Researcher profile

Jie Yin

Jie Yin contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Conformal Path Reasoning: Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Path-Level Calibration

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) has shown promise for grounded and interpretable reasoning, yet existing approaches often fail to provide reliable coverage guarantees over retrieved answers. While Conformal Prediction (CP) offers a principled framework for producing prediction sets with statistical guarantees, prior methods suffer from critical limitations in both calibration validity and score discriminability, resulting in violated coverage guarantees and excessively large prediction sets. To address these pitfalls, we propose Conformal Path Reasoning (CPR), a trustworthy KGQA framework with two key innovations. First, we perform query-level conformal calibration over path-level scores, preserving the exchangeability while generating path prediction sets. Second, we introduce the Residual Conformal Value Network (RCVNet), a lightweight module trained via PUCT-guided exploration to learn discriminative path-level nonconformity scores. Experiments on benchmarks show that CPR significantly improves the Empirical Coverage Rate by 34% while reducing average prediction set size by 40% compared to conformal baselines. These results validate the efficacy of CPR in satisfying coverage guarantees with substantially more compact answer sets.

preprint2026arXiv

MoEMeta: Mixture-of-Experts Meta Learning for Few-Shot Relational Learning

Few-shot knowledge graph relational learning seeks to perform reasoning over relations given only a limited number of training examples. While existing approaches largely adopt a meta-learning framework for enabling fast adaptation to new relations, they suffer from two key pitfalls. First, they learn relation meta-knowledge in isolation, failing to capture common relational patterns shared across tasks. Second, they struggle to effectively incorporate local, task-specific contexts crucial for rapid adaptation. To address these limitations, we propose MoEMeta, a novel meta-learning framework that disentangles globally shared knowledge from task-specific contexts to enable both effective model generalization and rapid adaptation. MoEMeta introduces two key innovations: (i) a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model that learns globally shared relational prototypes to enhance generalization, and (ii) a task-tailored adaptation mechanism that captures local contexts for fast task-specific adaptation. By balancing global generalization with local adaptability, MoEMeta significantly advances few-shot relational learning. Extensive experiments and analyses on three KG benchmarks show that MoEMeta consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

preprint2022arXiv

DeepC2: AI-powered Covert Command and Control on OSNs

Command and control (C&C) is important in an attack. It transfers commands from the attacker to the malware in the compromised hosts. Currently, some attackers use online social networks (OSNs) in C&C tasks. There are two main problems in the C&C on OSNs. First, the process for the malware to find the attacker is reversible. If the malware sample is analyzed by the defender, the attacker would be exposed before publishing the commands. Second, the commands in plain or encrypted form are regarded as abnormal contents by OSNs, which would raise anomalies and trigger restrictions on the attacker. The defender can limit the attacker once it is exposed. In this work, we propose DeepC2, an AI-powered C&C on OSNs, to solve these problems. For the reversible hard-coding, the malware finds the attacker using a neural network model. The attacker's avatars are converted into a batch of feature vectors, and the defender cannot recover the avatars in advance using the model and the feature vectors. To solve the abnormal contents on OSNs, hash collision and text data augmentation are used to embed commands into normal contents. The experiment on Twitter shows that command-embedded tweets can be generated efficiently. The malware can find the attacker covertly on OSNs. Security analysis shows it is hard to recover the attacker's identifiers in advance.

preprint2022arXiv

EvilModel 2.0: Bringing Neural Network Models into Malware Attacks

Security issues have gradually emerged with the continuous development of artificial intelligence (AI). Earlier work verified the possibility of converting neural network models into stegomalware, embedding malware into a model with limited impact on the model's performance. However, existing methods are not applicable in real-world attack scenarios and do not attract enough attention from the security community due to performance degradation and additional workload. Therefore, we propose an improved stegomalware EvilModel. By analyzing the composition of the neural network model, three new methods for embedding malware into the model are proposed: MSB reservation, fast substitution, and half substitution, which can embed malware that accounts for half of the model's volume without affecting the model's performance. We built 550 EvilModels using ten mainstream neural network models and 19 malware samples. The experiment shows that EvilModel achieved an embedding rate of 48.52\%. A quantitative algorithm is proposed to evaluate the existing embedding methods. We also design a trigger and propose a threat scenario for the targeted attack. The practicality and effectiveness of the proposed methods were demonstrated by experiments and analyses of the embedding capacity, performance impact, and detection evasion.

