Wenjie Zhang

Tong Xie, Yuwei Wan, Wei Huang et al.

Emerging tools bring forth fresh approaches to work, and the field of natural science is no different. In natural science, traditional manual, serial, and labour-intensive work is being augmented by automated, parallel, and iterative processes driven by artificial intelligence-based experimental automation and more. To add new capabilities in natural science, enabling the acceleration and enrichment of automation of the discovery process, we present DARWIN, a series of tailored LLMs for natural science, mainly in physics, chemistry, and material science. This series relies on open-source LLM, incorporating structured and unstructured scientific knowledge from public datasets and literature. We fine-tuned the models using over 60,000 instruction data points, emphasizing factual correctness. During the fine-tuning, we introduce the Scientific Instruction Generation (SIG) model, automating instruction generation from scientific texts. This eliminates the need for manual extraction or domain-specific knowledge graphs and efficiently injects scientific knowledge into the model. We also explore multi-task training strategies, revealing interconnections between scientific tasks. DARWIN series not only achieves state-of-the-art results on various scientific tasks but also diminishes reliance on closed-source AI models. Our research showcases the ability of LLM in the scientific domain, with the overarching goal of fostering prosperity within the broader AI for science community.

Anthony Cioppa, Silvio Giancola, Vladimir Somers et al. · pku

The SoccerNet 2023 challenges were the third annual video understanding challenges organized by the SoccerNet team. For this third edition, the challenges were composed of seven vision-based tasks split into three main themes. The first theme, broadcast video understanding, is composed of three high-level tasks related to describing events occurring in the video broadcasts: (1) action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to global actions in soccer, (2) ball action spotting, focusing on retrieving all timestamps related to the soccer ball change of state, and (3) dense video captioning, focusing on describing the broadcast with natural language and anchored timestamps. The second theme, field understanding, relates to the single task of (4) camera calibration, focusing on retrieving the intrinsic and extrinsic camera parameters from images. The third and last theme, player understanding, is composed of three low-level tasks related to extracting information about the players: (5) re-identification, focusing on retrieving the same players across multiple views, (6) multiple object tracking, focusing on tracking players and the ball through unedited video streams, and (7) jersey number recognition, focusing on recognizing the jersey number of players from tracklets. Compared to the previous editions of the SoccerNet challenges, tasks (2-3-7) are novel, including new annotations and data, task (4) was enhanced with more data and annotations, and task (6) now focuses on end-to-end approaches. More information on the tasks, challenges, and leaderboards are available on https://www.soccer-net.org. Baselines and development kits can be found on https://github.com/SoccerNet.

Qingqiang Sun, Xuemin Lin, Ying Zhang et al.

Network alignment task, which aims to identify corresponding nodes in different networks, is of great significance for many subsequent applications. Without the need for labeled anchor links, unsupervised alignment methods have been attracting more and more attention. However, the topological consistency assumptions defined by existing methods are generally low-order and less accurate because only the edge-indiscriminative topological pattern is considered, which is especially risky in an unsupervised setting. To reposition the focus of the alignment process from low-order to higher-order topological consistency, in this paper, we propose a fully unsupervised network alignment framework named HTC. The proposed higher-order topological consistency is formulated based on edge orbits, which is merged into the information aggregation process of a graph convolutional network so that the alignment consistencies are transformed into the similarity of node embeddings. Furthermore, the encoder is trained to be multi-orbit-aware and then be refined to identify more trusted anchor links. Node correspondence is comprehensively evaluated by integrating all different orders of consistency. {In addition to sound theoretical analysis, the superiority of the proposed method is also empirically demonstrated through extensive experimental evaluation. On three pairs of real-world datasets and two pairs of synthetic datasets, our HTC consistently outperforms a wide variety of unsupervised and supervised methods with the least or comparable time consumption. It also exhibits robustness to structural noise as a result of our multi-orbit-aware training mechanism.

Yufan Sheng, Xin Cao, Yixiang Fang et al.

Spatial objects often come with textual information, such as Points of Interest (POIs) with their descriptions, which are referred to as geo-textual data. To retrieve such data, spatial keyword queries that take into account both spatial proximity and textual relevance have been extensively studied. Existing indexes designed for spatial keyword queries are mostly built based on the geo-textual data without considering the distribution of queries already received. However, previous studies have shown that utilizing the known query distribution can improve the index structure for future query processing. In this paper, we propose WISK, a learned index for spatial keyword queries, which self-adapts for optimizing querying costs given a query workload. One key challenge is how to utilize both structured spatial attributes and unstructured textual information during learning the index. We first divide the data objects into partitions, aiming to minimize the processing costs of the given query workload. We prove the NP-hardness of the partitioning problem and propose a machine learning model to find the optimal partitions. Then, to achieve more pruning power, we build a hierarchical structure based on the generated partitions in a bottom-up manner with a reinforcement learning-based approach. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world datasets and query workloads with various distributions, and the results show that WISK outperforms all competitors, achieving up to 8x speedup in querying time with comparable storage overhead.

Wenjie Zhang, Xiaoning Song, Zhenhua Feng et al.

