Hypergraph-based distillation methods have been proposed to mitigate the high computational cost of Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) in modeling high-order relationships. However, most existing methods use static and uniform distillation strategies for all nodes and hyperedges, ignoring their individual characteristics. In addition, they neglect the student model's capability to independently extract useful internal features. As a result, they are not effective in transferring higher-order structural knowledge from the teacher. To overcome these limitations, we propose ARCHER, an Adaptive and Reinforcement-Guided Contrastive HypER graph Distillation framework that enables a lightweight MLP student model to outperform its HGNN teacher model. First, we design an adaptive strategy that leverages node- and hyperedge-level confidence to mediate error guidance from the teacher model. Second, we introduce a contrastive learning module that guides the student to learn from both the teacher's outputs and its own internal representations, producing more expressive embeddings. Finally, we propose a multi-armed bandit-based reinforcement learning module that dynamically balances multiple loss objectives during training. Experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing hypergraph distillation methods.

Graph unlearning (GU), which removes nodes, edges, or features from trained graph neural networks (GNNs), is crucial in Web applications where graph data may contain sensitive, mislabeled, or malicious information. However, existing GU methods lack a clear understanding of the key factors that determine unlearning effectiveness, leading to three fundamental limitations: (1) impractical and inaccurate GU difficulty assessment due to test-access requirements and invalid assumptions, (2) ineffectiveness on hard-to-unlearn tasks, and (3) misaligned evaluation protocols that overemphasize easy tasks and fail to capture true forgetting capability. To address these issues, we establish GNN memorization as a new perspective for understanding graph unlearning and propose MGU, a Memorization-guided Graph Unlearning framework. MGU achieves three key advances: it provides accurate and practical difficulty assessment across different GU tasks, develops an adaptive strategy that dynamically adjusts unlearning objectives based on difficulty levels, and establishes a comprehensive evaluation protocol that aligns with practical requirements. Extensive experiments on ten real-world graphs demonstrate that MGU consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in forgetting quality, computational efficiency, and utility preservation.

Graph self-supervised learning (GSSL) alleviates the graph data labeling bottleneck without supervision, enabling wide application in domains like recommendation systems and social network analysis. High-frequency signals are valuable in GSSL for capturing local structural preferences, thereby enriching graph representations and boosting model performance. However, in practical applications, two critical problems hinder the efficient and robust use of these signals. First, the locality of high-frequency signals limits their full utilization by the model. Second, over-reliance on specific high-frequency signals will affect the model's generalization. To address the above problems, we propose the Frequency-Corrupt Based Graph Self-Supervised Learning (FC-GSSL) algorithm. Specifically, we generate corrupted graphs biased toward high-frequency signals by corrupting nodes and edges according to their low-frequency contributions. These corrupted graphs are fed as input to an autoencoder, with low-frequency and general features serving as the supervision. This compels the model to effectively fuse high- and low-frequency signals, thereby integrating and utilizing more valuable high-frequency information. Additionally, we design multiple sampling strategies and form diverse corrupted graphs based on the intersections and union between the results obtained from these strategies. By aligning the node representations from these views, the model can identify valuable frequency combinations, which helps reduce the negative impact of specific high-frequency components and improve generalization. FC-GSSL optimizes the design of GSSL for web applications, significantly improving model performance on complex web-related graphs, such as social networks and citation networks. This work makes a direct contribution to advancing the ''Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web'' research track. Experimental results on 14 datasets across multiple tasks illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

Recently, hypergraph knowledge distillation has been proposed to alleviate the high computational cost of Hypergraph Neural Networks (HGNNs) when modeling high-order relationships in Web-related graph tasks. Its effectiveness primarily depends on the quality of knowledge transferred from the teacher and the representation capability of the student. However, existing methods remain limited on both sides. On the teacher side, most methods typically rely on a single HGNN teacher, which provides limited structural and semantic knowledge, thereby constraining the upper bound of the student's performance. The potential of exploiting multiple teachers in HGNNs remains largely underexplored. On the student side, existing methods ignore the student's capability to capture high-order semantic and structural information beyond simply imitating teacher outputs, leading to limited representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose MARCH, a framework for Multi-TeAcheR Contrastive Hypergraph Distillation, which advances semantic modeling and distillation for Web-scale structured data. Specifically, MARCH proposes a multi-teacher distillation strategy that adaptively transfers complementary knowledge from multiple teachers at both node and hyperedge levels, empowering the student model to learn richer and more discriminative representations and even outperform its teachers. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of MARCH.

Cross-domain fake news detection (CD-FND) transfers knowledge from a source domain to a target domain and is crucial for real-world fake news mitigation. This task becomes particularly important yet more challenging when the target domain is previously unseen (e.g., the COVID-19 outbreak or the Russia-Ukraine war). However, existing CD-FND methods overlook such scenarios and consequently suffer from the following two key limitations: (1) insufficient modeling of high-level semantics in news and user engagements; and (2) scarcity of labeled data in unseen domains. Targeting these limitations, we find that large language models (LLMs) offer strong potential for CD-FND on unseen domains, yet their effective use remains non-trivial. Nevertheless, two key challenges arise: (1) how to capture high-level semantics from both news content and user engagements using LLMs; and (2) how to make LLM-generated features more reliable and transferable for CD-FND on unseen domains. To tackle these challenges, we propose DAUD, a novel LLM-based Domain-Aware framework for fake news detection on Unseen Domains. DAUD employs LLMs to extract high-level semantics from news content. It models users' single- and cross-domain engagements to generate domain-aware behavioral representations. In addition, DAUD captures the relations between original data-driven features and LLM-derived features of news, users, and user engagements. This allows it to extract more reliable domain-shared representations that improve knowledge transfer to unseen domains. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DAUD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both general and unseen-domain CD-FND settings.

Trust relationships play a crucial role in various domains, such as social spam detection, retweet behavior analytics, and recommendation systems. Trust is often implicit and difficult to observe directly in the real world, as it is driven by people's underlying intentions and motivations. Therefore, when evaluating trust, it is critical to analyze not only user behavior data but also the intentions behind these behaviors that lead to trust. Existing trust evaluation methods often neglect the underlying reasons behind connections, such as shared hobbies or belonging to the same community. Therefore, these methods cannot differentiate the genuine intentions that lead to trust, resulting in an inaccurate evaluation of hidden trust relationships. To address this issue, we propose a novel Intent-based model for Trust Evaluation (INTRUST). This model can distinguish the intent behind high-order information in social communities using hypergraphs. Initially, we used hyperedges to represent high-order correlations between user-to-item and user-to-user interactions. Then, we construct K intent prototypes, which serve as foundational elements to build trust. Furthermore, we distinguish K-independent intent subgraphs from these high order correlations. To enhance the generalization and robustness of the model, we employ self-supervised learning and construct contrastive views at the node-level, hyperedge-level, and node hyperedge-level. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of trust evaluation accuracy and efficiency.