preprint2022arXiv

Informative Pseudo-Labeling for Graph Neural Networks with Few Labels

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results for semi-supervised node classification on graphs. Nevertheless, the challenge of how to effectively learn GNNs with very few labels is still under-explored. As one of the prevalent semi-supervised methods, pseudo-labeling has been proposed to explicitly address the label scarcity problem. It aims to augment the training set with pseudo-labeled unlabeled nodes with high confidence so as to re-train a supervised model in a self-training cycle. However, the existing pseudo-labeling approaches often suffer from two major drawbacks. First, they tend to conservatively expand the label set by selecting only high-confidence unlabeled nodes without assessing their informativeness. Unfortunately, those high-confidence nodes often convey overlapping information with given labels, leading to minor improvements for model re-training. Second, these methods incorporate pseudo-labels to the same loss function with genuine labels, ignoring their distinct contributions to the classification task. In this paper, we propose a novel informative pseudo-labeling framework, called InfoGNN, to facilitate learning of GNNs with extremely few labels. Our key idea is to pseudo label the most informative nodes that can maximally represent the local neighborhoods via mutual information maximization. To mitigate the potential label noise and class-imbalance problem arising from pseudo labeling, we also carefully devise a generalized cross entropy loss with a class-balanced regularization to incorporate generated pseudo labels into model re-training. Extensive experiments on six real-world graph datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and strong self-supervised methods on graphs.

preprint2022arXiv

LADDER: Latent Boundary-guided Adversarial Training

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have recently achieved great success in many classification tasks. Unfortunately, they are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that generate adversarial examples with a small perturbation to fool DNN models, especially in model sharing scenarios. Adversarial training is proved to be the most effective strategy that injects adversarial examples into model training to improve the robustness of DNN models against adversarial attacks. However, adversarial training based on the existing adversarial examples fails to generalize well to standard, unperturbed test data. To achieve a better trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness, we propose a novel adversarial training framework called LAtent bounDary-guided aDvErsarial tRaining (LADDER) that adversarially trains DNN models on latent boundary-guided adversarial examples. As opposed to most of the existing methods that generate adversarial examples in the input space, LADDER generates a myriad of high-quality adversarial examples through adding perturbations to latent features. The perturbations are made along the normal of the decision boundary constructed by an SVM with an attention mechanism. We analyze the merits of our generated boundary-guided adversarial examples from a boundary field perspective and visualization view. Extensive experiments and detailed analysis on MNIST, SVHN, CelebA, and CIFAR-10 validate the effectiveness of LADDER in achieving a better trade-off between standard accuracy and adversarial robustness as compared with vanilla DNNs and competitive baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Link Prediction with Contextualized Self-Supervision

Link prediction aims to infer the link existence between pairs of nodes in networks/graphs. Despite their wide application, the success of traditional link prediction algorithms is hindered by three major challenges -- link sparsity, node attribute noise and dynamic changes -- that are faced by many real-world networks. To address these challenges, we propose a Contextualized Self-Supervised Learning (CSSL) framework that fully exploits structural context prediction for link prediction. The proposed CSSL framework learns a link encoder to infer the link existence probability from paired node embeddings, which are constructed via a transformation on node attributes. To generate informative node embeddings for link prediction, structural context prediction is leveraged as a self-supervised learning task to boost the link prediction performance. Two types of structural context are investigated, i.e., context nodes collected from random walks vs. context subgraphs. The CSSL framework can be trained in an end-to-end manner, with the learning of model parameters supervised by both the link prediction and self-supervised learning tasks. The proposed CSSL is a generic and flexible framework in the sense that it can handle both attributed and non-attributed networks, and operate under both transductive and inductive link prediction settings. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on seven real-world benchmark networks demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed self-supervision based link prediction algorithm over state-of-the-art baselines, on different types of networks under both transductive and inductive settings. The proposed CSSL also yields competitive performance in terms of its robustness to node attribute noise and scalability over large-scale networks.

preprint2022arXiv

Search Efficient Binary Network Embedding

Traditional network embedding primarily focuses on learning a continuous vector representation for each node, preserving network structure and/or node content information, such that off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms can be easily applied to the vector-format node representations for network analysis. However, the learned continuous vector representations are inefficient for large-scale similarity search, which often involves finding nearest neighbors measured by distance or similarity in a continuous vector space. In this paper, we propose a search efficient binary network embedding algorithm called BinaryNE to learn a binary code for each node, by simultaneously modeling node context relations and node attribute relations through a three-layer neural network. BinaryNE learns binary node representations through a stochastic gradient descent based online learning algorithm. The learned binary encoding not only reduces memory usage to represent each node, but also allows fast bit-wise comparisons to support faster node similarity search than using Euclidean distance or other distance measures. Extensive experiments and comparisons demonstrate that BinaryNE not only delivers more than 25 times faster search speed, but also provides comparable or better search quality than traditional continuous vector based network embedding methods. The binary codes learned by BinaryNE also render competitive performance on node classification and node clustering tasks. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/daokunzhang/BinaryNE.

