in the E-learning system, facilitating students' personalized learning. Most existing exercise recommendation algorithms design a scoring criterion (e.g., weakest mastery, lowest historical correctness) in conjunction with experience, and then recommend the recommended knowledge concepts (KCs). These algorithms rely entirely on the scoring criteria by treating exercise recommendations as a centralized system. However, it is a complex problem for the centralized system to choose a limited number of exercises in a period of time to consolidate and learn the KCs efficiently. Moreover, different groups of students (e.g., different countries, schools, or classes) have different solutions for the same group of KCs according to their own situations, in the spirit of competency-based instructing. Therefore, we propose Meta Multi-Agent Exercise Recommendation (MMER). Specifically, we design the multi-agent exercise recommendation module, in which the KCs involved in exercises are considered agents with competition and cooperation among them. And the meta-training stage is designed to learn a robust recommendation module for new student groups. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the satisfactory performance of the proposed model. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the multi-agent and meta-training part is demonstrated for the model in recommendation applications.

Genealogical knowledge graphs depict the relationships of family networks and the development of family histories. They can help researchers to analyze and understand genealogical data, search for genealogical descendant paths, and explore the origins of a family more easily. However, the heterogenous, autonomous, complex, and evolving natures of genealogical data bring challenges to the development of contemporary genealogical knowledge graph models. Applying existing methods to genealogical data may be improper because general knowledge graph models lack in-depth domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose a genealogical knowledge graph model named Huapu-KG that combines HAO intelligence (human intelligence + artificial intelligence + organizational intelligence) to implement the construction and applications of genealogical knowledge graphs. Furthermore, challenges in constructing genealogical knowledge graphs are demonstrated, and experiments conducted on real-world genealogical datasets verify the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed model.

Investment promotion refers to the process by which the government uses disposable resources to attract investors to the region for production and business activities. The existing basic mode of attracting investment is to collect information about enterprises and entrepreneurs through manual methods, determine the target enterprise from the list of enterprises, and then attract investment through visits, negotiations, and other methods. As contacting and visiting companies one by one requires huge amounts of manpower and time, the choice of target companies is critical for attracting investments. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has conducted research from the perspective of knowledge-graph-based recommendation. In this study, we define the problem of target company recommendation in the process of investment promotion, and analyze the characteristics of the problem and the challenges it faces based on the background of the actual problem. Then, a two-tier model for solving this problem is provided from the perspective of knowledge graph reasoning. Aiming at the problem that the knowledge graph will frequently change, the model is designed based on the idea of combining the advantages of global and local link prediction. The experimental results on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

In the era of big data, fragmented knowledge, multisource heterogeneity, and different representation forms of the same entities in various data sources have posed considerable challenges to entity fusion. How to effectively integrate multisource knowledge for the same entities has provoked vast amounts of attention and research from multiple disciplines. Most existing methods for entity fusion can be categorized into two classes: one is to establish an association between the same entities, and the other is to delete duplicate entities after knowledge fusion and create a new fusion entity. However, in these two classes of methods, the former does not achieve true knowledge fusion and semantic interoperability, while the latter may cause irreversible loss of original information. In this paper, we propose a novel entity fusion scheme: Hypernode. Hypernode fuses the same entity in different data sources into a new entity while retaining the original data. We verify the effectiveness of Hypernode on multiple models of link prediction experiments. Several practical application cases illustrate the applicability of Hypernode in data traceability, open domain knowledge fusion, and multi-modal knowledge graph fusion.

The automatic construction of knowledge graphs (KGs) from multiple data sources has received increasing attention. The automatic construction process inevitably brings considerable noise, especially in the construction of KGs from unstructured text. The noise in a KG can be divided into two categories: factual noise and low-quality noise. Factual noise refers to plausible triples that meet the requirements of ontology constraints. For example, the plausible triple satisfies the constraints that the head entity “New_York” is a city and the tail entity “America” belongs to a country. Low-quality noise denotes the obvious errors commonly created in information extraction processes. This study focuses on entity type errors. Most existing approaches concentrate on refining an existing KG, assuming that the type information of most entities or the ontology information in the KG is known in advance. However, such methods may not be suitable at the start of a KG's construction. Therefore, the authors propose an effective framework to eliminate entity type errors. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Graph edge partitioning, which is essential for the efficiency of distributed graph computation systems, divides a graph into several balanced partitions within a given size to minimize the number of vertices to be cut. Existing graph partitioning models can be classified into two categories: offline and streaming graph partitioning models. The former requires global graph information during the partitioning, which is expensive in terms of time and memory for large-scale graphs. The latter creates partitions based solely on the received graph information. However, the streaming model may result in a lower partitioning quality compared with the offline model. Therefore, this study introduces a Local Graph Edge Partitioning model, which considers only the local information (i.e., a portion of a graph instead of the entire graph) during the partitioning. Considering only the local graph information is meaningful because acquiring complete information for large-scale graphs is expensive. Based on the Local Graph Edge Partitioning model, two local graph edge partitioning algorithms—Two-stage Local Partitioning and Adaptive Local Partitioning—are given. Experimental results obtained on 14 real-world graphs demonstrate that the proposed algorithms outperform rival algorithms in most tested cases. Furthermore, the proposed algorithms are proven to significantly improve the efficiency of the real graph computation system GraphX.

Clustering is a classical unsupervised learning task, which is aimed to divide a data set into several groups with similar objects. Clustering problem has been studied for many years, and many excellent clustering algorithms have been proposed. In this paper, we propose a novel clustering method based on density, which is simple but effective. The primary idea of the proposed method is given as follows. Firstly, the point with the largest local density in a cluster is considered as the cluster center. The local density of each point is estimated based on the distance (called radius) between the point and its k-th nearest neighbor. The point with a smaller radius indicates a larger local density. Secondly, the difference of the local densities between each two internal points should be small, while the difference between the density of a border point and the density of an internal point should be relatively large. Thirdly, if the intersection of k nearest neighbors of two points is small, they should be assigned to different clusters. The proposed algorithm has been compared with a typical clustering algorithm named FDPCluster, and the experimental results show that our algorithm has better clustering quality.