Recently, prompt-based learning has gained popularity across many natural language processing (NLP) tasks by reformulating them into a cloze-style format to better align pre-trained language models (PLMs) with downstream tasks. However, applying this approach to relation classification poses unique challenges. Specifically, associating natural language words that fill the masked token with semantic relation labels (\textit{e.g.} \textit{``org:founded\_by}'') is difficult. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel prompt-based learning method, namely LabelPrompt, for the relation classification task. Motivated by the intuition to ``GIVE MODEL CHOICES!'', we first define additional tokens to represent relation labels, which regard these tokens as the verbaliser with semantic initialisation and explicitly construct them with a prompt template method. Then, to mitigate inconsistency between predicted relations and given entities, we implement an entity-aware module with contrastive learning. Last, we conduct an attention query strategy within the self-attention layer to differentiates prompt tokens and sequence tokens. Together, these strategies enhance the adaptability of prompt-based learning, especially when only small labelled datasets is available. Comprehensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method, particularly in the few-shot scenario.

Zhiyuan Yan, Min Li, Zhengyuan Shi et al.

Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT) is fundamental to many applications. Existing works have used graph neural networks (GNNs) for (approximate) SAT solving. Typical GNN-based end-to-end SAT solvers predict SAT solutions concurrently. We show that for a group of symmetric SAT problems, the concurrent prediction is guaranteed to produce a wrong answer because it neglects the dependency among Boolean variables in SAT problems. % We propose AsymSAT, a GNN-based architecture which integrates recurrent neural networks to generate dependent predictions for variable assignments. The experiment results show that dependent variable prediction extends the solving capability of the GNN-based method as it improves the number of solved SAT instances on large test sets.

Linhao Luo, Yixiang Fang, Moli Lu et al.

Heterogeneous graphs, which contain nodes and edges of multiple types, are prevalent in various domains, including bibliographic networks, social media, and knowledge graphs. As a fundamental task in analyzing heterogeneous graphs, relevance measure aims to calculate the relevance between two objects of different types, which has been used in many applications such as web search, recommendation, and community detection. Most of existing relevance measures focus on homogeneous networks where objects are of the same type, and a few measures are developed for heterogeneous graphs, but they often need the pre-defined meta-path. Defining meaningful meta-paths requires much domain knowledge, which largely limits their applications, especially on schema-rich heterogeneous graphs like knowledge graphs. Recently, the Graph Neural Network (GNN) has been widely applied in many graph mining tasks, but it has not been applied for measuring relevance yet. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel GNN-based relevance measure, namely GSim. Specifically, we first theoretically analyze and show that GNN is effective for measuring the relevance of nodes in the graph. We then propose a context path-based graph neural network (CP-GNN) to automatically leverage the semantics in heterogeneous graphs. Moreover, we exploit CP-GNN to support relevance measures between two objects of any type. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GSim outperforms existing measures.

Lincan Li, Wei Shao, Wei Dong et al.

The aspiration of the next generation's autonomous driving (AD) technology relies on the dedicated integration and interaction among intelligent perception, prediction, planning, and low-level control. There has been a huge bottleneck regarding the upper bound of autonomous driving algorithm performance, a consensus from academia and industry believes that the key to surmount the bottleneck lies in data-centric autonomous driving technology. Recent advancement in AD simulation, closed-loop model training, and AD big data engine have gained some valuable experience. However, there is a lack of systematic knowledge and deep understanding regarding how to build efficient data-centric AD technology for AD algorithm self-evolution and better AD big data accumulation. To fill in the identified research gaps, this article will closely focus on reviewing the state-of-the-art data-driven autonomous driving technologies, with an emphasis on the comprehensive taxonomy of autonomous driving datasets characterized by milestone generations, key features, data acquisition settings, etc. Furthermore, we provide a systematic review of the existing benchmark closed-loop AD big data pipelines from the industrial frontier, including the procedure of closed-loop frameworks, key technologies, and empirical studies. Finally, the future directions, potential applications, limitations and concerns are discussed to arouse efforts from both academia and industry for promoting the further development of autonomous driving. The project repository is available at: https://github.com/LincanLi98/Awesome-Data-Centric-Autonomous-Driving.

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge. Current hybrid RAG system retrieves evidence from both knowledge graphs (KGs) and text documents to support LLM reasoning. However, it faces challenges like handling multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, multi-source verification, and effective graph utilization. To address these limitations, we present HydraRAG, a training-free framework that unifies graph topology, document semantics, and source reliability to support deep, faithful reasoning in LLMs. HydraRAG handles multi-hop and multi-entity problems through agent-driven exploration that combines structured and unstructured retrieval, increasing both diversity and precision of evidence. To tackle multi-source verification, HydraRAG uses a tri-factor cross-source verification (source trustworthiness assessment, cross-source corroboration, and entity-path alignment), to balance topic relevance with cross-modal agreement. By leveraging graph structure, HydraRAG fuses heterogeneous sources, guides efficient exploration, and prunes noise early. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets show that HydraRAG achieves overall state-of-the-art results on all benchmarks with GPT-3.5-Turbo, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by an average of 20.3% and up to 30.1%. Furthermore, HydraRAG enables smaller models (e.g., Llama-3.1-8B) to achieve reasoning performance comparable to that of GPT-4-Turbo. The source code is available on https://stevetantan.github.io/HydraRAG/.

Xiaomin Yu, Pengxiang Ding, Wenjie Zhang et al.

