Xinwang Liu

Ke Liang, Lingyuan Meng, Meng Liu et al.

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR), aiming to deduce new facts from existing facts based on mined logic rules underlying knowledge graphs (KGs), has become a fast-growing research direction. It has been proven to significantly benefit the usage of KGs in many AI applications, such as question answering, recommendation systems, and etc. According to the graph types, existing KGR models can be roughly divided into three categories, i.e., static models, temporal models, and multi-modal models. Early works in this domain mainly focus on static KGR, and recent works try to leverage the temporal and multi-modal information, which are more practical and closer to real-world. However, no survey papers and open-source repositories comprehensively summarize and discuss models in this important direction. To fill the gap, we conduct a first survey for knowledge graph reasoning tracing from static to temporal and then to multi-modal KGs. Concretely, the models are reviewed based on bi-level taxonomy, i.e., top-level (graph types) and base-level (techniques and scenarios). Besides, the performances, as well as datasets, are summarized and presented. Moreover, we point out the challenges and potential opportunities to enlighten the readers. The corresponding open-source repository is shared on GitHub https://github.com/LIANGKE23/Awesome-Knowledge-Graph-Reasoning.

Xihong Yang, Jiaqi Jin, Siwei Wang et al.

Benefiting from the strong view-consistent information mining capacity, multi-view contrastive clustering has attracted plenty of attention in recent years. However, we observe the following drawback, which limits the clustering performance from further improvement. The existing multi-view models mainly focus on the consistency of the same samples in different views while ignoring the circumstance of similar but different samples in cross-view scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Dual contrastive calibration network for Multi-View Clustering (DealMVC). Specifically, we first design a fusion mechanism to obtain a global cross-view feature. Then, a global contrastive calibration loss is proposed by aligning the view feature similarity graph and the high-confidence pseudo-label graph. Moreover, to utilize the diversity of multi-view information, we propose a local contrastive calibration loss to constrain the consistency of pair-wise view features. The feature structure is regularized by reliable class information, thus guaranteeing similar samples have similar features in different views. During the training procedure, the interacted cross-view feature is jointly optimized at both local and global levels. In comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches, the comprehensive experimental results obtained from eight benchmark datasets provide substantial validation of the effectiveness and superiority of our algorithm. We release the code of DealMVC at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/DealMVC on GitHub.

Liang Li, Siwei Wang, Xinwang Liu et al.

Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) is committed to achieving optimal information fusion from a set of base kernels. Constructing precise and local kernel matrices is proved to be of vital significance in applications since the unreliable distant-distance similarity estimation would degrade clustering per-formance. Although existing localized MKC algorithms exhibit improved performance compared to globally-designed competi-tors, most of them widely adopt KNN mechanism to localize kernel matrix by accounting for τ -nearest neighbors. However, such a coarse manner follows an unreasonable strategy that the ranking importance of different neighbors is equal, which is impractical in applications. To alleviate such problems, this paper proposes a novel local sample-weighted multiple kernel clustering (LSWMKC) model. We first construct a consensus discriminative affinity graph in kernel space, revealing the latent local structures. Further, an optimal neighborhood kernel for the learned affinity graph is output with naturally sparse property and clear block diagonal structure. Moreover, LSWMKC im-plicitly optimizes adaptive weights on different neighbors with corresponding samples. Experimental results demonstrate that our LSWMKC possesses better local manifold representation and outperforms existing kernel or graph-based clustering algo-rithms. The source code of LSWMKC can be publicly accessed from https://github.com/liliangnudt/LSWMKC.

Xinhang Wan, Xinwang Liu, Jiyuan Liu et al.

Multi-view clustering has gained broad attention owing to its capacity to exploit complementary information across multiple data views. Although existing methods demonstrate delightful clustering performance, most of them are of high time complexity and cannot handle large-scale data. Matrix factorization-based models are a representative of solving this problem. However, they assume that the views share a dimension-fixed consensus coefficient matrix and view-specific base matrices, limiting their representability. Moreover, a series of large-scale algorithms that bear one or more hyperparameters are impractical in real-world applications. To address the two issues, we propose an auto-weighted multi-view clustering (AWMVC) algorithm. Specifically, AWMVC first learns coefficient matrices from corresponding base matrices of different dimensions, then fuses them to obtain an optimal consensus matrix. By mapping original features into distinctive low-dimensional spaces, we can attain more comprehensive knowledge, thus obtaining better clustering results. Moreover, we design a six-step alternative optimization algorithm proven to be convergent theoretically. Also, AWMVC shows excellent performance on various benchmark datasets compared with existing ones. The code of AWMVC is publicly available at https://github.com/wanxinhang/AAAI-2023-AWMVC.

Siwei Wang, Xinwang Liu, Suyuan Liu et al.

Multi-view anchor graph clustering selects representative anchors to avoid full pair-wise similarities and therefore reduce the complexity of graph methods. Although widely applied in large-scale applications, existing approaches do not pay sufficient attention to establishing correct correspondences between the anchor sets across views. To be specific, anchor graphs obtained from different views are not aligned column-wisely. Such an \textbf{A}nchor-\textbf{U}naligned \textbf{P}roblem (AUP) would cause inaccurate graph fusion and degrade the clustering performance. Under multi-view scenarios, generating correct correspondences could be extremely difficult since anchors are not consistent in feature dimensions. To solve this challenging issue, we propose the first study of the generalized and flexible anchor graph fusion framework termed \textbf{F}ast \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{V}iew \textbf{A}nchor-\textbf{C}orrespondence \textbf{C}lustering (FMVACC). Specifically, we show how to find anchor correspondence with both feature and structure information, after which anchor graph fusion is performed column-wisely. Moreover, we theoretically show the connection between FMVACC and existing multi-view late fusion \cite{liu2018late} and partial view-aligned clustering \cite{huang2020partially}, which further demonstrates our generality. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Moreover, the proposed alignment module also shows significant performance improvement applying to existing multi-view anchor graph competitors indicating the importance of anchor alignment. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/wangsiwei2010/NeurIPS22-FMVACC}.

Xihong Yang, Cheng Tan, Yue Liu et al.

Contrastive graph node clustering via learnable data augmentation is a hot research spot in the field of unsupervised graph learning. The existing methods learn the sampling distribution of a pre-defined augmentation to generate data-driven augmentations automatically. Although promising clustering performance has been achieved, we observe that these strategies still rely on pre-defined augmentations, the semantics of the augmented graph can easily drift. The reliability of the augmented view semantics for contrastive learning can not be guaranteed, thus limiting the model performance. To address these problems, we propose a novel CONtrastiVe Graph ClustEring network with Reliable AugmenTation (CONVERT). Specifically, in our method, the data augmentations are processed by the proposed reversible perturb-recover network. It distills reliable semantic information by recovering the perturbed latent embeddings. Moreover, to further guarantee the reliability of semantics, a novel semantic loss is presented to constrain the network via quantifying the perturbation and recovery. Lastly, a label-matching mechanism is designed to guide the model by clustering information through aligning the semantic labels and the selected high-confidence clustering pseudo labels. Extensive experimental results on seven datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We release the code and appendix of CONVERT at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/CONVERT on GitHub.

Yue Liu, Jun Xia, Sihang Zhou et al.

Graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes in the graph into several distinct clusters, is a fundamental yet challenging task. Benefiting from the powerful representation capability of deep learning, deep graph clustering methods have achieved great success in recent years. However, the corresponding survey paper is relatively scarce, and it is imminent to make a summary of this field. From this motivation, we conduct a comprehensive survey of deep graph clustering. Firstly, we introduce formulaic definition, evaluation, and development in this field. Secondly, the taxonomy of deep graph clustering methods is presented based on four different criteria, including graph type, network architecture, learning paradigm, and clustering method. Thirdly, we carefully analyze the existing methods via extensive experiments and summarize the challenges and opportunities from five perspectives, including graph data quality, stability, scalability, discriminative capability, and unknown cluster number. Besides, the applications of deep graph clustering methods in six domains, including computer vision, natural language processing, recommendation systems, social network analyses, bioinformatics, and medical science, are presented. Last but not least, this paper provides open resource supports, including 1) a collection (\url{https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering}) of state-of-the-art deep graph clustering methods (papers, codes, and datasets) and 2) a unified framework (\url{https://github.com/Marigoldwu/A-Unified-Framework-for-Deep-Attribute-Graph-Clustering}) of deep graph clustering. We hope this work can serve as a quick guide and help researchers overcome challenges in this vibrant field.

Meng Liu, Ke Liang, Dayu Hu et al.

Audiovisual data is everywhere in this digital age, which raises higher requirements for the deep learning models developed on them. To well handle the information of the multi-modal data is the key to a better audiovisual modal. We observe that these audiovisual data naturally have temporal attributes, such as the time information for each frame in the video. More concretely, such data is inherently multi-modal according to both audio and visual cues, which proceed in a strict chronological order. It indicates that temporal information is important in multi-modal acoustic event modeling for both intra- and inter-modal. However, existing methods deal with each modal feature independently and simply fuse them together, which neglects the mining of temporal relation and thus leads to sub-optimal performance. With this motivation, we propose a Temporal Multi-modal graph learning method for Acoustic event Classification, called TMac, by modeling such temporal information via graph learning techniques. In particular, we construct a temporal graph for each acoustic event, dividing its audio data and video data into multiple segments. Each segment can be considered as a node, and the temporal relationships between nodes can be considered as timestamps on their edges. In this case, we can smoothly capture the dynamic information in intra-modal and inter-modal. Several experiments are conducted to demonstrate TMac outperforms other SOTA models in performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/MGitHubL/TMac.

Yue Liu, Ke Liang, Jun Xia et al.

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group nodes into disjoint clusters by neural networks in an unsupervised manner, has attracted great attention in recent years. Although the performance has been largely improved, the excellent performance of the existing methods heavily relies on an accurately predefined cluster number, which is not always available in the real-world scenario. To enable the deep graph clustering algorithms to work without the guidance of the predefined cluster number, we propose a new deep graph clustering method termed Reinforcement Graph Clustering (RGC). In our proposed method, cluster number determination and unsupervised representation learning are unified into a uniform framework by the reinforcement learning mechanism. Concretely, the discriminative node representations are first learned with the contrastive pretext task. Then, to capture the clustering state accurately with both local and global information in the graph, both node and cluster states are considered. Subsequently, at each state, the qualities of different cluster numbers are evaluated by the quality network, and the greedy action is executed to determine the cluster number. In order to conduct feedback actions, the clustering-oriented reward function is proposed to enhance the cohesion of the same clusters and separate the different clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The source code of RGC is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/RGC and a collection (papers, codes and, datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering on Github.

Xihong Yang, Yiqi Wang, Yue Liu et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising performance in semi-supervised node classification in recent years. However, the problem of insufficient supervision, together with representation collapse, largely limits the performance of the GNNs in this field. To alleviate the collapse of node representations in semi-supervised scenario, we propose a novel graph contrastive learning method, termed Mixed Graph Contrastive Network (MGCN). In our method, we improve the discriminative capability of the latent embeddings by an interpolation-based augmentation strategy and a correlation reduction mechanism. Specifically, we first conduct the interpolation-based augmentation in the latent space and then force the prediction model to change linearly between samples. Second, we enable the learned network to tell apart samples across two interpolation-perturbed views through forcing the correlation matrix across views to approximate an identity matrix. By combining the two settings, we extract rich supervision information from both the abundant unlabeled nodes and the rare yet valuable labeled nodes for discriminative representation learning. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the generality of MGCN compared to the existing state-of-the-art methods. The code of MGCN is available at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/MGCN on Github.

Yi Wen, Siwei Wang, Ke Liang et al.

The success of existing multi-view clustering (MVC) relies on the assumption that all views are complete. However, samples are usually partially available due to data corruption or sensor malfunction, which raises the research of incomplete multi-view clustering (IMVC). Although several anchor-based IMVC methods have been proposed to process the large-scale incomplete data, they still suffer from the following drawbacks: i) Most existing approaches neglect the inter-view discrepancy and enforce cross-view representation to be consistent, which would corrupt the representation capability of the model; ii) Due to the samples disparity between different views, the learned anchor might be misaligned, which we referred as the Anchor-Unaligned Problem for Incomplete data (AUP-ID). Such the AUP-ID would cause inaccurate graph fusion and degrades clustering performance. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel incomplete anchor graph learning framework termed Scalable Incomplete Multi-View Clustering with Structure Alignment (SIMVC-SA). Specially, we construct the view-specific anchor graph to capture the complementary information from different views. In order to solve the AUP-ID, we propose a novel structure alignment module to refine the cross-view anchor correspondence. Meanwhile, the anchor graph construction and alignment are jointly optimized in our unified framework to enhance clustering quality. Through anchor graph construction instead of full graphs, the time and space complexity of the proposed SIMVC-SA is proven to be linearly correlated with the number of samples. Extensive experiments on seven incomplete benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/wy1019/SIMVC-SA.

Xiao He, Chang Tang, Xinwang Liu et al.

Deep learning-based hyperspectral image (HSI) classification and object detection techniques have gained significant attention due to their vital role in image content analysis, interpretation, and wider HSI applications. However, current hyperspectral object detection approaches predominantly emphasize either spectral or spatial information, overlooking the valuable complementary relationship between these two aspects. In this study, we present a novel \textbf{S}pectral-\textbf{S}patial \textbf{A}ggregation (S2ADet) object detector that effectively harnesses the rich spectral and spatial complementary information inherent in hyperspectral images. S2ADet comprises a hyperspectral information decoupling (HID) module, a two-stream feature extraction network, and a one-stage detection head. The HID module processes hyperspectral images by aggregating spectral and spatial information via band selection and principal components analysis, consequently reducing redundancy. Based on the acquired spatial and spectral aggregation information, we propose a feature aggregation two-stream network for interacting spectral-spatial features. Furthermore, to address the limitations of existing databases, we annotate an extensive dataset, designated as HOD3K, containing 3,242 hyperspectral images captured across diverse real-world scenes and encompassing three object classes. These images possess a resolution of 512x256 pixels and cover 16 bands ranging from 470 nm to 620 nm. Comprehensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate that S2ADet surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving robust and reliable results. The demo code and dataset of this work are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/hexiao-cs/S2ADet}.

Siqi Shen, Chennan Ma, Chao Li et al.

Multi-agent systems are characterized by environmental uncertainty, varying policies of agents, and partial observability, which result in significant risks. In the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), learning coordinated and decentralized policies that are sensitive to risk is challenging. To formulate the coordination requirements in risk-sensitive MARL, we introduce the Risk-sensitive Individual-Global-Max (RIGM) principle as a generalization of the Individual-Global-Max (IGM) and Distributional IGM (DIGM) principles. This principle requires that the collection of risk-sensitive action selections of each agent should be equivalent to the risk-sensitive action selection of the central policy. Current MARL value factorization methods do not satisfy the RIGM principle for common risk metrics such as the Value at Risk (VaR) metric or distorted risk measurements. Therefore, we propose RiskQ to address this limitation, which models the joint return distribution by modeling quantiles of it as weighted quantile mixtures of per-agent return distribution utilities. RiskQ satisfies the RIGM principle for the VaR and distorted risk metrics. We show that RiskQ can obtain promising performance through extensive experiments. The source code of RiskQ is available in https://github.com/xmu-rl-3dv/RiskQ.

