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Researcher profile

Hongzhi Yin

Hongzhi Yin contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Information RetrievalArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningSocial and Information NetworksComputation and Languagecs.CYDatabasesComputer VisionHuman-Computer InteractionDistributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computingeess.SPMultiagent Systems

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Published work

45 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Efficient Content-based Recommendation Model Training via Noise-aware Coreset Selection

Content-based recommendation systems (CRSs) utilize content features to predict user-item interactions, serving as essential tools for helping users navigate information-rich web services. However, ensuring the effectiveness of CRSs requires large-scale and even continuous model training to accommodate diverse user preferences, resulting in significant computational costs and resource demands. A promising approach to this challenge is coreset selection, which identifies a small but representative subset of data samples that preserves model quality while reducing training overhead. Yet, the selected coreset is vulnerable to the pervasive noise in user-item interactions, particularly when it is minimally sized. To this end, we propose Noise-aware Coreset Selection (NaCS), a specialized framework for CRSs. NaCS constructs coresets through submodular optimization based on training gradients, while simultaneously correcting noisy labels using a progressively trained model. Meanwhile, we refine the selected coreset by filtering out low-confidence samples through uncertainty quantification, thereby avoid training with unreliable interactions. Through extensive experiments, we show that NaCS produces higher-quality coresets for CRSs while achieving better efficiency than existing coreset selection techniques. Notably, NaCS recovers 93-95\% of full-dataset training performance using merely 1\% of the training data. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}{https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs}.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Efficient Prompt Learning for Traffic Forecasting

Accurate traffic prediction is essential for optimizing transportation systems, enhancing resource allocation, and improving overall urban administration. Spatio-temporal graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance and have been widely used in various spatio-temporal prediction scenarios. However, these prediction methods often exhibit low generalization ability, struggling with distribution shifts caused by spatio-temporal dynamics. To address this challenge, we propose an approach to enhance the generalization and adaptation of spatio-temporal GNNs through efficient prompting. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight and model-agnostic prompt tuning framework for spatio-temporal GNNs, named SimpleST. It facilitates adapting pre-trained spatio-temporal GNNs to novel distributions while keeping the model parameters fixed. This prompt mechanism reduces the overhead and complexity of adaptation, enabling efficient utilization of pre-trained models for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments conducted on five real-world urban spatio-temporal datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach in terms of prediction accuracy and computational efficiency.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

FINER-SQL: Boosting Small Language Models for Text-to-SQL

Large language models have driven major advances in Text-to-SQL generation. However, they suffer from high computational cost, long latency, and data privacy concerns, which make them impractical for many real-world applications. A natural alternative is to use small language models (SLMs), which enable efficient and private on-premise deployment. Yet, SLMs often struggle with weak reasoning and poor instruction following. Conventional reinforcement learning methods based on sparse binary rewards (0/1) provide little learning signal when the generated SQLs are incorrect, leading to unstable or collapsed training. To overcome these issues, we propose FINER-SQL, a scalable and reusable reinforcement learning framework that enhances SLMs through fine-grained execution feedback. Built on group relative policy optimization, FINER-SQL replaces sparse supervision with dense and interpretable rewards that offer continuous feedback even for incorrect SQLs. It introduces two key reward functions: a memory reward, which aligns reasoning with verified traces for semantic stability, and an atomic reward, which measures operation-level overlap to grant partial credit for structurally correct but incomplete SQLs. This approach transforms discrete correctness into continuous learning, enabling stable, critic-free optimization. Experiments on the BIRD and Spider benchmarks show that FINER-SQL achieves up to 67.73\% and 85\% execution accuracy with a 3B model -- matching much larger LLMs while reducing inference latency to 5.57~s/sample. These results highlight a cost-efficient and privacy-preserving path toward high-performance Text-to-SQL generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/thanhdath/finer-sql.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

GRAFT: Graph-Tokenized LLMs for Tool Planning

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to complete complex tasks by selecting and coordinating external tools across multiple steps. This requires aligning tool choices with subtask intent while satisfying directional execution dependencies among tools. To do this, existing methods model these dependencies as tool graphs and incorporate the graphs with LLMs through retrieval, serialization, or prompt-level injection. However, these external graph-use strategies all follow a matching paradigm, which often fails to align tool choices with the underlying subtask structure, producing semantically plausible plans that violate graph constraints. This issue is further exacerbated by error accumulation, where an early incorrect tool selection shifts the plan into an invalid graph state and causes subsequent predictions to drift away from the valid execution path. To address these challenges, we propose GRAFT, a graph-tokenized language model framework for dependency-aware tool planning. GRAFT internalizes the tool graph by mapping each tool node to a dedicated special token and learning directed tool dependencies within the representation space. It further introduces on-policy tool context distillation, training the model on its own sampled trajectories while distilling stepwise planning signals. Experiments show that GRAFT achieves state-of-the-art performance in exact sequence matching and dependency legality, supporting more reliable LLM tool planning in complex workflows.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

On-Device Large Language Models for Sequential Recommendation

On-device recommendation is critical for a number of real-world applications, especially in scenarios that have agreements on execution latency, user privacy, and robust functionality when internet connectivity is unstable or even impossible. While large language models (LLMs) can now provide exceptional capabilities that model user behavior for sequential recommendation tasks, their substantial memory footprint and computational overhead make the deployment on resource-constrained devices a high risk proposition. In this paper, we propose OD-LLM, the first task-adaptive compression framework explicitly designed to provide efficient and accurate on-device deployment of LLMs for sequential recommendation tasks. OD-LLM uniquely integrates two complementary compression strategies: a low-rank structural compression algorithm which uses Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to significantly reduce parameter redundancy in the model, and a novel tokenization normalization technique that better complements the low-rank decomposition process being used. Additionally, to minimize any potential performance degradation when using higher compression ratios, a novel progressive alignment algorithm is used to iteratively refine the parameters required layerwise in the target model. Empirical evaluations conducted on sequential recommendation benchmarks show that OD-LLM exhibits no loss in effectiveness when compared to the original recommendation model, when the deployed model size is halved. These promising results demonstrate the efficacy and scalability of OD-LLM, making this novel solution a practical alternative for real-time, on-device solutions wishing to replace expensive, remotely executed LLMs.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

ProMax: Exploring the Potential of LLM-derived Profiles with Distribution Shaping for Recommender Systems

