The rapid growth of graph data creates significant scalability challenges as most graph algorithms scale quadratically with size. To mitigate these issues, Graph Condensation (GC) methods have been proposed to learn a small graph from a larger one, accelerating downstream tasks. However, existing approaches critically assume a static training set, which conflicts with the inherently dynamic and evolving nature of real-world graph data. This work introduces a novel framework for continual graph condensation, enabling efficient updates to the distilled graph that handle data streams without requiring costly retraining. This limitation leads to inefficiencies when condensing growing training sets. In this paper, we introduce GECC (\underline{G}raph \underline{E}volving \underline{C}lustering \underline{C}ondensation), a scalable graph condensation method designed to handle large-scale and evolving graph data. GECC employs a traceable and efficient approach by performing class-wise clustering on aggregated features. Furthermore, it can inherit previous condensation results as clustering centroids when the condensed graph expands, thereby attaining an evolving capability. This methodology is supported by robust theoretical foundations and demonstrates superior empirical performance. Comprehensive experiments including real world scenario show that GECC achieves better performance than most state-of-the-art graph condensation methods while delivering an around 1000$\times$ speedup on large datasets.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled promising progress in diagnosis prediction from electronic health records (EHRs). However, existing LLM-based approaches tend to overfit to historically observed diagnoses, often overlooking novel yet clinically important conditions that are critical for early intervention. To address this, we propose EviCare, an in-context reasoning framework that integrates deep model guidance into LLM-based diagnosis prediction. Rather than prompting LLMs directly with raw EHR inputs, EviCare performs (1) deep model inference for candidate selection, (2) evidential prioritization for set-based EHRs, and (3) relational evidence construction for novel diagnosis prediction. These signals are then composed into an adaptive in-context prompt to guide LLM reasoning in an accurate and interpretable manner. Extensive experiments on two real-world EHR benchmarks (MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV) demonstrate that EviCare achieves significant performance gains, which consistently outperforms both LLM-only and deep model-only baselines by an average of 20.65% across precision and accuracy metrics. The improvements are particularly notable in challenging novel diagnosis prediction, yielding average improvements of 30.97%.

Revealing the underlying causal mechanisms in the real world is crucial for scientific and technological progress. Despite notable advances in recent decades, the lack of high-quality data and the reliance of traditional causal discovery algorithms (TCDA) on the assumption of no latent confounders, as well as their tendency to overlook the precise semantics of latent variables, have long been major obstacles to the broader application of causal discovery. To address this issue, we propose a novel causal modeling framework, TLVD, which integrates the metadata-based reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with the data-driven modeling capabilities of TCDA for inferring latent variables and their semantics. Specifically, we first employ a data-driven approach to construct a causal graph that incorporates latent variables. Then, we employ multi-LLM collaboration for latent variable inference, modeling this process as a game with incomplete information and seeking its Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (BNE) to infer the possible specific latent variables. Finally, to validate the inferred latent variables across multiple real-world web-based data sources, we leverage LLMs for evidence exploration to ensure traceability. We comprehensively evaluate TLVD on three de-identified real patient datasets provided by a hospital and two benchmark datasets. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness and reliability of TLVD, with average improvements of 32.67% in Acc, 62.21% in CAcc, and 26.72% in ECit across the five datasets.

Deep Learning has facilitated various high-stakes applications such as crime detection, urban planning, drug discovery, and healthcare. Its continuous success hinges on learning from massive data in miscellaneous sources, ranging from data with independent distributions to graph-structured data capturing intricate inter-sample relationships. Scaling up the data access requires global collaboration from distributed data owners. Yet, centralizing all data sources to an untrustworthy centralized server will put users' data at risk of privacy leakage or regulation violation. Federated Learning (FL) is a de facto decentralized learning framework that enables knowledge aggregation from distributed users without exposing private data. Though promising advances are witnessed for FL, new challenges are emerging when integrating FL with the rising needs and opportunities in data mining, graph analytics, foundation models, generative AI, and new interdisciplinary applications in science. By hosting this workshop, we aim to attract a broad range of audiences, including researchers and practitioners from academia and industry interested in the emergent challenges in FL. As an effort to advance the fundamental development of FL, this workshop will encourage ideas exchange on the trustworthiness, scalability, and robustness of distributed data mining and graph analytics and their emergent challenges.

In recent years, the landscape of digital biomedicine and healthcare has been reshaped due to the disruptive breakthroughs in AIfacilitated by tremendous data and high-performance computers, large language models (LLMs) have transformed information technology from accessing data to performing analytical tasks.While demonstrating unprecedented capabilities, LLMs have been found unreliable in tasks requiring factual knowledge and rigorous reasoning.Biomedicine and healthcare, as an important vertical domain rapidly benefitting from progress in AI, necessitates strict requirements on the accuracy, controllability, and interpretability of analytical models, posing critical challenges for LLMs.Despite recent studies addressing the hallucination problem of LLMs, research on empowering LLMs with the ability to plan, reason, and ground with explicit knowledge has also started to prosper, especially in the biomedicine and healthcare domain.On the other hand, biomedical data are enormous and notoriously complex, coming from various sources (e.g., biomedical knowledge bases, online literature, and hospitals) and bearing various modalities (e.g., tables, texts, images and time-series).Healthcare professionals have spent decades collecting, cleaning, and curating various types of data.The processes are extremely costly, producing various datasets with different data schemas, coding systems, and quality standards, many privately

In e-commerce, product descriptions and other forms of copywriting play a critical role in shaping consumer purchasing decisions. However, manually crafting such content is both time-consuming and costly, particularly given the vast and diverse item catalogs. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have transformed automated text generation, offering immense potential to streamline this process. Despite their capabilities, LLMs continue to face obstacles in e-commerce applications, including a lack of diversity and an inability to fully grasp the nuanced details of specific items. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework that integrates graph-based knowledge into Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance content generation. Our approach leverages user reviews to construct an item-feature graph, capturing both explicit and implicit connections between items and features. This structured representation enables the retrieval of diverse, contextually relevant, and factually grounded information, effectively addressing key deficiencies of existing methods. With the constructed graph, we design a graph traversal mechanism that explores a broader range of item-related features, augmenting the generation process with more varied and informative inputs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly improves diversity while preserving fidelity, marking a major advancement in automated e-commerce content generation.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and differential equations (DEs) are two rapidly advancing areas of research that have shown remarkable synergy in recent years. GNNs have emerged as powerful tools for learning on graph-structured data, while differential equations provide a principled framework for modeling continuous dynamics across time and space. The intersection of these fields has led to innovative approaches that leverage the strengths of both, enabling applications in physics-informed learning, spatiotemporal modeling, and scientific computing. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the burgeoning research at the intersection of GNNs and DEs. We will categorize existing methods, discuss their underlying principles, and highlight their applications across domains such as molecular modeling, traffic prediction, and epidemic spreading. Furthermore, we identify open challenges and outline future research directions to advance this interdisciplinary field. A comprehensive paper list is provided at https://github.com/Emory-Melody/Awesome-Graph-NDEs.

Multi-label node classification is an important yet under-explored domain in graph mining as many real-world nodes belong to multiple categories rather than just a single one. Although a few efforts have been made by utilizing Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs) to learn node representations and model correlations between multiple labels in the embedding space, they still suffer from the ambiguous feature and ambiguous topology induced by multiple labels, which reduces the credibility of the messages delivered in graphs and overlooks the label correlations on graph data. Therefore, it is crucial to reduce the ambiguity and empower the GCNs for accurate classification. However, this is quite challenging due to the requirement of retaining the distinctiveness of each label while fully harnessing the correlation between labels simultaneously. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a Correlation-aware Graph Convolutional Network (CorGCN) for multi-label node classification. By introducing a novel Correlation-Aware Graph Decomposition module, CorGCN can learn a graph that contains rich label-correlated information for each label. It then employs a Correlation-Enhanced Graph Convolution to model the relationships between labels during message passing to further bolster the classification process. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed CorGCN.

In recent years, graph anomaly detection has gained considerable attention and has found extensive applications in various domains such as social, financial, and communication networks. However, anomalies in graph-structured data present unique challenges, including label scarcity, ill-defined anomalies, and varying anomaly types, making supervised or semi-supervised methods unreliable. Researchers often adopt unsupervised approaches to address these challenges, assuming that anomalies deviate significantly from the normal data distribution. Yet, when the available data is insufficient, capturing the normal distribution accurately and comprehensively becomes difficult. To overcome this limitation, we propose to utilize external graph data (i.e., graph data in the wild) to help anomaly detection tasks. This naturally raises the question: How can we use external data to help graph anomaly detection task? To answer this question, we propose a novel framework Wild-GAD. Our framework is built upon a unified database, UniWildGraph, which comprises a large and diverse collection of graph data with broad domain coverage, ample data volume, and a unified feature space. We further develop selection criteria based on representativity and diversity to identify the most suitable external data for each anomaly detection task. Extensive experiments on six real-world test datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Wild-GAD. Compared to the baseline methods, our framework has an average 18% AUCROC and 32% AUCPR improvement over the best-competing methods.

Revealing the underlying causal mechanisms in the real world is critical for scientific and technical progress. Despite advancements over the past decades, the lack of high-quality data and the inability of traditional causal discovery algorithms (TCDA) to fully comprehend the exact semantics of variables have long been major obstacles to the broader application of causal discovery. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel causal modeling framework, LLM-CD, which integrates the metadata-based reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) with the data-driven modeling abilities of TCDA for causal discovery. LLM-CD deeply couples the reasoning abilities of LLMs at various stages of TCDA, and enhances causal discovery through an iterative process. Due to the issues of overconfidence and hallucination in LLMs, LLM-CD quantifies and analyzes its uncertainty by incorporating evidence-based deep learning theory with the assumptions of TCDA. We utilize a large-scale de-identified real patient dataset provided by a hospital, a new dataset extracted from MIMIC-IV about the same disease (lung cancer), and two benchmark datasets to comprehensively evaluate LLM-CD. Extensive experimental results confirm the effectiveness and reliability of LLM-CD, with the highest improvement of 403.93% in the Recall and 25.77% in the Ratio metric across four datasets.

