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Jundong Li

Jundong Li contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

29 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Bridging Modalities, Spanning Time: Structured Memory for Ultra-Long Agentic Video Reasoning

Understanding ultra-long videos such as egocentric recordings, live streams, or surveillance footage spanning days to weeks, remains a challenge. For current multimodal LLMs: even with million-token context windows, frame budgets cover only tens of minutes of densely sampled video, and most evidence is discarded before inference begins. Memory-augmented and agentic approaches help with scale, but their retrieval remains fragmented across modalities and lacks long-range narrative summaries that span days or weeks. We propose \textbf{MAGIC-Video}, a training-free framework built around a multimodal memory graph with interleaved narrative chain: the graph unifies episodic, semantic, and visual content through six typed edges and supports cross-modal retrieval, while the chain distils long-horizon entity biographies and recurring activity events. At inference time, an agentic loop interleaves graph retrieval with narrative fact injection, covering both the modality and time dimensions of ultra-long video in a single retrieval pipeline. On EgoLifeQA, Ego-R1 and MM-Lifelong, MAGIC-Video consistently outperforms strong general-purpose, long-video, and agentic baselines, with gains of 10.1, 7.4, and 5.9 points over the prior best agentic system on each benchmark. Code is available at https://github.com/lijiazheng0917/MAGIC-video.

preprint2026arXiv

Is One Score Enough? Rethinking the Evaluation of Sequentially Evolving LLM Memory

Memory plays a central role in enabling large language models (LLMs) to operate over sequential tasks by accumulating and reusing experience over time. However, existing evaluations of LLM memory mostly rely on aggregate metrics such as final hold-out accuracy or cumulative online performance, which can obscure critical failure modes such as forgetting and negative transfer. In this paper, we introduce SeqMem-Eval, a diagnostic evaluation framework for sequentially evolving LLM memory. Drawing inspiration from continual learning, it targets a test-time setting in which memory is external, prompt-mediated, and updated without modifying model parameters. Rather than focusing only on final performance, SeqMem-Eval evaluates how memory states evolve, generalize, consolidate experience, and retain useful information during sequential inference. Specifically, it measures online utility, hold-out generalization, backward transfer, and forgetting, providing a finer-grained view of memory quality. Through extensive experiments across diverse tasks and memory methods, we show that higher final or cumulative accuracy does not necessarily imply better memory quality: many methods exhibit strong performance gains while suffering from substantial forgetting or negative transfer. Moreover, different memory designs exhibit distinct trade-offs between adaptability and stability that remain invisible under standard evaluation metrics.

preprint2026arXiv

SAPO: Step-Aligned Policy Optimization for Reasoning-Based Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation treats next-item prediction as autoregressive item-identifier generation. Specifically, items are encoded as semantic identifiers (SIDs), which are short coarse-to-fine token sequences whose early tokens capture broad semantics and later tokens refine them. Recent work augments this paradigm with reasoning traces and optimizes them via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, typically outcome-reward algorithm with exact-match feedback on the generated SID. However, in large-catalog recommendation, exact-match feedback on the generated SID only reports whether the final item is correct; when a generated SID mismatches, outcome-reward cannot identify which SID-token prediction caused the mismatch and may penalize matched SID-token positions together with the mismatched position. We identify that the natural unit of credit assignment in this setting is a single reasoning step (one thinking block paired with one SID token). We instantiate this idea in SAPO (Step-Aligned Policy Optimization): rather than broadcasting one advantage to the whole response, SAPO computes a separate group-relative advantage for each reasoning step and applies it only to the corresponding thinking block and SID token. Across three real-world recommendation datasets, SAPO stabilizes reinforcement-learning training and consistently improves over existing generative recommendation baselines, with the largest gains where sparse exact-match feedback makes reasoning-step credit assignment important. Our results suggest that reinforcement-learning objectives for structured generation should mirror the decoder's own decomposition of the output.

preprint2023arXiv

Causal Inference in Recommender Systems: A Survey of Strategies for Bias Mitigation, Explanation, and Generalization

