Enabling large language models (LLMs) to effectively process and reason with graph-structured data remains a significant challenge despite their remarkable success in natural language tasks. Current approaches either convert graph structures into verbose textual descriptions, consuming substantial computational resources, or employ complex graph neural networks as tokenizers, which introduce significant training overhead. To bridge this gap, we present NT-LLM, a novel framework with an anchor-based positional encoding scheme for graph representation. Our approach strategically selects reference nodes as anchors and encodes each node's position relative to these anchors, capturing essential topological information without the computational burden of existing methods. Notably, we identify and address a fundamental issue: the inherent misalignment between discrete hop-based distances in graphs and continuous distances in embedding spaces. By implementing a rank-preserving objective for positional encoding pretraining, NT-LLM achieves superior performance across diverse graph tasks ranging from basic structural analysis to complex reasoning scenarios. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that this lightweight yet powerful approach effectively enhances LLMs' ability to understand and reason with graph-structured information, offering an efficient solution for graph-based applications of language models.

In modern recommender systems, especially in e-commerce, predicting multiple targets such as click-through rate (CTR) and post-view conversion rate (CTCVR) is common. Multi-task recommender systems are increasingly popular in both research and practice, as they leverage shared knowledge across diverse business scenarios to enhance performance. However, emerging real-world scenarios and data privacy concerns complicate the development of a unified multi-task recommendation model.

Predicting click-through rate (CTR) is a critical task in recommendation systems, where the models are optimized with pointwise loss to infer the probability of items being clicked. In industrial practice, applications also require ranking items based on these probabilities. Existing solutions primarily combine the ranking-based loss, i.e., pairwise and listwise loss, with CTR prediction. However, they can hardly calibrate or generalize well in CTR scenarios where the clicks reflect the binary preference. This is because the binary click feedback leads to a large number of ties, which renders high data sparsity. In this paper, we propose an effective data augmentation strategy, named Beyond Binary Preference (BBP) training framework, to address this problem. Our key idea is to break the ties by leveraging Bayesian approaches, where the beta distribution models click behavior as probability distributions in the training data that naturally break ties. Therefore, we can obtain an auxiliary training label that generates more comparable pairs and improves the ranking performance. Besides, BBP formulates ranking and calibration as a multi-task framework to optimize both objectives simultaneously. Through extensive offline experiments and online tests on various datasets, we demonstrate that BBP significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both ranking and calibration capabilities, showcasing its effectiveness in addressing the limitations of existing methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/AlvinIsonomia/BBP.

Community detection on attributed graphs with rich semantic and topological information offers great potential for real-world network analysis, especially user matching in online games. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently enabled Deep Graph Clustering (DGC) methods to learn cluster assignments from semantic and topological information. However, their success depends on the prior knowledge related to the number of communities K, which is unrealistic due to the high costs and privacy issues of acquisition. In this paper, we investigate the community detection problem without prior K, referred to as K-Free Community Detection problem. To address this problem, we propose a novel Deep Adaptive and Generative model~(DAG) for community detection without specifying the prior K. DAG consists of three key components, i.e., a node representation learning module with masked attribute reconstruction, a community affiliation readout module, and a community number search module with group sparsity. These components enable DAG to convert the process of non-differentiable grid search for the community number, i.e., a discrete hyperparameter in existing DGC methods, into a differentiable learning process. In such a way, DAG can simultaneously perform community detection and community number search end-to-end. To alleviate the cost of acquiring community labels in real-world applications, we design a new metric, EDGE, to evaluate community detection methods even when the labels are not feasible. Extensive offline experiments on five public datasets and a real-world online mobile game dataset demonstrate the superiority of our DAG over the existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. DAG has a relative increase of 7.35% in teams in a Tencent online game compared with the best competitor.

Data-efficient learning on graphs (GEL) is essential in real-world applications. Existing GEL methods focus on learning useful representations for nodes, edges, or entire graphs with "small" labeled data. But the problem of data-efficient learning for subgraph prediction has not been explored. The challenges of this problem lie in the following aspects: 1) It is crucial for subgraphs to learn positional features to acquire structural information in the base graph in which they exist. Although the existing subgraph neural network method is capable of learning disentangled position encodings, the overall computational complexity is very high. 2) Prevailing graph augmentation methods for GEL, including rule-based, sample-based, adaptive, and automated methods, are not suitable for augmenting subgraphs because a subgraph contains fewer nodes but richer information such as position, neighbor, and structure. Subgraph augmentation is more susceptible to undesirable perturbations. 3) Only a small number of nodes in the base graph are contained in subgraphs, which leads to a potential "bias" problem that the subgraph representation learning is dominated by these "hot" nodes. By contrast, the remaining nodes fail to be fully learned, which reduces the generalization ability of subgraph representation learning. In this paper, we aim to address the challenges above and propose a Position-Aware Data-Efficient Learning framework for subgraph neural networks called PADEL. Specifically, we propose a novel node position encoding method that is anchor-free, and design a new generative subgraph augmentation method based on a diffused variational subgraph autoencoder, and we propose exploratory and exploitable views for subgraph contrastive learning. Extensive experiment results on three real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed method over state-of-the-art baselines.