Content recommender systems (RSs), which recommend content (e.g., news, videos) to users, can inadvertently facilitate the spread of misinformation (e.g., fake news, inaccurate content) due to their ignorance of content credibility. The widespread misinformation can lead to serious consequences, including public confusion and social unrest. Despite the pressing need to mitigate misinformation in content RSs, only a few studies have attempted to tackle this. Moreover, they generally require retraining the entire model from scratch, which is time-consuming and impractical for real-world applications. To this end, we propose MisEraser , a novel misinformation unlearning framework that effectively mitigates misinformation in content RSs without retraining. Specifically, MisEraser consists of three key components: (1) A misinformation disentanglement network , which effectively separates misinformation-specific information from item content while preserving misinformation-free information to maintain recommendation accuracy; (2) A misinformation fusion network , which fuses misinformation-specific signals from both users’ interaction sequences and the entire misinformation item set to enhance the comprehensiveness of misinformation unlearning; and (3) A misinformation erasing network , which effectively removes the fused misinformation-specific signals from trained recommendation models, enabling them to generate misinformation-suppressed and more responsible recommendations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MisEraser in mitigating misinformation while maintaining high recommendation accuracy and efficiency.

Cross-domain fake news detection aims to mitigate domain shift and improve detection performance by transferring knowledge across domains. Existing approaches transfer knowledge based on news content and user engagements from a source domain to a target domain. However, these approaches face two main limitations, hindering effective knowledge transfer and optimal fake news detection performance. Firstly, from a micro perspective, they neglect the negative impact of veracity-irrelevant features in news content when transferring domain-shared features across domains. Secondly, from a macro perspective, existing approaches ignore the relationship between user engagement and news content, which reveals shared behaviors of common users across domains and can facilitate more effective knowledge transfer. To address these limitations, we propose a novel macro- and micro- hierarchical transfer learning framework (MMHT) for cross-domain fake news detection. Firstly, we propose a micro-hierarchical disentangling module to disentangle veracity-relevant and veracity-irrelevant features from news content in the source domain for improving fake news detection performance in the target domain. Secondly, we propose a macro-hierarchical transfer learning module to generate engagement features based on common users' shared behaviors in different domains for improving effectiveness of knowledge transfer. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

To address the issue of label sparsity in heterogeneous graphs (HGs), heterogeneous graph few-shot learning (HGFL) has recently emerged. HGFL aims to extract meta-knowledge from source HGs with rich-labeled data and transfers it to a target HG, facilitating learning new classes with few-labeled training data and improving predictions on unlabeled testing data. Existing methods typically assume the same distribution across the source HG, training data, and testing data. However, in practice, distribution shifts in HGFL are inevitable due to (1) the scarcity of source HGs that match the target HG's distribution, and (2) the unpredictable data generation mechanism of the target HG. Such distribution shifts can degrade the performance of existing methods, leading to a novel problem of out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in HGFL. To address this challenging problem, we propose COHF, aCausalOODHeterogeneous graphFew-shot learning model. In COHF, we first adopt a bottom-up data generative perspective to identify the invariance principle for OOD generalization. Then, based on this principle, we design a novel variational autoencoder-based heterogeneous graph neural network (VAE-HGNN) to mitigate the impact of distribution shifts. Finally, we propose a novel meta-learning framework that incorporates VAE-HGNN to effectively transfer meta-knowledge in OOD environments. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of COHF over the state-of-the-art methods.

Disentanglement techniques used in collaborative filtering uncover interaction intents between nodes, improving the interpretability of node representations and enhancing recommendation performance. However, existing disentanglement methods still face the following two problems. 1) They focus on local structural features derived from direct node interactions, overlooking the comprehensive graph structure, which limits disentanglement accuracy. 2) The disentanglement process depends on backpropagation signals derived from recommendation tasks, lacking direct supervision, which may lead to biases and overfitting. To address the issues, we propose theIntentPropagationContrastiveCollaborativeFiltering (IPCCF) algorithm. Specifically, we design a double helix message propagation framework to more effectively extract the deep semantic information of nodes, thereby improving the model's understanding of interactions between nodes. An intent message propagation method is also developed that incorporates graph structure information into the disentanglement process, thereby expanding the consideration scope of disentanglement. In addition, contrastive learning techniques are employed to align node representations derived from the structure and intents, providing direct supervision for the disentanglement process, mitigating biases, and enhancing the model's robustness to overfitting. The experiments on three real data graphs illustrate the superiority of the proposed approach.

The sparse portfolio optimization (SPO) problem is increasingly crucial in portfolio management, focusing on selecting a few stocks with the potential for strong market performance. However, sparse portfolio strategies often face significant short-term drawdowns during periods of market volatility. To this end, a news-driven portfolio strategy offers valuable insights to capture sudden market changes. Nevertheless, it encounters two main challenges:how to reasonably map the relationships between news and stocksandhow to effectively utilize the irregular timing of news releases. To tackle the SPO problem in fluctuating markets while addressing these challenges, we propose a novel news-driven sparse portfolio strategy, named SPIN. Specifically, SPIN not only leverages industry-specific group structures existing among stocks for a more reasonable news-stock mapping and models news sequential patterns based on our devised novel news-driven forecaster to handle the irregularity of news releases. We rigorously prove that SPIN achieves a sub-linear regret. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate SPIN's superiority over state-of-the-art portfolio strategies in terms of cumulative wealth and short-term drawdowns.