In the era of information overload, recommender systems (RSs) have become an indispensable part of online service platforms. Traditional RSs estimate user interests and predict their future behaviors by utilizing correlations in the observational historical activities, their profiles, and the content of interacted items. However, since the inherent causal reasons that lead to the observed users' behaviors are not considered, multiple types of biases could exist in the generated recommendations. In addition, the causal motives that drive user activities are usually entangled in these RSs, where the explainability and generalization abilities of recommendations cannot be guaranteed. To address these drawbacks, recent years have witnessed an upsurge of interest in enhancing traditional RSs with causal inference techniques. In this survey, we provide a systematic overview of causal RSs and help readers gain a comprehensive understanding of this promising area. We start with the basic concepts of traditional RSs and their limitations due to the lack of causal reasoning ability. We then discuss how different causal inference techniques can be introduced to address these challenges, with an emphasis on debiasing, explainability promotion, and generalization improvement. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze various evaluation strategies for causal RSs, focusing especially on how to reliably estimate their performance with biased data if the causal effects of interests are unavailable. Finally, we provide insights into potential directions for future causal RS research.

preprint2023arXiv

Few-shot Node Classification with Extremely Weak Supervision

Few-shot node classification aims at classifying nodes with limited labeled nodes as references. Recent few-shot node classification methods typically learn from classes with abundant labeled nodes (i.e., meta-training classes) and then generalize to classes with limited labeled nodes (i.e., meta-test classes). Nevertheless, on real-world graphs, it is usually difficult to obtain abundant labeled nodes for many classes. In practice, each meta-training class can only consist of several labeled nodes, known as the extremely weak supervision problem. In few-shot node classification, with extremely limited labeled nodes for meta-training, the generalization gap between meta-training and meta-test will become larger and thus lead to suboptimal performance. To tackle this issue, we study a novel problem of few-shot node classification with extremely weak supervision and propose a principled framework X-FNC under the prevalent meta-learning framework. Specifically, our goal is to accumulate meta-knowledge across different meta-training tasks with extremely weak supervision and generalize such knowledge to meta-test tasks. To address the challenges resulting from extremely scarce labeled nodes, we propose two essential modules to obtain pseudo-labeled nodes as extra references and effectively learn from extremely limited supervision information. We further conduct extensive experiments on four node classification datasets with extremely weak supervision to validate the superiority of our framework compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2023arXiv

Personalized Federated Learning with Attention-based Client Selection

Personalized Federated Learning (PFL) relies on collective data knowledge to build customized models. However, non-IID data between clients poses significant challenges, as collaborating with clients who have diverse data distributions can harm local model performance, especially with limited training data. To address this issue, we propose FedACS, a new PFL algorithm with an Attention-based Client Selection mechanism. FedACS integrates an attention mechanism to enhance collaboration among clients with similar data distributions and mitigate the data scarcity issue. It prioritizes and allocates resources based on data similarity. We further establish the theoretical convergence behavior of FedACS. Experiments on CIFAR10 and FMNIST validate FedACS's superiority, showcasing its potential to advance personalized federated learning. By tackling non-IID data challenges and data scarcity, FedACS offers promising advances in the field of personalized federated learning.

preprint2023arXiv

RELIANT: Fair Knowledge Distillation for Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance on various graph learning tasks. To achieve better fitting capability, most GNNs are with a large number of parameters, which makes these GNNs computationally expensive. Therefore, it is difficult to deploy them onto edge devices with scarce computational resources, e.g., mobile phones and wearable smart devices. Knowledge Distillation (KD) is a common solution to compress GNNs, where a light-weighted model (i.e., the student model) is encouraged to mimic the behavior of a computationally expensive GNN (i.e., the teacher GNN model). Nevertheless, most existing GNN-based KD methods lack fairness consideration. As a consequence, the student model usually inherits and even exaggerates the bias from the teacher GNN. To handle such a problem, we take initial steps towards fair knowledge distillation for GNNs. Specifically, we first formulate a novel problem of fair knowledge distillation for GNN-based teacher-student frameworks. Then we propose a principled framework named RELIANT to mitigate the bias exhibited by the student model. Notably, the design of RELIANT is decoupled from any specific teacher and student model structures, and thus can be easily adapted to various GNN-based KD frameworks. We perform extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets, which corroborates that RELIANT achieves less biased GNN knowledge distillation while maintaining high prediction utility.