preprint2022arXiv

Snapping for high-speed and high-efficient, butterfly swimming-like soft flapping-wing robot

Natural selection has tuned many flying and swimming animals across different species to share the same narrow design space for optimal high-efficient and energy-saving locomotion, e.g., their dimensionless Strouhal numbers St that relate flapping frequency and amplitude and forward speed fall within the range of 0.2 < St < 0.4 for peak propulsive efficiency. It is rather challenging to achieve both fast and high-efficient soft-bodied swimming robots with high performances that are comparable to marine animals, due to the observed narrow optimal design space in nature and the compliance of soft body. Here, bioinspired by the wing or fin flapping motion in flying and swimming animals, we report leveraging the generic principle of snapping instabilities in the bistable and multistable flexible pre-curved wings for high-performance, butterfly swimming-like, soft-bodied flapping-wing robots. The soft swimming robot is lightweight (2.8 grams) and demonstrates a record-high speed of 3.74 body length/s (4.8 times faster than the reported fastest soft swimmer), high-efficient (0.2 < St = 0.25 < 0.4), low energy consumption cost, and high maneuverability (a high turning speed of 157o /s). Its high performances largely outperform the state-of-the-art soft swimming robots and are even comparable to its biological counterparts.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Deepening Graph Neural Networks: A GNTK-based Optimization Perspective

Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) and their variants have achieved great success in dealing with graph-structured data. Nevertheless, it is well known that deep GCNs suffer from the over-smoothing problem, where node representations tend to be indistinguishable as more layers are stacked up. The theoretical research to date on deep GCNs has focused primarily on expressive power rather than trainability, an optimization perspective. Compared to expressivity, trainability attempts to address a more fundamental question: Given a sufficiently expressive space of models, can we successfully find a good solution via gradient descent-based optimizers? This work fills this gap by exploiting the Graph Neural Tangent Kernel (GNTK), which governs the optimization trajectory under gradient descent for wide GCNs. We formulate the asymptotic behaviors of GNTK in the large depth, which enables us to reveal the dropping trainability of wide and deep GCNs at an exponential rate in the optimization process. Additionally, we extend our theoretical framework to analyze residual connection-based techniques, which are found to be merely able to mitigate the exponential decay of trainability mildly. Inspired by our theoretical insights on trainability, we propose Critical DropEdge, a connectivity-aware and graph-adaptive sampling method, to alleviate the exponential decay problem more fundamentally. Experimental evaluation consistently confirms using our proposed method can achieve better results compared to relevant counterparts with both infinite-width and finite-width.

preprint2021arXiv

Boundary curvature guided shape-programming kirigami sheets

Kirigami, an ancient paper cutting art, offers a promising strategy for 2D-to-3D shape morphing through cut-guided deformation. Existing kirigami designs for target 3D curved shapes rely on intricate cut patterns in thin sheets, making the inverse design challenging. Motivated by the Gauss-Bonnet theorem that correlates the geodesic curvature along the boundary with the topological Gaussian curvature, here, we exploit programming the curvature of cut boundaries rather than complex cut patterns in kirigami sheets for target 3D curved topologies through both forward and inverse designs. Such a new strategy largely simplifies the inverse design. We demonstrate the achievement of varieties of dynamic 3D shape shifting under both mechanical stretching and remote magnetic actuation, and its potential application as an untethered predator-like kirigami soft robot. This study opens a new avenue to encode boundary curvatures for shape-programing materials with potential applications in shape-morphing structures, soft robots, and multifunctional devices.

preprint2021arXiv

Human-Understandable Decision Making for Visual Recognition

The widespread use of deep neural networks has achieved substantial success in many tasks. However, there still exists a huge gap between the operating mechanism of deep learning models and human-understandable decision making, so that humans cannot fully trust the predictions made by these models. To date, little work has been done on how to align the behaviors of deep learning models with human perception in order to train a human-understandable model. To fill this gap, we propose a new framework to train a deep neural network by incorporating the prior of human perception into the model learning process. Our proposed model mimics the process of perceiving conceptual parts from images and assessing their relative contributions towards the final recognition. The effectiveness of our proposed model is evaluated on two classical visual recognition tasks. The experimental results and analysis confirm our model is able to provide interpretable explanations for its predictions, but also maintain competitive recognition accuracy.