In recent years, dual-target Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been proposed to capture comprehensive user preferences in order to ultimately enhance the recommendation accuracy in both data-richer and data-sparser domains simultaneously. However, in addition to users’ true preferences, the user–item interactions might also be affected by confounders (e.g., free shipping, sales promotion). As a result, dual-target CDR has to meet two challenges: (1) how to effectively decouple observed confounders, including single-domain confounders and cross-domain confounders, and (2) how to preserve the positive effects of observed confounders on predicted interactions, while eliminating their negative effects on capturing comprehensive user preferences. To address the above two challenges, we propose a Causal Deconfounding Framework via Confounder Disentanglement for Dual-Target Cross-Domain Recommendation (CD2CDR) . In CD2CDR, we first propose a confounder disentanglement module to effectively decouple observed single-domain and cross-domain confounders. We then propose a causal deconfounding module to preserve the positive effects of such observed confounders and eliminate their negative effects via backdoor adjustment, thereby enhancing the recommendation accuracy in each domain. Extensive experiments conducted on seven real-world datasets demonstrate that CD2CDR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Transfer of knowledge across domains is the focus for cross-domain and multi-domain fake news detection. However, most of the existing methods based on cross-domain knowledge transfer have two issues: (1) they usually ignore domain-specific features; (2) they are less effective in handling the imbalanced data distribution across domains. Targeting these two issues, we focus on how to effectively leverage user-news engagements in both data-richer and data-sparser domains. This is because not only users' engagement characteristics closely relate to the veracity of the engaged news, but also there are consistent patterns in common users' engagements with news across domains. Considering these two insights, this work aims to perform dual-target cross-domain fake news detection via well modeling users' engagement patterns. In particular, it aims to transfer knowledge based on user-news engagements for handling the imbalanced data distribution across domains, which is novel but challenging. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel framework to mine User-news engagement Patterns for DuAl-TargEt cross-domain fake news detection (UPDATE). In UPDATE, we first mine user-news engagement patterns as the key auxiliary information for cross-domain knowledge transfer. In such a way, it avoids the necessity to remove the domain-specific news information, and thereby, better preserve useful news information. Then, we combine engagement features of common users in both data-richer and data-sparser domains. By doing so, UPDATE improves the information richness in each of the two domains, thus improving detection performance in both domains when detecting news from domains with imbalanced data distribution. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that UPDATE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art cross-domain and multi-domain methods as well as large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5-turbo in terms of AUC and Fl-score for fake news detection.

Trust plays an essential role in an individual's decision-making. Traditional trust prediction models rely on pairwise correlations to infer potential relationships between users. However, in the real world, interactions between users are usually complicated rather than pairwise only. Hypergraphs offer a flexible approach to modeling these complex high-order correlations (not just pairwise connections), since hypergraphs can leverage hyperedeges to link more than two nodes. However, most hypergraph-based methods are generic and cannot be well applied to the trust prediction task. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Hypergraph Network for Trust Prediction (AHNTP), a novel approach that improves trust prediction accuracy by using higher-order correlations. AHNTP utilizes Motif-based PageRank to capture high-order social influence information. In addition, it constructs hypergroups from both node-level and structure-level attributes to incorporate complex correlation information. Furthermore, AHNTP leverages adaptive hypergraph Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) layers and multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) to generate comprehensive user embeddings, facilitating trust relationship prediction. To enhance model generalization and robustness, we introduce a novel supervised contrastive learning loss for optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model over the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of trust prediction accuracy.

In the era of information explosion, news recommender systems are crucial for users to effectively and efficiently discover their interested news. However, most of the existing news recommender systems face two major issues, hampering recommendation quality. Firstly, they often oversimplify users' reading interests, neglecting their hierarchical nature, spanning from high-level event (e.g., US Election) related interests to low-level news article-specifc interests. Secondly, existing work often assumes a simplistic context, disregarding the prevalence of fake news and political bias under the real-world context. This oversight leads to recommendations of biased or fake news, posing risks to individuals and society. To this end, this paper addresses these gaps by introducing a novel framework, the Hierarchical and Disentangling Interest learning framework (HDInt). HDInt incorporates a hierarchical interest learning module and a disentangling interest learning module. The former captures users' high- and low-level interests, enhancing next-news recommendation accuracy. The latter effectively separates polarity and veracity information from news contents and model them more specifcally, promoting fairness- and truth-aware reading interest learning for unbiased and true news recommendations. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate HDInt's superiority over state-of-the-art news recommender systems in delivering accurate, unbiased, and true news recommendations.

The goal of intent-aware session recommendation (ISR) approaches is to capture user intents within a session for accurate next-item prediction. However, the capability of these approaches is limited by assuming all sessions have a uniform and fixed number of intents. In reality, user sessions can vary, where the number of intentions may differ from one to another. Moreover, they can only learn user intents in the latent space, which further restricts the model's transparency. To ease these issues, we propose a simple yet effective paradigm for ISR motivated by the advanced reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we first create an initial prompt to instruct LLMs to predict the next item by inferring varying user intents reflected in a session. Then, we propose an effective optimization mechanism to automatically optimize prompts with an iterative self-reflection. Finally, we leverage the robust generalizability of LLMs across diverse domains to efficiently select the optimal prompt for ISR. As such, the proposed paradigm effectively guides LLMs to identify varying user intents at a semantic level, thus delivering more accurate and comprehensible recommendations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets verify the superiority of our proposed method.

Recommender systems (RSs) aim at helping users to effectively retrieve items of their interests from a large catalogue. For a quite long time, researchers and practitioners have been focusing on developing accurate RSs. Recent years have witnessed an increasing number of threats to RSs, coming from attacks, system and user generated noise, and various types of biases. As a result, it has become clear that the focus on RS accuracy is too narrow, and the research must consider other important factors, particularly trustworthiness. A trustworthy recommender system (TRS) should not only be accurate but also transparent, unbiased, fair, and robust to noise and attacks. These observations actually led to a paradigm shift of the research on RSs: from accuracy-oriented RSs to TRSs. However, there is a lack of a systematic overview and discussion of the literature in this novel and fast-developing field of TRSs. To this end, in this article, we provide an overview of TRSs, including a discussion of the motivation and basic concepts of TRSs, a presentation of the challenges in building TRSs, and a perspective on the future directions in this area. We also provide a novel conceptual framework to support the construction of TRSs.