This paper investigates the problem of learning mesh-based physical simulations, which is a crucial task with applications in fluid mechanics and aerodynamics. Recent works typically utilize graph neural networks (GNNs) to produce next-time states on irregular meshes by modeling interacting dynamics, and then adopt iterative rollouts for the whole trajectories. However, these methods cannot achieve satisfactory performance in long-term predictions due to the failure of capturing long-term dependency and potential error accumulations. To tackle this, we introduce a new future-to-present learning perspective, and further develop a simple yet effective approach named Foresight And Interpolation (FAIR) for long-term mesh-based simulations. The main idea of our FAIR is to first learn a graph ODE model for coarse long-term predictions and then refine short-term predictions via interpolation. Specifically, FAIR employs a continuous graph ODE model that incorporates past states into the evolution of interacting node representations, which is capable of learning coarse long-term trajectories under a multi-task learning framework. Then, we leverage a channel aggregation strategy to summarize the trajectories for refined short-term predictions, which can be illustrated using an interpolation process. Through pyramid-like alternative propagation between the foresight step and refinement step, our proposed framework FAIR can generate accurate long-term trajectories, achieving a significant error reduction compared with the best baseline on four benchmark datasets. Extensive ablation studies and visualization further validate the superiority of our proposed FAIR.

The ACM KDD 2025 Health Day theme, ''Harnessing AI Opportunities in Biomedicine and Healthcare'' highlights the transformative potential of AI-driven applications in healthcare, translational biomedical research, and basic biological research. This extended abstract discusses recent advancements, challenges, and future directions, focusing on integrating AI-ready data sets, interdisciplinary collaborations, and ethical AI practices. It aims to catalyze discussions on the potential of AI ecosystems in revolutionizing healthcare and related fields.

Graphs are crucial for modeling relational and biological data. As datasets grow larger in real-world scenarios, the risk of exposing sensitive information increases, making privacy-preserving training methods like federated learning (FL) essential to ensure data security and compliance with privacy regulations. Recently proposed personalized subgraph FL methods have become the de-facto standard for training personalized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in a federated manner while dealing with the missing links across clients’ subgraphs due to privacy restrictions. However, personalized subgraph FL faces significant challenges due to the heterogeneity in client subgraphs, such as degree distributions among the nodes, which complicate federated training of graph models. To address these challenges, we propose FedGrAINS, a novel data-adaptive and sampling-based regularization method for subgraph FL. FedGrAINS leverages generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to evaluate node importance concerning clients’ tasks, dynamically adjusting the message-passing step in clients’ GNNs. This adaptation reflects task-optimized sampling aligned with a trajectory balance objective. Experimental results demonstrate that the inclusion of FedGrAINS as a regularizer consistently improves the FL performance compared to baselines that do not leverage such regularization.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown state-of-the-art results in translating natural language questions into SQL queries (Text-to-SQL), a long-standing challenge within the database community. However, security concerns remain largely unexplored, particularly the threat of backdoor attacks, which can introduce malicious behaviors into models through fine-tuning with poisoned datasets. In this work, we systematically investigate the vulnerabilities of LLM-based Text-to-SQL models and present ToxicSQL, a novel backdoor attack framework. Our approach leverages stealthy command-like and character-level triggers to make backdoors difficult to detect and remove, ensuring that malicious behaviors remain covert while maintaining high model accuracy on benign inputs. Furthermore, we propose leveraging SQL injection payloads as backdoor targets, enabling the generation of malicious yet executable SQL queries, which pose severe security and privacy risks in language model-based SQL development. We demonstrate that injecting only 0.44% of poisoned data can result in an attack success rate of 79.41%, posing a significant risk to database security. Additionally, we propose detection and mitigation strategies to enhance model reliability. Our findings highlight the urgent need for security-aware Text-to-SQL development, emphasizing the importance of robust defenses against backdoor threats.

In the dynamic environment of multimedia-sharing platforms like X (formerly known as Twitter) and TikTok, multimedia recommendation systems have been widely used to help users discover items of interest. However, traditional approaches often fall short, when the item modalities are incomplete, a common issue in real-world scenarios. To this end, we introduce the unified heterogeneous Hypergraph construction for the Incomplete multimedia REcommendation ( HIRE ), a novel framework designed to jointly learn a heterogeneous hypergraph and perform accurate recommendations under incomplete scenarios. HIRE first initializes the unified heterogeneous hypergraph for modality completion and employs self-supervised learning aligned with the contrastive text-centered view for multimedia recommendation. Such integration effectively handles the challenges posed by incomplete modalities, leading to improved recommendation accuracy. Furthermore, we find that the hypergraph directly learned from the HIRE is a dense structure which can be inaccurate and coarse. Therefore, we devise the HIRE framework with Sparse constraint named HIRES , which uniquely integrates optimal transport and a \(\ell_{2,1}\) -norm to refine the hypergraph structure. Our extensive experiments across various datasets demonstrate the superiority of HIRES in addressing incomplete modalities, establishing it as a powerful tool for personalized multimedia recommendations.

Spatiotemporal time series are usually collected via monitoring sensors placed at different locations, which usually contain missing values due to various failures, such as mechanical damages and Internet outages. Imputing the missing values is crucial for analyzing time series. When recovering a specific data point, most existing methods consider all the information relevant to that point regardless of the cause-and-effect relationship. During data collection, it is inevitable that some unknown confounders are included, e.g., background noise in time series and non-causal shortcut edges in the constructed sensor network. These confounders could open backdoor paths and establish non-causal correlations between the input and output. Over-exploiting these non-causal correlations could cause overfitting. In this paper, we first revisit spatiotemporal time series imputation from a causal perspective and show how to block the confounders via the frontdoor adjustment. Based on the results of frontdoor adjustment, we introduce a novel Causality-Aware Spatiotemporal Graph Neural Network (Casper), which contains a novel Prompt Based Decoder (PBD) and a Spatiotemporal Causal Attention (SCA). PBD could reduce the impact of confounders and SCA could discover the sparse causal relationships among embeddings. Theoretical analysis reveals that SCA discovers causal relationships based on the values of gradients. We evaluate Casper on three real-world datasets, and the experimental results show that Casper could outperform the baselines and could effectively discover the causal relationships.

Heterogeneous networks contain multiple types of nodes and links, with some link types encapsulating hierarchical structure over entities. Hierarchical relationships can codify information such as subcategories or one entity being subsumed by another and are often used for organizing conceptual knowledge into a tree-structured graph. Hyperbolic embedding models learn node representations in a hyperbolic space suitable for preserving the hierarchical structure. Unfortunately, current hyperbolic embedding models only implicitly capture the hierarchical structure, failing to distinguish between node types, and they only assume a single tree. In practice, many networks contain a mixture of hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures, and the hierarchical relations may be represented as multiple trees with complex structures, such as sharing certain entities. In this work, we propose a new hyperbolic representation learning model that can handle complex hierarchical structures and also learn the representation of both hierarchical and non-hierarchic structures. We evaluate our model on several datasets, including identifying relevant articles for a systematic review, which is an essential tool for evidence-driven medicine and node classification.

Federated learning on graphs (a.k.a., federated graph learning- FGL) has recently received increasing attention due to its capacity to enable collaborative learning over distributed graph datasets without compromising local clients' data privacy. In previous works, clients of FGL typically represent institutes or organizations that possess sets of entire graphs (e.g., molecule graphs in biochemical research) or parts of a larger graph (e.g., sub-user networks of e-commerce platforms). However, another natural paradigm exists where clients act as remote devices retaining the graph structures of local neighborhoods centered around the device owners (i.e., ego-networks), which can be modeled for specific graph applications such as user profiling on social ego-networks and infection prediction on contact ego-networks. FGL in such novel yet realistic ego-network settings faces the unique challenge of incomplete neighborhood information for non-ego local nodes since they likely appear and have different sets of neighbors in multiple ego-networks. To address this challenge, we propose an FGL method for distributed ego-networks in which clients obtain complete neighborhood information of local nodes through sharing node embeddings with other clients. A contrastive learning mechanism is proposed to bridge the gap between local and global node embeddings and stabilize the local training of graph neural network models, while a secure embedding sharing protocol is employed to protect individual node identity and embedding privacy against the server and other clients. Comprehensive experiments on various distributed ego-network datasets successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed embedding sharing method on top of different federated model sharing frameworks, and we also provide discussions on the potential efficiency and privacy drawbacks of the method as well as their future mitigation.

The sparse interactions between users and items have aggravated the difficulty of their representations in recommender systems. Existing methods leverage tags to alleviate the sparsity problem but ignore prevalent logical relations among items and tags (e.g., membership, hierarchy, and exclusion), which can be leveraged to enhance the accuracy of modeling user preferences and conducting recommendations. To this end, we propose to extract logical relations among item tags from existing tag taxonomies and exploit the individual strengths of the Poincaré and the Lorentz models in hyperbolic space for logical relation modeling towards enhanced recommendations. Moreover, we find that the logical relations directly extracted from existing tag taxonomies can be inaccurate and coarse. Therefore, we further devise innovative consistency-based and granularity- based weighting mechanisms based on user behavior patterns for data-driven logical relation mining that can be jointly optimized along with recommendations in an end-to-end fashion. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets show drastic performance gains brought by our proposed framework, which constantly achieves an average of 8.25% improvement over state-of-the-art competitors regarding both Recall and NDCG metrics. Insightful case studies further demonstrate that our automatically refined logical relations are highly accurate and interpretable.

Temporal graph representation learning has drawn considerable attention in recent years. Most existing works mainly focus on modeling local structural dependencies of temporal graphs. However, underestimating the inherent global structural role information in many real-world temporal graphs inevitably leads to sub-optimal graph representations. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel Role-based Temporal Graph Convolution Network (RTGCN) that fully leverages the global structural role information in temporal graphs. Specifically, RTGCN can effectively capture the static global structural roles by using hypergraph convolution neural networks. To capture the evolution of nodes' structural roles, we further design structural role-based gated recurrent units. Finally, we integrate structural role proximity in our objective function to preserve global structural similarity, further promoting temporal graph representation learning. Experimental results on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that RTGCN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art temporal graph representation learning methods by significant margins in various temporal link prediction and node classification tasks. Specifically, RTGCN achieves AUC improvement of up to 5.1% for link prediction and F1 improvement of up to 6.2% for new link prediction. In addition, RTGCN achieves AUC improvement up to 4.6% for node classification and 2.7% for structural role classification.

