Xuanze Chen

Jiajun Zhou, Shengbo Gong, Xuanze Chen et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable advances in graph-oriented tasks. However, real-world graphs invariably contain a certain proportion of heterophilous nodes, challenging the homophily assumption of traditional GNNs and hindering their performance. Most existing studies continue to design generic models with shared weights between heterophilous and homophilous nodes. Despite the incorporation of high-order messages or multi-channel architectures, these efforts often fall short. A minority of studies attempt to train different node groups separately but suffer from inappropriate separation metrics and low efficiency. In this paper, we first propose a new metric, termed Neighborhood Confusion (NC), to facilitate a more reliable separation of nodes. We observe that node groups with different levels of NC values exhibit certain differences in intra-group accuracy and visualized embeddings. These pave the way for Neighborhood Confusion-guided Graph Convolutional Network (NCGCN), in which nodes are grouped by their NC values and accept intra-group weight sharing and message passing. Extensive experiments on both homophilous and heterophilous benchmarks demonstrate that our framework can effectively separate nodes and yield significant performance improvement compared to the latest methods. The source code will be available in https://github.com/GISec-Team/NCGNN.

Song Hao, Wentao Fu, Xuanze Chen et al.

Traditional anomalous traffic detection methods are based on single-view analysis, which has obvious limitations in dealing with complex attacks and encrypted communications. In this regard, we propose a Multi-view Feature Fusion (MuFF) method for network anomaly traffic detection. MuFF models the temporal and interactive relationships of packets in network traffic based on the temporal and interactive viewpoints respectively. It learns temporal and interactive features. These features are then fused from different perspectives for anomaly traffic detection. Extensive experiments on six real traffic datasets show that MuFF has excellent performance in network anomalous traffic detection, which makes up for the shortcomings of detection under a single perspective.

Jiajun Zhou, Yadong Li, Xuanze Chen et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures offer a scalable path for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in node classification tasks but typically rely on static and rigid routing strategies that enforce a uniform expert budget or coarse-grained expert toggles on all nodes. This limitation overlooks the varying discriminative difficulty of nodes and leads to under-fitting for hard nodes and redundant computation for easy ones. To resolve this issue, we propose D2MoE, a novel framework that shifts the focus from static expert selection to node-wise expert resource allocation. By using predictive entropy as a real-time proxy for difficulty, D2MoE employs a difficulty-driven top-p routing mechanism to adaptively concentrate expert resources on hard nodes while reducing overhead for easy ones, achieving continuous and fine-grained expert budget scaling for node classification. Experiments on 13 benchmarks demonstrate that D2MoE achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance, surpassing leading baselines by up to 7.92% in accuracy on heterophilous graphs. Notably, on large-scale graphs, it reduces memory consumption by up to 73.07% and training time by 46.53% compared to the best-performing Graph MoE, thereby validating its superior efficiency.

Xuanze Chen, Jiajun Zhou, Yadong Li et al.

Heterogeneous graph representation learning (HGRL) is essential for modeling complex systems with diverse node and edge types. However, most existing methods are limited to closed-world settings with shared schemas and feature spaces, hindering cross-domain generalization. While recent graph foundation models improve transferability, they often target homogeneous graphs, rely on domain-specific schemas, or require rich textual attributes. Consequently, text-free and few-shot cross-domain HGRL remains underexplored. To address this, we propose CrossHGL, a foundation framework that preserves and transfers multi-relational structural semantics without external textual supervision. Specifically, a semantic-preserving transformation strategy homogenizes heterogeneous graphs while encoding interaction semantics into edge features. Based on this, a prompt-aware multi-domain pre-training framework with a Tri-Prompt mechanism captures transferable knowledge across feature, edge, and structure perspectives via self-supervised contrastive learning. For target-domain adaptation, we develop a parameter-efficient fine-tuning strategy that freezes the pre-trained backbone and performs few-shot classification via prompt composition and prototypical learning. Experiments on node-level and graph-level tasks show that CrossHGL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, yielding average relative improvements of 25.1% and 7.6% in Micro-F1 for node and graph classification, respectively, while remaining competitive in challenging feature-degenerated settings.