Training vision-language models (VLMs) typically requires large-scale, high-quality image-text pairs, but collecting or synthesizing such data is costly. In contrast, text data is abundant and inexpensive, prompting the question: can high-quality multimodal training data be synthesized purely from text? To tackle this, we propose a cross-integrated three-stage multimodal data synthesis framework, which generates two datasets: Unicorn-1.2M and Unicorn-471K-Instruction. In Stage 1: Diverse Caption Data Synthesis, we construct 1.2M semantically diverse high-quality captions by expanding sparse caption seeds using large language models (LLMs). In Stage 2: Instruction-Tuning Data Generation, we further process 471K captions into multi-turn instruction-tuning tasks to support complex reasoning. Finally, in Stage 3: Modality Representation Transfer, these textual captions representations are transformed into visual representations, resulting in diverse synthetic image representations. This three-stage process enables us to construct Unicorn-1.2M for pretraining and Unicorn-471K-Instruction for instruction-tuning, without relying on real images. By eliminating the dependency on real images while maintaining data quality and diversity, our framework offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for VLMs training. Code is available at https://github.com/Yu-xm/Unicorn.git.

Fan Li, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenjie Zhang et al.

Deep graph models have achieved great success in network representation learning. However, their focus on pairwise relationships restricts their ability to learn pervasive higher-order interactions in real-world systems, which can be naturally modeled as hypergraphs. To tackle this issue, Hypergraph Neural Networks (HNNs) have garnered substantial attention in recent years. Despite the proposal of numerous HNNs, the absence of consistent experimental protocols and multi-dimensional empirical analysis impedes deeper understanding and further development of HNN research. While several toolkits for deep hypergraph learning (DHGL) have been introduced to facilitate algorithm evaluation, they provide only limited quantitative evaluation results and insufficient coverage of advanced algorithms, datasets, and benchmark tasks. To fill the gap, we introduce DHG-Bench, the first comprehensive benchmark for HNNs. Specifically, DHG-Bench systematically investigates the characteristics of HNNs in terms of four dimensions: effectiveness, efficiency, robustness, and fairness. We comprehensively evaluate 17 state-of-the-art HNN algorithms on 22 diverse datasets spanning node-, edge-, and graph-level tasks, under unified experimental settings. Extensive experiments reveal both the strengths and limitations of existing algorithms, offering valuable insights and directions for future research. Furthermore, to facilitate reproducible research, we have developed an easy-to-use library for training and evaluating different HNN methods. The DHG-Bench library is available at: https://github.com/Coco-Hut/DHG-Bench.

Lingkai Meng, Yu Shao, Long Yuan et al.

Usability evaluation is critical to the impact and adoption of open source software (OSS), yet traditional methods relying on human evaluators suffer from high costs and limited scalability. To address these limitations, we introduce OSS-UAgent, an automated, configurable, and interactive agent-based usability evaluation framework specifically designed for open source software. Our framework employs intelligent agents powered by large language models (LLMs) to simulate developers performing programming tasks across various experience levels (from Junior to Expert). By dynamically constructing platform-specific knowledge bases, OSS-UAgent ensures accurate and context-aware code generation. The generated code is automatically evaluated across multiple dimensions, including compliance, correctness, and readability, providing a comprehensive measure of the software's usability. Additionally, our demonstration showcases OSS-UAgent's practical application in evaluating graph analytics platforms, highlighting its effectiveness in automating usability evaluation.

Lincan Li, Hanchen Wang, Wenjie Zhang et al.

Spatial-Temporal Graph (STG) data is characterized as dynamic, heterogenous, and non-stationary, leading to the continuous challenge of spatial-temporal graph learning. In the past few years, various GNN-based methods have been proposed to solely focus on mimicking the relationships among node individuals of the STG network, ignoring the significance of modeling the intrinsic features that exist in STG system over time. In contrast, modern Selective State Space Models (SSSMs) present a new approach which treat STG Network as a system, and meticulously explore the STG system's dynamic state evolution across temporal dimension. In this work, we introduce Spatial-Temporal Graph Mamba (STG-Mamba) as the first exploration of leveraging the powerful selective state space models for STG learning by treating STG Network as a system, and employing the Spatial-Temporal Selective State Space Module (ST-S3M) to precisely focus on the selected STG latent features. Furthermore, to strengthen GNN's ability of modeling STG data under the setting of selective state space models, we propose Kalman Filtering Graph Neural Networks (KFGN) for dynamically integrate and upgrade the STG embeddings from different temporal granularities through a learnable Kalman Filtering statistical theory-based approach. Extensive empirical studies are conducted on three benchmark STG forecasting datasets, demonstrating the performance superiority and computational efficiency of STG-Mamba. It not only surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of STG forecasting performance, but also effectively alleviate the computational bottleneck of large-scale graph networks in reducing the computational cost of FLOPs and test inference time. The implementation code is available at: \url{https://github.com/LincanLi98/STG-Mamba}.

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in various tasks but struggle with hallucination problems and lack of relevant knowledge, especially in deep complex reasoning and knowledge-intensive tasks. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which capture vast amounts of facts in a structured format, offer a reliable source of knowledge for reasoning. However, existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods face challenges like handling multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, and effectively utilizing graph structures. To address these issues, we propose Paths-over-Graph (PoG), a novel method that enhances LLM reasoning by integrating knowledge reasoning paths from KGs, improving the interpretability and faithfulness of LLM outputs. PoG tackles multi-hop and multi-entity questions through a three-phase dynamic multi-hop path exploration, which combines the inherent knowledge of LLMs with factual knowledge from KGs. In order to improve the efficiency, PoG prunes irrelevant information from the graph exploration first and introduces efficient three-step pruning techniques that incorporate graph structures, LLM prompting, and a pre-trained language model (e.g., SBERT) to effectively narrow down the explored candidate paths. This ensures all reasoning paths contain highly relevant information captured from KGs, making the reasoning faithful and interpretable in problem-solving. PoG innovatively utilizes graph structure to prune the irrelevant noise and represents the first method to implement multi-entity deep path detection on KGs for LLM reasoning tasks. Comprehensive experiments on five benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate PoG outperforms the state-of-the-art method ToG across GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 18.9%. Notably, PoG with GPT-3.5-Turbo surpasses ToG with GPT-4 by up to 23.9%.