Deep Learning has facilitated various high-stakes applications such as crime detection, urban planning, drug discovery, and healthcare. Its continuous success hinges on learning from massive data in miscellaneous sources, ranging from data with independent distributions to graph-structured data capturing intricate inter-sample relationships. Scaling up the data access requires global collaboration from distributed data owners. Yet, centralizing all data sources to an untrustworthy centralized server will put users' data at risk of privacy leakage or regulation violation. Federated Learning (FL) is a de facto decentralized learning framework that enables knowledge aggregation from distributed users without exposing private data. Though promising advances are witnessed for FL, new challenges are emerging when integrating FL with the rising needs and opportunities in data mining, graph analytics, foundation models, generative AI, and new interdisciplinary applications in science. By hosting this workshop, we aim to attract a broad range of audiences, including researchers and practitioners from academia and industry interested in the emergent challenges in FL. As an effort to advance the fundamental development of FL, this workshop will encourage ideas exchange on the trustworthiness, scalability, and robustness of distributed data mining and graph analytics and their emergent challenges.

The growing availability of well-organized Electronic Health Records (EHR) data has enabled the development of various machine learning models towards disease risk prediction. However, existing risk prediction methods overlook the heterogeneity of complex diseases, failing to model the potential disease subtypes regarding their corresponding patient visits and clinical concept subgroups. In this work, we introduce TACCO, a novel framework that jointly discovers clusters of clinical concepts and patient visits based on a hypergraph modeling of EHR data. Specifically, we develop a novel self-supervised co-clustering framework that can be guided by the risk prediction task of specific diseases. Furthermore, we enhance the hypergraph model of EHR data with textual embeddings and enforce the alignment between the clusters of clinical concepts and patient visits through a contrastive objective. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the public MIMIC-III dataset and Emory internal CRADLE dataset over the downstream clinical tasks of phenotype classification and cardiovascular risk prediction demonstrate an average 31.25% performance improvement compared to traditional ML baselines and a 5.26% improvement on top of the vanilla hypergraph model without our co-clustering mechanism. In-depth model analysis, clustering results analysis, and clinical case studies further validate the improved utilities and insightful interpretations delivered by TACCO. Code is available at https://github.com/PericlesHat/TACCO.

Online health communities (OHCs) provide an essential platform for patients with similar health conditions to share experiences and offer moral support. However, many time-sensitive questions from patients often remain unanswered due to the multitude of threads and the random nature of patient visits in OHCs. Traditional recommendation systems solely based on similarity for recommendations cannot be directly applied in OHCs. They tend to overlook the influence of patients' dynamically changing features (e.g., health stages), affecting their ability to provide meaningful responses to questions. To address this, we propose a novel recommender system scenario designed for OHCs, which differs from traditional recommender systems in several ways. Firstly, it's challenging to model the social support factors that form helper-seeker links in OHCs. Secondly, the impact of patients' historical activities is complex to quantify. Lastly, ensuring recommended helpers have the requisite expertise is crucial. To overcome these challenges, we develop a Monotonically regularIzed diseNTangled Variational Autoencoders (MINT) model. This model formulates interactions between seekers and helpers as a dynamic graph, using encoded historical activities as node features. We also introduce a graph-based disentangle VAE to capture patient features and a monotonic regularizer to ensure the logical pairing of seekers and helpers. Our extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.

Behemoth graphs are often fragmented and separately stored by multiple data owners as distributed subgraphs in many realistic applications. Without harming data privacy, it is natural to consider the subgraph federated learning (subgraph FL) scenario, where each local client holds a subgraph of the entire global graph, to obtain globally generalized graph mining models. To overcome the unique challenge of incomplete information propagation on local subgraphs due to missing cross-subgraph neighbors, previous works resort to the augmentation of local neighborhoods through the joint FL of missing neighbor generators and GNNs. Yet their technical designs have profound limitations regarding the utility, efficiency, and privacy goals of FL. In this work, we propose FedDEP to comprehensively tackle these challenges in subgraph FL. FedDEP consists of a series of novel technical designs: (1) Deep neighbor generation through leveraging the GNN embeddings of potential missing neighbors; (2) Efficient pseudo-FL for neighbor generation through embedding prototyping; and (3) Privacy protection through noiseless edge-local-differential-privacy. We analyze the correctness and efficiency of FedDEP, and provide theoretical guarantees on its privacy. Empirical results on four real-world datasets justify the clear benefits of proposed techniques.

Linking (aligning) biomedical concepts across diverse data sources enables various integrative analyses, but it is challenging due to the discrepancies in concept naming conventions. Various strategies have been developed to overcome this challenge, such as those based on string-matching rules, manually crafted thesauri, and machine learning models. However, these methods are constrained by limited prior biomedical knowledge and can hardly generalize beyond the limited amounts of rules, thesauri, or training samples. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited impressive results in diverse biomedical NLP tasks due to their unprecedentedly rich prior knowledge and strong zero-shot prediction abilities. However, LLMs suffer from issues including high costs, limited context length, and unreliable predictions. In this research, we propose PromptLink, a novel biomedical concept linking framework that leverages LLMs. It first employs a biomedical-specialized pre-trained language model to generate candidate concepts that can fit in the LLM context windows. Then it utilizes an LLM to link concepts through two-stage prompts, where the first-stage prompt aims to elicit the biomedical prior knowledge from the LLM for the concept linking task and the second-stage prompt enforces the LLM to reflect on its own predictions to further enhance their reliability. Empirical results on the concept linking task between two EHR datasets and an external biomedical KG demonstrate the effectiveness of PromptLink. Furthermore, PromptLink is a generic framework without reliance on additional prior knowledge, context, or training data, making it well-suited for concept linking across various types of data sources. The source code of this study is available at https://github.com/constantjxyz/PromptLink.

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is a technique used to identify abnormal nodes within graphs, finding applications in network security, fraud detection, social media spam detection, and various other domains. A common method for GAD is Graph Auto-Encoders (GAEs), which encode graph data into node representations and identify anomalies by assessing the reconstruction quality of the graphs based on these representations. However, existing GAE models are primarily optimized for direct link reconstruction, resulting in nodes connected in the graph being clustered in the latent space. As a result, they excel at detecting cluster-type structural anomalies but struggle with more complex structural anomalies that do not conform to clusters. To address this limitation, we propose a novel solution called GAD-NR, a new variant of GAE that incorporates neighborhood reconstruction for graph anomaly detection. GAD-NR aims to reconstruct the entire neighborhood of a node, encompassing the local structure, self-attributes, and neighbor attributes, based on the corresponding node representation. By comparing the neighborhood reconstruction loss between anomalous nodes and normal nodes, GAD-NR can effectively detect any anomalies. Extensive experimentation conducted on six real-world datasets validates the effectiveness of GAD-NR, showcasing significant improvements (by up to 30%↑ in AUC) over state-of-the-art competitors. The source code for GAD-NR is openly available. Importantly, the comparative analysis reveals that the existing methods perform well only in detecting one or two types of anomalies out of the three types studied. In contrast, GAD-NR excels at detecting all three types of anomalies across the datasets, demonstrating its comprehensive anomaly detection capabilities.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in learning with graph-structured data. Privacy concerns have also been raised for the trained models which could expose the sensitive information of graphs including both node features and the structure information. In this paper, we aim to achieve node-level differential privacy (DP) for training GNNs so that a node and its edges are protected. Node DP is inherently difficult for GNNs because all direct and multi-hop neighbors participate in the calculation of gradients for each node via layer-wise message passing and there is no bound on how many direct and multi-hop neighbors a node can have, so existing DP methods will result in high privacy cost or poor utility due to high node sensitivity. We propose a D ecoupled GNN with Differentially P rivate A pproximate Personalized PageR ank (DPAR) for training GNNs with an enhanced privacy-utility tradeoff. The key idea is to decouple the feature projection and message passing via a DP PageRank algorithm which learns the structure information and uses the top-K neighbors determined by the PageRank for feature aggregation. By capturing the most important neighbors for each node and avoiding the layer-wise message passing, it bounds the node sensitivity and achieves improved privacy-utility tradeoff compared to layer-wise perturbation based methods. We theoretically analyze the node DP guarantee for the two processes combined together and empirically demonstrate better utilities of DPAR with the same level of node DP compared with state-of-the-art methods.

The data generated in many real-world applications can be modeled as heterogeneous graphs of multi-typed entities (nodes) and relations (links). Nowadays, such data are commonly generated and stored by distributed clients, making direct centralized model training unpractical. While the data in each client are prone to biased local distributions, generalizable global models are still in frequent need for large-scale applications. However, the large number of clients enforce significant computational overhead due to the communication and synchronization among the clients, whereas the biased local data distributions indicate that not all clients and parameters should be computed and updated at all times. Motivated by specifically designed preliminary studies on training a state-of-the-art heterogeneous graph neural network (HGN) with the vanilla FedAvg framework, in this work, we propose to leverage the characteristics of heterogeneous graphs by designing dynamic activation strategies for the clients and parameters during the federated training of HGN, named FedDA. Moreover, we design a novel disentangled model D-HGN to enable type-oriented activation of model parameters for FedDA. The effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed techniques are backed by both theoretical and empirical analysis– We theoretically analyze the validity and convergence of FedDA and mathematically illustrate its efficiency gain; meanwhile, we demonstrate the significant performance gains of FedDA and corroborate its efficiency gains with extensive experiments over multiple realistic FL settings synthesized based on real-world heterogeneous graphs.