preprint2022arXiv

AdaGNN: Graph Neural Networks with Adaptive Frequency Response Filter

Graph Neural Networks have recently become a prevailing paradigm for various high-impact graph analytical problems. Existing efforts can be mainly categorized as spectral-based and spatial-based methods. The major challenge for the former is to find an appropriate graph filter to distill discriminative information from input signals for learning. Recently, myriads of explorations are made to achieve better graph filters, e.g., Graph Convolutional Network (GCN), which leverages Chebyshev polynomial truncation to seek an approximation of graph filters and bridge these two families of methods. Nevertheless, it has been shown in recent studies that GCN and its variants are essentially employing fixed low-pass filters to perform information denoising. Thus their learning capability is rather limited and may over-smooth node representations at deeper layers. To tackle these problems, we develop a novel graph neural network framework AdaGNN with a well-designed adaptive frequency response filter. At its core, AdaGNN leverages a simple but elegant trainable filter that spans across multiple layers to capture the varying importance of different frequency components for node representation learning. The inherent differences among different feature channels are also well captured by the filter. As such, it empowers AdaGNN with stronger expressiveness and naturally alleviates the over-smoothing problem. We empirically validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on various benchmark datasets. Theoretical analysis is also provided to show the superiority of the proposed AdaGNN. The open-source implementation of AdaGNN can be found here: https://github.com/yushundong/AdaGNN.

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.

preprint2022arXiv

Empowering Next POI Recommendation with Multi-Relational Modeling

With the wide adoption of mobile devices and web applications, location-based social networks (LBSNs) offer large-scale individual-level location-related activities and experiences. Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is one of the most important tasks in LBSNs, aiming to make personalized recommendations of next suitable locations to users by discovering preferences from users' historical activities. Noticeably, LBSNs have offered unparalleled access to abundant heterogeneous relational information about users and POIs (including user-user social relations, such as families or colleagues; and user-POI visiting relations). Such relational information holds great potential to facilitate the next POI recommendation. However, most existing methods either focus on merely the user-POI visits, or handle different relations based on over-simplified assumptions while neglecting relational heterogeneities. To fill these critical voids, we propose a novel framework, MEMO, which effectively utilizes the heterogeneous relations with a multi-network representation learning module, and explicitly incorporates the inter-temporal user-POI mutual influence with the coupled recurrent neural networks. Extensive experiments on real-world LBSN data validate the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art next POI recommendation methods.

preprint2022arXiv

FAITH: Few-Shot Graph Classification with Hierarchical Task Graphs

Few-shot graph classification aims at predicting classes for graphs, given limited labeled graphs for each class. To tackle the bottleneck of label scarcity, recent works propose to incorporate few-shot learning frameworks for fast adaptations to graph classes with limited labeled graphs. Specifically, these works propose to accumulate meta-knowledge across diverse meta-training tasks, and then generalize such meta-knowledge to the target task with a disjoint label set. However, existing methods generally ignore task correlations among meta-training tasks while treating them independently. Nevertheless, such task correlations can advance the model generalization to the target task for better classification performance. On the other hand, it remains non-trivial to utilize task correlations due to the complex components in a large number of meta-training tasks. To deal with this, we propose a novel few-shot learning framework FAITH that captures task correlations via constructing a hierarchical task graph at different granularities. Then we further design a loss-based sampling strategy to select tasks with more correlated classes. Moreover, a task-specific classifier is proposed to utilize the learned task correlations for few-shot classification. Extensive experiments on four prevalent few-shot graph classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of FAITH over other state-of-the-art baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Few-Shot Learning on Graphs