The remarkable text understanding and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have revitalized the field of general recommendation based on implicit user feedback. Rather than deploying LLMs directly as recommendation models, a more flexible paradigm leverages their ability to interpret users' historical interactions and semantic contexts to extract structured profiles that characterize user preferences. These profiles can be further transformed into actionable high-dimensional representations, serving as powerful signals to augment and strengthen recommendation models. However, the mechanism by which such profiles enhance recommendation performance within the feature space remains insufficiently understood. Moreover, existing studies predominantly rely on nonlinear alignment and fusion strategies to incorporate these profiles, which often lead to semantic loss and fail to fully exploit their potential. To address these limitations, we revisit profiles from a retrieval perspective and propose a simple yet effective recommendation framework built upon distribution shaping (ProMax) in this paper. We begin by employing dense retrieval to uncover the collaborative relationships between user and item profiles within the feature space. Based on this insight, we introduce a dual distribution-reshaping process, in which the profile distribution acts as a guiding signal to steer the recommendation model toward learning user preferences for unseen items beyond the scope of observed interactions. We apply ProMax to four classic recommendation methods on three public datasets. The results indicate that ProMax substantially improves base model performance and outperforms existing LLM-based recommendation approaches.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2026arXiv

Reasoning Pattern Alignment Merging for Adaptive Reasoning

Recent large reasoning models (LRMs) have made substantial progress in complex reasoning tasks, yet they often generate lengthy reasoning paths for every query, incurring unnecessary computation and latency. Existing speed-up approaches typically rely on retraining the model or designing sophisticated prompting, which are either prohibitively expensive or highly sensitive to the input and prompt formulation. In this work, we study model merging as a lightweight alternative for efficient reasoning: by combining a long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning model with a Short-CoT instruction model, we obtain an adaptive reasoner without training from scratch or requiring large-scale additional data. Building on this idea, we propose Reasoning Pattern Alignment Merging (RPAM), a layer-wise model merging framework based on feature alignment to facilitate query-adaptive reasoning. RPAM first constructs a small pattern-labeled calibration set that assigns each query an appropriate reasoning pattern. It then optimizes layer-wise merging coefficients by aligning the merged model's intermediate representations with those of the selected model, while a contrastive objective explicitly pushes them away from the non-selected model. Experiments on seven widely used reasoning benchmarks show that RPAM substantially reduces inference cost while maintaining strong performance. Upon article acceptance, we will provide open-source code to reproduce experiments for RPAM.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2024arXiv

ROIC-DM: Robust Text Inference and Classification via Diffusion Model

While language models have made many milestones in text inference and classification tasks, they remain susceptible to adversarial attacks that can lead to unforeseen outcomes. Existing works alleviate this problem by equipping language models with defense patches. However, these defense strategies often rely on impractical assumptions or entail substantial sacrifices in model performance. Consequently, enhancing the resilience of the target model using such defense mechanisms is a formidable challenge. This paper introduces an innovative model for robust text inference and classification, built upon diffusion models (ROIC-DM). Benefiting from its training involving denoising stages, ROIC-DM inherently exhibits greater robustness compared to conventional language models. Moreover, ROIC-DM can attain comparable, and in some cases, superior performance to language models, by effectively incorporating them as advisory components. Extensive experiments conducted with several strong textual adversarial attacks on three datasets demonstrate that (1) ROIC-DM outperforms traditional language models in robustness, even when the latter are fortified with advanced defense mechanisms; (2) ROIC-DM can achieve comparable and even better performance than traditional language models by using them as advisors.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

AutoML for Deep Recommender Systems: A Survey

Recommender systems play a significant role in information filtering and have been utilized in different scenarios, such as e-commerce and social media. With the prosperity of deep learning, deep recommender systems show superior performance by capturing non-linear information and item-user relationships. However, the design of deep recommender systems heavily relies on human experiences and expert knowledge. To tackle this problem, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) is introduced to automatically search for the proper candidates for different parts of deep recommender systems. This survey performs a comprehensive review of the literature in this field. Firstly, we propose an abstract concept for AutoML for deep recommender systems (AutoRecSys) that describes its building blocks and distinguishes it from conventional AutoML techniques and recommender systems. Secondly, we present a taxonomy as a classification framework containing feature selection search, embedding dimension search, feature interaction search, model architecture search, and other components search. Furthermore, we put a particular emphasis on the search space and search strategy, as they are the common thread to connect all methods within each category and enable practitioners to analyze and compare various approaches. Finally, we propose four future promising research directions that will lead this line of research.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Efficient On-Device Session-Based Recommendation

On-device session-based recommendation systems have been achieving increasing attention on account of the low energy/resource consumption and privacy protection while providing promising recommendation performance. To fit the powerful neural session-based recommendation models in resource-constrained mobile devices, tensor-train decomposition and its variants have been widely applied to reduce memory footprint by decomposing the embedding table into smaller tensors, showing great potential in compressing recommendation models. However, these model compression techniques significantly increase the local inference time due to the complex process of generating index lists and a series of tensor multiplications to form item embeddings, and the resultant on-device recommender fails to provide real-time response and recommendation. To improve the online recommendation efficiency, we propose to learn compositional encoding-based compact item representations. Specifically, each item is represented by a compositional code that consists of several codewords, and we learn embedding vectors to represent each codeword instead of each item. Then the composition of the codeword embedding vectors from different embedding matrices (i.e., codebooks) forms the item embedding. Since the size of codebooks can be extremely small, the recommender model is thus able to fit in resource-constrained devices and meanwhile can save the codebooks for fast local inference.Besides, to prevent the loss of model capacity caused by compression, we propose a bidirectional self-supervised knowledge distillation framework. Extensive experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that compared with existing methods, the proposed on-device recommender not only achieves an 8x inference speedup with a large compression ratio but also shows superior recommendation performance.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2023arXiv

Self-supervised Hypergraph Representation Learning for Sociological Analysis

Modern sociology has profoundly uncovered many convincing social criteria for behavioural analysis. Unfortunately, many of them are too subjective to be measured and presented in online social networks. On the other hand, data mining techniques can better find data patterns but many of them leave behind unnatural understanding. In this paper, we propose a fundamental methodology to support the further fusion of data mining techniques and sociological behavioral criteria. Our highlights are three-fold: First, we propose an effective hypergraph awareness and a fast line graph construction framework. The hypergraph can more profoundly indicate the interactions between individuals and their environments because each edge in the hypergraph (a.k.a hyperedge) contains more than two nodes, which is perfect to describe social environments. A line graph treats each social environment as a super node with the underlying influence between different environments. In this way, we go beyond traditional pair-wise relations and explore richer patterns under various sociological criteria; Second, we propose a novel hypergraph-based neural network to learn social influence flowing from users to users, users to environments, environment to users, and environments to environments. The neural network can be learned via a task-free method, making our model very flexible to support various data mining tasks and sociological analysis; Third, we propose both qualitative and quantitive solutions to effectively evaluate the most common sociological criteria like social conformity, social equivalence, environmental evolving and social polarization. Our extensive experiments show that our framework can better support both data mining tasks for online user behaviours and sociological analysis.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A Multi-Strategy based Pre-Training Method for Cold-Start Recommendation