Numerous papers get published all the time. However, some papers are born to be well-cited while others are not. In this work, we revisit the important problem of citation prediction, by focusing on the important yet realistic prediction on the average number of citations a paper will attract per year. The task is nonetheless challenging because many correlated factors underlie the potential impact of a paper, such as the prestige of its authors, the authority of its publishing venue, and the significance of the problems/techniques/applications it studies. To jointly model these factors, we propose to construct a heterogeneous publication network of nodes including papers, authors, venues, and terms. Moreover, we devise a novel heterogeneous graph neural network (HGN) to jointly embed all types of nodes and links, towards the modeling of research impact and its propagation. Beyond graph heterogeneity, we find it also important to consider the latent research domains, because the same nodes can have different impacts within different communities. Therefore, we further devise a novel cluster-aware (CA) module, which models all nodes and their interactions under the proper contexts of research domains. Finally, to exploit the information-rich texts associated with papers, we devise a novel text-enhancing (TE) module for automatic quality term mining. With the real-world publication data of DBLP, we construct three different networks and conduct comprehensive experiments to evaluate our proposed CATE-HGN framework, against various state-of-the-art models. Rich quantitative results and qualitative case studies demonstrate the superiority of CATE-HGN in citation prediction on publication networks, and indicate its general advantages in various relevant downstream tasks on text-rich heterogeneous networks.

Personalized diagnosis prediction based on electronic health records (EHR) of patients is a promising yet challenging task for AI in healthcare. Existing studies typically ignore the heterogeneity of diseases across different patients. For example, diabetes can have different complications across different patients (e.g., hyperlipidemia and circulatory disorder), which requires personalized diagnoses and treatments. Specifically, existing models fail to consider 1) varying severity of the same diseases for different patients, 2) complex interactions among syndromic diseases, and 3) dynamic progression of chronic diseases. In this work, we propose to perform personalized diagnosis prediction based on EHR data via capturing disease severity, interaction, and progression. In particular, we enable personalized disease representations via severity-driven embeddings at the disease level. Then, at the visit level, we propose to capture higher-order interactions among diseases that can collectively affect patients’ health status via hypergraph-based aggregation; at the patient level, we devise a personalized generative model based on neural ordinary differential equations to capture the continuous-time disease progressions underlying discrete and incomplete visits. Extensive experiments on two real-world EHR datasets show significant performance gains brought by our approach, yielding average improvements of 10.70% for diagnosis prediction over state-of-the-art competitors.

In recent years, graph pre-training has gained significant attention, focusing on acquiring transferable knowledge from unlabeled graph data to improve downstream performance. Despite these recent endeavors, the problem of negative transfer remains a major concern when utilizing graph pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Previous studies made great efforts on the issue of what to pre-train and how to pre-train by designing a variety of graph pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. However, there are cases where even the most advanced "pre-train and fine-tune" paradigms fail to yield distinct benefits. This paper introduces a generic framework W2PGNN to answer the crucial question of when to pre-train (.e., in what situations could we take advantage of graph pre-training) before performing effortful pre-training or fine-tuning. We start from a new perspective to explore the complex generative mechanisms from the pre-training data to downstream data. In particular, W2PGNN first fits the pre-training data into graphon bases, each element of graphon basis (i.e., a graphon) identifies a fundamental transferable pattern shared by a collection of pre-training graphs. All convex combinations of graphon bases give rise to a generator space, from which graphs generated form the solution space for those downstream data that can benefit from pre-training. In this manner, the feasibility of pre-training can be quantified as the generation probability of the downstream data from any generator in the generator space. W2PGNN offers three broad applications: providing the application scope of graph pre-trained models, quantifying the feasibility of pre-training, and assistance in selecting pre-training data to enhance downstream performance. We provide a theoretically sound solution for the first application and extensive empirical justifications for the latter two applications.

Biological networks are commonly used in biomedical and healthcare domains to effectively model the structure of complex biological systems with interactions linking biological entities. However, due to their characteristics of high dimensionality and low sample size, directly applying deep learning models on biological networks usually faces severe overfitting. In this work, we propose R-MIXUP, a Mixup-based data augmentation technique that suits the symmetric positive definite (SPD) property of adjacency matrices from biological networks with optimized training efficiency. The interpolation process in R-MIXUP leverages the log-Euclidean distance metrics from the Riemannian manifold, effectively addressing the swelling effect and arbitrarily incorrect label issues of vanilla Mixup. We demonstrate the effectiveness of R-MIXUP with five real-world biological network datasets on both regression and classification tasks. Besides, we derive a commonly ignored necessary condition for identifying the SPD matrices of biological networks and empirically study its influence on the model performance. The code implementation can be found in Appendix E.

Model pre-training on large text corpora has been demonstrated effective for various downstream applications in the NLP domain. In the graph mining domain, a similar analogy can be drawn for pre-training graph models on large graphs in the hope of benefiting downstream graph applications, which has also been explored by several recent studies. However, no existing study has ever investigated the pre-training of text plus graph models on large heterogeneous graphs with abundant textual information (a.k.a. large graph corpora) and then fine-tuning the model on different related downstream applications with different graph schemas. To address this problem, we propose a framework of graph-aware language model pre-training (GaLM) on a large graph corpus, which incorporates large language models and graph neural networks, and a variety of fine-tuning methods on downstream applications. We conduct extensive experiments on Amazon's real internal datasets and large public datasets. Comprehensive empirical results and in-depth analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods along with lessons learned.

Medical decision-making processes can be enhanced by comprehensive biomedical knowledge bases, which require fusing knowledge graphs constructed from different sources via a uniform index system. The index system often organizes biomedical terms in a hierarchy to provide the aligned entities with fine-grained granularity. To address the challenge of scarce supervision in the biomedical knowledge fusion (BKF) task, researchers have proposed various unsupervised methods. However, these methods heavily rely on ad-hoc lexical and structural matching algorithms, which fail to capture the rich semantics conveyed by biomedical entities and terms. Recently, neural embedding models have proved effective in semantic-rich tasks, but they rely on sufficient labeled data to be adequately trained. To bridge the gap between the scarce-labeled BKF and neural embedding models, we propose HiPrompt, a supervision-efficient knowledge fusion framework that elicits the few-shot reasoning ability of large language models through hierarchy-oriented prompts. Empirical results on the collected KG-Hi-BKF benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of HiPrompt.

Scientific document classification is a critical task for a wide range of applications, but the cost of collecting human-labeled data can be prohibitive. We study scientific document classification using label names only. In scientific domains, label names often include domain-specific concepts that may not appear in the document corpus, making it difficult to match labels and documents precisely. To tackle this issue, we propose WanDeR, which leverages dense retrieval to perform matching in the embedding space to capture the semantics of label names. We further design the label name expansion module to enrich its representations. Lastly, a self-training step is used to refine the predictions. The experiments on three datasets show that WanDeR outperforms the best baseline by 11.9%. Our code will be published at https://github.com/ritaranx/wander.

Federated learning (FL) aims to train powerful and generalized global models without putting distributed data together, which has been shown effective in various domains of machine learning. The non-IIDness of data across local clients has been a major challenge for FL. In graphs, one specifically important perspective of non-IIDness is manifested in the link-type heterogeneity underlying homogeneous graphs- the seemingly uniform links captured in most real-world networks can carry different levels of homophily or semantics of relations, while the exact sets and distributions of such latent link-types can further differ across local clients. Through our preliminary data analysis, we are motivated to design a new graph FL framework that can simultaneously discover latent link-types and model message-passing w.r.t. the discovered link-types through the collaboration of distributed local clients. Specifically, we propose a framework FedLit that can dynamically detect the latent link-types during FL via an EM-based clustering algorithm and differentiate the message-passing through different types of links via multiple convolution channels. For experiments, we synthesize multiple realistic datasets of graphs with latent heterogeneous link-types from real-world data, and partition them with different levels of link-type heterogeneity. Comprehensive experimental results and in-depth analysis have demonstrated both superior performance and rational behaviors of our proposed techniques.

Heterogeneous information network (HIN) embedding, aiming to map the structure and semantic information in a HIN to distributed representations, has drawn considerable research attention. Graph neural networks for HIN embeddings typically adopt a hierarchical attention (including node-level and meta-path-level attentions) to capture the information from meta-path-based neighbors. However, this complicated attention structure often cannot achieve the function of selecting meta-paths due to severe overfitting. Moreover, when propagating information, these methods do not distinguish direct (one-hop) meta-paths from indirect (multi-hop) ones. But from the perspective of network science, direct relationships are often believed to be more essential, which can only be used to model direct information propagation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel neural network method viaimplicitlyutilizing attention and meta-paths, which can relieve the severe overfitting brought by the current over-parameterized attention mechanisms on HIN. We first use the multi-layer graph convolutional network (GCN) framework, which performs a discriminative aggregation at each layer, along with stacking the information propagation of direct linked meta-paths layer-by-layer, realizing the function of attentions for selecting meta-paths in an indirect way. We then give an effective relaxation and improvement via introducing a new propagation operation which can be separated from aggregation. That is, we first model the whole propagation process with well-defined probabilistic diffusion dynamics, and then introduce a random graph-based constraint which allows it to reduce noise with the increase of layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the new approach over state-of-the-art methods.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of concept map generation techniques due to their advantages in providing well-structured summarization of knowledge from free texts. Traditional unsupervised methods do not generate task-oriented concept maps, whereas deep generative models require large amounts of training data. In this work, we presentGT-D2G(Graph Translation-based Document To Graph), an automatic concept map generation framework that leverages generalized NLP pipelines to derive semantic-rich initial graphs, and translates them into more concise structures under the weak supervision of downstream task labels. The concept maps generated byGT-D2Gcan provide interpretable summarization of structured knowledge for the input texts, which are demonstrated through human evaluation and case studies on three real-world corpora. Further experiments on the downstream task of document classification show thatGT-D2Gbeats other concept map generation methods. Moreover, we specifically validate the labeling efficiency ofGT-D2Gin the label-efficient learning setting and the flexibility of generated graph sizes in controlled hyper-parameter studies.

