Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have effectively improved the performance of Cognitive Diagnosis Models (CDMs). Existing works have proposed a series of Graph-based Cognitive Diagnosis Frameworks (GCDFs) to enhance robustness to noise. However, these robust designs are often general methods for GNNs and are not designed for cognitive diagnosis, which undermines real cognitive information during the denoising process. Interestingly, a noteworthy phenomenon has been overlooked: even without robustness designs, GCDFs can still learn correct information in noisy environments. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive empirical analysis of this issue. We found that noise primarily accumulates in lower singular components. Even in noisy environments, the principal subspaces of representations still remain stable. Based on these findings, we propose a Noise-aware Cognitive Diagnostic framework based on Low-rank Alignment, named NCDLA. The framework first performs low-rank reconstruction of the interaction matrix between students and exercises, retaining only larger singular values to achieve noise reduction. Then, the reconstructed interaction matrix and the original interaction matrix are combined with the Q matrix to form a noise-reduced heterogeneous graph and an original heterogeneous graph. In order to distinguish between the interaction patterns of correct and incorrect responses, we decompose the heterogeneous graph according to the type of response. NCDLA achieves denoising of student representations and exercises representations through a self-supervised strategy based on low-rank reconstruction and a spectral anchor regularisation method. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that NCDLA achieves optimal prediction performance and robustness.

Graph condensation (GC), which reduces the size of a large-scale graph by synthesizing a small-scale condensed graph as its substitution, has benefited various graph learning tasks. However, existing GC methods rely on centralized data storage, which is unfeasible for real-world decentralized data distribution, and overlook data holders' privacy-preserving requirements. To bridge this gap, we propose and study the novel problem of federated graph condensation (FGC) for graph neural networks (GNNs). Specifically, we first propose a general framework for FGC, where we decouple the typical gradient matching process for GC into client-side gradient calculation and server-side gradient matching, integrating knowledge from multiple clients' subgraphs into one smaller condensed graph. Nevertheless, our empirical studies show that under the federated setting, the condensed graph will consistently leak data membership privacy, i.e., the condensed graph during federated training can be utilized to steal training data under the membership inference attack (MIA). To tackle this issue, we innovatively incorporate information bottleneck principles into the FGC, which only needs to extract partial node features in one local pre-training step and utilize the features during federated training. Theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate that our framework consistently protects membership privacy during training. Meanwhile, it can achieve comparable and even superior performance against existing centralized GC and federated graph learning (FGL) methods.

Differentially private graph analysis is a powerful tool for deriving insights from diverse graph data while protecting individual information. Designing private analytic algorithms for different graph queries often requires starting from scratch. In contrast, differentially private synthetic graph generation offers a general paradigm that supports one-time generation for multiple queries. Although various differentially private graph generation algorithms have been proposed, comparing them effectively remains challenging due to various factors, including differing privacy definitions, diverse graph datasets, varied privacy requirements, and multiple utility metrics. To this end, we propose PGB (Private Graph Benchmark), a comprehensive benchmark designed to enable researchers to compare differentially private graph generation algorithms fairly. We begin by identifying four essential elements of existing works as a 4-tuple: mechanisms, graph datasets, privacy requirements, and utility metrics. We discuss principles regarding these elements to ensure the comprehensiveness of a benchmark. Next, we present a benchmark instantiation that adheres to all principles, establishing a new method to evaluate existing and newly proposed graph generation algorithms. Through extensive theoretical and empirical analysis, we gain valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of prior algorithms. Our results indicate that there is no universal solution for all possible cases. Finally, we provide guidelines to help researchers select appropriate mechanisms for various scenarios.