In recent years, to address the issue of networked data sparsity in node classification tasks, cross-network node classification (CNNC) leverages the richer information from a source network to enhance the performance of node classification in the target network, which typically has sparser information. However, in real-world applications, labeled nodes may be collected from multiple sources with multiple modalities (e.g., text, vision, and video). Naive application of single-source and single-modal CNNC methods may result in sub-optimal solutions. To this end, in this article, we propose a model called Multi-source and Multi-modal Cross-network Deep Network Embedding (M 2 CDNE) for cross-network node classification. In M 2 CDNE, we propose a deep multi-modal network embedding approach that combines the extracted deep multi-modal features to make the node vector representations network invariant. In addition, we apply dynamic adversarial adaptation to assess the significance of marginal and conditional probability distributions between each source and target network to make node vector representations label discriminative. Furthermore, we devise to classify nodes in the target network through the related source classifier and aggregate different predictions utilizing respective network weights, corresponding to the discrepancy between each source and target network. Extensive experiments performed on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed M 2 CDNE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

In recent years, heterogeneous graph few-shot learning has been proposed to address the label sparsity issue in heterogeneous graphs (HGs), which contain various types of nodes and edges. The existing methods have achieved good performance by transferring generalized knowledge extracted from rich-labeled classes in source HG(s) to few-labeled classes in a target HG. However, these methods only consider the single-heterogeneity scenario where the source and target HGs share a fixed set of node/edge types, ignoring the more general scenario of cross-heterogeneity, where each HG can have a different and non-fixed set of node/edge types. To this end, we focus on the unexplored cross-heterogeneity scenario and propose a novel model for Cross-heterogeneity Graph Few-shot Learning, namely CGFL. In CGFL, we first extract meta-patterns to capture heterogeneous information and propose a multi-view heterogeneous graph neural network (MHGN) to learn meta-patterns across HGs. Then, we propose a score module to measure the informativeness of labeled samples and determine the transferability of each source HG. Finally, by integrating MHGN and the score module into a meta-learning mechanism, CGFL can effectively transfer generalized knowledge to predict new classes with few-labeled data. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of CGFL over the state-of-the-art methods.

Predictive Autoscaling is used to forecast the workloads of servers and prepare the resources in advance to ensure service level objectives (SLOs) in dynamic cloud environments. However, in practice, its prediction task often suffers from performance degradation under abnormal traffics caused by external events (such as sales promotional activities and applications' re-configurations), for which a common solution is to re-train the model with data of a long historical period, but at the expense of high computational and storage costs. To better address this problem, we propose a replay-based continual learning method, i.e., Density-based Memory Selection and Hint-based Network Learning Model (DMSHM), using only a small part of the historical log to achieve accurate predictions. First, we discover the phenomenon of sample overlap when applying replay-based continual learning in prediction tasks. In order to surmount this challenge and effectively integrate new sample distribution, we propose a density-based sample selection strategy that utilizes kernel density estimation to calculate sample density as a reference to compute sample weight, and employs weight sampling to construct a new memory set. Then we implement hint-based network learning based on hint representation to optimize the parameters. Finally, we conduct experiments on public and industrial datasets to demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods in terms of memory capacity and prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we demonstrate remarkable practicability of DMSHM in real industrial applications.

In recommendation scenarios, there are two long-standing challenges, i.e., selection bias and data sparsity, which lead to a significant drop in prediction accuracy for both Click-Through Rate (CTR) and post-click Conversion Rate (CVR) tasks. To cope with these issues, existing works emphasize on leveraging Multi-Task Learning (MTL) frameworks (Category 1) or causal debiasing frameworks (Category 2) to incorporate more auxiliary data in the entire exposure/inference space $\mathcal{D}$ or debias the selection bias in the click/training space ${\mathcal{O}}$. However, these two kinds of solutions cannot effectively address the not-missing-at-random problem and debias the selection bias in ${\mathcal{O}}$ to fit the inference in $\mathcal{D}$. To fill the research gaps, we propose a Direct entire-space Causal Multi-Task framework, namely DCMT, for post-click conversion prediction in this paper. Specifically, inspired by users’ decision process of conversion, we propose a new counterfactual mechanism to debias the selection bias in $\mathcal{D}$, which can predict the factual CVR and the counterfactual CVR under the soft constraint of a counterfactual prior knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DCMT can improve the state-of-the-art methods by an average of 1.07% in term of CVR AUC on the offline datasets and 0.75% in term of PV-CVR on the online A/B test (the Alipay Search). Such improvements can increase millions of conversions per week in real industrial applications, e.g., the Alipay Search.

The conventional single-target Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) aims to improve the recommendation performance on a sparser target domain by transferring the knowledge from a source domain that contains relatively richer information. By contrast, in recent years, dual-target CDR has been proposed to improve the recommendation performance on both domains simultaneously. However, to this end, there are two challenges in dual-target CDR: (1) how to generate both relevant and diverse augmented user representations, and (2) how to effectively decouple domain-independent information from domain-specific information, in addition to domain-shared information, to capture comprehensive user preferences. To address the above two challenges, we propose a Disentanglement-based framework with Interpolative Data Augmentation for dual-target Cross-Domain Recommendation, called DIDA-CDR. In DIDA-CDR, we first propose an interpolative data augmentation approach to generating both relevant and diverse augmented user representations to augment sparser domain and explore potential user preferences. We then propose a disentanglement module to effectively decouple domain-specific and domain-independent information to capture comprehensive user preferences. Both steps significantly contribute to capturing more comprehensive user preferences, thereby improving the recommendation performance on each domain. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world datasets show the significant superiority of DIDA-CDR over the state-of-the-art methods.

Most session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) focus on extracting information from the observed items in the current session of a user to predict a next item, ignoring the causes outside the session (called outer-session causes, OSCs) that influence the user’s selection of items. However, these causes widely exist in the real world, and few studies have investigated their role in SBRSs. In this work, we analyze the causalities and correlations of the OSCs in SBRSs from the perspective of causal inference. We find that the OSCs are essentially the confounders in SBRSs, which leads to spurious correlations in the data used to train SBRS models. To address this problem, we propose a novel SBRS framework named COCO-SBRS (COunterfactual COllaborative Session-Based Recommender Systems) to learn the causality between OSCs and user-item interactions in SBRSs. COCO-SBRS first adopts a self-supervised approach to pre-train a recommendation model by designing pseudo-labels of causes for each user’s selection of the item in data to guide the training process. Next, COCO-SBRS adopts counterfactual inference to recommend items based on the outputs of the pre-trained recommendation model considering the causalities to alleviate the data sparsity problem. As a result, COCO-SBRS can learn the causalities in data, preventing the model from learning spurious correlations. The experimental results of our extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework over ten representative SBRSs.