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been widely applied to various applications, including image classification, text generation, audio recognition, and graph data analysis. However, recent studies have shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Though there are several works about adversarial attack and defense strategies on domains such as images and natural language processing, it is still difficult to directly transfer the learned knowledge to graph data due to its representation structure. Given the importance of graph analysis, an increasing number of studies over the past few years have attempted to analyze the robustness of machine learning models on graph data. Nevertheless, existing research considering adversarial behaviors on graph data often focuses on specific types of attacks with certain assumptions. In addition, each work proposes its own mathematical formulation, which makes the comparison among different methods difficult. Therefore, this review is intended to provide an overall landscape of more than 100 papers on adversarial attack and defense strategies for graph data, and establish a unified formulation encompassing most graph adversarial learning models. Moreover, we also compare different graph attacks and defenses along with their contributions and limitations, as well as summarize the evaluation metrics, datasets and future trends. We hope this survey can help fill the gap in the literature and facilitate further development of this promising new field We also have created an online resource to keep track of relevant research on the basis of this survey athttps://github.com/safe-graph/graph-adversarial-learning-literature.

The sparse interactions between users and items on the web have aggravated the difficulty of their representations in recommender systems. Existing approaches leverage item attributes (e.g., item categories and tags) to alleviate the data sparsity problem, so as to enhance the performance and interpretability of recommendation. However, directly using all attributes of items cannot avoid the negative impacts of low-quality attributes, where manually labeling the quality of attributes is time-consuming. To this end, we propose HQRec to jointly measure the quality of attributes automatically and perform recommendation accurately. Specifically, we first analyze the different qualities among item attributes, and propose to leverage item categories to select high-quality tags via category-guided quality measurement and direction-aware optimization in an unsupervised fashion. Then, we propose to capture the complex relations among users and items based on the high-quality attributes, where a novel quality-aware embedding fusion and quality-aware embedding propagation mechanism for users and items is devised. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets show drastic performance gains brought by our proposed HQRec framework, which constantly achieves an average of 14.73% improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Recall and NDCG metrics. Insightful case studies also show that our automatic quality measurements are highly accurate and interpretable.

Mapping the connectome of the human brain using structural or functional connectivity has become one of the most pervasive paradigms for neuroimaging analysis. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) motivated from geometric deep learning have attracted broad interest due to their established power for modeling complex networked data. Despite their superior performance in many fields, there has not yet been a systematic study of how to design effective GNNs for brain network analysis. To bridge this gap, we present BrainGB, a benchmark for brain network analysis with GNNs. BrainGB standardizes the process by (1) summarizing brain network construction pipelines for both functional and structural neuroimaging modalities and (2) modularizing the implementation of GNN designs. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets across cohorts and modalities and recommend a set of general recipes for effective GNN designs on brain networks. To support open and reproducible research on GNN-based brain network analysis, we host the BrainGBwebsite at https://braingb.us with models, tutorials, examples, as well as an out-of-box Python package. We hope that this work will provide useful empirical evidence and offer insights for future research in this novel and promising direction.

Brain networks, graphical models such as those constructed from MRI, have been widely used in pathological prediction and analysis of brain functions. Within the complex brain system, differences in neuronal connection strengths parcellate the brain into various functional modules (network communities), which are critical for brain analysis. However, identifying such communities within the brain has been a nontrivial issue due to the complexity of neuronal interactions. In this work, we propose a novel interpretable transformer-based model for joint hierarchical cluster identification and brain network classification with three main contributions. First, we offer an end-to-end transformer-based approach to learning clustering assignments. Through pairwise attention, a clustering layer, BCluster, and a transformer encoder collaboratively learn a globally shared clustering assignment that is continuously tuned to downstream tasks. BCluster enhances the model’s performance and reduces run time complexity while also providing clinical insights. Second, we propose a hierarchical structure for the clustering model, enabling the model to learn more abstract, higher-level cluster representations by combining lower-level modules. Each clustering layer is attached to a distinct readout module, which allows the model to utilize the cluster embeddings of every layer effectively. Last but not least, we redesign the attention mechanism of the transformer with stochastic noise, which enhances its cluster learning capability. We compare our model’s performance with SOTA models and perform clustering analysis with the ground truth community labels. Extensive experimental results show that with the help of hierarchical clustering, the model achieves increased accuracy and reduced runtime complexity while providing plausible insight into the functional organization of brain regions.

Human brains, controlling behaviors and cognition, are at the center of complex neurobiological systems. Recent studies in neuroscience and neuroimaging analysis have reached a consensus that interactions among brain regions of interest (ROIs) are driving factors for neural development and disorders. Graph neural networks (GNNs) as a powerful tool for analyzing graph-structured data are naturally applied to the analysis of brain networks. However, training of deep learning models including GNNs often requires a significant amount of labeled data. Due to the complicated data acquisition process and restrictions on data sharing, brain network datasets are still small compared to other types of graphs (e.g., social networks, molecules, proteins). Moreover, real clinical tasks (e.g., mental disorder analysis) are often conducted on local datasets with even smaller scales and larger noises. To this end, we propose to leverage pre-training to capture the intrinsic brain network structures regardless of specific clinical outcomes, for obtaining GNN models that are easily adaptable to downstream tasks. Specifically, (1) we design brain-network-oriented unsupervised pre-training techniques to utilize large-scale brain imaging studies without highly relevant task labels; (2) we develop a data-driven parcellation atlas mapping pipeline to facilitate effective knowledge transfer across studies with different ROI systems. The proposed framework is validated with various GNN models, with extensive empirical results demonstrating consistent improvement in performance as well as robustness.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has become one of the most common imaging modalities for brain function analysis. Recently, graph neural networks (GNN) have been adopted for fMRI analysis with superior performance. Unfortunately, traditional functional brain networks are mainly constructed based on similarities among region of interests (ROI), which are noisy and agnostic to the downstream prediction tasks and can lead to inferior results for GNN-based models. To better adapt GNNs for fMRI analysis, we propose TBDS, an end-to-end framework based on Task-aware Brain connectivity DAG (short for Directed Acyclic Graph) Structure generation for fMRI analysis. The key component of TBDS is the brain network generator which adopts a DAG learning approach to transform the raw time-series into task-aware brain connectivities. Besides, we design an additional contrastive regularization to inject task-specific knowledge during the brain network generation process. Comprehensive experiments on two fMRI datasets, namely Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) and Philadelphia Neuroimaging Cohort (PNC) datasets demonstrate the efficacy of TBDS. In addition, the generated brain networks also highlight the prediction-related brain regions and thus provide unique interpretations of the prediction results. Our implementation will be published upon acceptance.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely used in various graph-related problems such as node classification and graph classification, where the superior performance is mainly established when natural node features are available. However, it is not well understood how GNNs work without natural node features, especially regarding the various ways to construct artificial ones. In this paper, we point out the two types of artificial node features, i.e., positional and structural node features, and provide insights on why each of them is more appropriate for certain tasks, i.e., positional node classification, structural node classification, and graph classification. Extensive experimental results on 10 benchmark datasets validate our insights, thus leading to a practical guideline on the choices between different artificial node features for GNNs on non-attributed graphs. The code is available at https://github.com/zjzijielu/gnn-positional-structural-node-features.

The field of graph data mining, one of the most important AI research areas, has been revolutionized by graph neural networks (GNNs), which benefit from training on real-world graph data with millions to billions of nodes and links. Unfortunately, the training data and process of GNNs involving graphs beyond millions of nodes are extremely costly on a centralized server, if not impossible. Moreover, due to the increasing concerns about data privacy, emerging data from realistic applications are naturally fragmented, forming distributed private graphs of multiple ''data silos", among which direct transferring of data is forbidden. The nascent field of federated learning (FL), which aims to enable individual clients to jointly train their models while keeping their local data decentralized and completely private, is a promising paradigm for large-scale distributed and private training of GNNs. øurs aims to bring together researchers from different backgrounds with a common interest in how to extend current FL algorithms to operate with graph data models such as GNNs. FL is an extremely hot topic of large commercial interest and has been intensively explored for machine learning with visual and textual data. The exploration from graph mining researchers and industrial practitioners is timely catching up just recently. There are many unexplored challenges and opportunities, which urges the establishment of an organized and open community to collaboratively advance the science behind it. The prospective participants of this workshop will include researchers and practitioners from both graph mining and federated learning communities, whose interests include, but are not limited to: graph analysis and mining, heterogeneous network modeling, complex data mining, large-scale machine learning, distributed systems, optimization, meta-learning, reinforcement learning, privacy, robustness, explainability, fairness, ethics, and trustworthiness.

The sparse interactions between users and items on the web have aggravated the difficulty of their representations in recommender systems. Existing approaches leverage tags to alleviate the data sparsity problem, so as to enhance the performance and interpretability of recommendation. However, directly using flat item tags fails to fully exploit the hierarchical relations in data, but tag taxonomies are not always available. To this end, we propose TaxoRec to jointly construct a tag taxonomy automatically and perform recommendation accurately in hyperbolic space. Specifically, we first leverage hyperbolic space and enable the optimization of a discrete taxonomy structure via a representation-aware scoring function and an adaptive clustering algorithm, and preserve the hierarchical structure for interpretability. Then, we propose to capture the complex relations among users, items, and tags in a unified hyperbolic metric space, where a novel tag-enhanced aggregation mechanism and tag-enhanced metric learning algorithm for users and items are defined. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets show drastic performance gains brought by our proposed TaxoRec framework, which constantly achieves an average of 7.76% improvement over the state-of-the-art baselines regarding both Recall and NDCG metrics. Insightful case studies also show that our automatically constructed tag taxonomies are highly accurate and interpretable.