Yuwei Wan, Yixuan Liu, Aswathy Ajith et al.

We introduce SciQAG, a novel framework for automatically generating high-quality science question-answer pairs from a large corpus of scientific literature based on large language models (LLMs). SciQAG consists of a QA generator and a QA evaluator, which work together to extract diverse and research-level questions and answers from scientific papers. Utilizing this framework, we construct a large-scale, high-quality, open-ended science QA dataset containing 188,042 QA pairs extracted from 22,743 scientific papers across 24 scientific domains. We also introduce SciQAG-24D, a new benchmark task designed to evaluate the science question-answering ability of LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs on the SciQAG dataset significantly improves their performance on both open-ended question answering and scientific tasks. To foster research and collaboration, we make the datasets, models, and evaluation codes publicly available, contributing to the advancement of science question answering and developing more interpretable and reasoning-capable AI systems.

Chengpei Xu, Hao Fu, Long Ma et al.

Localizing text in low-light environments is challenging due to visual degradations. Although a straightforward solution involves a two-stage pipeline with low-light image enhancement (LLE) as the initial step followed by detector, LLE is primarily designed for human vision instead of machine and can accumulate errors. In this work, we propose an efficient and effective single-stage approach for localizing text in dark that circumvents the need for LLE. We introduce a constrained learning module as an auxiliary mechanism during the training stage of the text detector. This module is designed to guide the text detector in preserving textual spatial features amidst feature map resizing, thus minimizing the loss of spatial information in texts under low-light visual degradations. Specifically, we incorporate spatial reconstruction and spatial semantic constraints within this module to ensure the text detector acquires essential positional and contextual range knowledge. Our approach enhances the original text detector's ability to identify text's local topological features using a dynamic snake feature pyramid network and adopts a bottom-up contour shaping strategy with a novel rectangular accumulation technique for accurate delineation of streamlined text features. In addition, we present a comprehensive low-light dataset for arbitrary-shaped text, encompassing diverse scenes and languages. Notably, our method achieves state-of-the-art results on this low-light dataset and exhibits comparable performance on standard normal light datasets. The code and dataset will be released.

Xinyang Tong, Pengxiang Ding, Yiguo Fan et al.

This paper addresses the inherent inference latency challenges associated with deploying multimodal large language models (MLLM) in quadruped vision-language-action (QUAR-VLA) tasks. Our investigation reveals that conventional parameter reduction techniques ultimately impair the performance of the language foundation model during the action instruction tuning phase, making them unsuitable for this purpose. We introduce a novel latency-free quadruped MLLM model, dubbed QUART-Online, designed to enhance inference efficiency without degrading the performance of the language foundation model. By incorporating Action Chunk Discretization (ACD), we compress the original action representation space, mapping continuous action values onto a smaller set of discrete representative vectors while preserving critical information. Subsequently, we fine-tune the MLLM to integrate vision, language, and compressed actions into a unified semantic space. Experimental results demonstrate that QUART-Online operates in tandem with the existing MLLM system, achieving real-time inference in sync with the underlying controller frequency, significantly boosting the success rate across various tasks by 65%. Our project page is https://quart-online.github.io.

Fan Li, Xiaoyang Wang, Dawei Cheng et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) provides a promising alternative for representation learning on hypergraphs without costly labels. However, existing hypergraph SSL models are mostly based on contrastive methods with the instance-level discrimination strategy, suffering from two significant limitations: (1) They select negative samples arbitrarily, which is unreliable in deciding similar and dissimilar pairs, causing training bias. (2) They often require a large number of negative samples, resulting in expensive computational costs. To address the above issues, we propose SE-HSSL, a hypergraph SSL framework with three sampling-efficient self-supervised signals. Specifically, we introduce two sampling-free objectives leveraging the canonical correlation analysis as the node-level and group-level self-supervised signals. Additionally, we develop a novel hierarchical membership-level contrast objective motivated by the cascading overlap relationship in hypergraphs, which can further reduce membership sampling bias and improve the efficiency of sample utilization. Through comprehensive experiments on 7 real-world hypergraphs, we demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the state-of-the-art method in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Jianwei Wang, Kai Wang, Ying Zhang et al.

Missing data imputation, which aims to impute the missing values in the raw datasets to achieve the completeness of datasets, is crucial for modern data-driven models like large language models (LLMs) and has attracted increasing interest over the past decades. Despite its importance, existing solutions for missing data imputation either 1) only support numerical and categorical data or 2) show an unsatisfactory performance due to their design prioritizing text data and the lack of key properties for tabular data imputation. In this paper, we propose UnIMP, a Unified IMPutation framework that leverages LLM and high-order message passing to enhance the imputation of mixed-type data including numerical, categorical, and text data. Specifically, we first introduce a cell-oriented hypergraph to model the table. We then propose BiHMP, an efficient Bidirectional High-order Message-Passing network to aggregate global-local information and high-order relationships on the constructed hypergraph while capturing the inter-column heterogeneity and intra-column homogeneity. To effectively and efficiently align the capacity of the LLM with the information aggregated by BiHMP, we introduce Xfusion, which, together with BiHMP, acts as adapters for the LLM. We follow a pre-training and fine-tuning pipeline to train UnIMP, integrating two optimizations: chunking technique, which divides tables into smaller chunks to enhance efficiency; and progressive masking technique, which gradually adapts the model to learn more complex data patterns. Both theoretical proofs and empirical experiments on 10 real world datasets highlight the superiority of UnIMP over existing techniques.