Streaming Recommender Systems (SRSs) have emerged to deliver recommendations based on pervasive data streams, which are a sequence of user-item interactions with multiple behavior types (e.g., purchase, add-to-cart, and view). However, existing SRSs all rely on a single behavior type (e.g., purchase) to make streaming recommendations, and commonly suffer from the data sparsity problem. To address this issue, the relatively more abundant multi-behavior interactions (i.e., interactions with multiple behavior types) could be well leveraged for more accurate streaming recommendations. However, it remains a challenge on how to effectively leverage the commonly-existing and complex multi-behavior interactions for improving the accuracy of streaming recommendations. Targeting at this challenge, we propose the first Multi-behavior Streaming Recommender System in the literature, called MbSRS, to elaborately exploit multi-behavior interactions for delivering accurate recommendations in streaming scenarios. In MbSRS, we first learn instant user preferences and unified item characteristics collaboratively from multi-behavior interactions. Then, we attentively learn long-term user preferences from the historical items interacted by the corresponding users. After that, we wisely fuse the learned instant and long-term user preferences via a gate mechanism. Finally, a novel multi-behavior-specific training process is devised for more effectively learning user preferences towards items from multi-behavior interactions. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed MbSRS significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

An Attributed Dynamic Graph (ADG) contains multiple dynamic attributes associated with each edge in the graph, where people usually can specify multiple constraints in the attributes to illustrate their requirements, such as the total cost, the total travel time and the stopover interval of a flight between two cities. This inspires the Multi-Constrained Temporal Path (MCTP) discovery in ADGs, which is a challenging NP-Complete problem. The existing methods adopt Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) in MCTP discovery. However, they require a certain degree of discovery experience to obtain better results, which can lead to the expensive cost of query time and storage space, and thus are not applicable in real-time applications. This motivates us to develop a new Adaptive Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm (A-MCTS). A-MCTS dynamically adjusts the priority of historical records that are used in MCTS to improve the performance and reduce the size of required discovery experience. The experimental results on ten real-world dynamic graphs demonstrate that our proposed A-MCTS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness.

Semantic relation prediction aims to mine the implicit relationships between objects in heterogeneous graphs, which consist of different types of objects and different types of links. In real-world scenarios, new semantic relations constantly emerge and they typically appear with only a few labeled data. Since a variety of semantic relations exist in multiple heterogeneous graphs, the transferable knowledge can be mined from some existing semantic relations to help predict the new semantic relations with few labeled data. This inspires a novel problem of few-shot semantic relation prediction across heterogeneous graphs. However, the existing methods cannot solve this problem because they not only require a large number of labeled samples as input, but also focus on a single graph with a fixed heterogeneity. Targeting this novel and challenging problem, in this paper, we propose a Meta-learning based Graph neural network for Semantic relation prediction, named MetaGS. First, MetaGS decomposes the graph structure between objects into multiple normalized subgraphs, then adopts a two-view graph neural network to capture local heterogeneous information and global structure information of these subgraphs. Second, MetaGS aggregates the information of these subgraphs with a hyper-prototypical network, which can learn from existing semantic relations and adapt to new semantic relations. Third, using the well-initialized two-view graph neural network and hyper-prototypical network, MetaGS can effectively learn new semantic relations from different graphs while overcoming the limitation of few labeled data. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets have demonstrated the superior performance of MetaGS over the state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we study the problem of multi-source cross-network node classification, which aims to classify unlabeled nodes in a target network by leveraging the knowledge learned from the rich labeled nodes in multiple source networks. The existing multi-source transfer learning approaches generally fail to model the structural information of networks, and the current cross-network node classification models mainly neglect that not all source networks can boost the task performance in the target network. Thus, none can be directly applied to the multi-source cross-network node classification task. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel multi-source data selection (MSDS) based framework for cross-network node classification, which integrates multi-source transfer learning with network embedding to learn label-discriminative and network-invariant node representations. In MSDS, we first propose the multi-source network data selection, which applies three distances to jointly select the transferable source networks to well alleviate the problem of suboptimal solution or even negative transfer. In addition, we devise a new feature information alignment technique to make node vector representations network-invariant. Moreover, we incorporate aggregated structural information and feature information to make node representations label-discriminative. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed approaches outperform the state-of-the-art non-transfer and single-source transfer approaches in terms of classification accuracy.

Graph Pattern based Node Matching(GPNM) is to find all the matches of the nodes in a data graph$G_D$based on a given pattern graph$G_P$. GPNM has become increasingly important in many applications, e.g., group finding and expert recommendation. In real scenarios, both$G_P$and$G_D$are updated frequently. However, the existing GPNM methods either need to perform a new GPNM procedure from scratch to deliver the node matching results based on the updated$G_P$and$G_D$or incrementally perform the GPNM procedure for each of the updates, leading to low efficiency. Although the elimination relations between updates and partitions of data graphs are considered in the state-of-the-art method, it still suffers from low efficiency as only the labels of nodes are considered in the partitions. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a new method to efficiently deliver the node matching results on the updated graphs. In this paper, we propose a new Partition-aware GPNM algorithm, called P-GPNM, where we propose two new partition methods, i.e.,connection-based partitionanddensity-based partition. In these two methods, P-GPNM considers the dense connections between partitions and the inner connections inside a single partition, respectively. The experimental results on five real-world social graphs demonstrate that our proposed P-GPNM is much more efficient than the state-of-the-art GPNM methods.

Users’ purchase behaviors are complex and dynamic, which are usually driven by various personal demands evolving with time. According to psychology and economic theories, user demands can be satisfied with a sequence of purchase behaviors, resulting in a basket of items. However, most of the existing works simply predict the next basket from a shallow perspective of (purchase) sequence data modeling without deep insight into the underlying factors which drive user purchase behaviors. In fact, filling a basket with multiple items is a process to incrementally satisfy a user's demand. Therefore, the key challenges to predict a user's next basket lie in (1) how to track the changes of the user's demand, and (2) how to satisfy her demand at a given moment. To this end, we propose an Evolving DEmand SAtisfaction (EvoDESA) model to model a user's demand evolution for next-basket prediction. In EvoDESA, a demand evolution module learns the dynamics of user demand over a sequence of basket-purchase behaviors. Then, a next-basket planning module effectively packs an optimal combination of items to best satisfy the user's current demand. Extensive experiments on three real-world transaction datasets demonstrate the considerable superiority of EvoDESA over the state-of-the-art approaches.

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.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) and Cross-System Recommendation (CSR) have been proposed to improve the recommendation accuracy in a target dataset (domain/system) with the help of a source one with relatively richer information. However, most existing CDR and CSR approaches are single-target, namely, there is a single target dataset, which can only help the target dataset and thus cannot benefit the source dataset. In this paper, we focus on three new scenarios, i.e., Dual-Target CDR (DTCDR), Multi-Target CDR (MTCDR), and CDR+CSR, and aim to improve the recommendation accuracy in all datasets simultaneously for all scenarios. To do this, we propose a unified framework, called GA (based onGraph embedding andAttention techniques), for all three scenarios. In GA, we first construct separate heterogeneous graphs to generate more representative user and item embeddings. Then, we propose an element-wise attention mechanism to effectively combine the embeddings of common entities (users/items) learned from different datasets. Moreover, to avoid negative transfer, we further propose aPersonalized training strategy to minimize the embedding difference of common entities between a richer dataset and a sparser dataset, deriving three new models, i.e., GA-DTCDR-P, GA-MTCDR-P, and GA-CDR+CSR-P, for the three scenarios respectively. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed GA models significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.