Graph representation learning has attracted tremendous attention due to its remarkable performance in many real-world applications. However, prevailing supervised graph representation learning models for specific tasks often suffer from label sparsity issue as data labeling is always time and resource consuming. In light of this, few-shot learning on graphs (FSLG), which combines the strengths of graph representation learning and few-shot learning together, has been proposed to tackle the performance degradation in face of limited annotated data challenge. There have been many studies working on FSLG recently. In this paper, we comprehensively survey these work in the form of a series of methods and applications. Specifically, we first introduce FSLG challenges and bases, then categorize and summarize existing work of FSLG in terms of three major graph mining tasks at different granularity levels, i.e., node, edge, and graph. Finally, we share our thoughts on some future research directions of FSLG. The authors of this survey have contributed significantly to the AI literature on FSLG over the last few years.

preprint2022arXiv

Geometric Graph Representation Learning via Maximizing Rate Reduction

Learning discriminative node representations benefits various downstream tasks in graph analysis such as community detection and node classification. Existing graph representation learning methods (e.g., based on random walk and contrastive learning) are limited to maximizing the local similarity of connected nodes. Such pair-wise learning schemes could fail to capture the global distribution of representations, since it has no explicit constraints on the global geometric properties of representation space. To this end, we propose Geometric Graph Representation Learning (G2R) to learn node representations in an unsupervised manner via maximizing rate reduction. In this way, G2R maps nodes in distinct groups (implicitly stored in the adjacency matrix) into different subspaces, while each subspace is compact and different subspaces are dispersedly distributed. G2R adopts a graph neural network as the encoder and maximizes the rate reduction with the adjacency matrix. Furthermore, we theoretically and empirically demonstrate that rate reduction maximization is equivalent to maximizing the principal angles between different subspaces. Experiments on real-world datasets show that G2R outperforms various baselines on node classification and community detection tasks.

preprint2022arXiv

Improving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Mitigating Sensitive Attribute Leakage

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great power in learning node representations on graphs. However, they may inherit historical prejudices from training data, leading to discriminatory bias in predictions. Although some work has developed fair GNNs, most of them directly borrow fair representation learning techniques from non-graph domains without considering the potential problem of sensitive attribute leakage caused by feature propagation in GNNs. However, we empirically observe that feature propagation could vary the correlation of previously innocuous non-sensitive features to the sensitive ones. This can be viewed as a leakage of sensitive information which could further exacerbate discrimination in predictions. Thus, we design two feature masking strategies according to feature correlations to highlight the importance of considering feature propagation and correlation variation in alleviating discrimination. Motivated by our analysis, we propose Fair View Graph Neural Network (FairVGNN) to generate fair views of features by automatically identifying and masking sensitive-correlated features considering correlation variation after feature propagation. Given the learned fair views, we adaptively clamp weights of the encoder to avoid using sensitive-related features. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that FairVGNN enjoys a better trade-off between model utility and fairness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuWVandy/FairVGNN.

preprint2022arXiv

KCD: Knowledge Walks and Textual Cues Enhanced Political Perspective Detection in News Media

Political perspective detection has become an increasingly important task that can help combat echo chambers and political polarization. Previous approaches generally focus on leveraging textual content to identify stances, while they fail to reason with background knowledge or leverage the rich semantic and syntactic textual labels in news articles. In light of these limitations, we propose KCD, a political perspective detection approach to enable multi-hop knowledge reasoning and incorporate textual cues as paragraph-level labels. Specifically, we firstly generate random walks on external knowledge graphs and infuse them with news text representations. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to jointly model news content as well as semantic, syntactic and entity cues in news articles. Finally, we adopt relational graph neural networks for graph-level representation learning and conduct political perspective detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. We further examine the effect of knowledge walks and textual cues and how they contribute to our approach's data efficiency.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Causal Effects on Hypergraphs