Human activity recognition (HAR) is prone to performance degradation in real-world applications due to data missing between intra-sensor and inter-sensor channels. Masked modeling, as one mainstream paradigm of self-supervised pre-training, can learn robust representations across sensors in the data missing scenario by reconstructing the masked content based on the unmasked part. However, the existing methods predominantly emphasize the temporal dynamics of human activities, which limits their ability to effectively capture the spatial interdependencies among multiple sensors. Besides, different human activities often span across various spatial-temporal scales, which results in activity recognizer failing to capture intricate spatial-temporal semantic information. To address these issues, we propose RobustHAR, a new HAR model with multi-scale spatial-temporal masked self-supervised pre-training designed to improve model performance on the data missing context. RobustHAR involves three main steps: (1) RobustHAR constructs location-inspired spatial-temporal 3D-variation modeling to capture spatial-temporal correlated information in human activity data. (2) RobustHAR then designs multi-scale spatial-temporal masked self-supervised pre-training with semantic-consistent multi-scale feature co-learning for learning robust features at different scales. (3) Finally, RobustHAR fine-tunes the pretraining model with adaptive multi-scale feature fusion for human activity recognition. Extensive experiments on three public multi-sensor datasets demonstrate that RobustHAR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Fair graph neural networks aim to eliminate discriminatory biases in predictions. Existing approaches often rely on adversarial learning to mitigate dependencies between sensitive attributes and labels but face challenges due to optimisation difficulties. A key limitation lies in neglecting intrinsic causality, which may lead to the entanglement of sensitive and causal factors, discarding causal factors or retaining sensitive factors in the final prediction, especially on unbalanced datasets. To address this issue, we propose a Causality-inspired Disentangled framework for Fair Graph neural networks (CDFG). In CDFG, node representations are conceptualised as a combination of causal and sensitive factors, enabling fair representation learning by only utilising the causal factors. We first use a counterfactual data generation mechanism to generate counterfactual data with similar causal factors but completely different sensitive factors. Then, we input real-world data and counterfactual data into the factor disentanglement module to achieve independence and disentanglement between the causal factors and sensitive factors. Finally, an adaptive mask module extracts the causal representation for fair and accurate graph-based predictions. Extensive experiments on three widely used datasets demonstrate that CDFG consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving competitive utility and significantly improved fairness.

Although a large amount of valuable knowledge can be obtained from the weighted graph snapshots modeled over time, it may cause privacy issues. Local differential privacy (LDP) provides a strong solution for private graph data publishing in decentralized networks. However, most existing LDP studies over graphs are only applicable to static unweighted graphs. This paper investigates the problem of continuous publication of weighted graph snapshots and proposes a graph publication framework, WGT-LDP, under w -event edge weight LDP, which can protect the privacy of edges and weights over any w consecutive time steps. WGT-LDP consists of four key components: population division-based sampling that overcomes the problem of over-segmentation of the privacy budget, data range estimation that mitigates noise on edge weights, aggregate information collection that obtains important information about the graph structure and edge weights, and graph snapshot generation that reconstructs weighted graph snapshot at each time step. We provide theoretical guarantees on privacy and utility, and perform extensive experiments on three real-world and two synthetic datasets, using four commonly used metrics. Our experiments show that WGT-LDP produces high-quality synthetic weighted graphs and significantly outperforms baseline methods.

Differentially private triangle counting in graphs is essential for analyzing connection patterns and calculating clustering coefficients while protecting sensitive individual information. Previous works have relied on either central or local models to enforce differential privacy. However, a significant utility gap exists between the central and local models of differentially private triangle counting, depending on whether or not a trusted server is needed. In particular, the central model provides a high accuracy but necessitates a trusted server. The local model does not require a trusted server but suffers from limited accuracy. Our paper introduces a crypto-assisted differentially private triangle counting system, named CARGO, leveraging cryptographic building blocks to improve the effectiveness of differentially private triangle counting without assumption of trusted servers. It achieves high utility similar to the central model but without the need for a trusted server like the local model. CARGO consists of three main components. First, we introduce a similarity-based projection method that reduces the global sensitivity while preserving more triangles via triangle homogeneity. Second, we present a triangle counting scheme based on the additive secret sharing that securely and accurately computes the triangles while protecting sensitive information. Third, we design a distributed perturbation algorithm that perturbs the triangle count with minimal but sufficient noise. We also provide a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of our proposed methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our CARGO significantly outperforms the local model in terms of utility and achieves high-utility triangle counting comparable to the central model.

Publishing graph statistics under node differential privacy has attracted much attention since it provides a stronger privacy guarantee than edge differential privacy. Existing works related to node differential privacy assume a trusted data curator who holds the whole graph. However, in many applications, a trusted curator is usually not available due to privacy and security issues. In this paper, for the first time, we investigate the problem of publishing graph statistics under Node Local Differential privacy (Node-LDP), which does not rely on a trusted server. We propose an algorithm to publish the degree distribution with Node-LDP by exploring how to select the graph projection parameter in the local setting and how to execute the graph projection locally. Specifically, we propose a crypto-assisted local projection method based on cryptographic primitives, achieving the higher accuracy than our baseline pureLDP local projection method. Furthermore, we improve our baseline graph projection method from node-level to edge-level that preserves more neighboring information, owning better utility. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world graphs show that crypto-assisted parameter selection owns better utility than pureLDP parameter selection, and edge-level local projection provides higher accuracy than node-level local projection, improving by up to 57.2% and 79.8%, respectively.