Jun Zhuang

Zhengjian Kang, Jun Zhuang, Kangtong Mo et al.

Detection Transformer (DETR) has redefined object detection by casting it as a set prediction task within an end-to-end framework. Despite its elegance, DETR and its variants still rely on fixed learnable queries and suffer from severe query utilization imbalance, which limits adaptability and leaves the model capacity underused. We propose PaQ-DETR (Pattern and Quality-Aware DETR), a unified framework that enhances both query adaptivity and supervision balance. It learns a compact set of shared latent patterns capturing global semantics and dynamically generates image-specific queries through content-conditioned weighting. In parallel, a quality-aware one-to-many assignment strategy adaptively selects positive samples based on localizatio-classification consistency, enriching supervision and promoting balanced query optimization. Experiments on COCO, CityScapes, and other benchmarks show consistent gains of 1.5%-4.2% mAP across DETR backbones, including ResNet and Swin-Transformer. Beyond accuracy improvement, our method provides interpretable insights into how dynamic patterns cluster semantically across object categories.

Jun Zhuang, Casey Kennington

As new research on Large Language Models (LLMs) continues, it is difficult to keep up with new research and models. To help researchers synthesize the new research many have written survey papers, but even those have become numerous. In this paper, we develop a method to automatically assign survey papers to a taxonomy. We collect the metadata of 144 LLM survey papers and explore three paradigms to classify papers within the taxonomy. Our work indicates that leveraging graph structure information on co-category graphs can significantly outperform the language models in two paradigms; pre-trained language models' fine-tuning and zero-shot/few-shot classifications using LLMs. We find that our model surpasses an average human recognition level and that fine-tuning LLMs using weak labels generated by a smaller model, such as the GCN in this study, can be more effective than using ground-truth labels, revealing the potential of weak-to-strong generalization in the taxonomy classification task.

Jun Zhuang, Mohammad Al Hasan

Node representation learning by using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been widely explored. However, in recent years, compelling evidence has revealed that GNN-based node representation learning can be substantially deteriorated by delicately-crafted perturbations in a graph structure. To learn robust node representation in the presence of perturbations, various works have been proposed to safeguard GNNs. Within these existing works, Bayesian label transition has been proven to be more effective, but this method is extensively reliant on a well-built prior distribution. The variational inference could address this limitation by sampling the latent node embedding from a Gaussian prior distribution. Besides, leveraging the Gaussian distribution (noise) in hidden layers is an appealing strategy to strengthen the robustness of GNNs. However, our experiments indicate that such a strategy can cause over-smoothing issues during node aggregation. In this work, we propose the Graph Variational Diffusion Network (GVDN), a new node encoder that effectively manipulates Gaussian noise to safeguard robustness on perturbed graphs while alleviating over-smoothing issues through two mechanisms: Gaussian diffusion and node embedding propagation. Thanks to these two mechanisms, our model can generate robust node embeddings for recovery. Specifically, we design a retraining mechanism using the generated node embedding to recover the performance of node classifications in the presence of perturbations. The experiments verify the effectiveness of our proposed model across six public datasets.

Zichong Wang, Zhipeng Yin, Liping Yang et al.

Ensuring fairness in Graph Neural Networks is fundamental to promoting trustworthy and socially responsible machine learning systems. In response, numerous fair graph learning methods have been proposed in recent years. However, most of them assume full access to demographic information, a requirement rarely met in practice due to privacy, legal, or regulatory restrictions. To this end, this paper introduces a novel fair graph learning framework that mitigates bias in graph learning under limited demographic information. Specifically, we propose a mechanism guided by partial demographic data to generate proxies for demographic information and design a strategy that enforces consistent node embeddings across demographic groups. In addition, we develop an adaptive confidence strategy that dynamically adjusts each node's contribution to fairness and utility based on prediction confidence. We further provide theoretical analysis demonstrating that our framework, FairGLite, achieves provable upper bounds on group fairness metrics, offering formal guarantees for bias mitigation. Through extensive experiments on multiple datasets and fair graph learning frameworks, we demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in both mitigating bias and maintaining model utility.

Shuqi He, Jun Zhuang, Ding Wang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been extensively employed in node classification. Nevertheless, recent studies indicate that GNNs are vulnerable to topological perturbations, such as adversarial attacks and edge disruptions. Considerable efforts have been devoted to mitigating these challenges. For example, pioneering Bayesian methodologies, including GraphSS and LlnDT, incorporate Bayesian label transitions and topology-based label sampling to strengthen the robustness of GNNs. However, GraphSS is hindered by slow convergence, while LlnDT faces challenges in sparse graphs. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel label inference framework, TraTopo, which combines topology-driven label propagation, Bayesian label transitions, and link analysis via random walks. TraTopo significantly surpasses its predecessors on sparse graphs by utilizing random walk sampling, specifically targeting isolated nodes for link prediction, thus enhancing its effectiveness in topological sampling contexts. Additionally, TraTopo employs a shortest-path strategy to refine link prediction, thereby reducing predictive overhead and improving label inference accuracy. Empirical evaluations highlight TraTopo's superiority in node classification, significantly exceeding contemporary GCN models in accuracy.

Jun Zhuang, Mohammad Al Hasan

Supervised learning, while deployed in real-life scenarios, often encounters instances of unknown classes. Conventional algorithms for training a supervised learning model do not provide an option to detect such instances, so they miss-classify such instances with 100% probability. Open Set Recognition (OSR) and Non-Exhaustive Learning (NEL) are potential solutions to overcome this problem. Most existing methods of OSR first classify members of existing classes and then identify instances of new classes. However, many of the existing methods of OSR only makes a binary decision, i.e., they only identify the existence of the unknown class. Hence, such methods cannot distinguish test instances belonging to incremental unseen classes. On the other hand, the majority of NEL methods often make a parametric assumption over the data distribution, which either fail to return good results, due to the reason that real-life complex datasets may not follow a well-known data distribution. In this paper, we propose a new online non-exhaustive learning model, namely, Non-Exhaustive Gaussian Mixture Generative Adversarial Networks (NE-GM-GAN) to address these issues. Our proposed model synthesizes Gaussian mixture based latent representation over a deep generative model, such as GAN, for incremental detection of instances of emerging classes in the test data. Extensive experimental results on several benchmark datasets show that NE-GM-GAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in detecting instances of novel classes in streaming data.