Xihong Yang, Erxue Min, Ke Liang et al.

Contrastive deep graph clustering (CDGC) leverages the power of contrastive learning to group nodes into different clusters. The quality of contrastive samples is crucial for achieving better performance, making augmentation techniques a key factor in the process. However, the augmentation samples in existing methods are always predefined by human experiences, and agnostic from the downstream task clustering, thus leading to high human resource costs and poor performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Graph Node Clustering with Fully Learnable Augmentation, termed GraphLearner. It introduces learnable augmentors to generate high-quality and task-specific augmented samples for CDGC. GraphLearner incorporates two learnable augmentors specifically designed for capturing attribute and structural information. Moreover, we introduce two refinement matrices, including the high-confidence pseudo-label matrix and the cross-view sample similarity matrix, to enhance the reliability of the learned affinity matrix. During the training procedure, we notice the distinct optimization goals for training learnable augmentors and contrastive learning networks. In other words, we should both guarantee the consistency of the embeddings as well as the diversity of the augmented samples. To address this challenge, we propose an adversarial learning mechanism within our method. Besides, we leverage a two-stage training strategy to refine the high-confidence matrices. Extensive experimental results on six benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of GraphLearner.The code and appendix of GraphLearner are available at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/GraphLearner on Github.

Zhenglai Li, Chang Tang, Xinwang Liu et al.

Fully supervised change detection methods have achieved significant advancements in performance, yet they depend severely on acquiring costly pixel-level labels. Considering that the patch-level annotations also contain abundant information corresponding to both changed and unchanged objects in bi-temporal images, an intuitive solution is to segment the changes with patch-level annotations. How to capture the semantic variations associated with the changed and unchanged regions from the patch-level annotations to obtain promising change results is the critical challenge for the weakly supervised change detection task. In this paper, we propose a memory-supported transformer (MS-Former), a novel framework consisting of a bi-directional attention block (BAB) and a patch-level supervision scheme (PSS) tailored for weakly supervised change detection with patch-level annotations. More specifically, the BAM captures contexts associated with the changed and unchanged regions from the temporal difference features to construct informative prototypes stored in the memory bank. On the other hand, the BAM extracts useful information from the prototypes as supplementary contexts to enhance the temporal difference features, thereby better distinguishing changed and unchanged regions. After that, the PSS guides the network learning valuable knowledge from the patch-level annotations, thus further elevating the performance. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in the change detection task. The demo code for our work will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/guanyuezhen/MS-Former}.

Jingcan Duan, Pei Zhang, Siwei Wang et al.

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) has attracted increasing attention in machine learning and data mining. Recent works have mainly focused on how to capture richer information to improve the quality of node embeddings for GAD. Despite their significant advances in detection performance, there is still a relative dearth of research on the properties of the task. GAD aims to discern the anomalies that deviate from most nodes. However, the model is prone to learn the pattern of normal samples which make up the majority of samples. Meanwhile, anomalies can be easily detected when their behaviors differ from normality. Therefore, the performance can be further improved by enhancing the ability to learn the normal pattern. To this end, we propose a normality learning-based GAD framework via multi-scale contrastive learning networks (NLGAD for abbreviation). Specifically, we first initialize the model with the contrastive networks on different scales. To provide sufficient and reliable normal nodes for normality learning, we design an effective hybrid strategy for normality selection. Finally, the model is refined with the only input of reliable normal nodes and learns a more accurate estimate of normality so that anomalous nodes can be more easily distinguished. Eventually, extensive experiments on six benchmark graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our normality learning-based scheme on GAD. Notably, the proposed algorithm improves the detection performance (up to 5.89% AUC gain) compared with the state-of-the-art methods. The source code is released at https://github.com/FelixDJC/NLGAD.

Xin Ning, Qiankun Li, Xiaolong Huang et al.

With the accumulation of resources in the era of big data and the rise of pre-trained models in deep learning, optimizing neural networks for various tasks often involves different strategies for fine-tuning pre-trained models versus training from scratch. However, existing optimizers primarily focus on reducing the loss function by updating model parameters, without fully addressing the unique demands of these two major paradigms. In this paper, we propose DualOpt, a novel approach that decouples optimization techniques specifically tailored for these distinct training scenarios. For training from scratch, we introduce real-time layer-wise weight decay, designed to enhance both convergence and generalization by aligning with the characteristics of weight updates and network architecture. For more importantly fine-tuning, we integrate weight rollback with the optimizer, incorporating a rollback term into each weight update step. This ensures consistency in the weight distribution between upstream and downstream models, effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting and improving fine-tuning performance. Additionally, we extend the layer-wise weight decay to dynamically adjust the rollback levels across layers, adapting to the varying demands of different downstream tasks. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks, including image classification, object detection, semantic segmentation, and instance segmentation, demonstrate the broad applicability and state-of-the-art performance of DualOpt. Code is available at https://github.com/qklee-lz/OLOR-AAAI-2024.

Siwei Wang, Xinwang Liu, En Zhu

Multi-view clustering (MVC) optimally integrates complementary information from different views to improve clustering performance. Although demonstrating promising performance in various applications, most of existing approaches directly fuse multiple pre-specified similarities to learn an optimal similarity matrix for clustering, which could cause over-complicated optimization and intensive computational cost. In this paper, we propose late fusion MVC via alignment maximization to address these issues. To do so, we first reveal the theoretical connection of existing k-means clustering and the alignment between base partitions and the consensus one. Based on this observation, we propose a simple but effective multi-view algorithm termed LF-MVC-GAM. It optimally fuses multiple source information in partition level from each individual view, and maximally aligns the consensus partition with these weighted base ones. Such an alignment is beneficial to integrate partition level information and significantly reduce the computational complexity by sufficiently simplifying the optimization procedure. We then design another variant, LF-MVC-LAM to further improve the clustering performance by preserving the local intrinsic structure among multiple partition spaces. After that, we develop two three-step iterative algorithms to solve the resultant optimization problems with theoretically guaranteed convergence. Further, we provide the generalization error bound analysis of the proposed algorithms. Extensive experiments on eighteen multi-view benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed LF-MVC-GAM and LF-MVC-LAM, ranging from small to large-scale data items. The codes of the proposed algorithms are publicly available at https://github.com/wangsiwei2010/latefusionalignment.

Yawei Zhao, Qinghe Liu, Xinwang Liu et al.

Although data-driven methods usually have noticeable performance on disease diagnosis and treatment, they are suspected of leakage of privacy due to collecting data for model training. Recently, federated learning provides a secure and trustable alternative to collaboratively train model without any exchange of medical data among multiple institutes. Therefore, it has draw much attention due to its natural merit on privacy protection. However, when heterogenous medical data exists between different hospitals, federated learning usually has to face with degradation of performance. In the paper, we propose a new personalized framework of federated learning to handle the problem. It successfully yields personalized models based on awareness of similarity between local data, and achieves better tradeoff between generalization and personalization than existing methods. After that, we further design a differentially sparse regularizer to improve communication efficiency during procedure of model training. Additionally, we propose an effective method to reduce the computational cost, which improves computation efficiency significantly. Furthermore, we collect 5 real medical datasets, including 2 public medical image datasets and 3 private multi-center clinical diagnosis datasets, and evaluate its performance by conducting nodule classification, tumor segmentation, and clinical risk prediction tasks. Comparing with 13 existing related methods, the proposed method successfully achieves the best model performance, and meanwhile up to 60% improvement of communication efficiency. Source code is public, and can be accessed at: https://github.com/ApplicationTechnologyOfMedicalBigData/pFedNet-code.