With the advancement of data science and AI, more and more powerful and accurate recommender systems (RSs) have been developed. They provide recommendation services in various areas, including shopping, eating, travelling and entertainment. RSs have achieved a great success and benefted the society. However, most of the research on RS has focused on the improvement of the recommendation accuracy, while ignoring other important qualities, such as trustworthiness (robustness, fairness, explainability, privacy and security) and social impact (influence on users' recognition and behaviours) of the recommendations. These are important aspects and cannot be overlooked since they measure properties that determine whether the recommendation service is reliable, trustworthy and benefcial to individual users and society. In this work, responsible recommendations refer to trustworthy recommendation techniques and positive-social-impact recommendation results.

In recent years, sequential recommender systems (SRSs) and session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have emerged as a new paradigm of RSs to capture users' short-term but dynamic preferences for enabling more timely and accurate recommendations. Although SRSs and SBRSs have been extensively studied, there are many inconsistencies in this area caused by the diverse descriptions, settings, assumptions and application domains. There is no work to provide a unified framework and problem statement to remove the commonly existing and various inconsistencies in the area of SR/SBR. There is a lack of work to provide a comprehensive and systematic demonstration of the data characteristics, key challenges, most representative and state-of-the-art approaches, typical real- world applications and important future research directions in the area. This work aims to fill in these gaps so as to facilitate further research in this exciting and vibrant area.

Despite the tremendous efforts by social media platforms and fact-check services for fake news detection, fake news and misinformation still spread wildly on social media platforms (e.g., Twitter). Consequently, fake news mitigation strategies are urgently needed. Most of the existing work on fake news mitigation focuses on the overall mitigation on a whole social network while ignoring developing concrete mitigation strategies to deter individual users from sharing fake news. In this paper, we propose a novel veracity-aware and event-driven recommendation model to recommend personalised corrective true news to individual users for effectively debunking fake news. Our proposed model Rec4Mit (Recommendation for Mitigation) not only effectively captures a user’s current reading preference with a focus on which event, e.g., US election, from her/his recent reading history containing true and/or fake news, but also accurately predicts the veracity (true or fake) of candidate news. As a result, Rec4Mit can recommend the most suitable true news to best match the user’s preference as well as to mitigate fake news. In particular, for those users who have read fake news of a certain event, Rec4Mit is able to recommend the corresponding true news of the same event. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show Rec4Mit significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art news recommendation methods in terms of the capability to recommend personalized true news for fake news mitigation.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable progress in various real-world applications, especially when abundant training data are provided. However, data isolation has become a serious problem currently. Existing works build privacy-preserving DNN models from either algorithmic perspective or cryptographic perspective. The former mainly splits the DNN computation graph between data holders or between data holders and server, which demonstrates good scalability but suffers from accuracy loss and potential privacy risks. In contrast, the latter leverages time-consuming cryptographic techniques, which has strong privacy guarantee but poor scalability. In this article, we propose SPNN—a Scalable and Privacy-preserving deep Neural Network learning framework, from an algorithmic-cryptographic co-perspective. From algorithmic perspective, we split the computation graph of DNN models into two parts, i.e., the private-data-related computations that are performed by data holders and the rest heavy computations that are delegated to a semi-honest server with high computation ability. From cryptographic perspective, we propose using two types of cryptographic techniques, i.e., secret sharing and homomorphic encryption, for the isolated data holders to conduct private-data-related computations privately and cooperatively. Furthermore, we implement SPNN in a decentralized setting and introduce user-friendly APIs. Experimental results conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed SPNN.

Implicit feedback is widely used in collaborative filtering methods for sequential recommendation. It is well known that implicit feedback contains a large number of values that aremissing not at random(MNAR); and the missing data is a mixture of negative and unknown feedback, making it difficult to learn users’ negative preferences. Recent studies modeledexposure, a latent missingness variable which indicates whether an item is exposed to a user, to give each missing entry a confidence of being negative feedback. However, these studies use static models and ignore the information in temporal dependencies among items, which seems to be an essential underlying factor to subsequent missingness. To model and exploit the dynamics of missingness, we propose a latent variable named “user intent” to govern the temporal changes of item missingness, and a hidden Markov model to represent such a process. The resulting framework captures the dynamic item missingness and incorporates it into matrix factorization (MF) for recommendation. We further extend the proposed framework to capture the dynamic preference of users, which results in a unified framework that is able to model different evolution patterns of user intent and user preference. We also explore two types of constraints to achieve a more compact and interpretable representation ofuser intents. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art recommender systems.

The changing preferences of users towards items trigger the emergence of session-based recommender systems (SBRSs), which aim to model the dynamic preferences of users for next-item recommendations. However, most of the existing studies on SBRSs are based on long sessions only for recommendations, ignoring short sessions, though short sessions, in fact, account for a large proportion in most of the real-world datasets. As a result, the applicability of existing SBRSs solutions is greatly reduced. In a short session, quite limited contextual information is available, making the next-item recommendation very challenging. To this end, in this paper, inspired by the success of few-shot learning (FSL) in effectively learning a model with limited instances, we formulate the next-item recommendation as an FSL problem. Accordingly, following the basic idea of a representative approach for FSL, i.e., meta-learning, we devise an effective SBRS called INter-SEssion collaborativeRecommender neTwork (INSERT) for next-item recommendations in short sessions. With the carefully devised local module and global module, INSERT is able to learn an optimal preference representation of the current user in a given short session. In particular, in the global module, a similar session retrieval network (SSRN) is designed to find out the sessions similar to the current short session from the historical sessions of both the current user and other users, respectively. The obtained similar sessions are then utilized to complement and optimize the preference representation learned from the current short session by the local module for more accurate next-item recommendations in this short session. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed INSERT over the state-of-the-art SBRSs when making next-item recommendations in short sessions.