Hypergraphs provide an effective abstraction for modeling multi-way group interactions among nodes, where each hyperedge can connect any number of nodes. Different from most existing studies which leverage statistical dependencies, we study hypergraphs from the perspective of causality. Specifically, in this paper, we focus on the problem of individual treatment effect (ITE) estimation on hypergraphs, aiming to estimate how much an intervention (e.g., wearing face covering) would causally affect an outcome (e.g., COVID-19 infection) of each individual node. Existing works on ITE estimation either assume that the outcome on one individual should not be influenced by the treatment assignments on other individuals (i.e., no interference), or assume the interference only exists between pairs of connected individuals in an ordinary graph. We argue that these assumptions can be unrealistic on real-world hypergraphs, where higher-order interference can affect the ultimate ITE estimations due to the presence of group interactions. In this work, we investigate high-order interference modeling, and propose a new causality learning framework powered by hypergraph neural networks. Extensive experiments on real-world hypergraphs verify the superiority of our framework over existing baselines.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Fair Node Representations with Graph Counterfactual Fairness

Fair machine learning aims to mitigate the biases of model predictions against certain subpopulations regarding sensitive attributes such as race and gender. Among the many existing fairness notions, counterfactual fairness measures the model fairness from a causal perspective by comparing the predictions of each individual from the original data and the counterfactuals. In counterfactuals, the sensitive attribute values of this individual had been modified. Recently, a few works extend counterfactual fairness to graph data, but most of them neglect the following facts that can lead to biases: 1) the sensitive attributes of each node's neighbors may causally affect the prediction w.r.t. this node; 2) the sensitive attributes may causally affect other features and the graph structure. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel fairness notion - graph counterfactual fairness, which considers the biases led by the above facts. To learn node representations towards graph counterfactual fairness, we propose a novel framework based on counterfactual data augmentation. In this framework, we generate counterfactuals corresponding to perturbations on each node's and their neighbors' sensitive attributes. Then we enforce fairness by minimizing the discrepancy between the representations learned from the original graph and the counterfactuals for each node. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world graphs show that our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in graph counterfactual fairness, and also achieves comparable prediction performance.

preprint2022arXiv

On Structural Explanation of Bias in Graph Neural Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance in various graph analytical problems. Hence, they have become the \emph{de facto} solution in a variety of decision-making scenarios. However, GNNs could yield biased results against certain demographic subgroups. Some recent works have empirically shown that the biased structure of the input network is a significant source of bias for GNNs. Nevertheless, no studies have systematically scrutinized which part of the input network structure leads to biased predictions for any given node. The low transparency on how the structure of the input network influences the bias in GNN outcome largely limits the safe adoption of GNNs in various decision-critical scenarios. In this paper, we study a novel research problem of structural explanation of bias in GNNs. Specifically, we propose a novel post-hoc explanation framework to identify two edge sets that can maximally account for the exhibited bias and maximally contribute to the fairness level of the GNN prediction for any given node, respectively. Such explanations not only provide a comprehensive understanding of bias/fairness of GNN predictions but also have practical significance in building an effective yet fair GNN model. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework towards delivering effective structural explanations for the bias of GNNs. Open-source code can be found at https://github.com/yushundong/REFEREE.

preprint2022arXiv

Robust Graph Meta-learning for Weakly-supervised Few-shot Node Classification

Graphs are widely used to model the relational structure of data, and the research of graph machine learning (ML) has a wide spectrum of applications ranging from drug design in molecular graphs to friendship recommendation in social networks. Prevailing approaches for graph ML typically require abundant labeled instances in achieving satisfactory results, which is commonly infeasible in real-world scenarios since labeled data for newly emerged concepts (e.g., new categorizations of nodes) on graphs is limited. Though meta-learning has been applied to different few-shot graph learning problems, most existing efforts predominately assume that all the data from those seen classes is gold-labeled, while those methods may lose their efficacy when the seen data is weakly-labeled with severe label noise. As such, we aim to investigate a novel problem of weakly-supervised graph meta-learning for improving the model robustness in terms of knowledge transfer. To achieve this goal, we propose a new graph meta-learning framework -- Graph Hallucination Networks (Meta-GHN) in this paper. Based on a new robustness-enhanced episodic training, Meta-GHN is meta-learned to hallucinate clean node representations from weakly-labeled data and extracts highly transferable meta-knowledge, which enables the model to quickly adapt to unseen tasks with few labeled instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of Meta-GHN over existing graph meta-learning studies on the task of weakly-supervised few-shot node classification.