Yuanyuan Xu, Wenjie Zhang, Xuemin Lin et al.

Dynamic graphs are formulated in continuous-time or discrete-time dynamic graphs. They differ in temporal granularity: Continuous-Time Dynamic Graphs (CTDGs) exhibit rapid, localized changes, while Discrete-Time Dynamic Graphs (DTDGs) show gradual, global updates. This difference leads to isolated developments in representation learning for each type. To advance representation learning, recent research attempts to design a unified model capable of handling both CTDGs and DTDGs. However, it typically focuses on local dynamic propagation for temporal structure learning in the time domain, failing to accurately capture the structural evolution associated with each temporal granularity. In addition, existing works-whether specific or unified-often overlook the issue of temporal noise, compromising the model robustness and effectiveness. To better model both types of dynamic graphs, we propose UniDyG, a unified and effective representation learning approach, which scales to large dynamic graphs. We first propose a novel Fourier Graph Attention (FGAT) mechanism that can model local and global structural correlations based on recent neighbors and complex-number selective aggregation, while theoretically ensuring consistent representations of dynamic graphs over time. Based on approximation theory, we demonstrate that FGAT is well-suited to capture the underlying structures in CTDGs and DTDGs. We further enhance FGAT to resist temporal noise by designing an energy-gated unit, which adaptively filters out high-frequency noise according to the energy. Last, we leverage our FGAT mechanisms for temporal structure learning and employ the frequency-enhanced linear function for node-level dynamic updates, facilitating the generation of high-quality temporal embeddings. Extensive experiments show that our UniDyG achieves an average improvement of 14.4% over sixteen baselines across nine dynamic graphs.

Yuwei Wan, Tong Xie, Nan Wu et al.

Exploring the predictive capabilities of language models in material science is an ongoing interest. This study investigates the application of language model embeddings to enhance material property prediction in materials science. By evaluating various contextual embedding methods and pre-trained models, including Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT), we demonstrate that domain-specific models, particularly MatBERT significantly outperform general-purpose models in extracting implicit knowledge from compound names and material properties. Our findings reveal that information-dense embeddings from the third layer of MatBERT, combined with a context-averaging approach, offer the most effective method for capturing material-property relationships from the scientific literature. We also identify a crucial "tokenizer effect," highlighting the importance of specialized text processing techniques that preserve complete compound names while maintaining consistent token counts. These insights underscore the value of domain-specific training and tokenization in materials science applications and offer a promising pathway for accelerating the discovery and development of new materials through AI-driven approaches.

Guangxin Su, Yifan Zhu, Wenjie Zhang et al.

Graph representation learning, involving both node features and graph structures, is crucial for real-world applications but often encounters pervasive noise. State-of-the-art methods typically address noise by focusing separately on node features with large language models (LLMs) and on graph structures with graph structure learning models (GSLMs). In this paper, we introduce LangGSL, a robust framework that integrates the complementary strengths of pre-trained language models and GSLMs to jointly enhance both node feature and graph structure learning. In LangGSL, we first leverage LLMs to filter noise in the raw data and extract valuable cleaned information as features, enhancing the synergy of downstream models. During the mutual learning phase in LangGSL, the core idea is to leverage the relatively small language model (LM) to process local attributes and generate reliable pseudo-labels and informative node embeddings, which are then integrated into the GSLM's prediction phase. This approach enriches the global context and enhances overall performance. Meanwhile, GSLM refines the evolving graph structure constructed from the LM's output, offering updated labels back to the LM as additional guidance, thus facilitating a more effective mutual learning process. The LM and GSLM work synergistically, complementing each other's strengths and offsetting weaknesses within a variational information-maximizing framework, resulting in enhanced node features and a more robust graph structure. Extensive experiments on diverse graph datasets of varying scales and across different task scenarios demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Jianwei Wang, Mengqi Wang, Yinsi Zhou et al.

Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) compliance assessment demands dynamic real-time decision-making under complicated regulations and complex human-machine-environment interactions. While large language models (LLMs) hold significant potential for decision intelligence and contextual dialogue, their capacity for domain-specific knowledge in HSE and structured legal reasoning remains underexplored. We introduce HSE-Bench, the first benchmark dataset designed to evaluate the HSE compliance assessment capabilities of LLM. HSE-Bench comprises over 1,000 manually curated questions drawn from regulations, court cases, safety exams, and fieldwork videos, and integrates a reasoning flow based on Issue spotting, rule Recall, rule Application, and rule Conclusion (IRAC) to assess the holistic reasoning pipeline. We conduct extensive evaluations on different prompting strategies and more than 10 LLMs, including foundation models, reasoning models and multimodal vision models. The results show that, although current LLMs achieve good performance, their capabilities largely rely on semantic matching rather than principled reasoning grounded in the underlying HSE compliance context. Moreover, their native reasoning trace lacks the systematic legal reasoning required for rigorous HSE compliance assessment. To alleviate these, we propose a new prompting technique, Reasoning of Expert (RoE), which guides LLMs to simulate the reasoning process of different experts for compliance assessment and reach a more accurate unified decision. We hope our study highlights reasoning gaps in LLMs for HSE compliance and inspires further research on related tasks.

