Graph alignment, the task of identifying corresponding nodes across different graphs, is crucial for applications ranging from social network analysis to bioinformatics. Although most existing methods leverage graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn node embeddings for attributed graphs and match them based on node similarity, they often rely on objectives designed for node classification or link prediction. These approaches preserve node proximity within individual graphs but fail to capture cross-graph correspondence knowledge, leading to suboptimal alignment performance.

Blockchain technology has transformed financial services sectors by providing security, transparency, and immutability through decentralized ledger systems. However, while blockchain data can support a range of applications-such as user quality analysis, illegal activity detection, and transaction pattern identification-existing systems are restricted to basic queries on blocks and transactions due to their sequential data storage. To support queries more generally, we propose VGQ, the first verifiable graph query (VGQ) framework that enables efficient graph queries on blockchain systems without altering blockchain storage structures. VGQ integrates a query layer with an external graph database system and represents blockchain data as a directed transaction graph to improve the efficiency of graph query execution. To ensure reliable results, VGQ includes result verification with three key performance enhancing optimizations: (i) computing connected components to exclude irrelevant vertices and edges during verification; (ii) merging information from edges to accelerate completeness verification; and (iii) employing a dual pointer algorithm for efficient soundness verification. Experiments offer evidence that VGQ can improve on the state-of-the-art framework in terms of query efficiency by up to one order of magnitude and in terms of verification efficiency by up to two orders of magnitude.

Graph Few-Shot Node Classification (GFSNC) has emerged as a promising approach to address the challenge of learning with limited labeled data in graph-structured networks.Despite the success of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in node classification tasks, their performance heavily depends on the availability of abundant labeled data, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios.To tackle this issue, GFSNC adopts the episodic meta-learning paradigm, where models are trained on a series of meta-tasks.However, existing methods face two critical limitations: (i) they focus on local distributions within individual meta-tasks, neglecting the global data distribution, and (ii) they optimize models to minimize intra-class distances without adequately addressing inter-class separability, leading to suboptimal performance.This paper presents TaskNS, a novel GFSNC framework that introduces task-negative samples into meta-training tasks to address these limitations.By incorporating samples from classes outside the current meta-task, our framework enables the model to gradually learn the global distribution of the graph data.Additionally, we design a novel loss function that enhances the model's ability to distinguish between different classes of query samples.This loss function not only ensures high intra-class compactness but also maximizes the inter-class separation by leveraging task-negative samples.To further enhance the quality of task-negative samples, we propose an ℎ-hop-neighbors-based sampling method that leverages the topological structure of a graph.It selects task-negative samples that are structurally close to query samples, ensuring that they are informative and challenging for the model to classify.Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TaskNS, achieving average improvements of 4.6% in accuracy (ACC) and 4.9% in F1-score over state-of-the-art methods.

Federated learning (FL) is a popular collaborative training paradigm in which data owners offer gradients instead of private data to model owners for model training to protect data privacy. However, it faces security threats from two sides: dishonest model owners may extract sensitive information about private data from gradients; meanwhile, adversaries may pretend to be data owners and poison the model by sending malicious gradients. We propose a novel FL protocol, PARSIFAL, to address privacy leakage and model poisoning threats. A poisoning detection module is designed based on a novel sketch structure. This module efficiently detects potential malicious gradients that are dissimilar to the majority of benign gradients. PARSIFAL also contains a robust aggregation module based on sign gradients to mitigate the influence of poisoning gradients on aggregation results. Meanwhile, all processes of our PARSIFAL are protected by privacy protocols, mainly based on secret sharing, to guarantee that malicious detection and aggregation processes will not leak sensitive information. Experimental results show that PARSIFAL improves poisoning defense performance by up to 28% compared with recent baselines.