Epilepsy is one of the most serious neurological diseases, affecting 1-2% of the world's population. The diagnosis of epilepsy depends heavily on the recognition of epileptic waves, i.e., disordered electrical brainwave activity in the patient's brain. Existing works have begun to employ machine learning models to detect epileptic waves via cortical electroencephalogram (EEG), which refers to brain data obtained from a noninvasive examination performed on the patient's scalp surface to record electrical activity in the brain. However, the recently developed stereoelectrocorticography (SEEG) method provides information in stereo that is more precise than conventional EEG, and has been broadly applied in clinical practice. Therefore, in this paper, we propose the first data-driven study to detect epileptic waves in a real-world SEEG dataset. While offering new opportunities, SEEG also poses several challenges. In clinical practice, epileptic wave activities are considered to propagate between different regions in the brain. These propagation paths, also known as the epileptogenic network, are deemed to be a key factor in the context of epilepsy surgery. However, the question of how to extract an exact epileptogenic network for each patient remains an open problem in the field of neuroscience. Moreover, the nature of epileptic waves and SEEG data inevitably leads to extremely imbalanced labels and severe noise. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model (BrainNet) that jointly learns the dynamic diffusion graphs and models the brain wave diffusion patterns. In addition, our model effectively aids in resisting label imbalance and severe noise by employing several self-supervised learning tasks and a hierarchical framework. By experimenting with the extensive real SEEG dataset obtained from multiple patients, we find that BrainNet outperforms several latest state-of-the-art baselines derived from time-series analysis.

Drug recommendation is an important task of AI for healthcare. To recommend proper drugs, existing methods rely on various clinical records (e.g., diagnosis and procedures), which are commonly found in data such as electronic health records (EHRs). However, detailed records as such are often not available and the inputs might merely include a set of symptoms provided by doctors. Moreover, existing drug recommender systems usually treat drugs as individual items, ignoring the unique requirements that drug recommendation has to be done on a set of items (drugs), which should be as small as possible and safe without harmful drug-drug interactions (DDIs).

Brain networks characterize complex connectivities among brain regions as graph structures, which provide a powerful means to study brain connectomes. In recent years, graph neural networks have emerged as a prevalent paradigm of learning with structured data. However, most brain network datasets are limited in sample sizes due to the relatively high cost of data collection, which hinders the deep learning models from sufficient training. Inspired by meta-learning that learns new concepts fast with limited training examples, this paper studies data-efficient training strategies for analyzing brain connectomes in a cross-dataset setting. Specifically, we propose to meta-train the model on datasets of large sample sizes and transfer the knowledge to small datasets. In addition, we also explore brain-network-oriented designs, including atlas transformation and adaptive task reweighing. Compared to other pre-training strategies, our meta-learning-based approach achieves higher and stabler performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed solutions. The framework is also able to derive new insights regarding the similarities among datasets and diseases in a data-driven fashion.

Global monitoring of novel diseases and outbreaks is crucial for pandemic prevention. To this end, movement data from cell-phones is already used to augment epidemiological models. Recent work has posed individual cell-phone metadata as a universal data source for syndromic surveillance for two key reasons: (1) these records are already collected for billing purposes in virtually every country and (2) they could allow deviations from people's routine behaviors during symptomatic illness to be detected, both in terms of mobility and social interactions. In this paper, we develop the necessary models to conduct population-level infectious disease surveillance by using cell-phone metadata individually linked with health outcomes. Specifically, we propose GraphDNA---a model that builds Graph neural networks (GNNs) into Dynamic Network Anomaly detection. Using cell-phone call records (CDR) linked with diagnostic information from Iceland during the H1N1v influenza outbreak, we show that GraphDNA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on individual Date-of-Diagnosis (DoD) prediction, while tracking the epidemic signal in the overall population. Our results suggest that proper modeling of the universal CDR data could inform public health officials and bolster epidemic preparedness measures.

Recent years have seen a growing interest in Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), which trains Graph Neural Network (GNN) model to discriminate similar and dissimilar pairs of nodes without human annotations. Most prior GCL work focuses on homogeneous graphs and little attention has been paid to Heterogeneous Graphs (HGs) that involve different types of nodes and edges. Moreover, earlier studies reveal that the explicit use of structure information of underlying graphs is useful for learning representations. Conventional GCL methods merely measure the likelihood of contrastive pairs according to node representations, which may not align with the true semantic similarities. How to leverage such structure information for GCL is not yet well-understood. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper presents a novel method dubbed STructure-EnhaNced heterogeneous graph ContrastIve Learning, STENCIL for brevity. At first, we generate multiple semantic views for HGs based on metapaths. Unlike most methods that maximize the consistency among these views, we propose a novel multiview contrastive aggregation objective to adaptively distill information from each view. In addition, we advocate the explicit use of structure embedding, which enriches the model with local structural patterns of the underlying HGs, so as to better mine true and hard negatives for GCL. Empirical studies on three real-world datasets show that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods and even surpasses several supervised counterparts.

Cold-start diagnosis prediction is a challenging task for AI in healthcare, where often only a few visits per patient and a few observations per disease can be exploited. Although meta-learning is widely adopted to address the data sparsity problem in general domains, directly applying it to healthcare data is less effective, since it is unclear how to capture both the temporal relations in clinical visits and the complicated relations among syndromic diseases for precise personalized diagnosis. To this end, we first propose a novel Meta-learning framework for cold-start diagnosis prediction in healthCare data (MetaCare). By explicitly encoding the effects of disease progress over time as a generalization prior, MetaCare dynamically predicts future diagnosis and timestamp for infrequent patients. Then, to model complicated relations among rare diseases, we propose to utilize domain knowledge of hierarchical relations among diseases, and further perform diagnosis subtyping to mine the latent syndromic relations among diseases. Finally, to tailor the generic meta-learning framework with personalized parameters, we design a hierarchical patient subtyping mechanism and bridge the modeling of both infrequent patients and rare diseases. We term the joint model as MetaCare++. Extensive experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets show significant performance gains brought by MetaCare++, yielding average improvements of 7.71% for diagnosis prediction and 13.94% for diagnosis time prediction over the state-of-the-art baselines.

User-User interaction recommendation, or interaction recommendation, is an indispensable service in social platforms, where the system automatically predicts with whom a user wants to interact. In real-world social platforms, we observe that user interactions may occur in diverse scenarios, and new scenarios constantly emerge, such as new games or sales promotions. There are two challenges in these emerging scenarios: (1) The behavior of users on the emerging scenarios could be different from existing ones due to the diversity among scenarios; (2) Emerging scenarios may only have scarce user behavioral data for model learning. Towards these two challenges, we present KoMen, a Domain Knowledge Guided Meta-learning framework for Interaction Recommendation. KoMen first learns a set of global model parameters shared among all scenarios and then quickly adapts the parameters for an emerging scenario based on its similarities with the existing ones. There are two highlights of KoMen: (1) KoMen customizes global model parameters by incorporating domain knowledge of the scenarios (e.g., a taxonomy that organizes scenarios by their purposes and functions), which captures scenario inter-dependencies with very limited training. (2) KoMen learns the scenario-specific parameters through a mixture-of-expert architecture, which reduces model variance resulting from data scarcity while still achieving the expressiveness to handle diverse scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that KoMen achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public benchmark dataset and a large-scale real industry dataset. Remarkably, KoMen improves over the best baseline w.r.t. weighted ROC-AUC by 2.14% and 2.03% on the two datasets, respectively. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Veronicium/koMen.

Since real-world objects and their interactions are often multi-modal and multi-typed, heterogeneous networks have been widely used as a more powerful, realistic, and generic superclass of traditional homogeneous networks (graphs). Meanwhile, representation learning (a.k.a.embedding) has recently been intensively studied and shown effective for various network mining and analytical tasks. In this work, we aim to provide a unified framework to deeply summarize and evaluate existing research on heterogeneous network embedding (HNE), which includes but goes beyond a normal survey. Since there has already been a broad body of HNE algorithms, as the first contribution of this article, we provide a generic paradigm for the systematic categorization and analysis over the merits of various existing HNE algorithms. Moreover, existing HNE algorithms, though mostly claimed generic, are often evaluated on different datasets. Understandable due to the application favor of HNE, such indirect comparisons largely hinder the proper attribution of improved task performance towards effective data preprocessing and novel technical design, especially considering the various ways possible to construct a heterogeneous network from real-world application data. Therefore, as the second contribution, we create four benchmark datasets with various properties regarding scale, structure, attribute/label availability, andetc. from different sources, towards handy and fair evaluations of HNE algorithms. As the third contribution, we carefully refactor and amend the implementations and create friendly interfaces for 13 popular HNE algorithms, and provide all-around comparisons among them over multiple tasks and experimental settings. By putting all existing HNE algorithms under a unified framework, we aim to provide a universal reference and guideline for the understanding and development of HNE algorithms. Meanwhile, by open-sourcing all data and code, we envision to serve the community with an ready-to-use benchmark platform to test and compare the performance of existing and future HNE algorithms (https://github.com/yangji9181/HNE).

Visual question answering (VQA) is a challenging problem in machine perception, which requires a deep joint understanding of both visual and textual data. Recent research has advanced the automatic generation of high-quality scene graphs from images, while powerful yet elegant models like graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown great power in reasoning over graph-structured data. In this work, we propose to bridge the gap between scene graph generation and VQA by leveraging GNNs. In particular, we design a new model called Conditional Enhanced Graph ATtention network (CE-GAT) to encode pairs of visual and semantic scene graphs with both node and edge features, which is seamlessly integrated with a textual question encoder to generate answers through question-graph conditioning. Moreover, to alleviate the training difficulties of CE-GAT towards VQA, we enforce more useful inductive biases in the scene graphs through novel question-guided graph enriching and pruning. Finally, we evaluate the framework on one of the largest available VQA datasets (namely, GQA) with ground-truth scene graphs, achieving the accuracy of 77.87%, compared with the state of the art (namely, the neural state machine (NSM)), which gives 63.17%. Notably, by leveraging existing scene graphs, our framework is much lighter compared with end-to-end VQA methods (e.g., about 95.3% less parameters than a typical NSM).