Meng Liu, Ke Liang, Yue Liu et al.

Temporal graph clustering (TGC) is a crucial task in temporal graph learning. Its focus is on node clustering on temporal graphs, and it offers greater flexibility for large-scale graph structures due to the mechanism of temporal graph methods. However, the development of TGC is currently constrained by a significant problem: the lack of suitable and reliable large-scale temporal graph datasets to evaluate clustering performance. In other words, most existing temporal graph datasets are in small sizes, and even large-scale datasets contain only a limited number of available node labels. It makes evaluating models for large-scale temporal graph clustering challenging. To address this challenge, we build arXiv4TGC, a set of novel academic datasets (including arXivAI, arXivCS, arXivMath, arXivPhy, and arXivLarge) for large-scale temporal graph clustering. In particular, the largest dataset, arXivLarge, contains 1.3 million labeled available nodes and 10 million temporal edges. We further compare the clustering performance with typical temporal graph learning models on both previous classic temporal graph datasets and the new datasets proposed in this paper. The clustering performance on arXiv4TGC can be more apparent for evaluating different models, resulting in higher clustering confidence and more suitable for large-scale temporal graph clustering. The arXiv4TGC datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/MGitHubL/arXiv4TGC.

Yue Liu, Xihong Yang, Sihang Zhou et al.

Contrastive learning has recently attracted plenty of attention in deep graph clustering for its promising performance. However, complicated data augmentations and time-consuming graph convolutional operation undermine the efficiency of these methods. To solve this problem, we propose a Simple Contrastive Graph Clustering (SCGC) algorithm to improve the existing methods from the perspectives of network architecture, data augmentation, and objective function. As to the architecture, our network includes two main parts, i.e., pre-processing and network backbone. A simple low-pass denoising operation conducts neighbor information aggregation as an independent pre-processing, and only two multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) are included as the backbone. For data augmentation, instead of introducing complex operations over graphs, we construct two augmented views of the same vertex by designing parameter un-shared siamese encoders and corrupting the node embeddings directly. Finally, as to the objective function, to further improve the clustering performance, a novel cross-view structural consistency objective function is designed to enhance the discriminative capability of the learned network. Extensive experimental results on seven benchmark datasets validate our proposed algorithm's effectiveness and superiority. Significantly, our algorithm outperforms the recent contrastive deep clustering competitors with at least seven times speedup on average.

Yue Liu, Xihong Yang, Sihang Zhou et al.

Contrastive deep graph clustering, which aims to divide nodes into disjoint groups via contrastive mechanisms, is a challenging research spot. Among the recent works, hard sample mining-based algorithms have achieved great attention for their promising performance. However, we find that the existing hard sample mining methods have two problems as follows. 1) In the hardness measurement, the important structural information is overlooked for similarity calculation, degrading the representativeness of the selected hard negative samples. 2) Previous works merely focus on the hard negative sample pairs while neglecting the hard positive sample pairs. Nevertheless, samples within the same cluster but with low similarity should also be carefully learned. To solve the problems, we propose a novel contrastive deep graph clustering method dubbed Hard Sample Aware Network (HSAN) by introducing a comprehensive similarity measure criterion and a general dynamic sample weighing strategy. Concretely, in our algorithm, the similarities between samples are calculated by considering both the attribute embeddings and the structure embeddings, better revealing sample relationships and assisting hardness measurement. Moreover, under the guidance of the carefully collected high-confidence clustering information, our proposed weight modulating function will first recognize the positive and negative samples and then dynamically up-weight the hard sample pairs while down-weighting the easy ones. In this way, our method can mine not only the hard negative samples but also the hard positive sample, thus improving the discriminative capability of the samples further. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed method.

Xihong Yang, Yue Liu, Sihang Zhou et al.

Benefiting from the intrinsic supervision information exploitation capability, contrastive learning has achieved promising performance in the field of deep graph clustering recently. However, we observe that two drawbacks of the positive and negative sample construction mechanisms limit the performance of existing algorithms from further improvement. 1) The quality of positive samples heavily depends on the carefully designed data augmentations, while inappropriate data augmentations would easily lead to the semantic drift and indiscriminative positive samples. 2) The constructed negative samples are not reliable for ignoring important clustering information. To solve these problems, we propose a Cluster-guided Contrastive deep Graph Clustering network (CCGC) by mining the intrinsic supervision information in the high-confidence clustering results. Specifically, instead of conducting complex node or edge perturbation, we construct two views of the graph by designing special Siamese encoders whose weights are not shared between the sibling sub-networks. Then, guided by the high-confidence clustering information, we carefully select and construct the positive samples from the same high-confidence cluster in two views. Moreover, to construct semantic meaningful negative sample pairs, we regard the centers of different high-confidence clusters as negative samples, thus improving the discriminative capability and reliability of the constructed sample pairs. Lastly, we design an objective function to pull close the samples from the same cluster while pushing away those from other clusters by maximizing and minimizing the cross-view cosine similarity between positive and negative samples. Extensive experimental results on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CCGC compared with the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Ke Liang, Yue Liu, Sihang Zhou et al.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) aims at learning powerful representations to benefit various artificial intelligence applications. Meanwhile, contrastive learning has been widely leveraged in graph learning as an effective mechanism to enhance the discriminative capacity of the learned representations. However, the complex structures of KG make it hard to construct appropriate contrastive pairs. Only a few attempts have integrated contrastive learning strategies with KGE. But, most of them rely on language models ( e.g., Bert) for contrastive pair construction instead of fully mining information underlying the graph structure, hindering expressive ability. Surprisingly, we find that the entities within a relational symmetrical structure are usually similar and correlated. To this end, we propose a knowledge graph contrastive learning framework based on relation-symmetrical structure, KGE-SymCL, which mines symmetrical structure information in KGs to enhance the discriminative ability of KGE models. Concretely, a plug-and-play approach is proposed by taking entities in the relation-symmetrical positions as positive pairs. Besides, a self-supervised alignment loss is designed to pull together positive pairs. Experimental results on link prediction and entity classification datasets demonstrate that our KGE-SymCL can be easily adopted to various KGE models for performance improvements. Moreover, extensive experiments show that our model could outperform other state-of-the-art baselines.

Meng Liu, Ke Liang, Yawei Zhao et al.

Temporal graph learning aims to generate high-quality representations for graph-based tasks with dynamic information, which has recently garnered increasing attention. In contrast to static graphs, temporal graphs are typically organized as node interaction sequences over continuous time rather than an adjacency matrix. Most temporal graph learning methods model current interactions by incorporating historical neighborhood. However, such methods only consider first-order temporal information while disregarding crucial high-order structural information, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this issue, we propose a self-supervised method called S2T for temporal graph learning, which extracts both temporal and structural information to learn more informative node representations. Notably, the initial node representations combine first-order temporal and high-order structural information differently to calculate two conditional intensities. An alignment loss is then introduced to optimize the node representations, narrowing the gap between the two intensities and making them more informative. Concretely, in addition to modeling temporal information using historical neighbor sequences, we further consider structural knowledge at both local and global levels. At the local level, we generate structural intensity by aggregating features from high-order neighbor sequences. At the global level, a global representation is generated based on all nodes to adjust the structural intensity according to the active statuses on different nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model S2T achieves at most 10.13% performance improvement compared with the state-of-the-art competitors on several datasets.

Jiaqi Jin, Siwei Wang, Zhibin Dong et al.