Cold-start problem is a fundamental challenge for recommendation tasks. The recent self-supervised learning (SSL) on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) model, PT-GNN, pre-trains the GNN model to reconstruct the cold-start embeddings and has shown great potential for cold-start recommendation. However, due to the over-smoothing problem, PT-GNN can only capture up to 3-order relation, which can not provide much useful auxiliary information to depict the target cold-start user or item. Besides, the embedding reconstruction task only considers the intra-correlations within the subgraph of users and items, while ignoring the inter-correlations across different subgraphs. To solve the above challenges, we propose a multi-strategy based pre-training method for cold-start recommendation (MPT), which extends PT-GNN from the perspective of model architecture and pretext tasks to improve the cold-start recommendation performance. Specifically, in terms of the model architecture, in addition to the short-range dependencies of users and items captured by the GNN encoder, we introduce a Transformer encoder to capture long-range dependencies. In terms of the pretext task, in addition to considering the intra-correlations of users and items by the embedding reconstruction task, we add embedding contrastive learning task to capture inter-correlations of users and items. We train the GNN and Transformer encoders on these pretext tasks under the meta-learning setting to simulate the real cold-start scenario, making the model easily and rapidly being adapted to new cold-start users and items. Experiments on three public recommendation datasets show the superiority of the proposed MPT model against the vanilla GNN models, the pre-training GNN model on user/item embedding inference and the recommendation task.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

A War Beyond Deepfake: Benchmarking Facial Counterfeits and Countermeasures

In recent years, visual forgery has reached a level of sophistication that humans cannot identify fraud, which poses a significant threat to information security. A wide range of malicious applications have emerged, such as fake news, defamation or blackmailing of celebrities, impersonation of politicians in political warfare, and the spreading of rumours to attract views. As a result, a rich body of visual forensic techniques has been proposed in an attempt to stop this dangerous trend. In this paper, we present a benchmark that provides in-depth insights into visual forgery and visual forensics, using a comprehensive and empirical approach. More specifically, we develop an independent framework that integrates state-of-the-arts counterfeit generators and detectors, and measure the performance of these techniques using various criteria. We also perform an exhaustive analysis of the benchmarking results, to determine the characteristics of the methods that serve as a comparative reference in this never-ending war between measures and countermeasures.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Are Graph Augmentations Necessary? Simple Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Contrastive learning (CL) recently has spurred a fruitful line of research in the field of recommendation, since its ability to extract self-supervised signals from the raw data is well-aligned with recommender systems' needs for tackling the data sparsity issue. A typical pipeline of CL-based recommendation models is first augmenting the user-item bipartite graph with structure perturbations, and then maximizing the node representation consistency between different graph augmentations. Although this paradigm turns out to be effective, what underlies the performance gains is still a mystery. In this paper, we first experimentally disclose that, in CL-based recommendation models, CL operates by learning more evenly distributed user/item representations that can implicitly mitigate the popularity bias. Meanwhile, we reveal that the graph augmentations, which were considered necessary, just play a trivial role. Based on this finding, we propose a simple CL method which discards the graph augmentations and instead adds uniform noises to the embedding space for creating contrastive views. A comprehensive experimental study on three benchmark datasets demonstrates that, though it appears strikingly simple, the proposed method can smoothly adjust the uniformity of learned representations and has distinct advantages over its graph augmentation-based counterparts in terms of recommendation accuracy and training efficiency. The code is released at https://github.com/Coder-Yu/QRec.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Decentralized Collaborative Learning Framework for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an indispensable functionality in Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) due to its effectiveness in helping people decide the next POI to visit. However, accurate recommendation requires a vast amount of historical check-in data, thus threatening user privacy as the location-sensitive data needs to be handled by cloud servers. Although there have been several on-device frameworks for privacy-preserving POI recommendations, they are still resource-intensive when it comes to storage and computation, and show limited robustness to the high sparsity of user-POI interactions. On this basis, we propose a novel decentralized collaborative learning framework for POI recommendation (DCLR), which allows users to train their personalized models locally in a collaborative manner. DCLR significantly reduces the local models' dependence on the cloud for training, and can be used to expand arbitrary centralized recommendation models. To counteract the sparsity of on-device user data when learning each local model, we design two self-supervision signals to pretrain the POI representations on the server with geographical and categorical correlations of POIs. To facilitate collaborative learning, we innovatively propose to incorporate knowledge from either geographically or semantically similar users into each local model with attentive aggregation and mutual information maximization. The collaborative learning process makes use of communications between devices while requiring only minor engagement from the central server for identifying user groups, and is compatible with common privacy preservation mechanisms like differential privacy. We evaluate DCLR with two real-world datasets, where the results show that DCLR outperforms state-of-the-art on-device frameworks and yields competitive results compared with centralized counterparts.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

DeHIN: A Decentralized Framework for Embedding Large-scale Heterogeneous Information Networks

Modeling heterogeneity by extraction and exploitation of high-order information from heterogeneous information networks (HINs) has been attracting immense research attention in recent times. Such heterogeneous network embedding (HNE) methods effectively harness the heterogeneity of small-scale HINs. However, in the real world, the size of HINs grow exponentially with the continuous introduction of new nodes and different types of links, making it a billion-scale network. Learning node embeddings on such HINs creates a performance bottleneck for existing HNE methods that are commonly centralized, i.e., complete data and the model are both on a single machine. To address large-scale HNE tasks with strong efficiency and effectiveness guarantee, we present \textit{Decentralized Embedding Framework for Heterogeneous Information Network} (DeHIN) in this paper. In DeHIN, we generate a distributed parallel pipeline that utilizes hypergraphs in order to infuse parallelization into the HNE task. DeHIN presents a context preserving partition mechanism that innovatively formulates a large HIN as a hypergraph, whose hyperedges connect semantically similar nodes. Our framework then adopts a decentralized strategy to efficiently partition HINs by adopting a tree-like pipeline. Then, each resulting subnetwork is assigned to a distributed worker, which employs the deep information maximization theorem to locally learn node embeddings from the partition it receives. We further devise a novel embedding alignment scheme to precisely project independently learned node embeddings from all subnetworks onto a common vector space, thus allowing for downstream tasks like link prediction and node classification.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Detecting Rumours with Latency Guarantees using Massive Streaming Data