Tabular data is prevalent in many fields. In practice, tabular data classification may encounter severe challenges due to class imbalance, i.e., some majority classes overwhelm minority ones. Such imbalance could lead to biased prediction tendency of trained classifiers towards majority classes. Oversampling minority classes is an essential solution due to its generality and independence of downstream tasks. Recent years have witnessed the advantages of generative adversarial networks (GANs) in synthetic data generation, favored for their ability to generate quasi-realistic samples. However, challenges arise when the size of minority classes is too small to provide sufficient information for learning real data distributions. Furthermore, the generated minority-class samples could exacerbate the class overlap problem, i.e., some generated samples unexpectedly overlap with partial majority-class samples. To address these challenges, this paper presents B2BGAN, a novel GAN-based approach for oversampling imbalanced tabular data. To capture the real data distribution in a fine-grained manner, we propose a novel backbone-to-branches neural network for the generator to fit the majority and minority classes simultaneously. The backbone network fits the whole distribution of the entire data, while each branch network grasps the distinctive characteristics of individual classes. To alleviate the class overlap problem of generated samples, we develop a prototype-guided loss function to ensure that generated samples are closer to the corresponding class prototypes. We evaluate the effectiveness of B2BGAN on six real-world datasets using six metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art models by 5.38% in AUC and 10.19% in AP.

With the widespread deployment of location-aware mobile devices, a mass of trajectory data is being generated and collected. Mining co-movement patterns of people and vehicles from streaming and massive trajectory data has attracted much attention due to its wide applications in various fields. As a typical co-movement pattern, convoys describe objects moving together in consecutive timestamps. There are two challenges for efficient distributed convoy mining: object clustering and workload balancing. Clustering objects in each time snapshot is a time-consuming operation. In addition, on the basis of practical application scenarios, load balancing is an important consideration for distributed algorithms. To tackle the above challenges, we propose a novel method for distributed convoy mining via sliding window-based indexing and sub-track partitioning, abbreviated SWISP. We offer three major advancements. First, we develop a grid-based DBSCAN clustering algorithm named Grid-DBSCAN for distributed scenarios. It avoids the exhaustive calculation of pairwise distances for neighborhood search and thus improves computational efficiency in the clustering stage. Second, we propose a sliding window-based indexing scheme to filter out sub-tracks with less than$k$consecutive time snapshots, significantly reducing the number of candidate sub-tracks for convoy mining. Third, we develop a distributed convoy mining algorithm based on sub-track partitioning. It exploits both temporal and spatial information of sub-tracks for data partitioning and solves the data skewness problem caused by uneven data distributions. We conduct extensive experiments on four real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our distributed algorithm can handle large-scale trajectory data and is more efficient than state-of-the-art approaches.

Graph few-shot learning (GFSL) has achieved great success in node classification tasks with rare labels. However, graph few-shot classification (GFSC) models often encounter the problem of classifying test samples with unobserved (or unknown) classes due to the rareness of labels. We formulate this problem as out-of-distribution (OOD) sample detection in inductive graph few-shot learning. This paper presents SMUG, a novel GFSL framework that can detect unobserved classes. Since we have no ground-truth OOD samples in a practical training dataset, it is challenging for the GFSC model to retrieve knowledge about unknown classes from labeled samples. To address this difficulty, we propose a sand mixing scheme to introduce observed classes as artificial OOD samples into meta-tasks. We also develop two unsupervised OOD discriminators to identify OOD samples. Thus, we can assess the performance of OOD discriminators since we know the true classes of these artificial OOD samples. Subsequently, we design a novel training procedure to optimize the encoder based on the performance of the OOD discriminators and the GFSC model. It not only enables the GFSL model to distinguish OOD samples but also promotes the classification accuracy of normal samples. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of SMUG based on four benchmark datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SMUG achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art approaches in OOD detection and node classification. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/Memepp/SMUG.

Graph alignment aims to find correspondent nodes between two graphs. Most existing algorithms assume that correspondent nodes in different graphs have similar local structures. However, this principle may not apply to some real-world application scenarios when two graphs have different densities. Some correspondent node pairs may have very different local structures in these cases. Nevertheless, correspondent nodes are expected to have similar importance, inspiring us to exploit global topology consistency for graph alignment. This paper presents GTCAlign, an unsupervised graph alignment framework based on global topology consistency. An indicating matrix is calculated to show node pairs with consistent global topology based on a comprehensive centrality metric. A graph convolutional network (GCN) encodes local structural and attributive information into low-dimensional node embeddings. Then, node similarities are computed based on the obtained node embeddings under the guidance of the indicating matrix. Moreover, a pair of nodes are more likely to be aligned if most of their neighbors are aligned, motivating us to develop an iterative algorithm to refine the alignment results recursively. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets to evaluate the effectiveness of GTCAlign. The experimental results show that GTCAlign outperforms state-of-the-art graph alignment approaches.