Le Pan, Yuanjiang Cao, Chengkai Huang et al.

Recommender Systems (RSs) aim to provide personalized recommendations for users. A newly discovered bias, known as sentiment bias, uncovers a common phenomenon within Review-based RSs (RRSs): the recommendation accuracy of users or items with negative reviews deteriorates compared with users or items with positive reviews. Critical users and niche items are disadvantaged by such unfair recommendations. We study this problem from the perspective of counterfactual inference with two stages. At the model training stage, we build a causal graph and model how sentiment influences the final rating score. During the inference stage, we decouple the direct and indirect effects to mitigate the impact of sentiment bias and remove the indirect effect using counterfactual inference. We have conducted extensive experiments, and the results validate that our model can achieve comparable performance on rating prediction for better recommendations and effective mitigation of sentiment bias. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to employ counterfactual inference on sentiment bias mitigation in RSs.

Xiangjun Zai, Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang et al.

Knowledge Hypergraphs (KHs) have recently emerged as a knowledge representation for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), offering a paradigm to model multi-entity relations into a structured form. However, existing KH-based RAG methods suffer from three major limitations: static retrieval planning, non-adaptive retrieval execution, and superficial use of KH structure and semantics, which constrain their ability to perform effective multi-hop question answering. To overcome these limitations, we propose PRoH, a dynamic Planning and Reasoning over Knowledge Hypergraphs framework. PRoH incorporates three core innovations: (i) a context-aware planning module that sketches the local KH neighborhood to guide structurally grounded reasoning plan generation; (ii) a structured question decomposition process that organizes subquestions as a dynamically evolving Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to enable adaptive, multi-trajectory exploration; and (iii) an Entity-Weighted Overlap (EWO)-guided reasoning path retrieval algorithm that prioritizes semantically coherent hyperedge traversals. Experiments across multiple domains demonstrate that PRoH achieves state-of-the-art performance, surpassing the prior SOTA model HyperGraphRAG by an average of 19.73% in F1 and 8.41% in Generation Evaluation (G-E) score, while maintaining strong robustness in long-range multi-hop reasoning tasks.

Han Chen, Hanchen Wang, Hongmei Chen et al.

The advancement of graph-based malware analysis is critically limited by the absence of large-scale datasets that capture the inherent hierarchical structure of software. Existing methods often oversimplify programs into single level graphs, failing to model the crucial semantic relationship between high-level functional interactions and low-level instruction logic. To bridge this gap, we introduce \dataset, the largest public hierarchical graph dataset for malware analysis, comprising over \textbf{200M} Control Flow Graphs (CFGs) nested within \textbf{595K} Function Call Graphs (FCGs). This two-level representation preserves structural semantics essential for building robust detectors resilient to code obfuscation and malware evolution. We demonstrate HiGraph's utility through a large-scale analysis that reveals distinct structural properties of benign and malicious software, establishing it as a foundational benchmark for the community. The dataset and tools are publicly available at https://higraph.org.

Xushuo Tang, Yi Ding, Zhengyi Yang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in sensitive contexts where fairness and inclusivity are critical. Pronoun usage, especially concerning gender-neutral and neopronouns, remains a key challenge for responsible AI. Prior work, such as the MISGENDERED benchmark, revealed significant limitations in earlier LLMs' handling of inclusive pronouns, but was constrained to outdated models and limited evaluations. In this study, we introduce MISGENDERED+, an extended and updated benchmark for evaluating LLMs' pronoun fidelity. We benchmark five representative LLMs, GPT-4o, Claude 4, DeepSeek-V3, Qwen Turbo, and Qwen2.5, across zero-shot, few-shot, and gender identity inference. Our results show notable improvements compared with previous studies, especially in binary and gender-neutral pronoun accuracy. However, accuracy on neopronouns and reverse inference tasks remains inconsistent, underscoring persistent gaps in identity-sensitive reasoning. We discuss implications, model-specific observations, and avenues for future inclusive AI research.

Yufan Sheng, Xin Cao, Kaiqi Zhao et al.

Cardinality estimation is a fundamental functionality in database systems. Most existing cardinality estimators focus on handling predicates over numeric or categorical data. They have largely omitted an important data type, set-valued data, which frequently occur in contemporary applications such as information retrieval and recommender systems. The few existing estimators for such data either favor high-frequency elements or rely on a partial independence assumption, which limits their practical applicability. We propose ACE, an Attention-based Cardinality Estimator for estimating the cardinality of queries over set-valued data. We first design a distillation-based data encoder to condense the dataset into a compact matrix. We then design an attention-based query analyzer to capture correlations among query elements. To handle variable-sized queries, a pooling module is introduced, followed by a regression model (MLP) to generate final cardinality estimates. We evaluate ACE on three datasets with varying query element distributions, demonstrating that ACE outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors in terms of both accuracy and efficiency.

Ping Chen, Wenjie Zhang, Shuibing He et al.

Large model training often uses recomputation to alleviate memory pressure and pipelines to exploit the parallelism of data, tensors, and devices. However, existing recomputation approaches may incur high overhead when training real-world models, as they are executed on demand in the critical training path. In this paper, we present Lynx, a new recomputation framework to reduce overhead by overlapping recomputation with communication in training pipelines. To reduce the large search space for recomputation strategies, we propose a heuristic-based recomputation scheduling algorithm, which is based on the observation that there are identical structures in large DNN models so that we can apply the same scheduling policy to all such structures. Additionally, we propose a recomputation-aware model partitioning method to balance each stage's execution time for improved training throughput. Our comprehensive evaluation using GPT models with 1.3B-23B parameters shows that Lynx outperforms existing recomputation approaches by up to 1.37x.