Today's social networks continuously generate massive streams of data, which provide a valuable starting point for the detection of rumours as soon as they start to propagate. However, rumour detection faces tight latency bounds, which cannot be met by contemporary algorithms, given the sheer volume of high-velocity streaming data emitted by social networks. Hence, in this paper, we argue for best-effort rumour detection that detects most rumours quickly rather than all rumours with a high delay. To this end, we combine techniques for efficient, graph-based matching of rumour patterns with effective load shedding that discards some of the input data while minimising the loss in accuracy. Experiments with large-scale real-world datasets illustrate the robustness of our approach in terms of runtime performance and detection accuracy under diverse streaming conditions.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Discovering Collaborative Signals for Next POI Recommendation with Iterative Seq2Graph Augmentation

Being an indispensable component in location-based social networks, next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation recommends users unexplored POIs based on their recent visiting histories. However, existing work mainly models check-in data as isolated POI sequences, neglecting the crucial collaborative signals from cross-sequence check-in information. Furthermore, the sparse POI-POI transitions restrict the ability of a model to learn effective sequential patterns for recommendation. In this paper, we propose Sequence-to-Graph (Seq2Graph) augmentation for each POI sequence, allowing collaborative signals to be propagated from correlated POIs belonging to other sequences. We then devise a novel Sequence-to-Graph POI Recommender (SGRec), which jointly learns POI embeddings and infers a user's temporal preferences from the graph-augmented POI sequence. To overcome the sparsity of POI-level interactions, we further infuse category-awareness into SGRec with a multi-task learning scheme that captures the denser category-wise transitions. As such, SGRec makes full use of the collaborative signals for learning expressive POI representations, and also comprehensively uncovers multi-level sequential patterns for user preference modelling. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of SGRec against state-of-the-art methods in next POI recommendation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Diverse Preference Augmentation with Multiple Domains for Cold-start Recommendations

Cold-start issues have been more and more challenging for providing accurate recommendations with the fast increase of users and items. Most existing approaches attempt to solve the intractable problems via content-aware recommendations based on auxiliary information and/or cross-domain recommendations with transfer learning. Their performances are often constrained by the extremely sparse user-item interactions, unavailable side information, or very limited domain-shared users. Recently, meta-learners with meta-augmentation by adding noises to labels have been proven to be effective to avoid overfitting and shown good performance on new tasks. Motivated by the idea of meta-augmentation, in this paper, by treating a user's preference over items as a task, we propose a so-called Diverse Preference Augmentation framework with multiple source domains based on meta-learning (referred to as MetaDPA) to i) generate diverse ratings in a new domain of interest (known as target domain) to handle overfitting on the case of sparse interactions, and to ii) learn a preference model in the target domain via a meta-learning scheme to alleviate cold-start issues. Specifically, we first conduct multi-source domain adaptation by dual conditional variational autoencoders and impose a Multi-domain InfoMax (MDI) constraint on the latent representations to learn domain-shared and domain-specific preference properties. To avoid overfitting, we add a Mutually-Exclusive (ME) constraint on the output of decoders to generate diverse ratings given content data. Finally, these generated diverse ratings and the original ratings are introduced into the meta-training procedure to learn a preference meta-learner, which produces good generalization ability on cold-start recommendation tasks. Experiments on real-world datasets show our proposed MetaDPA clearly outperforms the current state-of-the-art baselines.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Double-Scale Self-Supervised Hypergraph Learning for Group Recommendation

With the prevalence of social media, there has recently been a proliferation of recommenders that shift their focus from individual modeling to group recommendation. Since the group preference is a mixture of various predilections from group members, the fundamental challenge of group recommendation is to model the correlations among members. Existing methods mostly adopt heuristic or attention-based preference aggregation strategies to synthesize group preferences. However, these models mainly focus on the pairwise connections of users and ignore the complex high-order interactions within and beyond groups. Besides, group recommendation suffers seriously from the problem of data sparsity due to severely sparse group-item interactions. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised hypergraph learning framework for group recommendation to achieve two goals: (1) capturing the intra- and inter-group interactions among users; (2) alleviating the data sparsity issue with the raw data itself. Technically, for (1), a hierarchical hypergraph convolutional network based on the user- and group-level hypergraphs is developed to model the complex tuplewise correlations among users within and beyond groups. For (2), we design a double-scale node dropout strategy to create self-supervision signals that can regularize user representations with different granularities against the sparsity issue. The experimental analysis on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrates the superiority of the proposed model and also elucidates the rationality of the hypergraph modeling and the double-scale self-supervision.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

HFUL: A Hybrid Framework for User Account Linkage across Location-Aware Social Networks

Sources of complementary information are connected when we link user accounts belonging to the same user across different platforms or devices. The expanded information promotes the development of a wide range of applications, such as cross-platform prediction, cross-platform recommendation, and advertisement. Due to the significance of user account linkage and the widespread popularization of GPS-enabled mobile devices, there are increasing research studies on linking user account with spatio-temporal data across location-aware social networks. Being different from most existing studies in this domain that only focus on the effectiveness, we propose a novel framework entitled HFUL (A Hybrid Framework for User Account Linkage across Location-Aware Social Networks), where efficiency, effectiveness, scalability, robustness, and application of user account linkage are considered. Specifically, to improve the efficiency, we develop a comprehensive index structure from the spatio-temporal perspective, and design novel pruning strategies to reduce the search space. To improve the effectiveness, a kernel density estimation-based method has been proposed to alleviate the data sparsity problem in measuring users' similarities. Additionally, we investigate the application of HFUL in terms of user prediction, time prediction, and location prediction. The extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of HFUL in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, scalability, robustness, and application compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

Incomplete Knowledge Graph Alignment

Knowledge graph (KG) alignment - the task of recognizing entities referring to the same thing in different KGs - is recognized as one of the most important operations in the field of KG construction and completion. However, existing alignment techniques often assume that the input KGs are complete and isomorphic, which is not true due to the real-world heterogeneity in the domain, size, and sparsity. In this work, we address the problem of aligning incomplete KGs with representation learning. Our KG embedding framework exploits two feature channels: transitivity-based and proximity-based. The former captures the consistency constraints between entities via translation paths, while the latter captures the neighbourhood structure of KGs via attention guided relation-aware graph neural network. The two feature channels are jointly learned to exchange important features between the input KGs while enforcing the output representations of the input KGs in the same embedding space. Also, we develop a missing links detector that discovers and recovers the missing links in the input KGs during the training process, which helps mitigate the incompleteness issue and thus improve the compatibility of the learned representations. The embeddings then are fused to generate the alignment result, and the high-confidence matched node pairs are updated to the pre-aligned supervision data to improve the embeddings gradually. Empirical results show that our model is more accurate than the SOTA and is robust against different levels of incompleteness.

