Lan Zhao

Xiang Li, Lan Zhao, Junhao Ren et al.

Effective information gathering and knowledge codification are pivotal for developing recommendation systems that promote circular economy practices. One promising approach involves the creation of a centralized knowledge repository cataloguing historical waste-to-resource transactions, which subsequently enables the generation of recommendations based on past successes. However, a significant barrier to constructing such a knowledge repository lies in the absence of a universally standardized framework for representing business activities across disparate geographical regions. To address this challenge, this paper leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to classify textual data describing economic activities into the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC), a globally recognized economic activity classification framework. This approach enables any economic activity descriptions provided by businesses worldwide to be categorized into the unified ISIC standard, facilitating the creation of a centralized knowledge repository. Our approach achieves a 95% accuracy rate on a 182-label test dataset with fine-tuned GPT-2 model. This research contributes to the global endeavour of fostering sustainable circular economy practices by providing a standardized foundation for knowledge codification and recommendation systems deployable across regions.

Junhao Ren, Honglin Gao, Lan Zhao et al.

Uncertainties in renewable generation and demand dynamics challenge day-ahead scheduling. To enhance renewable penetration and maintain intra-day balance, we develop a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for self-interested microgrids participating in peer-to-peer (P2P) electricity trading. Each microgrid independently bids both price and quantity while optimizing its own profit via storage arbitrage under time-varying main-grid prices. A market-clearing mechanism coordinating trades and promoting incentive compatibility is proposed. Simulation results show that the learned bidding policy improves renewable utilization and reduces reliance on high-carbon electricity, while increasing community-level economic welfare, delivering a win-win situation in emission reduction and local prosperity.

Honglin Gao, Lan Zhao, Junhao Ren et al.

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have achieved strong performance in many real-world applications, yet targeted backdoor poisoning on heterogeneous graphs remains less studied. We consider backdoor attacks for heterogeneous node classification, where an adversary injects a small set of trigger nodes and connections during training to force specific victim nodes to be misclassified into an attacker-chosen label at test time while preserving clean performance. We propose HeteroHBA, a generative backdoor framework that selects influential auxiliary neighbors for trigger attachment via saliency-based screening and synthesizes diverse trigger features and connection patterns to better match the local heterogeneous context. To improve stealthiness, we combine Adaptive Instance Normalization (AdaIN) with a Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) loss to align the trigger feature distribution with benign statistics, thereby reducing detectability, and we optimize the attack with a bilevel objective that jointly promotes attack success and maintains clean accuracy. Experiments on multiple real-world heterogeneous graphs with representative HGNN architectures show that HeteroHBA consistently achieves higher attack success than prior backdoor baselines with comparable or smaller impact on clean accuracy; moreover, the attack remains effective under our heterogeneity-aware structural defense, CSD. These results highlight practical backdoor risks in heterogeneous graph learning and motivate the development of stronger defenses.

Junhao Ren, Honglin Gao, Sijie Wang et al.

The challenges of the uncertainties in renewable energy generation and the instability of the real-time market limit the effective utilization of clean energy in microgrid communities. Existing peer-to-peer (P2P) and microgrid coordination approaches typically rely on certain centralized optimization or restrictive coordination rules which are difficult to be implemented in real-life applications. To address the challenge, we propose an intraday P2P trading framework that allows self-interested microgrids to pursue their economic benefits, while allowing the market operator to maximize the social welfare, namely the low carbon emission objective, of the entire community. Specifically, the decision-making processes of the microgrids are formulated as a Decentralized Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (DEC-POMDP) and solved using a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework. Such an approach grants each microgrid a high degree of decision-making autonomy, while a novel market clearing mechanism is introduced to provide macro-regulation, incentivizing microgrids to prioritize local renewable energy consumption and hence reduce carbon emissions. Simulation results demonstrate that the combination of the self-interested bidding strategy and the P2P market design helps significantly improve renewable energy utilization and reduce reliance on external electricity with high carbon-emissions. The framework achieves a balanced integration of local autonomy, self-interest pursuit, and improved community-level economic and environmental benefits.

Honglin Gao, Xiang Li, Lan Zhao et al.

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have recently drawn increasing attention for modeling complex multi-relational data in domains such as recommendation, finance, and social networks. While existing research has been largely focused on enhancing HGNNs' predictive performance, their robustness and security, especially under backdoor attacks, remain underexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Backdoor Attack (HeteroBA) framework for node classification tasks on heterogeneous graphs. HeteroBA inserts carefully crafted trigger nodes with realistic features and targeted structural connections, leveraging attention-based and clustering-based strategies to select influential auxiliary nodes for effective trigger propagation, thereby causing the model to misclassify specific nodes into a target label while maintaining accuracy on clean data. Experimental results on three datasets and various HGNN architectures demonstrate that HeteroBA achieves high attack success rates with minimal impact on the clean accuracy. Our method sheds light on potential vulnerabilities in HGNNs and calls for more robust defenses against backdoor threats in multi-relational graph scenarios.