Hanchen Wang, Ying Zhang, Lu Qin et al.

Subgraph matching is a fundamental problem in various fields that use graph structured data. Subgraph matching algorithms enumerate all isomorphic embeddings of a query graph q in a data graph G. An important branch of matching algorithms exploit the backtracking search approach which recursively extends intermediate results following a matching order of query vertices. It has been shown that the matching order plays a critical role in time efficiency of these backtracking based subgraph matching algorithms. In recent years, many advanced techniques for query vertex ordering (i.e., matching order generation) have been proposed to reduce the unpromising intermediate results according to the preset heuristic rules. In this paper, for the first time we apply the Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) techniques to generate the high-quality matching order for subgraph matching algorithms. Instead of using the fixed heuristics to generate the matching order, our model could capture and make full use of the graph information, and thus determine the query vertex order with the adaptive learning-based rule that could significantly reduces the number of redundant enumerations. With the help of the reinforcement learning framework, our model is able to consider the long-term benefits rather than only consider the local information at current ordering step.Extensive experiments on six real-life data graphs demonstrate that our proposed matching order generation technique could reduce up to two orders of magnitude of query processing time compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Jiabao Jin, Peng Cheng, Lei Chen et al.

With the development of traffic prediction technology, spatiotemporal prediction models have attracted more and more attention from academia communities and industry. However, most existing researches focus on reducing model's prediction error but ignore the error caused by the uneven distribution of spatial events within a region. In this paper, we study a region partitioning problem, namely optimal grid size selection problem (OGSS), which aims to minimize the real error of spatiotemporal prediction models by selecting the optimal grid size. In order to solve OGSS, we analyze the upper bound of real error of spatiotemporal prediction models and minimize the real error by minimizing its upper bound. Through in-depth analysis, we find that the upper bound of real error will decrease then increase when the number of model grids increase from 1 to the maximum allowed value. Then, we propose two algorithms, namely Ternary Search and Iterative Method, to automatically find the optimal grid size. Finally, the experiments verify that the error of prediction has the same trend as its upper bound, and the change trend of the upper bound of real error with respect to the increase of the number of model grids will decrease then increase. Meanwhile, in a case study, by selecting the optimal grid size, the order dispatching results of a state-of-the-art prediction-based algorithm can be improved up to 13.6%, which shows the effectiveness of our methods on tuning the region partition for spatiotemporal prediction models.

Linhao Luo, Yixiang Fang, Xin Cao et al.

Community detection, aiming to group the graph nodes into clusters with dense inner-connection, is a fundamental graph mining task. Recently, it has been studied on the heterogeneous graph, which contains multiple types of nodes and edges, posing great challenges for modeling the high-order relationship between nodes. With the surge of graph embedding mechanism, it has also been adopted to community detection. A remarkable group of works use the meta-path to capture the high-order relationship between nodes and embed them into nodes' embedding to facilitate community detection. However, defining meaningful meta-paths requires much domain knowledge, which largely limits their applications, especially on schema-rich heterogeneous graphs like knowledge graphs. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we propose to exploit the context path to capture the high-order relationship between nodes, and build a Context Path-based Graph Neural Network (CP-GNN) model. It recursively embeds the high-order relationship between nodes into the node embedding with attention mechanisms to discriminate the importance of different relationships. By maximizing the expectation of the co-occurrence of nodes connected by context paths, the model can learn the nodes' embeddings that both well preserve the high-order relationship between nodes and are helpful for community detection. Extensive experimental results on four real-world datasets show that CP-GNN outperforms the state-of-the-art community detection methods.

Qihao Zhu, Zeyu Sun, Yuan-an Xiao et al.

Automated Program Repair (APR) helps improve the efficiency of software development and maintenance. Recent APR techniques use deep learning, particularly the encoder-decoder architecture, to generate patches. Though existing DL-based APR approaches have proposed different encoder architectures, the decoder remains to be the standard one, which generates a sequence of tokens one by one to replace the faulty statement. This decoder has multiple limitations: 1) allowing to generate syntactically incorrect programs, 2) inefficiently representing small edits, and 3) not being able to generate project-specific identifiers. In this paper, we propose Recoder, a syntax-guided edit decoder with placeholder generation. Recoder is novel in multiple aspects: 1) Recoder generates edits rather than modified code, allowing efficient representation of small edits; 2) Recoder is syntax-guided, with the novel provider/decider architecture to ensure the syntactic correctness of the patched program and accurate generation; 3) Recoder generates placeholders that could be instantiated as project-specific identifiers later. We conduct experiments to evaluate Recoder on 395 bugs from Defects4J v1.2 and 420 additional bugs from Defects4J v2.0. Our results show that Recoder repairs 53 bugs on Defects4J v1.2, which achieves 21.4% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art approach for single-hunk bugs (TBar). Importantly, to our knowledge, Recoder is the first DL-based APR approach that has outperformed the traditional APR approaches on this dataset. Furthermore, Recoder also repairs 19 bugs on the additional bugs from Defects4J v2.0, which is 137.5% more than TBar (8 bugs) and 850% more than SimFix (2 bugs). This result suggests that Recoder has better generalizability than existing APR approaches.