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preprint2022arXiv

Model-Agnostic and Diverse Explanations for Streaming Rumour Graphs

The propagation of rumours on social media poses an important threat to societies, so that various techniques for rumour detection have been proposed recently. Yet, existing work focuses on \emph{what} entities constitute a rumour, but provides little support to understand \emph{why} the entities have been classified as such. This prevents an effective evaluation of the detected rumours as well as the design of countermeasures. In this work, we argue that explanations for detected rumours may be given in terms of examples of related rumours detected in the past. A diverse set of similar rumours helps users to generalize, i.e., to understand the properties that govern the detection of rumours. Since the spread of rumours in social media is commonly modelled using feature-annotated graphs, we propose a query-by-example approach that, given a rumour graph, extracts the $k$ most similar and diverse subgraphs from past rumours. The challenge is that all of the computations require fast assessment of similarities between graphs. To achieve an efficient and adaptive realization of the approach in a streaming setting, we present a novel graph representation learning technique and report on implementation considerations. Our evaluation experiments show that our approach outperforms baseline techniques in delivering meaningful explanations for various rumour propagation behaviours.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

On-Device Next-Item Recommendation with Self-Supervised Knowledge Distillation

Modern recommender systems operate in a fully server-based fashion. To cater to millions of users, the frequent model maintaining and the high-speed processing for concurrent user requests are required, which comes at the cost of a huge carbon footprint. Meanwhile, users need to upload their behavior data even including the immediate environmental context to the server, raising the public concern about privacy. On-device recommender systems circumvent these two issues with cost-conscious settings and local inference. However, due to the limited memory and computing resources, on-device recommender systems are confronted with two fundamental challenges: (1) how to reduce the size of regular models to fit edge devices? (2) how to retain the original capacity? Previous research mostly adopts tensor decomposition techniques to compress the regular recommendation model with limited compression ratio so as to avoid drastic performance degradation. In this paper, we explore ultra-compact models for next-item recommendation, by loosing the constraint of dimensionality consistency in tensor decomposition. Meanwhile, to compensate for the capacity loss caused by compression, we develop a self-supervised knowledge distillation framework which enables the compressed model (student) to distill the essential information lying in the raw data, and improves the long-tail item recommendation through an embedding-recombination strategy with the original model (teacher). The extensive experiments on two benchmarks demonstrate that, with 30x model size reduction, the compressed model almost comes with no accuracy loss, and even outperforms its uncompressed counterpart in most cases.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

ReFRS: Resource-efficient Federated Recommender System for Dynamic and Diversified User Preferences

Owing to its nature of scalability and privacy by design, federated learning (FL) has received increasing interest in decentralized deep learning. FL has also facilitated recent research on upscaling and privatizing personalized recommendation services, using on-device data to learn recommender models locally. These models are then aggregated globally to obtain a more performant model, while maintaining data privacy. Typically, federated recommender systems (FRSs) do not consider the lack of resources and data availability at the end-devices. In addition, they assume that the interaction data between users and items is i.i.d. and stationary across end-devices, and that all local recommender models can be directly averaged without considering the user's behavioral diversity. However, in real scenarios, recommendations have to be made on end-devices with sparse interaction data and limited resources. Furthermore, users' preferences are heterogeneous and they frequently visit new items. This makes their personal preferences highly skewed, and the straightforwardly aggregated model is thus ill-posed for such non-i.i.d. data. In this paper, we propose Resource Efficient Federated Recommender System (ReFRS) to enable decentralized recommendation with dynamic and diversified user preferences. On the device side, ReFRS consists of a lightweight self-supervised local model built upon the variational autoencoder for learning a user's temporal preference from a sequence of interacted items. On the server side, ReFRS utilizes a semantic sampler to adaptively perform model aggregation within each identified user cluster. The clustering module operates in an asynchronous and dynamic manner to support efficient global model update and cope with shifting user interests. As a result, ReFRS achieves superior performance in terms of both accuracy and scalability, as demonstrated by comparative experiments.

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preprint2022arXiv

Reinforcement Learning-enhanced Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (SCSR) is an emerging yet challenging task that simultaneously considers the shared-account and cross-domain characteristics in the sequential recommendation. Existing works on SCSR are mainly based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) and Graph Neural Network (GNN) but they ignore the fact that although multiple users share a single account, it is mainly occupied by one user at a time. This observation motivates us to learn a more accurate user-specific account representation by attentively focusing on its recent behaviors. Furthermore, though existing works endow lower weights to irrelevant interactions, they may still dilute the domain information and impede the cross-domain recommendation. To address the above issues, we propose a reinforcement learning-based solution, namely RL-ISN, which consists of a basic cross-domain recommender and a reinforcement learning-based domain filter. Specifically, to model the account representation in the shared-account scenario, the basic recommender first clusters users' mixed behaviors as latent users, and then leverages an attention model over them to conduct user identification. To reduce the impact of irrelevant domain information, we formulate the domain filter as a hierarchical reinforcement learning task, where a high-level task is utilized to decide whether to revise the whole transferred sequence or not, and if it does, a low-level task is further performed to determine whether to remove each interaction within it or not. To evaluate the performance of our solution, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our RL-ISN method compared with the state-of-the-art recommendation methods.

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preprint2022arXiv

Self-supervised Graph Learning for Occasional Group Recommendation

As an important branch in Recommender System, occasional group recommendation has received more and more attention. In this scenario, each occasional group (cold-start group) has no or few historical interacted items. As each occasional group has extremely sparse interactions with items, traditional group recommendation methods can not learn high-quality group representations. The recent proposed Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which incorporate the high-order neighbors of the target occasional group, can alleviate the above problem in some extent. However, these GNNs still can not explicitly strengthen the embedding quality of the high-order neighbors with few interactions. Motivated by the Self-supervised Learning technique, which is able to find the correlations within the data itself, we propose a self-supervised graph learning framework, which takes the user/item/group embedding reconstruction as the pretext task to enhance the embeddings of the cold-start users/items/groups. In order to explicitly enhance the high-order cold-start neighbors' embedding quality, we further introduce an embedding enhancer, which leverages the self-attention mechanism to improve the embedding quality for them. Comprehensive experiments show the advantages of our proposed framework than the state-of-the-art methods.