The success of existing multi-view clustering relies on the assumption of sample integrity across multiple views. However, in real-world scenarios, samples of multi-view are partially available due to data corruption or sensor failure, which leads to incomplete multi-view clustering study (IMVC). Although several attempts have been proposed to address IMVC, they suffer from the following drawbacks: i) Existing methods mainly adopt cross-view contrastive learning forcing the representations of each sample across views to be exactly the same, which might ignore view discrepancy and flexibility in representations; ii) Due to the absence of non-observed samples across multiple views, the obtained prototypes of clusters might be unaligned and biased, leading to incorrect fusion. To address the above issues, we propose a Cross-view Partial Sample and Prototype Alignment Network (CPSPAN) for Deep Incomplete Multi-view Clustering. Firstly, unlike existing contrastive-based methods, we adopt pair-observed data alignment as 'proxy supervised signals' to guide instance-to-instance correspondence construction among views. Then, regarding of the shifted prototypes in IMVC, we further propose a prototype alignment module to achieve incomplete distribution calibration across views. Extensive experimental results showcase the effectiveness of our proposed modules, attaining noteworthy performance improvements when compared to existing IMVC competitors on benchmark datasets.

Jingcan Duan, Bin Xiao, Siwei Wang et al.

Recently, graph anomaly detection on attributed networks has attracted growing attention in data mining and machine learning communities. Apart from attribute anomalies, graph anomaly detection also aims at suspicious topological-abnormal nodes that exhibit collective anomalous behavior. Closely connected uncorrelated node groups form uncommonly dense substructures in the network. However, existing methods overlook that the topology anomaly detection performance can be improved by recognizing such a collective pattern. To this end, we propose a new graph anomaly detection framework on attributed networks via substructure awareness (ARISE for abbreviation). Unlike previous algorithms, we focus on the substructures in the graph to discern abnormalities. Specifically, we establish a region proposal module to discover high-density substructures in the network as suspicious regions. The average node-pair similarity can be regarded as the topology anomaly degree of nodes within substructures. Generally, the lower the similarity, the higher the probability that internal nodes are topology anomalies. To distill better embeddings of node attributes, we further introduce a graph contrastive learning scheme, which observes attribute anomalies in the meantime. In this way, ARISE can detect both topology and attribute anomalies. Ultimately, extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that ARISE greatly improves detection performance (up to 7.30% AUC and 17.46% AUPRC gains) compared to state-of-the-art attributed networks anomaly detection (ANAD) algorithms.

Xinhang Wan, Jiyuan Liu, Xinwang Liu et al.

Multi-view clustering has attracted broad attention due to its capacity to utilize consistent and complementary information among views. Although tremendous progress has been made recently, most existing methods undergo high complexity, preventing them from being applied to large-scale tasks. Multi-view clustering via matrix factorization is a representative to address this issue. However, most of them map the data matrices into a fixed dimension, limiting the model's expressiveness. Moreover, a range of methods suffers from a two-step process, i.e., multimodal learning and the subsequent $k$-means, inevitably causing a sub-optimal clustering result. In light of this, we propose a one-step multi-view clustering with diverse representation method, which incorporates multi-view learning and $k$-means into a unified framework. Specifically, we first project original data matrices into various latent spaces to attain comprehensive information and auto-weight them in a self-supervised manner. Then we directly use the information matrices under diverse dimensions to obtain consensus discrete clustering labels. The unified work of representation learning and clustering boosts the quality of the final results. Furthermore, we develop an efficient optimization algorithm with proven convergence to solve the resultant problem. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the promising clustering performance of our proposed method.

Xinhang Wan, Bin Xiao, Xinwang Liu et al.

Multi-view clustering (MVC) has gained broad attention owing to its capacity to exploit consistent and complementary information across views. This paper focuses on a challenging issue in MVC called the incomplete continual data problem (ICDP). In specific, most existing algorithms assume that views are available in advance and overlook the scenarios where data observations of views are accumulated over time. Due to privacy considerations or memory limitations, previous views cannot be stored in these situations. Some works are proposed to handle it, but all fail to address incomplete views. Such an incomplete continual data problem (ICDP) in MVC is tough to solve since incomplete information with continual data increases the difficulty of extracting consistent and complementary knowledge among views. We propose Fast Continual Multi-View Clustering with Incomplete Views (FCMVC-IV) to address it. Specifically, it maintains a consensus coefficient matrix and updates knowledge with the incoming incomplete view rather than storing and recomputing all the data matrices. Considering that the views are incomplete, the newly collected view might contain samples that have yet to appear; two indicator matrices and a rotation matrix are developed to match matrices with different dimensions. Besides, we design a three-step iterative algorithm to solve the resultant problem in linear complexity with proven convergence. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets show the superiority of FCMVC-IV.

Yi Wen, Siwei Wang, Qing Liao et al.

Multi-view clustering (MVC), which effectively fuses information from multiple views for better performance, has received increasing attention. Most existing MVC methods assume that multi-view data are fully paired, which means that the mappings of all corresponding samples between views are pre-defined or given in advance. However, the data correspondence is often incomplete in real-world applications due to data corruption or sensor differences, referred as the data-unpaired problem (DUP) in multi-view literature. Although several attempts have been made to address the DUP issue, they suffer from the following drawbacks: 1) Most methods focus on the feature representation while ignoring the structural information of multi-view data, which is essential for clustering tasks; 2) Existing methods for partially unpaired problems rely on pre-given cross-view alignment information, resulting in their inability to handle fully unpaired problems; 3) Their inevitable parameters degrade the efficiency and applicability of the models. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel parameter-free graph clustering framework termed Unpaired Multi-view Graph Clustering framework with Cross-View Structure Matching (UPMGC-SM). Specifically, unlike the existing methods, UPMGC-SM effectively utilizes the structural information from each view to refine cross-view correspondences. Besides, our UPMGC-SM is a unified framework for both the fully and partially unpaired multi-view graph clustering. Moreover, existing graph clustering methods can adopt our UPMGC-SM to enhance their ability for unpaired scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our proposed framework for both paired and unpaired datasets.

Yi Wen, Suyuan Liu, Xinhang Wan et al.

Anchor-based multi-view graph clustering (AMVGC) has received abundant attention owing to its high efficiency and the capability to capture complementary structural information across multiple views. Intuitively, a high-quality anchor graph plays an essential role in the success of AMVGC. However, the existing AMVGC methods only consider single-structure information, i.e., local or global structure, which provides insufficient information for the learning task. To be specific, the over-scattered global structure leads to learned anchors failing to depict the cluster partition well. In contrast, the local structure with an improper similarity measure results in potentially inaccurate anchor assignment, ultimately leading to sub-optimal clustering performance. To tackle the issue, we propose a novel anchor-based multi-view graph clustering framework termed Efficient Multi-View Graph Clustering with Local and Global Structure Preservation (EMVGC-LG). Specifically, a unified framework with a theoretical guarantee is designed to capture local and global information. Besides, EMVGC-LG jointly optimizes anchor construction and graph learning to enhance the clustering quality. In addition, EMVGC-LG inherits the linear complexity of existing AMVGC methods respecting the sample number, which is time-economical and scales well with the data size. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Xihong Yang, Yiqi Wang, Jin Chen et al.