Xuanze Chen, Jiajun Zhou, Yadong Li et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved significant progress in graph-based learning tasks, yet their performance often deteriorates when facing heterophilous structures where connected nodes differ substantially in features and labels. To address this limitation, we propose GNNMoE, a novel entropy-driven mixture of message-passing experts framework that enables node-level adaptive representation learning. GNNMoE decomposes message passing into propagation and transformation operations and integrates them through multiple expert networks guided by a hybrid routing mechanism. And a routing entropy regularization dynamically adjusts soft weighting and soft top-$k$ routing, allowing GNNMoE to flexibly adapt to diverse neighborhood contexts. Extensive experiments on twelve benchmark datasets demonstrate that GNNMoE consistently outperforms SOTA node classification methods, while maintaining scalability and interpretability. This work provides a unified and principled approach for achieving fine-grained, personalized node representation learning.

Jiajun Zhou, Jiacheng Yao, Xuanze Chen et al.

Lateral movement is a crucial component of advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks in networks. Attackers exploit security vulnerabilities in internal networks or IoT devices, expanding their control after initial infiltration to steal sensitive data or carry out other malicious activities, posing a serious threat to system security. Existing research suggests that attackers generally employ seemingly unrelated operations to mask their malicious intentions, thereby evading existing lateral movement detection methods and hiding their intrusion traces. In this regard, we analyze host authentication log data from a graph perspective and propose a multi-scale lateral movement detection framework called LMDetect. The main workflow of this framework proceeds as follows: 1) Construct a heterogeneous multigraph from host authentication log data to strengthen the correlations among internal system entities; 2) Design a time-aware subgraph generator to extract subgraphs centered on authentication events from the heterogeneous authentication multigraph; 3) Design a multi-scale attention encoder that leverages both local and global attention to capture hidden anomalous behavior patterns in the authentication subgraphs, thereby achieving lateral movement detection. Extensive experiments on two real-world authentication log datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework in detecting lateral movement behaviors.

Jiajun Zhou, Xuanze Chen, Chenxuan Xie et al.

Graph Transformer (GT), as a special type of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), utilizes multi-head attention to facilitate high-order message passing. However, this also imposes several limitations in node classification applications: 1) nodes are susceptible to global noise; 2) self-attention computation cannot scale well to large graphs. In this work, we conduct extensive observational experiments to explore the adaptability of the GT architecture in node classification tasks and draw several conclusions: the current multi-head self-attention module in GT can be completely replaceable, while the feed-forward neural network module proves to be valuable. Based on this, we decouple the propagation (P) and transformation (T) of GNNs and explore a powerful GT architecture, named GNNFormer, which is based on the P/T combination message passing and adapted for node classification in both homophilous and heterophilous scenarios. Extensive experiments on 12 benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed GT architecture can effectively adapt to node classification tasks without being affected by global noise and computational efficiency limitations.

Xuanze Chen, Jiajun Zhou, Shanqing Yu et al.

Graph neural networks excel at graph representation learning but struggle with heterophilous data and long-range dependencies. And graph transformers address these issues through self-attention, yet face scalability and noise challenges on large-scale graphs. To overcome these limitations, we propose GNNMoE, a universal model architecture for node classification. This architecture flexibly combines fine-grained message-passing operations with a mixture-of-experts mechanism to build feature encoding blocks. Furthermore, by incorporating soft and hard gating layers to assign the most suitable expert networks to each node, we enhance the model's expressive power and adaptability to different graph types. In addition, we introduce adaptive residual connections and an enhanced FFN module into GNNMoE, further improving the expressiveness of node representation. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GNNMoE performs exceptionally well across various types of graph data, effectively alleviating the over-smoothing issue and global noise, enhancing model robustness and adaptability, while also ensuring computational efficiency on large-scale graphs.