Xinwang Liu

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.

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.

Yue Liu, Shihao Zhu, Jun Xia et al.

Intent learning, which aims to learn users' intents for user understanding and item recommendation, has become a hot research spot in recent years. However, existing methods suffer from complex and cumbersome alternating optimization, limiting performance and scalability. To this end, we propose a novel intent learning method termed \underline{ELCRec}, by unifying behavior representation learning into an \underline{E}nd-to-end \underline{L}earnable \underline{C}lustering framework, for effective and efficient \underline{Rec}ommendation. Concretely, we encode user behavior sequences and initialize the cluster centers (latent intents) as learnable neurons. Then, we design a novel learnable clustering module to separate different cluster centers, thus decoupling users' complex intents. Meanwhile, it guides the network to learn intents from behaviors by forcing behavior embeddings close to cluster centers. This allows simultaneous optimization of recommendation and clustering via mini-batch data. Moreover, we propose intent-assisted contrastive learning by using cluster centers as self-supervision signals, further enhancing mutual promotion. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of ELCRec from six perspectives. Compared to the runner-up, ELCRec improves NDCG@5 by 8.9\% and reduces computational costs by 22.5\% on the Beauty dataset. Furthermore, due to the scalability and universal applicability, we deploy this method on the industrial recommendation system with 130 million page views and achieve promising results. The codes are available on GitHub (https://github.com/yueliu1999/ELCRec). A collection (papers, codes, datasets) of deep group recommendation/intent learning methods is available on GitHub (https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Group-Recommendation).

Yaowen Hu, Wenxuan Tu, Yue Liu et al.

Deep graph clustering (DGC) for attribute-missing graphs is an unsupervised task aimed at partitioning nodes with incomplete attributes into distinct clusters. Addressing this challenging issue is vital for practical applications. However, research in this area remains underexplored. Existing imputation methods for attribute-missing graphs often fail to account for the varying amounts of information available across node neighborhoods, leading to unreliable results, especially for nodes with insufficient known neighborhood. To address this issue, we propose a novel method named Divide-Then-Rule Graph Completion (DTRGC). This method first addresses nodes with sufficient known neighborhood information and treats the imputed results as new knowledge to iteratively impute more challenging nodes, while leveraging clustering information to correct imputation errors. Specifically, Dynamic Cluster-Aware Feature Propagation (DCFP) initializes missing node attributes by adjusting propagation weights based on the clustering structure. Subsequently, Hierarchical Neighborhood-aware Imputation (HNAI) categorizes attribute-missing nodes into three groups based on the completeness of their neighborhood attributes. The imputation is performed hierarchically, prioritizing the groups with nodes that have the most available neighborhood information. The cluster structure is then used to refine the imputation and correct potential errors. Finally, Hop-wise Representation Enhancement (HRE) integrates information across multiple hops, thereby enriching the expressiveness of node representations. Experimental results on six widely used graph datasets show that DTRGC significantly improves the clustering performance of various DGC methods under attribute-missing graphs.

Xihong Yang, Xiaochang Hu, Sihang Zhou et al.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) has long been proved to be an effective technique to construct powerful models with limited labels. In the existing literature, consistency regularization-based methods, which force the perturbed samples to have similar predictions with the original ones have attracted much attention for their promising accuracy. However, we observe that, the performance of such methods decreases drastically when the labels get extremely limited, e.g., 2 or 3 labels for each category. Our empirical study finds that the main problem lies with the drifting of semantic information in the procedure of data augmentation. The problem can be alleviated when enough supervision is provided. However, when little guidance is available, the incorrect regularization would mislead the network and undermine the performance of the algorithm. To tackle the problem, we (1) propose an interpolation-based method to construct more reliable positive sample pairs; (2) design a novel contrastive loss to guide the embedding of the learned network to change linearly between samples so as to improve the discriminative capability of the network by enlarging the margin decision boundaries. Since no destructive regularization is introduced, the performance of our proposed algorithm is largely improved. Specifically, the proposed algorithm outperforms the second best algorithm (Comatch) with 5.3% by achieving 88.73% classification accuracy when only two labels are available for each class on the CIFAR-10 dataset. Moreover, we further prove the generality of the proposed method by improving the performance of the existing state-of-the-art algorithms considerably with our proposed strategy.

Yawei Zhao, Qian Zhao, Xingxing Zhang et al.

As a metric to measure the performance of an online method, dynamic regret with switching cost has drawn much attention for online decision making problems. Although the sublinear regret has been provided in many previous researches, we still have little knowledge about the relation between the dynamic regret and the switching cost. In the paper, we investigate the relation for two classic online settings: Online Algorithms (OA) and Online Convex Optimization (OCO). We provide a new theoretical analysis framework, which shows an interesting observation, that is, the relation between the switching cost and the dynamic regret is different for settings of OA and OCO. Specifically, the switching cost has significant impact on the dynamic regret in the setting of OA. But, it does not have an impact on the dynamic regret in the setting of OCO. Furthermore, we provide a lower bound of regret for the setting of OCO, which is same with the lower bound in the case of no switching cost. It shows that the switching cost does not change the difficulty of online decision making problems in the setting of OCO.

Yawei Zhao, En Zhu, Xinwang Liu et al.

We provide a new theoretical analysis framework to investigate online gradient descent in the dynamic environment. Comparing with the previous work, the new framework recovers the state-of-the-art dynamic regret, but does not require extra gradient queries for every iteration. Specifically, when functions are $α$ strongly convex and $β$ smooth, to achieve the state-of-the-art dynamic regret, the previous work requires $O(κ)$ with $κ= \fracβα$ queries of gradients at every iteration. But, our framework shows that the query complexity can be improved to be $O(1)$, which does not depend on $κ$. The improvement is significant for ill-conditioned problems because that their objective function usually has a large $κ$.