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preprint2022arXiv

Self-Supervised Hypergraph Convolutional Networks for Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation (SBR) focuses on next-item prediction at a certain time point. As user profiles are generally not available in this scenario, capturing the user intent lying in the item transitions plays a pivotal role. Recent graph neural networks (GNNs) based SBR methods regard the item transitions as pairwise relations, which neglect the complex high-order information among items. Hypergraph provides a natural way to capture beyond-pairwise relations, while its potential for SBR has remained unexplored. In this paper, we fill this gap by modeling session-based data as a hypergraph and then propose a hypergraph convolutional network to improve SBR. Moreover, to enhance hypergraph modeling, we devise another graph convolutional network which is based on the line graph of the hypergraph and then integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the networks by maximizing mutual information between the session representations learned via the two networks, serving as an auxiliary task to improve the recommendation task. Since the two types of networks both are based on hypergraph, which can be seen as two channels for hypergraph modeling, we name our model \textbf{DHCN} (Dual Channel Hypergraph Convolutional Networks). Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over the SOTA methods, and the results validate the effectiveness of hypergraph modeling and self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available at https://github.com/xiaxin1998/DHCN

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preprint2022arXiv

Self-Supervised Multi-Channel Hypergraph Convolutional Network for Social Recommendation

Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via https://github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.

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preprint2022arXiv

Single-shot Embedding Dimension Search in Recommender System

As a crucial component of most modern deep recommender systems, feature embedding maps high-dimensional sparse user/item features into low-dimensional dense embeddings. However, these embeddings are usually assigned a unified dimension, which suffers from the following issues: (1) high memory usage and computation cost. (2) sub-optimal performance due to inferior dimension assignments. In order to alleviate the above issues, some works focus on automated embedding dimension search by formulating it as hyper-parameter optimization or embedding pruning problems. However, they either require well-designed search space for hyperparameters or need time-consuming optimization procedures. In this paper, we propose a Single-Shot Embedding Dimension Search method, called SSEDS, which can efficiently assign dimensions for each feature field via a single-shot embedding pruning operation while maintaining the recommendation accuracy of the model. Specifically, it introduces a criterion for identifying the importance of each embedding dimension for each feature field. As a result, SSEDS could automatically obtain mixed-dimensional embeddings by explicitly reducing redundant embedding dimensions based on the corresponding dimension importance ranking and the predefined parameter budget. Furthermore, the proposed SSEDS is model-agnostic, meaning that it could be integrated into different base recommendation models. The extensive offline experiments are conducted on two widely used public datasets for CTR prediction tasks, and the results demonstrate that SSEDS can still achieve strong recommendation performance even if it has reduced 90\% parameters. Moreover, SSEDS has also been deployed on the WeChat Subscription platform for practical recommendation services. The 7-day online A/B test results show that SSEDS can significantly improve the performance of the online recommendation model.

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preprint2022arXiv

Spatial-Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Crime Prediction

Exposure to crime and violence can harm individuals' quality of life and the economic growth of communities. In light of the rapid development in machine learning, there is a rise in the need to explore automated solutions to prevent crimes. With the increasing availability of both fine-grained urban and public service data, there is a recent surge in fusing such cross-domain information to facilitate crime prediction. By capturing the information about social structure, environment, and crime trends, existing machine learning predictive models have explored the dynamic crime patterns from different views. However, these approaches mostly convert such multi-source knowledge into implicit and latent representations (e.g., learned embeddings of districts), making it still a challenge to investigate the impacts of explicit factors for the occurrences of crimes behind the scenes. In this paper, we present a Spatial-Temporal Metapath guided Explainable Crime prediction (STMEC) framework to capture dynamic patterns of crime behaviours and explicitly characterize how the environmental and social factors mutually interact to produce the forecasts. Extensive experiments show the superiority of STMEC compared with other advanced spatiotemporal models, especially in predicting felonies (e.g., robberies and assaults with dangerous weapons).

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preprint2022arXiv

Switchable Online Knowledge Distillation

Online Knowledge Distillation (OKD) improves the involved models by reciprocally exploiting the difference between teacher and student. Several crucial bottlenecks over the gap between them -- e.g., Why and when does a large gap harm the performance, especially for student? How to quantify the gap between teacher and student? -- have received limited formal study. In this paper, we propose Switchable Online Knowledge Distillation (SwitOKD), to answer these questions. Instead of focusing on the accuracy gap at test phase by the existing arts, the core idea of SwitOKD is to adaptively calibrate the gap at training phase, namely distillation gap, via a switching strategy between two modes -- expert mode (pause the teacher while keep the student learning) and learning mode (restart the teacher). To possess an appropriate distillation gap, we further devise an adaptive switching threshold, which provides a formal criterion as to when to switch to learning mode or expert mode, and thus improves the student's performance. Meanwhile, the teacher benefits from our adaptive switching threshold and keeps basically on a par with other online arts. We further extend SwitOKD to multiple networks with two basis topologies. Finally, extensive experiments and analysis validate the merits of SwitOKD for classification over the state-of-the-arts. Our code is available at https://github.com/hfutqian/SwitOKD.

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preprint2022arXiv

Time Interval-enhanced Graph Neural Network for Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Shared-account Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (SCSR) task aims to recommend the next item via leveraging the mixed user behaviors in multiple domains. It is gaining immense research attention as more and more users tend to sign up on different platforms and share accounts with others to access domain-specific services. Existing works on SCSR mainly rely on mining sequential patterns via Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)-based models, which suffer from the following limitations: 1) RNN-based methods overwhelmingly target discovering sequential dependencies in single-user behaviors. They are not expressive enough to capture the relationships among multiple entities in SCSR. 2) All existing methods bridge two domains via knowledge transfer in the latent space, and ignore the explicit cross-domain graph structure. 3) None existing studies consider the time interval information among items, which is essential in the sequential recommendation for characterizing different items and learning discriminative representations for them. In this work, we propose a new graph-based solution, namely TiDA-GCN, to address the above challenges. Specifically, we first link users and items in each domain as a graph. Then, we devise a domain-aware graph convolution network to learn userspecific node representations. To fully account for users' domainspecific preferences on items, two effective attention mechanisms are further developed to selectively guide the message passing process. Moreover, to further enhance item- and account-level representation learning, we incorporate the time interval into the message passing, and design an account-aware self-attention module for learning items' interactive characteristics. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method from various aspects.