Deep learning has been widely applied in recommender systems, which has achieved revolutionary progress recently. However, most existing learning-based methods assume that the user and item distributions remain unchanged between the training phase and the test phase. However, the distribution of user and item features can naturally shift in real-world scenarios, potentially resulting in a substantial decrease in recommendation performance. This phenomenon can be formulated as an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) recommendation problem. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Dual Test-Time-Training framework for OOD Recommendation, termed DT3OR. In DT3OR, we incorporate a model adaptation mechanism during the test-time phase to carefully update the recommendation model, allowing the model to specially adapt to the shifting user and item features. To be specific, we propose a self-distillation task and a contrastive task to assist the model learning both the user's invariant interest preferences and the variant user/item characteristics during the test-time phase, thus facilitating a smooth adaptation to the shifting features. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the rationale behind our dual test-time training framework. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to address OOD recommendation via a test-time-training strategy. We conduct experiments on three datasets with various backbones. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of DT3OR compared to other state-of-the-art baselines.

Junpu Zhang, Liang Li, Siwei Wang et al.

Clustering is a representative unsupervised method widely applied in multi-modal and multi-view scenarios. Multiple kernel clustering (MKC) aims to group data by integrating complementary information from base kernels. As a representative, late fusion MKC first decomposes the kernels into orthogonal partition matrices, then learns a consensus one from them, achieving promising performance recently. However, these methods fail to consider the noise inside the partition matrix, preventing further improvement of clustering performance. We discover that the noise can be disassembled into separable dual parts, i.e. N-noise and C-noise (Null space noise and Column space noise). In this paper, we rigorously define dual noise and propose a novel parameter-free MKC algorithm by minimizing them. To solve the resultant optimization problem, we design an efficient two-step iterative strategy. To our best knowledge, it is the first time to investigate dual noise within the partition in the kernel space. We observe that dual noise will pollute the block diagonal structures and incur the degeneration of clustering performance, and C-noise exhibits stronger destruction than N-noise. Owing to our efficient mechanism to minimize dual noise, the proposed algorithm surpasses the recent methods by large margins.

Xinhang Wan, Jiyuan Liu, Hao Yu et al.

Multi-view clustering thrives in applications where views are collected in advance by extracting consistent and complementary information among views. However, it overlooks scenarios where data views are collected sequentially, i.e., real-time data. Due to privacy issues or memory burden, previous views are not available with time in these situations. Some methods are proposed to handle it but are trapped in a stability-plasticity dilemma. In specific, these methods undergo a catastrophic forgetting of prior knowledge when a new view is attained. Such a catastrophic forgetting problem (CFP) would cause the consistent and complementary information hard to get and affect the clustering performance. To tackle this, we propose a novel method termed Contrastive Continual Multi-view Clustering with Filtered Structural Fusion (CCMVC-FSF). Precisely, considering that data correlations play a vital role in clustering and prior knowledge ought to guide the clustering process of a new view, we develop a data buffer with fixed size to store filtered structural information and utilize it to guide the generation of a robust partition matrix via contrastive learning. Furthermore, we theoretically connect CCMVC-FSF with semi-supervised learning and knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments exhibit the excellence of the proposed method.

Wenxuan Tu, Qing Liao, Sihang Zhou et al.

Masked graph autoencoder (MGAE) has emerged as a promising self-supervised graph pre-training (SGP) paradigm due to its simplicity and effectiveness. However, existing efforts perform the mask-then-reconstruct operation in the raw data space as is done in computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP) areas, while neglecting the important non-Euclidean property of graph data. As a result, the highly unstable local connection structures largely increase the uncertainty in inferring masked data and decrease the reliability of the exploited self-supervision signals, leading to inferior representations for downstream evaluations. To address this issue, we propose a novel SGP method termed Robust mAsked gRaph autoEncoder (RARE) to improve the certainty in inferring masked data and the reliability of the self-supervision mechanism by further masking and reconstructing node samples in the high-order latent feature space. Through both theoretical and empirical analyses, we have discovered that performing a joint mask-then-reconstruct strategy in both latent feature and raw data spaces could yield improved stability and performance. To this end, we elaborately design a masked latent feature completion scheme, which predicts latent features of masked nodes under the guidance of high-order sample correlations that are hard to be observed from the raw data perspective. Specifically, we first adopt a latent feature predictor to predict the masked latent features from the visible ones. Next, we encode the raw data of masked samples with a momentum graph encoder and subsequently employ the resulting representations to improve predicted results through latent feature matching. Extensive experiments on seventeen datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and robustness of RARE against state-of-the-art (SOTA) competitors across three downstream tasks.

Lingyuan Meng, Ke Liang, Bin Xiao et al.

Few-shot relation reasoning on knowledge graphs (FS-KGR) aims to infer long-tail data-poor relations, which has drawn increasing attention these years due to its practicalities. The pre-training of previous methods needs to manually construct the meta-relation set, leading to numerous labor costs. Self-supervised learning (SSL) is treated as a solution to tackle the issue, but still at an early stage for FS-KGR task. Moreover, most of the existing methods ignore leveraging the beneficial information from aliasing relations (AR), i.e., data-rich relations with similar contextual semantics to the target data-poor relation. Therefore, we proposed a novel Self-Supervised Learning model by leveraging Aliasing Relations to assist FS-KGR, termed SARF. Concretely, four main components are designed in our model, i.e., SSL reasoning module, AR-assisted mechanism, fusion module, and scoring function. We first generate the representation of the co-occurrence patterns in a generative manner. Meanwhile, the representations of aliasing relations are learned to enhance reasoning in the AR-assist mechanism. Besides, multiple strategies, i.e., simple summation and learnable fusion, are offered for representation fusion. Finally, the generated representation is used for scoring. Extensive experiments on three few-shot benchmarks demonstrate that SARF achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other methods in most cases.

Yao Duan, Chenyang Zhu, Yuqing Lan et al.

We introduce Displacement Aware Relation Module (DisARM), a novel neural network module for enhancing the performance of 3D object detection in point cloud scenes. The core idea of our method is that contextual information is critical to tell the difference when the instance geometry is incomplete or featureless. We find that relations between proposals provide a good representation to describe the context. However, adopting relations between all the object or patch proposals for detection is inefficient, and an imbalanced combination of local and global relations brings extra noise that could mislead the training. Rather than working with all relations, we found that training with relations only between the most representative ones, or anchors, can significantly boost the detection performance. A good anchor should be semantic-aware with no ambiguity and independent with other anchors as well. To find the anchors, we first perform a preliminary relation anchor module with an objectness-aware sampling approach and then devise a displacement-based module for weighing the relation importance for better utilization of contextual information. This lightweight relation module leads to significantly higher accuracy of object instance detection when being plugged into the state-of-the-art detectors. Evaluations on the public benchmarks of real-world scenes show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both SUN RGB-D and ScanNet V2.

Wenxuan Tu, Bin Xiao, Xinwang Liu et al.

With the development of various applications, such as social networks and knowledge graphs, graph data has been ubiquitous in the real world. Unfortunately, graphs usually suffer from being absent due to privacy-protecting policies or copyright restrictions during data collection. The absence of graph data can be roughly categorized into attribute-incomplete and attribute-missing circumstances. Specifically, attribute-incomplete indicates that a part of the attribute vectors of all nodes are incomplete, while attribute-missing indicates that the whole attribute vectors of partial nodes are missing. Although many efforts have been devoted, none of them is custom-designed for a common situation where both types of graph data absence exist simultaneously. To fill this gap, we develop a novel network termed Revisiting Initializing Then Refining (RITR), where we complete both attribute-incomplete and attribute-missing samples under the guidance of a novel initializing-then-refining imputation criterion. Specifically, to complete attribute-incomplete samples, we first initialize the incomplete attributes using Gaussian noise before network learning, and then introduce a structure-attribute consistency constraint to refine incomplete values by approximating a structure-attribute correlation matrix to a high-order structural matrix. To complete attribute-missing samples, we first adopt structure embeddings of attribute-missing samples as the embedding initialization, and then refine these initial values by adaptively aggregating the reliable information of attribute-incomplete samples according to a dynamic affinity structure. To the best of our knowledge, this newly designed method is the first unsupervised framework dedicated to handling hybrid-absent graphs. Extensive experiments on four datasets have verified that our methods consistently outperform existing state-of-the-art competitors.