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.

preprint2022arXiv

Task-Adaptive Few-shot Node Classification

Node classification is of great importance among various graph mining tasks. In practice, real-world graphs generally follow the long-tail distribution, where a large number of classes only consist of limited labeled nodes. Although Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant improvements in node classification, their performance decreases substantially in such a few-shot scenario. The main reason can be attributed to the vast generalization gap between meta-training and meta-test due to the task variance caused by different node/class distributions in meta-tasks (i.e., node-level and class-level variance). Therefore, to effectively alleviate the impact of task variance, we propose a task-adaptive node classification framework under the few-shot learning setting. Specifically, we first accumulate meta-knowledge across classes with abundant labeled nodes. Then we transfer such knowledge to the classes with limited labeled nodes via our proposed task-adaptive modules. In particular, to accommodate the different node/class distributions among meta-tasks, we propose three essential modules to perform \emph{node-level}, \emph{class-level}, and \emph{task-level} adaptations in each meta-task, respectively. In this way, our framework can conduct adaptations to different meta-tasks and thus advance the model generalization performance on meta-test tasks. Extensive experiments on four prevalent node classification datasets demonstrate the superiority of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is provided at https://github.com/SongW-SW/TENT.

preprint2022arXiv

Towards Explanation for Unsupervised Graph-Level Representation Learning

Due to the superior performance of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in various domains, there is an increasing interest in the GNN explanation problem "\emph{which fraction of the input graph is the most crucial to decide the model's decision?}" Existing explanation methods focus on the supervised settings, \eg, node classification and graph classification, while the explanation for unsupervised graph-level representation learning is still unexplored. The opaqueness of the graph representations may lead to unexpected risks when deployed for high-stake decision-making scenarios. In this paper, we advance the Information Bottleneck principle (IB) to tackle the proposed explanation problem for unsupervised graph representations, which leads to a novel principle, \textit{Unsupervised Subgraph Information Bottleneck} (USIB). We also theoretically analyze the connection between graph representations and explanatory subgraphs on the label space, which reveals that the expressiveness and robustness of representations benefit the fidelity of explanatory subgraphs. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our developed explainer and the validity of our theoretical analysis.

preprint2022arXiv

Unbiased Graph Embedding with Biased Graph Observations

Graph embedding techniques are pivotal in real-world machine learning tasks that operate on graph-structured data, such as social recommendation and protein structure modeling. Embeddings are mostly performed on the node level for learning representations of each node. Since the formation of a graph is inevitably affected by certain sensitive node attributes, the node embeddings can inherit such sensitive information and introduce undesirable biases in downstream tasks. Most existing works impose ad-hoc constraints on the node embeddings to restrict their distributions for unbiasedness/fairness, which however compromise the utility of the resulting embeddings. In this paper, we propose a principled new way for unbiased graph embedding by learning node embeddings from an underlying bias-free graph, which is not influenced by sensitive node attributes. Motivated by this new perspective, we propose two complementary methods for uncovering such an underlying graph, with the goal of introducing minimum impact on the utility of the embeddings. Both our theoretical justification and extensive experimental comparisons against state-of-the-art solutions demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

preprint2021arXiv

Automated Generation of Interorganizational Disaster Response Networks through Information Extraction