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preprint2022arXiv

Towards Revenue Maximization with Popular and Profitable Products

Economic-wise, a common goal for companies conducting marketing is to maximize the return revenue/profit by utilizing the various effective marketing strategies. Consumer behavior is crucially important in economy and targeted marketing, in which behavioral economics can provide valuable insights to identify the biases and profit from customers. Finding credible and reliable information on products' profitability is, however, quite difficult since most products tends to peak at certain times w.r.t. seasonal sales cycle in a year. On-Shelf Availability (OSA) plays a key factor for performance evaluation. Besides, staying ahead of hot product trends means we can increase marketing efforts without selling out the inventory. To fulfill this gap, in this paper, we first propose a general profit-oriented framework to address the problem of revenue maximization based on economic behavior, and compute the 0n-shelf Popular and most Profitable Products (OPPPs) for the targeted marketing. To tackle the revenue maximization problem, we model the k-satisfiable product concept and propose an algorithmic framework for searching OPPP and its variants. Extensive experiments are conducted on several real-world datasets to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

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preprint2021arXiv

FENet: A Frequency Extraction Network for Obstructive Sleep Apnea Detection

Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a highly prevalent but inconspicuous disease that seriously jeopardizes the health of human beings. Polysomnography (PSG), the gold standard of detecting OSA, requires multiple specialized sensors for signal collection, hence patients have to physically visit hospitals and bear the costly treatment for a single detection. Recently, many single-sensor alternatives have been proposed to improve the cost efficiency and convenience. Among these methods, solutions based on RR-interval (i.e., the interval between two consecutive pulses) signals reach a satisfactory balance among comfort, portability and detection accuracy. In this paper, we advance RR-interval based OSA detection by considering its real-world practicality from energy perspectives. As photoplethysmogram (PPG) pulse sensors are commonly equipped on smart wrist-worn wearable devices (e.g., smart watches and wristbands), the energy efficiency of the detection model is crucial to fully support an overnight observation on patients. This creates challenges as the PPG sensors are unable to keep collecting continuous signals due to the limited battery capacity on smart wrist-worn devices. Therefore, we propose a novel Frequency Extraction Network (FENet), which can extract features from different frequency bands of the input RR-interval signals and generate continuous detection results with downsampled, discontinuous RR-interval signals. With the help of the one-to-multiple structure, FENet requires only one-third of the operation time of the PPG sensor, thus sharply cutting down the energy consumption and enabling overnight diagnosis. Experimental results on real OSA datasets reveal the state-of-the-art performance of FENet.

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preprint2021arXiv

Graph Embedding for Recommendation against Attribute Inference Attacks

In recent years, recommender systems play a pivotal role in helping users identify the most suitable items that satisfy personal preferences. As user-item interactions can be naturally modelled as graph-structured data, variants of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have become a well-established building block in the latest recommenders. Due to the wide utilization of sensitive user profile data, existing recommendation paradigms are likely to expose users to the threat of privacy breach, and GCN-based recommenders are no exception. Apart from the leakage of raw user data, the fragility of current recommenders under inference attacks offers malicious attackers a backdoor to estimate users' private attributes via their behavioral footprints and the recommendation results. However, little attention has been paid to developing recommender systems that can defend such attribute inference attacks, and existing works achieve attack resistance by either sacrificing considerable recommendation accuracy or only covering specific attack models or protected information. In our paper, we propose GERAI, a novel differentially private graph convolutional network to address such limitations. Specifically, in GERAI, we bind the information perturbation mechanism in differential privacy with the recommendation capability of graph convolutional networks. Furthermore, based on local differential privacy and functional mechanism, we innovatively devise a dual-stage encryption paradigm to simultaneously enforce privacy guarantee on users' sensitive features and the model optimization process. Extensive experiments show the superiority of GERAI in terms of its resistance to attribute inference attacks and recommendation effectiveness.

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preprint2021arXiv

Heterogeneous Hypergraph Embedding for Graph Classification

Recently, graph neural networks have been widely used for network embedding because of their prominent performance in pairwise relationship learning. In the real world, a more natural and common situation is the coexistence of pairwise relationships and complex non-pairwise relationships, which is, however, rarely studied. In light of this, we propose a graph neural network-based representation learning framework for heterogeneous hypergraphs, an extension of conventional graphs, which can well characterize multiple non-pairwise relations. Our framework first projects the heterogeneous hypergraph into a series of snapshots and then we take the Wavelet basis to perform localized hypergraph convolution. Since the Wavelet basis is usually much sparser than the Fourier basis, we develop an efficient polynomial approximation to the basis to replace the time-consuming Laplacian decomposition. Extensive evaluations have been conducted and the experimental results show the superiority of our method. In addition to the standard tasks of network embedding evaluation such as node classification, we also apply our method to the task of spammers detection and the superior performance of our framework shows that relationships beyond pairwise are also advantageous in the spammer detection.

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preprint2021arXiv

Passenger Mobility Prediction via Representation Learning for Dynamic Directed and Weighted Graph

In recent years, ride-hailing services have been increasingly prevalent as they provide huge convenience for passengers. As a fundamental problem, the timely prediction of passenger demands in different regions is vital for effective traffic flow control and route planning. As both spatial and temporal patterns are indispensable passenger demand prediction, relevant research has evolved from pure time series to graph-structured data for modeling historical passenger demand data, where a snapshot graph is constructed for each time slot by connecting region nodes via different relational edges (e.g., origin-destination relationship, geographical distance, etc.). Consequently, the spatiotemporal passenger demand records naturally carry dynamic patterns in the constructed graphs, where the edges also encode important information about the directions and volume (i.e., weights) of passenger demands between two connected regions. However, existing graph-based solutions fail to simultaneously consider those three crucial aspects of dynamic, directed, and weighted (DDW) graphs, leading to limited expressiveness when learning graph representations for passenger demand prediction. Therefore, we propose a novel spatiotemporal graph attention network, namely Gallat (Graph prediction with all attention) as a solution. In Gallat, by comprehensively incorporating those three intrinsic properties of DDW graphs, we build three attention layers to fully capture the spatiotemporal dependencies among different regions across all historical time slots. Moreover, the model employs a subtask to conduct pretraining so that it can obtain accurate results more quickly. We evaluate the proposed model on real-world datasets, and our experimental results demonstrate that Gallat outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

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preprint2021arXiv

Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation

This paper utilizes well-designed item-item path modelling between consecutive items with attention mechanisms to sequentially model dynamic user-item evolutions on dynamic knowledge graph for explainable recommendations. Compared with existing works that use heavy recurrent neural networks to model temporal information, we propose simple but effective neural networks to capture user historical item features and path-based context to characterise next purchased item. Extensive evaluations of TMER on three real-world benchmark datasets show state-of-the-art performance compared against recent strong baselines.

