A General Graph Spectral Wavelet Convolution via Chebyshev Order DecompositionNian Liu, Xiaoxin He, Thomas Laurent et al.
Spectral graph convolution, an important tool of data filtering on graphs, relies on two essential decisions: selecting spectral bases for signal transformation and parameterizing the kernel for frequency analysis. While recent techniques mainly focus on standard Fourier transform and vector-valued spectral functions, they fall short in flexibility to model signal distributions over large spatial ranges, and capacity of spectral function. In this paper, we present a novel wavelet-based graph convolution network, namely WaveGC, which integrates multi-resolution spectral bases and a matrix-valued filter kernel. Theoretically, we establish that WaveGC can effectively capture and decouple short-range and long-range information, providing superior filtering flexibility, surpassing existing graph wavelet neural networks. To instantiate WaveGC, we introduce a novel technique for learning general graph wavelets by separately combining odd and even terms of Chebyshev polynomials. This approach strictly satisfies wavelet admissibility criteria. Our numerical experiments showcase the consistent improvements in both short-range and long-range tasks. This underscores the effectiveness of the proposed model in handling different scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/liun-online/WaveGC.
6.7CLOct 8, 2025
Haystack Engineering: Context Engineering for Heterogeneous and Agentic Long-Context EvaluationMufei Li, Dongqi Fu, Limei Wang et al. · gatech
Modern long-context large language models (LLMs) perform well on synthetic "needle-in-a-haystack" (NIAH) benchmarks, but such tests overlook how noisy contexts arise from biased retrieval and agentic workflows. We argue that haystack engineering is necessary to construct noisy long contexts that faithfully capture key real-world factors -- distraction from heterogeneous biased retrievers and cascading errors in agentic workflows -- to test models' long-context robustness. We instantiate it through HaystackCraft, a new NIAH benchmark built on the full English Wikipedia hyperlink network with multi-hop questions. HaystackCraft evaluates how heterogeneous retrieval strategies (e.g., sparse, dense, hybrid, and graph-based) affect distractor composition, haystack ordering, and downstream LLM performance. HaystackCraft further extends NIAH to dynamic, LLM-dependent settings that simulate agentic operations, where models refine queries, reflect on their past reasonings, and decide when to stop. Experiments with 15 long-context models show that (1) while stronger dense retrievers can introduce more challenging distractors, graph-based reranking simultaneously improves retrieval effectiveness and mitigates more harmful distractors; (2) in agentic tests, even advanced models like Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 suffer cascading failures from self-generated distractors or struggle to perform early stops. These results highlight persistent challenges in agentic long-context reasoning and establish HaystackCraft as a valuable testbed for future progress.