Implicit feedback is widely explored by modern recommender systems. Since the feedback is often sparse and imbalanced, it poses great challenges to the learning of complex interactions among users and items. Metric learning has been proposed to capture user-item interactions from implicit feedback, but existing methods only represent users and items in a single metric space, ignoring the fact that users can have multiple preferences and items can have multiple properties, which leads to potential conflicts limiting their performance in recommendation. To capture the multiple facets of user preferences and item properties while resolving their potential conflicts, we propose the novel framework of Multi-fAcet Recommender networks with Spherical optimization (MARS). By designing a cross-facet similarity measurement, we project users and items into multiple metric spaces for fine-grained representation learning, and compare them only in the proper spaces. Furthermore, we devise a spherical optimization strategy to enhance the effectiveness and robustness of the multi-facet recommendation framework. Extensive experiments on six real-world benchmark datasets show drastic performance gains brought by MARS, which constantly achieves up to 40% improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines regarding both HR and nDCG metrics.

Heterogeneous graphs are ubiquitous data structures that can inherently capture multi-type and multi-modal interactions between objects. In recent years, research on encoding heterogeneous graph into latent representations have enjoyed a rapid increase. However, its reverse process, namely how to construct heterogeneous graphs from underlying representations and distributions have not been well explored due to several challenges in 1) modeling the local heterogeneous semantic distribution; 2) preserving the graph-structured distributions over the local semantics; and 3) characterizing the global heterogeneous graph distributions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework for heterogeneous graph generation (HGEN) that jointly captures the semantic, structural, and global distributions of heterogeneous graphs. Specifically, we propose a heterogeneous walk generator that hierarchically generates meta-paths and their path instances. In addition, a novel heterogeneous graph assembler is developed that can sample and combine the generated meta-path instances (e.g., walks) into heterogeneous graphs in a stratified manner. Theoretical analysis on the preservation of heterogeneous graph patterns by the proposed generation process has been performed. Extensive experiments1on multiple real-world and synthetic heterogeneous graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed HGEN in generating realistic heterogeneous graphs.1https://github.com/lingchen0331/HGEN

The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, EvoNet models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.

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.

In this paper, we identify and study an important problem of gradient item retrieval. We define the problem as retrieving a sequence of items with a gradual change on a certain attribute, given a reference item and a modification text. For example, after a customer saw a white dress, she/he wants to buy a similar one but more floral on it. The extent of ”more floral” is subjective, thus prompting one floral dress is hard to satisfy the customer’s needs. A better way is to present a sequence of products with increasingly floral attributes based on the white dress, and allow the customer to select the most satisfactory one from the sequence. Existing item retrieval methods mainly focus on whether the target items appear at the top of the retrieved sequence, but ignore the demand for retrieving a sequence of products with gradual change on a certain attribute. To deal with this problem, we propose a weakly-supervised method that can learn a disentangled item representation from user-item interaction data and ground the semantic meaning of attributes to dimensions of the item representation. Our method takes a reference item and a modification as a query. During inference, we start from the reference item and ”walk” along the direction of the modification in the item representation space to retrieve a sequence of items in a gradient manner. We demonstrate our proposed method can achieve disentanglement through weak supervision. Besides, we empirically show that an item sequence retrieved by our method is gradually changed on an indicated attribute and, in the item retrieval task, our method outperforms existing approaches on three different datasets.

In the past decade, the amount of attributed network data has skyrocketed, and the problem of identifying their underlying group structures has received significant attention. By leveraging both attribute and link information, recent state-of-the-art network clustering methods have achieved significant improvements on relatively clean datasets. However, the noisy nature of real-world attributed networks has long been over-looked, which leads to degraded performance facing missing or inaccurate attributes and links. In this work, we overcome such weaknesses by marrying the strengths of clustering and embedding on attributed networks. Specifically, we propose GRACE (GRAph Clustering with Embedding propagation), to simultaneously learn network representations and identify net-work clusters in an end-to-end manner. It employs deep denoise autoencoders to generate robust network embeddings from node attributes, propagates the embeddings in the network to capture node interactions, and detects clusters based on the stable state of embedding propagation. To provide more insight, we further analyze GRACE in a theoretical manner and find its underlying connections with two canonical approaches for network modeling. Extensive experiments on six real-world attributed networks demonstrate the superiority of GRACE over various baselines from the state-of-the-art. Remarkably, GRACE improves the averaged performance of the strongest baseline from 0.43 to 0.52, yielding a 21% relative improvement. Controlled experiments and case studies further verify our intuitions and demonstrate the ability of GRACE to handle noisy information in real-world attributed networks.

Community detection is an important research field in the understanding of networks. The definition of network communities focuses on denser intracommunity links and sparpser intercommunity links. It cannot explain the fundamental generation mechanisms of the two types of links, which is challenging to reveal. Unfortunately, none of existing works can solve this challenge which is important for accurately modeling community structures. This paper investigates a typical category of networks which possess contents on links. Based on analyses of real networks, we get an observation that nodes with distinctive personality regarding content topics are more active across communities, while nodes without it are more active inside a community, behaving in a similar way known as homophily. This observation provides clues to the generation of intracommunity and intercommunity links. Based on above observation, this paper proposes a novel generative community detection model called GHIPT (Group Homophily and Individual Personality of Topics) by integrating group homophily and individual personality of topics. Besides deriving more precise community results by accurately modeling intracommunity and intercommunity links, GHIPT is able to identify those nodes with distinctive personality who are more willing to interact with others from different communities. It further validates that they change their community memberships more frequently. GHIPT is evaluated on two real networks, i.e., Reddit and DBLP. Experimental results show that it outperforms all the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition to case studies on above two datasets, a case study on COVID-19 dataset provides new insights to support the ongoing fight against COVID-19 pandemic.

Network embedding aims at transferring node proximity in networks into distributed vectors, which can be leveraged in various downstream applications. Recent research has shown that nodes in a network can often be organized in latent hierarchical structures, but without a particular underlying taxonomy, the learned node embedding is less useful nor interpretable. In this work, we aim to improve network embedding by modeling the conditional node proximity in networks indicated by node labels residing in real taxonomies. In the meantime, we also aim to model the hierarchical label proximity in the given taxonomies, which is too coarse by solely looking at the hierarchical topologies. To this end, we propose TaxoGAN to co-embed network nodes and hierarchical labels, through a hierarchical network generation process. Particularly, TaxoGAN models the child labels and network nodes of each parent label in an individual embedding space while learning to transfer network proximity among the spaces of hierarchical labels through stacked network generators and embedding encoders. To enable robust and efficient model inference, we further develop a hierarchical adversarial training process. Comprehensive experiments and case studies on four real-world datasets of networks with hierarchical labels demonstrate the utility of TaxoGAN in improving network embedding on traditional tasks of node classification and link prediction, as well as novel tasks like conditional proximity search and fine-grained taxonomy layout.

Network embedding is an influential graph mining technique for representing nodes in a graph as distributed vectors. However, the majority of network embedding methods focus on learning a single vector representation for each node, which has been recently criticized for not being capable of modeling multiple aspects of a node. To capture the multiple aspects of each node, existing studies mainly rely on offline graph clustering performed prior to the actual embedding, which results in the cluster membership of each node (i.e., node aspect distribution) fixed throughout training of the embedding model. We argue that this not only makes each node always have the same aspect distribution regardless of its dynamic context, but also hinders the end-to-end training of the model that eventually leads to the final embedding quality largely dependent on the clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for multi-aspect network embedding, called asp2vec, in which the aspects of each node are dynamically assigned based on its local context. More precisely, among multiple aspects, we dynamically assign a single aspect to each node based on its current context, and our aspect selection module is end-to-end differentiable via the Gumbel-Softmax trick. We also introduce the aspect regularization framework to capture the interactions among the multiple aspects in terms of relatedness and diversity. We further demonstrate that our proposed framework can be readily extended to heterogeneous networks. Extensive experiments towards various downstream tasks on various types of homogeneous networks and a heterogeneous network demonstrate the superiority of asp2vec.

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) are a powerful class of graph neural networks. Trained in a semi-supervised end-to-end fashion, GCNs can learn to integrate node features and graph structures to generate high-quality embeddings that can be used for various downstream tasks like search and recommendation. However, existing GCNs mostly work on homogeneous graphs and consider a single embedding for each node, which do not sufficiently model the multi-facet nature and complex interaction of nodes in real-world networks. Here, we present a contextualized GCN engine by modeling the multipartite networks of target nodes and their intermediatecontext nodes that specify the contexts of their interactions. Towards the neighborhood aggregation process, we devise a contextual masking operation at the feature level and a contextual attention mechanism at the node level to achieve interaction contextualization by treating neighboring target nodes based on intermediate context nodes. Consequently, we compute multiple embeddings for target nodes that capture their diverse facets and different interactions during graph convolution, which is useful for fine-grained downstream applications. To enable efficient web-scale training, we build a parallel random walk engine to pre-sample contextualized neighbors, and a Hadoop2-based data provider pipeline to pre-join training data, dynamically reduce multi-GPU training time, and avoid high memory cost. Extensive experiments on the bipartite Pinterest graph and tripartite OAG graph corroborate the advantage of the proposed system.

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.

Concept maps provide concise structured representations for documents regarding their important concepts and interaction links, which have been widely used for document summarization and downstream tasks. However, the construction of concept maps often relies heavily on heuristic design and auxiliary tools. Recent popular neural network models, on the other hand, are shown effective in tasks across various domains, but are short in interpretability and prone to overfitting. In this work, we bridge the gap between concept map construction and neural network models, by designing doc2graph, a novel weakly-supervised text-to-graph neural network, which generates concept maps in the middle and is trained towards document-level tasks like document classification. In our experiments, doc2graph outperforms both its traditional baselines and neural counterparts by significant margins in document classification, while producing high-quality interpretable concept maps as document structured summarization.

While node semantics have been extensively explored in social networks, little research attention has been paid to pro le edge semantics, i.e., social relations. Ideal edge semantics should not only show that two users are connected, but also why they know each other and what they share in common. However, relations in social networks are often hard to pro le, due to noisy multi-modal signals and limited user-generated ground-truth labels.