Graph Pattern based Node Matching (GPNM) has been proposed to find all the matches of the nodes in a data graph GD based on a given pattern graph GP. GPNM has been increasingly adopted in many applications such as group finding and expert recommendation, in which data graphs are frequently updated overtime. Moreover, many typical pattern graphs frequently and repeatedly appear in users' queries in a short period of time, e.g., social graph searches on Facebook. To deliver a GPNM result in such applications, the existing GPNM methods have to perform an incremental GPNM procedure for each of the updates in the data graph, which is computationally expensive. To address this problem, in this paper, we first analyze the elimination relationships between multiple updates in GD and the hierarchical structure between these elimination relationships. Then, we generate an Elimination Hierarchy Tree (EH-Tree) to index the elimination relationships and propose an EH-Tree based GPNM method, called EHGPNM, considering the elimination relationships between multiple updates in GD. EH-GPNM first delivers the GPNM result of an initial query, and then delivers the GPNM result of a subsequent query, based on the initial GPNM result and the multiple updates of GD that occur between those two queries. The experimental results on five real-world social graphs demonstrate that our proposed EH-GPNM is much more efficient than the state-of-the-art GPNM methods.

Graph Pattern based Node Matching (GPNM) is to find all the matches of the nodes in a data graph GDbased on a given pattern graph GP. GPNM has become increasingly important in many applications, e.g., group finding and expert recommendation. In real scenarios, both GPand GDare updated frequently. However, the existing GPNM methods either need to perform a new GPNM procedure from scratch to deliver the node matching results based on the updated GPand GDor incrementally perform the GPNM procedure for each of the updates, leading to low efficiency. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a new method to efficiently deliver the node matching results on the updated graphs. In this paper, we first analyze and detect the elimination relationships between the updates. Then, we construct an Elimination Hierarchy Tree (EH-Tree) to index these elimination relationships. In order to speed up the GPNM process, we propose a graph partition method and then propose a new updates-aware GPNM method, called UA-GPNM, considering the single-graph elimination relationships among the updates in a single graph of GPor GD, and also the cross-graph elimination relationships between the updates in GPand the updates in GD. UA-GPNM first delivers the GPNM result of an initial query, and then delivers the GPNM result of a subsequent query, based on the initial GPNM result and the multiple updates that occur between two queries. The experimental results on five real-world social graphs demonstrate that our proposed UA-GPNM is much more efficient than the state-of-the-art GPNM methods.

In order to address the data sparsity problem in recommender systems, in recent years, Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) leverages the relatively richer information from a source domain to improve the recommendation performance on a target domain with sparser information. However, each of the two domains may be relatively richer in certain types of information (e.g., ratings, reviews, user profiles, item details, and tags), and thus, if we can leverage such information well, it is possible to improve the recommendation performance on both domains simultaneously (i.e., dual-target CDR), rather than a single target domain only. To this end, in this paper, we propose a new framework, DTCDR, for Dual-Target Cross-Domain Recommendation. In DTCDR, we first extensively utilize rating and multi-source content information to generate rating and document embeddings of users and items. Then, based on Multi-Task Learning (MTL), we design an adaptable embedding-sharing strategy to combine and share the embeddings of common users across domains, with which DTCDR can improve the recommendation performance on both richer and sparser (i.e., dual-target) domains simultaneously. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that DTCDR can significantly improve the recommendation accuracies on both richer and sparser domains and outperform the state-of-the-art single-domain and cross-domain approaches.

Graph Pattern based Node Matching (GPNM) is to find all the matches of the nodes in a data graph GD based on a given pattern graph GP. GPNM has become increasingly important in many applications, e.g., group finding and expert recommendation. In real scenarios, both GP and GD are updated frequently. However, the existing GPNM methods need to perform a new GPNM procedure from scratch to deliver the node matching results based on the updated GP and updated GD, which consumes much time. Therefore, there is a pressing need for a novel method to efficiently deliver the node matching results. In this paper, we propose a novel INCremental GPNM method called INC-GPNM, where we first build up indices to incrementally maintain the shortest path length range between different label types in GD, and then identify the affected parts of GD in GPNM including nodes and edges w.r.t. the updates of GP and GD. Moreover, based on the index structure and our novel search strategies, INC-GPNM can efficiently deliver node matching results taking the updates of GP and GD as input, and can greatly save the query processing time with improved time complexity. The extensive experiments on five real-world social graphs demonstrate that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art GPNM method in efficiency.

Graph Pattern Matching (GPM) has been used in lots of areas, like biology, medical science, and physics. With the advent of Online Social Networks (OSNs), recently, GPM has been playing a significant role in social network analysis, which has been widely used in, for example, finding experts, social community mining, and social position detection. Given a query which contains a pattern graph GQand a data graph GD, a GPM algorithm finds those subgraphs, GM, that match GQin GD. However, the existing GPM methods do not consider the multiple end-to-end constraints of the social contexts, like social relationships, social trust, and social positions on edges in GQ, which are commonly found in various applications, such as crowdsourcing travel, social network based ecommerce, and study group selection, etc. In this paper, we first conceptually extend Bounded Simulation to Multi-Constrained Simulation (MCS), and propose a novel NP-Complete Multi-Constrained Graph Pattern Matching (MC-GPM) problem. Then, to address the efficiency issue in large-scale MC-GPM, we propose a new concept called Strong Social Component (SSC), consisting of participants with strong social connections. We also propose an approach to identifying SSCs, and propose a novel index method and a graph compression method for SSC. Moreover, we devise a multithreading heuristic algorithm, called M-HAMC, to bidirectionally search the MC-GPM results in parallel without decompressing graphs. An extensive empirical study over five real-world large-scale social graphs has demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

To address the issue of data sparsity and cold-start in recommender system, social information (e.g., user-user trust links) has been introduced to complement rating data for improving the performances of traditional model-based recommendation techniques such as matrix factorization (MF) and Bayesian personalized ranking (BPR). Although effective, the utilization of the explicit user-user relationships extracted directly from such social information has three main limitations. First, it is difficult to obtain explicit and reliable social links. Only a small portion of users indicate explicitly their trusted friends in recommender systems. Second, the “cold-start” users are “cold” not only on rating but also on socializing. There is no significant amount of explicit social information that can be useful for “cold-start” users. Third, an active user can be socially connected with others who have different taste/preference. Direct usage of explicit social links may mislead recommendation. To address these issues, we propose to extract implicit and reliable social information from user feedbacks and identify top-k semantic friends for each user. We incorporate the top-k semantic friends information into MF and BPR frameworks to solve the problems of ratings prediction and items ranking, respectively. The experimental results on three real-world datasets show that our proposed approaches achieve better results than the state-of-the-art MF with explicit social links (with 3.0% improvement on RMSE), and social BPR (with 9.1% improvement on AUC).