Ke Liang, Sihang Zhou, Yue Liu et al.

Multimodal knowledge graphs (MKGs), which intuitively organize information in various modalities, can benefit multiple practical downstream tasks, such as recommendation systems, and visual question answering. However, most MKGs are still far from complete, which motivates the flourishing of MKG reasoning models. Recently, with the development of general artificial architectures, the pretrained transformer models have drawn increasing attention, especially for multimodal scenarios. However, the research of multimodal pretrained transformer (MPT) for knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is still at an early stage. As the biggest difference between MKG and other multimodal data, the rich structural information underlying the MKG still cannot be fully leveraged in existing MPT models. Most of them only utilize the graph structure as a retrieval map for matching images and texts connected with the same entity. This manner hinders their reasoning performances. To this end, we propose the graph Structure Guided Multimodal Pretrained Transformer for knowledge graph reasoning, termed SGMPT. Specifically, the graph structure encoder is adopted for structural feature encoding. Then, a structure-guided fusion module with two different strategies, i.e., weighted summation and alignment constraint, is first designed to inject the structural information into both the textual and visual features. To the best of our knowledge, SGMPT is the first MPT model for multimodal KGR, which mines the structural information underlying the knowledge graph. Extensive experiments on FB15k-237-IMG and WN18-IMG, demonstrate that our SGMPT outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, and prove the effectiveness of the designed strategies.

Xinpeng Lv, Chunyuan Zheng, Yunxin Mao et al.

Strategic classification (SC) investigates scenarios where agents manipulate their features to obtain favorable decisions from predictive models. Existing fairness-aware SC approaches primarily focus on group fairness and typically assume that agents respond independently. However, when individual fairness is required, ensuring similar individuals receive similar outcomes, agents' manipulation becomes interdependent: an agent's preferred manipulation depends on the neighborhoods' outcomes. This induces a mismatch between classical SC formulations and fairness-aware decision settings, where independent models no longer accurately characterize strategic manipulations. To address this issue, we introduce individual fairness-aware strategic classification (IFSC), a framework that models peer-driven manipulation arising from individual fairness, where agents imitate nearby positively decided peers to obtain favorable outcomes. IFSC characterizes strategic manipulation as similarity-based imitation toward visible accepted peers and learns classifiers under the resulting post-manipulation distributions. To account for uncertainty in peer observability, IFSC employs a robust learning process that introduces stochastic perturbations during manipulation simulation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that IFSC improves individual-fairness consistency and mitigates imitation-induced distortions.

Yingxu Wang, Xinwang Liu, Siyang Gao et al.

Source-free graph domain adaptation (SF-GDA) aims to adapt source-trained graph models to unlabeled target graphs when source graphs are no longer accessible. A central obstacle is pseudo-label reliability: under feature and topological shifts, source-induced predictions may become confidently wrong, and indiscriminate self-training can amplify systematic errors through graph message passing. This paper studies SF-GDA from a selective pseudo-labeling perspective. Instead of assuming globally bounded pseudo-label noise over the entire target domain, we identify a confidence-consistent safe subspace on which pseudo-label noise can be controlled under restricted posterior discrepancy, and derive a target-risk decomposition that separates safe-subspace fitting error, selected-label noise, and uncertain-set risk. Guided by this analysis, we propose SafeSubspace Pseudo-Label Refinement (S$^2$PLR), a source-free graph adaptation framework that applies hard pseudo-label supervision only to target graphs supported by both semantic and structural evidence. Specifically, S$^2$PLR estimates semantic reliability using source-committee confidence and disagreement, learns a targetintrinsic structural representation via graph contrastive learning, verifies pseudo-labels through neighborhood consistency, and exploits the remaining uncertain samples with noise-tolerant soft regularization rather than unreliable hard labels. Experiments on image and real-world graph benchmarks under different domain shifts demonstrate that S$^2$PLR achieves robust and competitive performance across diverse source-free transfer settings.

Hao Yu, Chuan Ma, Meng Liu et al.

Federated Learning (FL) offers collaborative model training without data sharing but is vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where poisoned model weights lead to compromised system integrity. Existing countermeasures, primarily based on anomaly detection, are prone to erroneous rejections of normal weights while accepting poisoned ones, largely due to shortcomings in quantifying similarities among client models. Furthermore, other defenses demonstrate effectiveness only when dealing with a limited number of malicious clients, typically fewer than 10%. To alleviate these vulnerabilities, we present G$^2$uardFL, a protective framework that reinterprets the identification of malicious clients as an attributed graph clustering problem, thus safeguarding FL systems. Specifically, this framework employs a client graph clustering approach to identify malicious clients and integrates an adaptive mechanism to amplify the discrepancy between the aggregated model and the poisoned ones, effectively eliminating embedded backdoors. We also conduct a theoretical analysis of convergence to confirm that G$^2$uardFL does not affect the convergence of FL systems. Through empirical evaluation, comparing G$^2$uardFL with cutting-edge defenses, such as FLAME (USENIX Security 2022) [28] and DeepSight (NDSS 2022) [36], against various backdoor attacks including 3DFed (SP 2023) [20], our results demonstrate its significant effectiveness in mitigating backdoor attacks while having a negligible impact on the aggregated model's performance on benign samples (i.e., the primary task performance). For instance, in an FL system with 25% malicious clients, G$^2$uardFL reduces the attack success rate to 10.61%, while maintaining a primary task performance of 73.05% on the CIFAR-10 dataset. This surpasses the performance of the best-performing baseline, which merely achieves a primary task performance of 19.54%.

Linxuan Song, Wenxuan Tu, Sihang Zhou et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely investigated in the field of semi-supervised graph machine learning. Most methods fail to exploit adequate graph information when labeled data is limited, leading to the problem of oversmoothing. To overcome this issue, we propose the Graph Alignment Neural Network (GANN), a simple and effective graph neural architecture. A unique learning algorithm with three alignment rules is proposed to thoroughly explore hidden information for insufficient labels. Firstly, to better investigate attribute specifics, we suggest the feature alignment rule to align the inner product of both the attribute and embedding matrices. Secondly, to properly utilize the higher-order neighbor information, we propose the cluster center alignment rule, which involves aligning the inner product of the cluster center matrix with the unit matrix. Finally, to get reliable prediction results with few labels, we establish the minimum entropy alignment rule by lining up the prediction probability matrix with its sharpened result. Extensive studies on graph benchmark datasets demonstrate that GANN can achieve considerable benefits in semi-supervised node classification and outperform state-of-the-art competitors.

Tao Sun, Congliang Chen, Peng Qiao et al.

Sign-based stochastic methods have gained attention due to their ability to achieve robust performance despite using only the sign information for parameter updates. However, the current convergence analysis of sign-based methods relies on the strong assumptions of first-order gradient Lipschitz and second-order gradient Lipschitz, which may not hold in practical tasks like deep neural network training that involve high non-smoothness. In this paper, we revisit sign-based methods and analyze their convergence under more realistic assumptions of first- and second-order smoothness. We first establish the convergence of the sign-based method under weak first-order Lipschitz. Motivated by the weak first-order Lipschitz, we propose a relaxed second-order condition that still allows for nonconvex acceleration in sign-based methods. Based on our theoretical results, we gain insights into the computational advantages of the recently developed LION algorithm. In distributed settings, we prove that this nonconvex acceleration persists with linear speedup in the number of nodes, when utilizing fast communication compression gossip protocols. The novelty of our theoretical results lies in that they are derived under much weaker assumptions, thereby expanding the provable applicability of sign-based algorithms to a wider range of problems.