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preprint2021arXiv

Where are we in embedding spaces? A Comprehensive Analysis on Network Embedding Approaches for Recommender Systems

Hyperbolic space and hyperbolic embeddings are becoming a popular research field for recommender systems. However, it is not clear under what circumstances the hyperbolic space should be considered. To fill this gap, This paper provides theoretical analysis and empirical results on when and where to use hyperbolic space and hyperbolic embeddings in recommender systems. Specifically, we answer the questions that which type of models and datasets are more suited for hyperbolic space, as well as which latent size to choose. We evaluate our answers by comparing the performance of Euclidean space and hyperbolic space on different latent space models in both general item recommendation domain and social recommendation domain, with 6 widely used datasets and different latent sizes. Additionally, we propose a new metric learning based recommendation method called SCML and its hyperbolic version HSCML. We evaluate our conclusions regarding hyperbolic space on SCML and show the state-of-the-art performance of hyperbolic space by comparing HSCML with other baseline methods.

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preprint2020arXiv

EPARS: Early Prediction of At-risk Students with Online and Offline Learning Behaviors

Early prediction of students at risk (STAR) is an effective and significant means to provide timely intervention for dropout and suicide. Existing works mostly rely on either online or offline learning behaviors which are not comprehensive enough to capture the whole learning processes and lead to unsatisfying prediction performance. We propose a novel algorithm (EPARS) that could early predict STAR in a semester by modeling online and offline learning behaviors. The online behaviors come from the log of activities when students use the online learning management system. The offline behaviors derive from the check-in records of the library. Our main observations are two folds. Significantly different from good students, STAR barely have regular and clear study routines. We devised a multi-scale bag-of-regularity method to extract the regularity of learning behaviors that is robust to sparse data. Second, friends of STAR are more likely to be at risk. We constructed a co-occurrence network to approximate the underlying social network and encode the social homophily as features through network embedding. To validate the proposed algorithm, extensive experiments have been conducted among an Asian university with 15,503 undergraduate students. The results indicate EPARS outperforms baselines by 14.62% ~ 38.22% in predicting STAR.

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preprint2020arXiv

GCN-Based User Representation Learning for Unifying Robust Recommendation and Fraudster Detection

In recent years, recommender system has become an indispensable function in all e-commerce platforms. The review rating data for a recommender system typically comes from open platforms, which may attract a group of malicious users to deliberately insert fake feedback in an attempt to bias the recommender system to their favour. The presence of such attacks may violate modeling assumptions that high-quality data is always available and these data truly reflect users' interests and preferences. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to construct a robust recommender system that is able to generate stable recommendations even in the presence of shilling attacks. In this paper, we propose GraphRfi - a GCN-based user representation learning framework to perform robust recommendation and fraudster detection in a unified way. In its end-to-end learning process, the probability of a user being identified as a fraudster in the fraudster detection component automatically determines the contribution of this user's rating data in the recommendation component; while the prediction error outputted in the recommendation component acts as an important feature in the fraudster detection component. Thus, these two components can mutually enhance each other. Extensive experiments have been conducted and the experimental results show the superiority of our GraphRfi in the two tasks - robust rating prediction and fraudster detection. Furthermore, the proposed GraphRfi is validated to be more robust to the various types of shilling attacks over the state-of-the-art recommender systems.

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preprint2020arXiv

Multi-level Graph Convolutional Networks for Cross-platform Anchor Link Prediction

Cross-platform account matching plays a significant role in social network analytics, and is beneficial for a wide range of applications. However, existing methods either heavily rely on high-quality user generated content (including user profiles) or suffer from data insufficiency problem if only focusing on network topology, which brings researchers into an insoluble dilemma of model selection. In this paper, to address this problem, we propose a novel framework that considers multi-level graph convolutions on both local network structure and hypergraph structure in a unified manner. The proposed method overcomes data insufficiency problem of existing work and does not necessarily rely on user demographic information. Moreover, to adapt the proposed method to be capable of handling large-scale social networks, we propose a two-phase space reconciliation mechanism to align the embedding spaces in both network partitioning based parallel training and account matching across different social networks. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two large-scale real-life social networks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models with a big margin.

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preprint2020arXiv

Try This Instead: Personalized and Interpretable Substitute Recommendation

As a fundamental yet significant process in personalized recommendation, candidate generation and suggestion effectively help users spot the most suitable items for them. Consequently, identifying substitutable items that are interchangeable opens up new opportunities to refine the quality of generated candidates. When a user is browsing a specific type of product (e.g., a laptop) to buy, the accurate recommendation of substitutes (e.g., better equipped laptops) can offer the user more suitable options to choose from, thus substantially increasing the chance of a successful purchase. However, existing methods merely treat this problem as mining pairwise item relationships without the consideration of users' personal preferences. Moreover, the substitutable relationships are implicitly identified through the learned latent representations of items, leading to uninterpretable recommendation results. In this paper, we propose attribute-aware collaborative filtering (A2CF) to perform substitute recommendation by addressing issues from both personalization and interpretability perspectives. Instead of directly modelling user-item interactions, we extract explicit and polarized item attributes from user reviews with sentiment analysis, whereafter the representations of attributes, users, and items are simultaneously learned. Then, by treating attributes as the bridge between users and items, we can thoroughly model the user-item preferences (i.e., personalization) and item-item relationships (i.e., substitution) for recommendation. In addition, A2CF is capable of generating intuitive interpretations by analyzing which attributes a user currently cares the most and comparing the recommended substitutes with her/his currently browsed items at an attribute level. The recommendation effectiveness and interpretation quality of A2CF are demonstrated via extensive experiments on three real datasets.

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preprint2019arXiv

Generating Reliable Friends via Adversarial Training to Improve Social Recommendation

Most of the recent studies of social recommendation assume that people share similar preferences with their friends and the online social relations are helpful in improving traditional recommender systems. However, this assumption is often untenable as the online social networks are quite sparse and a majority of users only have a small number of friends. Besides, explicit friends may not share similar interests because of the randomness in the process of building social networks. Therefore, discovering a number of reliable friends for each user plays an important role in advancing social recommendation. Unlike other studies which focus on extracting valuable explicit social links, our work pays attention to identifying reliable friends in both the observed and unobserved social networks. Concretely, in this paper, we propose an end-to-end social recommendation framework based on Generative Adversarial Nets (GAN). The framework is composed of two blocks: a generator that is used to produce friends that can possibly enhance the social recommendation model, and a discriminator that is responsible for assessing these generated friends and ranking the items according to both the current user and her friends' preferences. With the competition between the generator and the discriminator, our framework can dynamically and adaptively generate reliable friends who can perfectly predict the current user' preference at a specific time. As a result, the sparsity and unreliability problems of explicit social relations can be mitigated and the social recommendation performance is significantly improved. Experimental studies on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework and verify the positive effects of the generated reliable friends.

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