Graph Pattern Matching (GPM) plays a significant role in social network analysis, which has been widely used in, for example, experts finding, social community mining and social position detection. Given a pattern graph GQand a data graph GD, a GPM algorithm finds those subgraphs, GM, that match GQin GD. However, the existing GPM methods do not consider the multiple constraints on edges in GQ, which are commonly exist in various applications such as, crowdsourcing travel, social network based e-commerce and study group selection, etc. In this paper, we first conceptually extend Bounded Simulation to Multi-Constrained Simulation (MCS), and propose a novel NP-Complete Multi-Constrained Graph Pattern Matching (MC-GPM) problem. Then, to address the efficiency issue in large-scale MC-GPM, we propose a new concept called Strong Social Component (SSC), consisting of participants with strong social connections. We also propose an approach to identify SSCs, and propose a novel index method and a graph compression method for SSC. Moreover, we devise a heuristic algorithm to identify MC-GPM results effectively and efficiently without decompressing graphs. An extensive empirical study on five real-world large-scale social graphs has demonstrated the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our approach.

In e-commerce environments, the trustworthiness of a seller is utterly important to potential buyers, especially when a seller is not known to them. Most existing trust evaluation models compute a single value to reflect the general trustworthiness of a seller without taking any transaction context information into account. With such a result as the indication of reputation, a buyer may be easily deceived by a malicious seller in a transaction where the notorious value imbalance problem is involved—in other words, a malicious seller accumulates a high-level reputation by selling cheap products and then deceives buyers by inducing them to purchase more expensive products. In this article, we first present a trust vector consisting of three values for contextual transaction trust (CTT). In the computation of CTT values, three identified important context dimensions , including Product Category, Transaction Amount, and Transaction Time, are taken into account. In the meantime, the computation of each CTT value is based on both past transactions and the forthcoming transaction. In particular, with different parameters specified by a buyer regarding context dimensions, different sets of CTT values can be calculated. As a result, all of these trust values can outline the reputation profile of a seller that indicates the dynamic trustworthiness of a seller in different products, product categories, price ranges, time periods, and any necessary combination of them. We name this new model ReputationPro . Nevertheless, in ReputationPro , the computation of reputation profile requires new data structures for appropriately indexing the precomputation of aggregates over large-scale ratings and transaction data in three context dimensions, as well as novel algorithms for promptly answering buyers’ CTT queries. In addition, storing precomputed aggregation results consumes a large volume of space, particularly for a system with millions of sellers. Therefore, reducing storage space for aggregation results is also a great demand. To solve these challenging problems, we first propose a new index scheme CMK-tree by extending the two-dimensional K-D-B-tree that indexes spatial data to support efficient computation of CTT values. Then, we further extend the CMK-tree and propose a CMK-tree RS approach to reducing the storage space allocated to each seller. The two approaches are not only applicable to three context dimensions that are either linear or hierarchical but also take into account the characteristics of the transaction-time model—that is, transaction data is inserted in chronological order. Moreover, the proposed data structures can index each specific product traded in a time period to compute the trustworthiness of a seller in selling a product. Finally, the experimental results illustrate that the CMK-tree is superior in efficiency of computing CTT values to all three existing approaches in the literature. In particular, while answering a buyer’s CTT queries for each brand-based product category, the CMK-tree has almost linear query performance. In addition, with significantly reduced storage space, the CMK-tree RS approach can further improve the efficiency in computing CTT values. Therefore, our proposed ReputationPro model is scalable to large-scale e-commerce Web sites in terms of efficiency and storage space consumption.

Reputation-based trust models are widely used in e-commerce applications, and feedback ratings are aggregated to compute sellers' reputation trust scores. The “all good reputation” problem, however, is prevalent in current reputation systems-reputation scores are universally high for sellers and it is difficult for potential buyers to select trustworthy sellers. In this paper, based on the observation that buyers often express opinions openly in free text feedback comments, we propose CommTrust for trust evaluation by mining feedback comments. Our main contributions include: 1) we propose a multidimensional trust model for computing reputation scores from user feedback comments; and 2) we propose an algorithm for mining feedback comments for dimension ratings and weights, combining techniques of natural language processing, opinion mining, and topic modeling. Extensive experiments on eBay and Amazon data demonstrate that CommTrust can effectively address the “all good reputation” issue and rank sellers effectively. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first piece of work on trust evaluation by mining feedback comments.

Web services specification provides an open standard for the distributed service oriented architecture. It is widely used in Internet and pervasive networks supporting wireless mobile devices. A mobile agent is a composition of computer software and data which is able to migrate from one host to another autonomously and continue its execution on the destination host. Mobile agent technology can reduce the bandwidth requirement and tolerate the network faults - able to operate without an active connection between clients and server. Hence, the applications of the combination of mobile agents and web service have been widely investigated in recent years. However, the security issue is still of a major concern. In this paper, we propose a novel agent-based web service security scheme. This scheme provides a new authentication protocol without using the user- name/password pair, which is infeasible for mobile agent, and gives an alternative method to current security mechanism without using Certification Authorities (CA) based public key infrastructure. With this scheme, we can simplify the key management and reduce the computation particularly for group-oriented web services.

The mobile agent approach is suitable for deploying large-scale parallel processing over distributed hosts. However, if the number of mobile agents is very large and the dispatch is processed in a serial way, it can become a bottleneck that impacts the efficiency as a whole. In this paper, we first briefly present a mobile agent based framework for Internet marketplaces enabling parallel processing. Then we present and discuss several hierarchical dispatch models where the dispatch of multiple mobile agents can be processed in parallel over different hosts. In the best case, the time complexity for dispatching n mobile agents is O(log/sub 2//sup n/). Discussions of these models are taken on the basis of theoretical analysis and experiments.

In this paper, we propose a framework of Internet marketplaces on the basis of mobile agent. It not only simulates real commercial activities by consumers, agents and merchants, but also provides an environment for parallel processing. The latter is particularly important as more shops (sites) can be searched in real time to provide consumers with better choices. The conducted experiments show that, in comparison with several serial mobile agent models, parallel mobile agent model can improve the performance significantly.

We propose a 2-phase evaluation model that can be applied to agent-mediated Internet marketplaces. The model not only facilitates parallel processing, it also allows mobile agents to select online shops (e-shops) and evaluate offers autonomously and automatically. To provide the "best" answer, the approach considers multiple attributes of an e-shop and an offer, such as the commercial credit and security rank of the e-shop, price, delivery/shipment service and warranty service of an offer. Moreover, with the fuzzy-set rules, the evaluation results are more reasonable and accord with human behavior. With the 2-phase evaluation of this model, it can not only help to control the scale of the dispatched mobile agent to a rational level to reduce the burden of network traffic, but also help to evaluate offers to assist users to make good decisions.