Heterogeneous information network (HIN) summarizes rich structural information in real-world datasets and plays an important role in many big data applications. Recently, graph neural networks have been extended to the representation learning of HIN. One very recent advancement is the hierarchical attention mechanism which incorporates both nodewise and semantic-wise attention. However, since HIN is more likely to be densely connected given its diverse types of edges, repeatedly applying graph convolutional layers can make the node embeddings indistinguishable very quickly. In order to avoid oversmoothness, existing graph neural networks targeting HIN generally suffer from a shallow structure. Consequently, those approaches ignore information beyond the local neighborhood. This design flaw violates the concept of non-local learning, which emphasizes the importance of capturing long-range dependencies. To properly address this limitation, we propose a novel framework of non-local attention in heterogeneous information networks (NLAH). Our framework utilizes a non-local attention structure to complement the hierarchical attention mechanism. In this way, it leverages both local and non-local information simultaneously. Moreover, a weighted sampling schema is designed for NLAH to reduce the computation cost for largescale datasets. Extensive experiments on three different realworld heterogeneous information networks illustrate that our framework exhibits extraordinary scalability and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with significant margins.

Given a query, unlike traditional IR that finds relevant documents or entities, in this work, we focus on retrieving both entities and their connections for insightful knowledge summarization. For example, given a query "computer vision'' on a CS literature corpus, rather than returning a list of relevant entities like "cnn'', "imagenet'' and "svm'', we are interested in the connections among them, and furthermore, the evolution patterns of such connections along particular ordinal dimensions such as time. Particularly, we hope to provide structural knowledge relevant to the query, such as "svm'' is related to "imagenet'' but not "cnn''. Moreover, we aim to model the changing trends of the connections, such as "cnn'' becomes highly related to "imagenet'' after 2010, which enables the tracking of knowledge evolutions. In this work, to facilitate such a novel insightful search system, we propose SetEvolve, which is a unified framework based on nonparanomal graphical models for evolutionary network construction from large text corpora. Systematic experiments on synthetic data and insightful case studies on real-world corpora demonstrate the utility of SetEvolve.

Classification is one of the most important problems in machine learning. To address label scarcity, semi-supervised learning (SSL) has been intensively studied over the past two decades, which mainly leverages data affinity modeled by networks. Label propagation (LP), however, as the most popular SSL technique, mostly only works on homogeneous networks with single-typed simple interactions. In this work, we focus on the more general and powerful heterogeneous networks, which accommodate multi-typed objects and links, and thus endure multi-typed complex interactions. Specifically, we propose neural embedding propagation (NEP), which leverages distributed embeddings to represent objects and dynamically composed modular networks to model their complex interactions. While generalizing LP as a simple instance, NEP is far more powerful in its natural awareness of different types of objects and links, and the ability to automatically capture their important interaction patterns. Further, we develop a series of efficient training strategies for NEP, leading to its easy deployment on real-world heterogeneous networks with millions of objects. With extensive experiments on three datasets, we comprehensively demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of NEP compared with state-of-the-art network embedding and SSL algorithms.

On social networks, while nodes bear rich attributes, we often lack the ‘semantics’ of why each link is formed–and thus we are missing the ‘road signs’ to navigate and organize the complex social universe. How to identify relationship semantics without labeled links? Founded on the prevalent homophily principle, we propose the novel problem of Attribute-based Relationship Profiling (ARP), to profile the closeness w.r.t. the underlying relationships (e.g., schoolmate) between users based on their similarity in the corresponding attributes (e.g., schools) and, as output, learn a set of social affinity graphs, where each link is weighted by its probabilities of carrying the relationships. As requirements, ARP should be systematic and complete to profile every link for every relationship– our challenges lie in effectively modeling homophily. We propose a novel reverse smoothness principle by observing that the similarity-closeness duality of homophily is consistent with the well-known smoothness assumption in graph-based semi-supervised learning– only the direction of inference is reversed. To realize smoothness over noisy social graphs, we further propose a novel holistic closeness modeling approach to capture ‘high-order’ smoothness by extending closeness from edges to paths. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed algorithm for ARP.

Thanks to the advancing mobile location services, people nowadays can post about places to share visiting experience on-the-go. A large place graph not only helps users explore interesting destinations, but also provides opportunities for understanding and modeling the real world. To improve coverage and flexibility of the place graph, many platforms import places data from multiple sources, which unfortunately leads to the emergence of numerous duplicated places that severely hinder subsequent location-related services. In this work, we take the anonymous place graph from Facebook as an example to systematically study the problem of place deduplication: We carefully formulate the problem, study its connections to various related tasks that lead to several promising basic models, and arrive at a systematic two-step data-driven pipeline based on place embedding with multiple novel techniques that works significantly better than the state-of-the-art.

Networks or graphs provide a natural and generic way for modeling rich structured data. Recent research on graph analysis has been focused on representation learning, of which the goal is to encode the network structures into distributed embedding vectors, so as to enable various downstream applications through off-the-shelf machine learning. However, existing methods mostly focus on node-level embedding, which is insufficient for subgraph analysis. Moreover, their leverage of network structures through path sampling or neighborhood preserving is implicit and coarse. Network motifs allow graph analysis in a finer granularity, but existing methods based on motif matching are limited to enumerated simple motifs and do not leverage node labels and supervision. In this paper, we develop NEST, a novel hierarchical network embedding method combining motif filtering and convolutional neural networks. Motif-based filtering enables NEST to capture exact small structures within networks, and convolution over the filtered embedding allows it to fully explore complex substructures and their combinations. NEST can be trivially applied to any domain and provide insight into particular network functional blocks. Extensive experiments on protein function prediction, drug toxicity prediction and social network community identification have demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency.

Online taxicab platforms like DiDi and Uber have impacted hundreds of millions of users on their choices of traveling, but how do users feel about the ride-sharing services, and how to improve their experience? While current ride-sharing services have collected massive travel data, it remains challenging to develop data-driven techniques for modeling and predicting user ride experience. In this work, we aim to accurately predict passenger satisfaction over their rides and understand the key factors that lead to good/bad experiences. Based on in-depth analysis of large-scale travel data from a popular taxicab platform in China, we develop PHINE (Pattern-aware Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding) for data-driven user experience modeling. Our PHINE framework is novel in that it is composed of spatial-temporal node binding and grouping for addressing the inherent data variation, and pattern preservation based joint training for modeling the interactions among drivers, passengers, locations, and time. Extensive experiments on 12 real-world travel datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PHINE over strong baseline methods. We have deployed PHINE in the DiDi Big Data Center, delivering high-quality predictions for passenger satisfaction on a daily basis.

Heterogeneous information network (HIN) has drawn significant research attention recently, due to its power of modeling multi-typed multi-relational data and facilitating various downstream applications. In this decade, many algorithms have been developed for HIN modeling, including traditional similarity measures and recent embedding techniques. Most algorithms on HIN leverage meta-graphs or meta-paths (special cases of meta-graphs) to capture various semantics. Given any arbitrary set of meta-graphs, existing algorithms either consider them as equally important or study their different importance through supervised learning. Their performance largely relies on prior knowledge and labeled data. While unsupervised embedding has shown to be a fundamental solution for various homogeneous network mining tasks, for HIN, it is a much harder problem due to such a presence of various meta-graphs. In this work, we propose to study the utility of different meta-graphs, as well as how to simultaneously leverage multiple meta-graphs for HIN embedding in an unsupervised manner. Motivated by prolific research on homogeneous networks, especially spectral graph theory, we firstly conduct a systematic empirical study on the spectrum and embedding quality of different meta-graphs on multiple HINs, which leads to an efficient method of meta-graph assessment. It also helps us to gain valuable insight into the higher-order organization of HINs and indicates a practical way of selecting useful embedding dimensions. Further, we explore the challenges of combining multiple meta-graphs to capture the multi-dimensional semantics in HIN through reasoning from mathematical geometry and arrive at an embedding compression method of autoencoder with l2,1-loss, which finds the most informative meta-graphs and embeddings in an end-to-end unsupervised manner. Finally, empirical analysis suggests a unified workflow to close the gap between our meta-graph assessment and combination methods. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research effort to provide rich theoretical and empirical analyses on the utility of meta-graphs and their combinations, especially regarding HIN embedding. Extensive experimental comparisons with various state-of-the-art neural network based embedding methods on multiple real-world HINs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our framework in finding useful meta-graphs and generating high-quality HIN embeddings.

As online platforms are striving to get more users, a critical challenge is user churn, which is especially concerning for new users. In this paper, by taking the anonymous large-scale real-world data from Snapchat as an example, we develop ClusChurn , a systematic two-step framework for interpretable new user clustering and churn prediction, based on the intuition that proper user clustering can help understand and predict user churn. Therefore, ClusChurn firstly groups new users into interpretable typical clusters, based on their activities on the platform and ego-network structures. Then we design a novel deep learning pipeline based on LSTM and attention to accurately predict user churn with very limited initial behavior data, by leveraging the correlations among users' multi- dimensional activities and the underlying user types. ClusChurn is also able to predict user types, which enables rapid reactions to different types of user churn. Extensive data analysis and experiments show that ClusChurn provides valuable insight into user behaviors, and achieves state-of-the-art churn prediction performance. The whole framework is deployed as a data analysis pipeline, delivering real-time data analysis and prediction results to multiple relevant teams for business intelligence uses. It is also general enough to be readily adopted by any online systems with user behavior data.

Recommender system is one of the most popular data mining topics that keep drawing extensive attention from both academia and industry. Among them, POI (point of interest) recommendation is extremely practical but challenging: it greatly benefits both users and businesses in real-world life, but it is hard due to data scarcity and various context. While a number of algorithms attempt to tackle the problem w.r.t. specific data and problem settings, they often fail when the scenarios change. In this work, we propose to devise a general and principled SSL (semi-supervised learning) framework, to alleviate data scarcity via smoothing among neighboring users and POIs, and treat various context by regularizing user preference based on context graphs. To enable such a framework, we develop PACE (Preference And Context Embedding), a deep neural architecture that jointly learns the embeddings of users and POIs to predict both user preference over POIs and various context associated with users and POIs. We show that PACE successfully bridges CF (collaborative filtering) and SSL by generalizing the de facto methods matrix factorization of CF and graph Laplacian regularization of SSL. Extensive experiments on two real location-based social network datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of PACE.