Dayu Hu, Zhibin Dong, Ke Liang et al.

Single-cell multi-view clustering enables the exploration of cellular heterogeneity within the same cell from different views. Despite the development of several multi-view clustering methods, two primary challenges persist. Firstly, most existing methods treat the information from both single-cell RNA (scRNA) and single-cell Assay of Transposase Accessible Chromatin (scATAC) views as equally significant, overlooking the substantial disparity in data richness between the two views. This oversight frequently leads to a degradation in overall performance. Additionally, the majority of clustering methods necessitate manual specification of the number of clusters by users. However, for biologists dealing with cell data, precisely determining the number of distinct cell types poses a formidable challenge. To this end, we introduce scUNC, an innovative multi-view clustering approach tailored for single-cell data, which seamlessly integrates information from different views without the need for a predefined number of clusters. The scUNC method comprises several steps: initially, it employs a cross-view fusion network to create an effective embedding, which is then utilized to generate initial clusters via community detection. Subsequently, the clusters are automatically merged and optimized until no further clusters can be merged. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of scUNC using three distinct single-cell datasets. The results underscored that scUNC outperforms the other baseline methods.

Yuhang Huang, Zheng Qin, Xinwang Liu et al.

Recent studies have demonstrated that the forward diffusion process is crucial for the effectiveness of diffusion models in terms of generative quality and sampling efficiency. We propose incorporating an analytical image attenuation process into the forward diffusion process for high-quality (un)conditioned image generation with significantly fewer denoising steps compared to the vanilla diffusion model requiring thousands of steps. In a nutshell, our method represents the forward image-to-noise mapping as simultaneous \textit{image-to-zero} mapping and \textit{zero-to-noise} mapping. Under this framework, we mathematically derive 1) the training objectives and 2) for the reverse time the sampling formula based on an analytical attenuation function which models image to zero mapping. The former enables our method to learn noise and image components simultaneously which simplifies learning. Importantly, because of the latter's analyticity in the \textit{zero-to-image} sampling function, we can avoid the ordinary differential equation-based accelerators and instead naturally perform sampling with an arbitrary step size. We have conducted extensive experiments on unconditioned image generation, \textit{e.g.}, CIFAR-10 and CelebA-HQ-256, and image-conditioned downstream tasks such as super-resolution, saliency detection, edge detection, and image inpainting. The proposed diffusion models achieve competitive generative quality with much fewer denoising steps compared to the state of the art, thus greatly accelerating the generation speed. In particular, to generate images of comparable quality, our models require only one-twentieth of the denoising steps compared to the baseline denoising diffusion probabilistic models. Moreover, we achieve state-of-the-art performances on the image-conditioned tasks using only no more than 10 steps.

Yingxu Wang, Xinwang Liu, Mengzhu Wang et al.

Graph Domain Adaptation (GDA) aims to transfer graph classifiers across domains with both semantic and topological shifts. Existing Euclidean adversarial methods face two challenges: Structural Degeneration, where domain confusion entangles and suppresses label-relevant topology, and Optimization Instability, where minimax training induces oscillatory gradients under large structural shifts. We propose DisRFM, a geometry-aware GDA framework that addresses these challenges with Riemannian representation learning and flow-based transport. DisRFM embeds graph representations on a constant-curvature manifold and expresses them in geodesic polar coordinates. Polar endpoint regularization calibrates topologysensitive radial scales via univariate Wasserstein alignment and preserves scalenormalized class semantics through confidence-filtered angular alignment, with radial magnitude modulating pseudo-label reliability. DisRFM introduces topologyconditioned polar flow matching, which couples class-compatible source and target samples by a normalized polar transport cost and learns a metric-corrected vector field along geodesic interpolants. Theoretical analysis characterizes the structural risk of unconditional domain confusion and relates polar discrepancies and flow error to target risk. Extensive experiments under diverse domain shifts demonstrate that DisRFM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Xin Zou, Ruimeng Liu, Chang Tang et al.

Multi-View Clustering (MVC) has gained significant attention for its ability to leverage complementary information across diverse views. However, existing deep MVC methods often struggle with view-distribution entanglement during cross-view fusion, which hampers the quality of the shared latent space and leads to suboptimal Figures. To address this issue, we propose the Generalized Multi-view Auto-Encoder (GMAE), a framework designed to preserve cross-view complementarity through disentangled representation learning. Specifically, GMAE employs dual-path autoencoders to decouple source features into view-specific and view-common embeddings, facilitating the discovery of clearer clustering structures. We further construct cross-view adversarial discriminators to guide view-specific encoders in capturing more discriminative features. By strategically modulating mutual information, GMAE effectively aligns distributions and prevents representation collapse, ensuring the generation of robust, non-trivial embeddings. Comprehensive experiments on 13 benchmark datasets demonstrate that GMAE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both complete and incomplete MVC tasks. Our code implementation is available at the repository: https://github.com/obananas/GMAE.

Yunhui Liu, Yue Liu, Yongchao Liu et al.

Attributed Graph Clustering (AGC) is a fundamental unsupervised task that partitions nodes into cohesive groups by jointly modeling structural topology and node attributes. While the advent of graph neural networks and self-supervised learning has catalyzed a proliferation of AGC methodologies, a widening chasm persists between academic benchmark performance and the stringent demands of real-world industrial deployment. To bridge this gap, this survey provides a comprehensive, industrially grounded review of AGC from three complementary perspectives. First, we introduce the Encode-Cluster-Optimize taxonomic framework, which decomposes the diverse algorithmic landscape into three orthogonal, composable modules: representation encoding, cluster projection, and optimization strategy. This unified paradigm enables principled architectural comparisons and inspires novel methodological combinations. Second, we critically examine prevailing evaluation protocols to expose the field's academic monoculture: a pervasive over-reliance on small, homophilous citation networks, the inadequacy of supervised-only metrics for an inherently unsupervised task, and the chronic neglect of computational scalability. In response, we advocate for a holistic evaluation standard that integrates supervised semantic alignment, unsupervised structural integrity, and rigorous efficiency profiling. Third, we explicitly confront the practical realities of industrial deployment. By analyzing operational constraints such as massive scale, severe heterophily, and tabular feature noise alongside extensive empirical evidence from our companion benchmark, we outline actionable engineering strategies. Furthermore, we chart a clear roadmap for future research, prioritizing heterophily-robust encoders, scalable joint optimization, and unsupervised model selection criteria to meet production-grade requirements.

Jiyuan Liu, Xinwang Liu, Siqi Wang et al.

Vertical federated learning is a natural and elegant approach to integrate multi-view data vertically partitioned across devices (clients) while preserving their privacies. Apart from the model training, existing methods requires the collaboration of all clients in the model inference. However, the model inference is probably maintained for service in a long time, while the collaboration, especially when the clients belong to different organizations, is unpredictable in real-world scenarios, such as concellation of contract, network unavailablity, etc., resulting in the failure of them. To address this issue, we, at the first attempt, propose a flexible Active-Passive Federated learning (APFed) framework. Specifically, the active client is the initiator of a learning task and responsible to build the complete model, while the passive clients only serve as assistants. Once the model built, the active client can make inference independently. In addition, we instance the APFed framework into two classification methods with employing the reconstruction loss and the contrastive loss on passive clients, respectively. Meanwhile, the two methods are tested in a set of experiments and achieves desired results, validating their effectiveness.