When a disaster occurs, maintaining and restoring community lifelines subsequently require collective efforts from various stakeholders. Aiming at reducing the efforts associated with generating Stakeholder Collaboration Networks (SCNs), this paper proposes a systematic approach to reliable information extraction for stakeholder collaboration and automated network generation. Specifically, stakeholders and their interactions are extracted from texts through Named Entity Recognition (NER), one of the techniques in natural language processing. Once extracted, the collaboration information is transformed into structured datasets to generate the SCNs automatically. A case study of stakeholder collaboration during Hurricane Harvey was investigated and it had demonstrated the feasibility and applicability of the proposed method. Hence, the proposed approach was proved to significantly reduce practitioners' interpretation and data collection workloads. In the end, discussions and future work are provided.

preprint2020arXiv

A Survey of Learning Causality with Data: Problems and Methods

This work considers the question of how convenient access to copious data impacts our ability to learn causal effects and relations. In what ways is learning causality in the era of big data different from -- or the same as -- the traditional one? To answer this question, this survey provides a comprehensive and structured review of both traditional and frontier methods in learning causality and relations along with the connections between causality and machine learning. This work points out on a case-by-case basis how big data facilitates, complicates, or motivates each approach.

preprint2020arXiv

Feature Interaction-aware Graph Neural Networks

Inspired by the immense success of deep learning, graph neural networks (GNNs) are widely used to learn powerful node representations and have demonstrated promising performance on different graph learning tasks. However, most real-world graphs often come with high-dimensional and sparse node features, rendering the learned node representations from existing GNN architectures less expressive. In this paper, we propose \textit{Feature Interaction-aware Graph Neural Networks (FI-GNNs)}, a plug-and-play GNN framework for learning node representations encoded with informative feature interactions. Specifically, the proposed framework is able to highlight informative feature interactions in a personalized manner and further learn highly expressive node representations on feature-sparse graphs. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior capability of FI-GNNs for graph learning tasks.

preprint2020arXiv

Recommender Systems Based on Generative Adversarial Networks: A Problem-Driven Perspective

Recommender systems (RSs) now play a very important role in the online lives of people as they serve as personalized filters for users to find relevant items from an array of options. Owing to their effectiveness, RSs have been widely employed in consumer-oriented e-commerce platforms. However, despite their empirical successes, these systems still suffer from two limitations: data noise and data sparsity. In recent years, generative adversarial networks (GANs) have garnered increased interest in many fields, owing to their strong capacity to learn complex real data distributions; their abilities to enhance RSs by tackling the challenges these systems exhibit have also been demonstrated in numerous studies. In general, two lines of research have been conducted, and their common ideas can be summarized as follows: (1) for the data noise issue, adversarial perturbations and adversarial sampling-based training often serve as a solution; (2) for the data sparsity issue, data augmentation--implemented by capturing the distribution of real data under the minimax framework--is the primary coping strategy. To gain a comprehensive understanding of these research efforts, we review the corresponding studies and models, organizing them from a problem-driven perspective. More specifically, we propose a taxonomy of these models, along with their detailed descriptions and advantages. Finally, we elaborate on several open issues and current trends in GAN-based RSs.

preprint2020arXiv

Scalable Attack on Graph Data by Injecting Vicious Nodes

Recent studies have shown that graph convolution networks (GCNs) are vulnerable to carefully designed attacks, which aim to cause misclassification of a specific node on the graph with unnoticeable perturbations. However, a vast majority of existing works cannot handle large-scale graphs because of their high time complexity. Additionally, existing works mainly focus on manipulating existing nodes on the graph, while in practice, attackers usually do not have the privilege to modify information of existing nodes. In this paper, we develop a more scalable framework named Approximate Fast Gradient Sign Method (AFGSM) which considers a more practical attack scenario where adversaries can only inject new vicious nodes to the graph while having no control over the original graph. Methodologically, we provide an approximation strategy to linearize the model we attack and then derive an approximate closed-from solution with a lower time cost. To have a fair comparison with existing attack methods that manipulate the original graph, we adapt them to the new attack scenario by injecting vicious nodes. Empirical experimental results show that our proposed attack method can significantly reduce the classification accuracy of GCNs and is much faster than existing methods without jeopardizing the attack performance.

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.