Network embedding algorithms learn a mapping from the discrete representation of nodes to continuous vector spaces that preserve node proximity. Despite recent efforts to design novel models, little attention has been given to understanding the instability of network embedding. In this paper, we define the stability of node embeddings as the invariance of the nearest neighbors of nodes in different instantiations. We find that existing embedding approaches have significant amounts of instability. In addition, network structures and algorithm models influence the stability of node embeddings significantly. We also examine the implications of embedding instability for downstream tasks and find remarkable impacts on performance.

Network embedding algorithms learn a mapping from the discrete representation of nodes to continuous vector spaces that preserve the proximities of nodes. The techniques have a wide range of applications in various downstream tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and network alignment. Despite recent efforts to the design of novel models, little attention has been paid to understanding the instability of network embedding. In this paper, we fill this gap by investigating several state-of-the-art network embedding methods. Node embeddings form a geometric shape in the latent space. Characterizing the geometry is critical to figure out the variance of network embedding. Hence, we define two metrics to characterize the geometric properties and find that node embeddings tremble in different instantiations of an embedding space. Then, we formally define the stability of node embeddings as the invariance of the nearest neighbors of nodes. Experimental results show that existing embedding approaches have significant amounts of instability. We explore the influence factors that affect the stability of different methods and find that both network structure and algorithm models affect the stability of node embeddings significantly. Finally, we examine the implications of embedding instability for downstream tasks and find remarkable impacts on the performance.

Estimating set similarity and detecting highly similar sets are fundamental problems in areas such as databases and machine learning. MinHash is a well-known technique for approximating Jaccard similarity of sets and has been successfully used for many applications. Its two compressed versions, b-bit MinHash and Odd Sketch, can significantly reduce the memory usage of the MinHash, especially for estimating high similarities (i.e., similarities around 1). Although MinHash can be applied to static sets as well as streaming sets, of which elements are given in a streaming fashion, unfortunately, b-bit MinHash and Odd Sketch fail to deal with streaming data. To solve this problem, we previously designed a memory-efficient sketch method, MaxLogHash, to accurately estimate Jaccard similarities in streaming sets. Compared with MinHash, our method uses smaller sized registers (each register consists of less than 7 bits) to build a compact sketch for each set. In this paper, we further develop a faster method, MaxLogOPH++. Compared with MaxLogHash, MaxLogOPH++ reduces the time complexity for updating each coming element from O(k) with a small additional memory. We conduct experiments on a variety of datasets, and experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods.

Estimating set similarity and detecting highly similar sets are fundamental problems in areas such as databases, machine learning, and information retrieval. MinHash is a well-known technique for approximating Jaccard similarity of sets and has been successfully used for many applications such as similarity search and large scale learning. Its two compressed versions, b-bit MinHash and Odd Sketch, can significantly reduce the memory usage of the original MinHash method, especially for estimating high similarities (i.e., similarities around 1). Although MinHash can be applied to static sets as well as streaming sets, of which elements are given in a streaming fashion and cardinality is unknown or even infinite, unfortunately, b-bit MinHash and Odd Sketch fail to deal with streaming data. To solve this problem, we design a memory efficient sketch method, MaxLogHash, to accurately estimate Jaccard similarities in streaming sets. Compared to MinHash, our method uses smaller sized registers (each register consists of less than 7 bits) to build a compact sketch for each set. We also provide a simple yet accurate estimator for inferring Jaccard similarity from MaxLogHash sketches. In addition, we derive formulas for bounding the estimation error and determine the smallest necessary memory usage (i.e., the number of registers used for a MaxLogHash sketch) for the desired accuracy. We conduct experiments on a variety of datasets, and experimental results show that our method MaxLogHash is about 5 times more memory efficient than MinHash with the same accuracy and computational cost for estimating high similarities.