Zeyu Sun, Wenjie Zhang, Lili Mou et al.

Existing graph neural networks (GNNs) largely rely on node embeddings, which represent a node as a vector by its identity, type, or content. However, graphs with unattributed nodes widely exist in real-world applications (e.g., anonymized social networks). Previous GNNs either assign random labels to nodes (which introduces artefacts to the GNN) or assign one embedding to all nodes (which fails to explicitly distinguish one node from another). Further, when these GNNs are applied to unattributed node classification problems, they have an undesired equivariance property, which are fundamentally unable to address the data with multiple possible outputs. In this paper, we analyze the limitation of existing approaches to node classification problems. Inspired by our analysis, we propose a generalized equivariance property and a Preferential Labeling technique that satisfies the desired property asymptotically. Experimental results show that we achieve high performance in several unattributed node classification tasks.

Junjie Wang, Xiangfeng Wang, Bo Jin et al.

Generalized zero-shot learning (GZSL) tackles the problem of learning to classify instances involving both seen classes and unseen ones. The key issue is how to effectively transfer the model learned from seen classes to unseen classes. Existing works in GZSL usually assume that some prior information about unseen classes are available. However, such an assumption is unrealistic when new unseen classes appear dynamically. To this end, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph-based knowledge transfer method (HGKT) for GZSL, agnostic to unseen classes and instances, by leveraging graph neural network. Specifically, a structured heterogeneous graph is constructed with high-level representative nodes for seen classes, which are chosen through Wasserstein barycenter in order to simultaneously capture inter-class and intra-class relationship. The aggregation and embedding functions can be learned through graph neural network, which can be used to compute the embeddings of unseen classes by transferring the knowledge from their neighbors. Extensive experiments on public benchmark datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art results.

Yang Yang, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang et al.

In this paper, we study the problem of approximate containment similarity search. Given two records Q and X, the containment similarity between Q and X with respect to Q is |Q intersect X|/ |Q|. Given a query record Q and a set of records S, the containment similarity search finds a set of records from S whose containment similarity regarding Q are not less than the given threshold. This problem has many important applications in commercial and scientific fields such as record matching and domain search. Existing solution relies on the asymmetric LSH method by transforming the containment similarity to well-studied Jaccard similarity. In this paper, we use a different framework by transforming the containment similarity to set intersection. We propose a novel augmented KMV sketch technique, namely GB-KMV, which is data-dependent and can achieve a good trade-off between the sketch size and the accuracy. We provide a set of theoretical analysis to underpin the proposed augmented KMV sketch technique, and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art technique LSH-E in terms of estimation accuracy under practical assumption. Our comprehensive experiments on real-life datasets verify that GB-KMV is superior to LSH-E in terms of the space-accuracy trade-off, time-accuracy trade-off, and the sketch construction time. For instance, with similar estimation accuracy (F-1 score), GB-KMV is over 100 times faster than LSH-E on some real-life dataset.

Yang Wang, Xuemin Lin, Lin Wu et al.

Given a query photo issued by a user (q-user), the landmark retrieval is to return a set of photos with their landmarks similar to those of the query, while the existing studies on the landmark retrieval focus on exploiting geometries of landmarks for similarity matches between candidate photos and a query photo. We observe that the same landmarks provided by different users over social media community may convey different geometry information depending on the viewpoints and/or angles, and may subsequently yield very different results. In fact, dealing with the landmarks with \illshapes caused by the photography of q-users is often nontrivial and has seldom been studied. In this paper we propose a novel framework, namely multi-query expansions, to retrieve semantically robust landmarks by two steps. Firstly, we identify the top-$k$ photos regarding the latent topics of a query landmark to construct multi-query set so as to remedy its possible \illshape. For this purpose, we significantly extend the techniques of Latent Dirichlet Allocation. Then, motivated by the typical \emph{collaborative filtering} methods, we propose to learn a \emph{collaborative} deep networks based semantically, nonlinear and high-level features over the latent factor for landmark photo as the training set, which is formed by matrix factorization over \emph{collaborative} user-photo matrix regarding the multi-query set. The learned deep network is further applied to generate the features for all the other photos, meanwhile resulting into a compact multi-query set within such space. Extensive experiments are conducted on real-world social media data with both landmark photos together with their user information to show the superior performance over the existing methods.

Yang Wang, Wenjie Zhang, Lin Wu et al.

Multi-view spectral clustering, which aims at yielding an agreement or consensus data objects grouping across multi-views with their graph laplacian matrices, is a fundamental clustering problem. Among the existing methods, Low-Rank Representation (LRR) based method is quite superior in terms of its effectiveness, intuitiveness and robustness to noise corruptions. However, it aggressively tries to learn a common low-dimensional subspace for multi-view data, while inattentively ignoring the local manifold structure in each view, which is critically important to the spectral clustering; worse still, the low-rank minimization is enforced to achieve the data correlation consensus among all views, failing to flexibly preserve the local manifold structure for each view. In this paper, 1) we propose a multi-graph laplacian regularized LRR with each graph laplacian corresponding to one view to characterize its local manifold structure. 2) Instead of directly enforcing the low-rank minimization among all views for correlation consensus, we separately impose low-rank constraint on each view, coupled with a mutual structural consensus constraint, where it is able to not only well preserve the local manifold structure but also serve as a constraint for that from other views, which iteratively makes the views more agreeable. Extensive experiments on real-world multi-view data sets demonstrate its superiority.