preprint2021arXiv

Unified Robust Training for Graph NeuralNetworks against Label Noise

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance for node classification on graphs. The vast majority of existing works assume that genuine node labels are always provided for training. However, there has been very little research effort on how to improve the robustness of GNNs in the presence of label noise. Learning with label noise has been primarily studied in the context of image classification, but these techniques cannot be directly applied to graph-structured data, due to two major challenges -- label sparsity and label dependency -- faced by learning on graphs. In this paper, we propose a new framework, UnionNET, for learning with noisy labels on graphs under a semi-supervised setting. Our approach provides a unified solution for robustly training GNNs and performing label correction simultaneously. The key idea is to perform label aggregation to estimate node-level class probability distributions, which are used to guide sample reweighting and label correction. Compared with existing works, UnionNET has two appealing advantages. First, it requires no extra clean supervision, or explicit estimation of the noise transition matrix. Second, a unified learning framework is proposed to robustly train GNNs in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that our proposed approach: (1) is effective in improving model robustness against different types and levels of label noise; (2) yields significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2020arXiv

Cost-effectiveness Analysis of Antiepidemic Policies and Global Situation Assessment of COVID-19

With a two-layer contact-dispersion model and data in China, we analyze the cost-effectiveness of three types of antiepidemic measures for COVID-19: regular epidemiological control, local social interaction control, and inter-city travel restriction. We find that: 1) intercity travel restriction has minimal or even negative effect compared to the other two at the national level; 2) the time of reaching turning point is independent of the current number of cases, and only related to the enforcement stringency of epidemiological control and social interaction control measures; 3) strong enforcement at the early stage is the only opportunity to maximize both antiepidemic effectiveness and cost-effectiveness; 4) mediocre stringency of social interaction measures is the worst choice. Subsequently, we cluster countries/regions into four groups based on their control measures and provide situation assessment and policy suggestions for each group.

preprint2020arXiv

Leveraging Elastic instabilities for Amplified Performance: spine-inspired high-speed and high-force soft robots

Soft machines typically exhibit slow locomotion speed and low manipulation strength because of intrinsic limitations of soft materials. Here, we present a generic design principle that harnesses mechanical instability for a variety of spine-inspired fast and strong soft machines. Unlike most current soft robots that are designed as inherently and unimodally stable, our design leverages tunable snap-through bistability to fully explore the ability of soft robots to rapidly store and release energy within tens of milliseconds. We demonstrate this generic design principle with three high-performance soft machines: High-speed cheetah-like galloping crawlers with locomotion speeds of 2.68 body length/s, high-speed underwater swimmers (0.78 body length/s), and tunable low-to-high-force soft grippers with over 1 to 103 stiffness modulation (maximum load capacity is 11.4 kg). Our study establishes a new generic design paradigm of next-generation high-performance soft robots that are applicable for multifunctionality, different actuation methods, and materials at multiscales.

preprint2020arXiv

SEAL: Semi-supervised Adversarial Active Learning on Attributed Graphs

Active learning (AL) on attributed graphs has received increasing attention with the prevalence of graph-structured data. Although AL has been widely studied for alleviating label sparsity issues with the conventional non-related data, how to make it effective over attributed graphs remains an open research question. Existing AL algorithms on graphs attempt to reuse the classic AL query strategies designed for non-related data. However, they suffer from two major limitations. First, different AL query strategies calculated in distinct scoring spaces are often naively combined to determine which nodes to be labelled. Second, the AL query engine and the learning of the classifier are treated as two separating processes, resulting in unsatisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a SEmi-supervised Adversarial active Learning (SEAL) framework on attributed graphs, which fully leverages the representation power of deep neural networks and devises a novel AL query strategy in an adversarial way. Our framework learns two adversarial components: a graph embedding network that encodes both the unlabelled and labelled nodes into a latent space, expecting to trick the discriminator to regard all nodes as already labelled, and a semi-supervised discriminator network that distinguishes the unlabelled from the existing labelled nodes in the latent space. The divergence score, generated by the discriminator in a unified latent space, serves as the informativeness measure to actively select the most informative node to be labelled by an oracle. The two adversarial components form a closed loop to mutually and simultaneously reinforce each other towards enhancing the active learning performance. Extensive experiments on four real-world networks validate the effectiveness of the SEAL framework with superior performance improvements to state-of-the-art baselines.