Aiguo Chen

Yi Luo, Guiduo Duan, Guangchun Luo et al.

The success of Graph Neural Networks (GNN) in learning on non-Euclidean data arouses many subtopics, such as Label-inputted GNN (LGNN) and Implicit GNN (IGNN). LGNN, explicitly inputting supervising information (a.k.a. labels) in GNN, integrates label propagation to achieve superior performance, but with the dilemma between its propagating distance and adaptiveness. IGNN, outputting an equilibrium point by iterating its network infinite times, exploits information in the entire graph to capture long-range dependencies, but with its network constrained to guarantee the existence of the equilibrium. This work unifies the two subdomains by interpreting LGNN in the theory of IGNN and reducing prevailing LGNNs to the form of IGNN. The unification facilitates the exchange between the two subdomains and inspires more studies. Specifically, implicit differentiation of IGNN is introduced to LGNN to differentiate its infinite-range label propagation with constant memory, making the propagation both distant and adaptive. Besides, the masked label strategy of LGNN is proven able to guarantee the well-posedness of IGNN in a network-agnostic manner, granting its network more complex and thus more expressive. Combining the advantages of LGNN and IGNN, Label-inputted Implicit GNN (LI-GNN) is proposed. It can be widely applied to any specific GNN to boost its performance. Node classification experiments on two synthesized and six real-world datasets demonstrate its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/cf020031308/LI-GNN

Yi Luo, Xu Sun, Guangchun Luo et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in engineering applications such as social network analysis, chemical research and computer vision. However, their efficacy is severely compromised by the inherent homophily assumption, which fails to hold for heterophilic graphs where dissimilar nodes are frequently connected. To address this fundamental limitation in graph learning, we first draw inspiration from the recently discovered monophily property of real-world graphs, and propose Neighbourhood Transformers (NT), a novel paradigm that applies self-attention within every local neighbourhood instead of aggregating messages to the central node as in conventional message-passing GNNs. This design makes NT inherently monophily-aware and theoretically guarantees its expressiveness is no weaker than traditional message-passing frameworks. For practical engineering deployment, we further develop a neighbourhood partitioning strategy equipped with switchable attentions, which reduces the space consumption of NT by over 95% and time consumption by up to 92.67%, significantly expanding its applicability to larger graphs. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets (5 heterophilic and 5 homophilic graphs) show that NT outperforms all current state-of-the-art methods on node classification tasks, demonstrating its superior performance and cross-domain adaptability. The full implementation code of this work is publicly available at https://github.com/cf020031308/MoNT to facilitate reproducibility and industrial adoption.

Yi Luo, Guangchun Luo, Ke Qin et al.

Node classifiers are required to comprehensively reduce prediction errors, training resources, and inference latency in the industry. However, most graph neural networks (GNN) concentrate only on one or two of them. The compromised aspects thus are the shortest boards on the bucket, hindering their practical deployments for industrial-level tasks. This work proposes a novel semi-supervised learning method termed Graph Entropy Minimization (GEM) to resolve the three issues simultaneously. GEM benefits its one-hop aggregation from massive uncategorized nodes, making its prediction accuracy comparable to GNNs with two or more hops message passing. It can be decomposed to support stochastic training with mini-batches of independent edge samples, achieving extremely fast sampling and space-saving training. While its one-hop aggregation is faster in inference than deep GNNs, GEM can be further accelerated to an extreme by deriving a non-hop classifier via online knowledge distillation. Thus, GEM can be a handy choice for latency-restricted and error-sensitive services running on resource-constraint hardware. Code is available at https://github.com/cf020031308/GEM.

Ji Guo, Wenbo Jiang, Yansong Lin et al.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are widely deployed in safety-critical embodied AI applications such as robotics. However, their complex multimodal interactions also expose new security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we investigate a backdoor threat in VLA models, where malicious inputs cause targeted misbehavior while preserving performance on clean data. Existing backdoor methods predominantly rely on inserting visible triggers into visual modality, which suffer from poor robustness and low insusceptibility in real-world settings due to environmental variability. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the State Backdoor, a novel and practical backdoor attack that leverages the robot arm's initial state as the trigger. To optimize trigger for insusceptibility and effectiveness, we design a Preference-guided Genetic Algorithm (PGA) that efficiently searches the state space for minimal yet potent triggers. Extensive experiments on five representative VLA models and five real-world tasks show that our method achieves over 90% attack success rate without affecting benign task performance, revealing an underexplored vulnerability in embodied AI systems.

Ji Guo, Long Zhou, Zhijin Wang et al.

In recent years, deep learning-based Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE) models have been widely applied in fields such as autonomous driving and robotics. However, their vulnerability to backdoor attacks remains unexplored. To fill the gap in this area, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of backdoor attacks against MDE models. Typically, existing backdoor attack methods can not be applied to MDE models. This is because the label used in MDE is in the form of a depth map. To address this, we propose BadDepth, the first backdoor attack targeting MDE models. BadDepth overcomes this limitation by selectively manipulating the target object's depth using an image segmentation model and restoring the surrounding areas via depth completion, thereby generating poisoned datasets for object-level backdoor attacks. To improve robustness in physical world scenarios, we further introduce digital-to-physical augmentation to adapt to the domain gap between the physical world and the digital domain. Extensive experiments on multiple models validate the effectiveness of BadDepth in both the digital domain and the physical world, without being affected by environmental factors.

Yi Luo, Aiguo Chen, Ke Yan et al.

Nowadays, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) following the Message Passing paradigm become the dominant way to learn on graphic data. Models in this paradigm have to spend extra space to look up adjacent nodes with adjacency matrices and extra time to aggregate multiple messages from adjacent nodes. To address this issue, we develop a method called LinkDist that distils self-knowledge from connected node pairs into a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) without the need to aggregate messages. Experiment with 8 real-world datasets shows the MLP derived from LinkDist can predict the label of a node without knowing its adjacencies but achieve comparable accuracy against GNNs in the contexts of semi- and full-supervised node classification. Moreover, LinkDist benefits from its Non-Message Passing paradigm that we can also distil self-knowledge from arbitrarily sampled node pairs in a contrastive way to further boost the performance of LinkDist.

Yi Luo, Aiguo Chen, Bei Hui et al.

Conventional Supervised Learning approaches focus on the mapping from input features to output labels. After training, the learnt models alone are adapted onto testing features to predict testing labels in isolation, with training data wasted and their associations ignored. To take full advantage of the vast number of training data and their associations, we propose a novel learning paradigm called Memory-Associated Differential (MAD) Learning. We first introduce an additional component called Memory to memorize all the training data. Then we learn the differences of labels as well as the associations of features in the combination of a differential equation and some sampling methods. Finally, in the evaluating phase, we predict unknown labels by inferencing from the memorized facts plus the learnt differences and associations in a geometrically meaningful manner. We gently build this theory in unary situations and apply it on Image Recognition, then extend it into Link Prediction as a binary situation, in which our method outperforms strong state-of-the-art baselines on ogbl-ddi dataset.