Qin Li

Yiran Li, Gongyao Guo, Jieming Shi et al. · utoronto

Attributed networks containing entity-specific information in node attributes are ubiquitous in modeling social networks, e-commerce, bioinformatics, etc. Their inherent network topology ranges from simple graphs to hypergraphs with high-order interactions and multiplex graphs with separate layers. An important graph mining task is node clustering, aiming to partition the nodes of an attributed network into k disjoint clusters such that intra-cluster nodes are closely connected and share similar attributes, while inter-cluster nodes are far apart and dissimilar. It is highly challenging to capture multi-hop connections via nodes or attributes for effective clustering on multiple types of attributed networks. In this paper, we first present AHCKA as an efficient approach to attributed hypergraph clustering (AHC). AHCKA includes a carefully-crafted K-nearest neighbor augmentation strategy for the optimized exploitation of attribute information on hypergraphs, a joint hypergraph random walk model to devise an effective AHC objective, and an efficient solver with speedup techniques for the objective optimization. The proposed techniques are extensible to various types of attributed networks, and thus, we develop ANCKA as a versatile attributed network clustering framework, capable of attributed graph clustering (AGC), attributed multiplex graph clustering (AMGC), and AHC. Moreover, we devise ANCKA with algorithmic designs tailored for GPU acceleration to boost efficiency. We have conducted extensive experiments to compare our methods with 19 competitors on 8 attributed hypergraphs, 16 competitors on 6 attributed graphs, and 16 competitors on 3 attributed multiplex graphs, all demonstrating the superb clustering quality and efficiency of our methods.

Qin Li, Li Wang

In this paper we study the effect of randomness in kinetic equations that preserve mass. Our focus is in proving the analyticity of the solution with respect to the randomness, which naturally leads to the convergence of numerical methods. The analysis is carried out in a general setting, with the regularity result not depending on the specific form of the collision term, the probability distribution of the random variables, or the regime the system is in, and thereby termed "uniform". Applications include the linear Boltzmann equation, BGK model, Carlemann model, among many others; and the results hold true in kinetic, parabolic and high field regimes. The proof relies on the explicit expression of the high order derivatives of the solution in the random space, and the convergence in time is mainly based on hypocoercivity, which, despite the popularity in PDE analysis of kinetic theory, has rarely been used for numerical algorithms.

Wanlong Liu, Enqi Zhang, Li Zhou et al.

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in the Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. However, existing retrieval-based EAE methods have two main limitations: (1) input length constraints and (2) the gap between the retriever and the inference model. These issues limit the diversity and quality of the retrieved information. In this paper, we propose a Compressive Memory-based Retrieval (CMR) mechanism for EAE, which addresses the two limitations mentioned above. Our compressive memory, designed as a dynamic matrix that effectively caches retrieved information and supports continuous updates, overcomes the limitations of the input length. Additionally, after pre-loading all candidate demonstrations into the compressive memory, the model further retrieves and filters relevant information from memory based on the input query, bridging the gap between the retriever and the inference model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, ACE05), significantly outperforming existing retrieval-based EAE methods.

Haozhen Zhang, Haodong Yue, Xi Xiao et al.

With the growing significance of network security, the classification of encrypted traffic has emerged as an urgent challenge. Traditional byte-based traffic analysis methods are constrained by the rigid granularity of information and fail to fully exploit the diverse correlations between bytes. To address these limitations, this paper introduces MH-Net, a novel approach for classifying network traffic that leverages multi-view heterogeneous traffic graphs to model the intricate relationships between traffic bytes. The essence of MH-Net lies in aggregating varying numbers of traffic bits into multiple types of traffic units, thereby constructing multi-view traffic graphs with diverse information granularities. By accounting for different types of byte correlations, such as header-payload relationships, MH-Net further endows the traffic graph with heterogeneity, significantly enhancing model performance. Notably, we employ contrastive learning in a multi-task manner to strengthen the robustness of the learned traffic unit representations. Experiments conducted on the ISCX and CIC-IoT datasets for both the packet-level and flow-level traffic classification tasks demonstrate that MH-Net achieves the best overall performance compared to dozens of SOTA methods.

Yunqing Liu, Wenqi Fan, Xiaoyong Wei et al.

Proteins are central to biological systems, participating as building blocks across all forms of life. Despite advancements in understanding protein functions through protein sequence analysis, there remains potential for further exploration in integrating protein structural information. We argue that the structural information of proteins is not only limited to their 3D information but also encompasses information from amino acid molecules (local information) to protein-protein structure similarity (global information). To address this, we propose \textbf{GLProtein}, the first framework in protein pre-training that incorporates both global structural similarity and local amino acid details to enhance prediction accuracy and functional insights. GLProtein innovatively combines protein-masked modelling with triplet structure similarity scoring, protein 3D distance encoding and substructure-based amino acid molecule encoding. Experimental results demonstrate that GLProtein outperforms previous methods in several bioinformatics tasks, including predicting protein-protein interaction, contact prediction, and so on.

Chenyang Li, Qin Li, Haimin Wang et al.

High-resolution (HR) solar imaging is crucial for capturing fine-scale dynamic features such as filaments and fibrils. However, the spatial resolution of the full-disk H$α$ images is limited and insufficient to resolve these small-scale structures. To address this, we propose a GAN-based superresolution approach to enhance low-resolution (LR) full-disk H$α$ images from the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG) to a quality comparable with HR observations from the Big Bear Solar Observatory/Goode Solar Telescope (BBSO/GST). We employ Real-ESRGAN with Residual-in-Residual Dense Blocks and a relativistic discriminator. We carefully aligned GONG-GST pairs. The model effectively recovers fine details within sunspot penumbrae and resolves fine details in filaments and fibrils, achieving an average mean squared error (MSE) of 467.15, root mean squared error (RMSE) of 21.59, and cross-correlation (CC) of 0.7794. Slight misalignments between image pairs limit quantitative performance, which we plan to address in future work alongside dataset expansion to further improve reconstruction quality.

Li Zhou, Lutong Yu, Dongchu Xie et al.

Culture is a rich and dynamic domain that evolves across both geography and time. However, existing studies on cultural understanding with vision-language models (VLMs) primarily emphasize geographic diversity, often overlooking the critical temporal dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hanfu-Bench, a novel, expert-curated multimodal dataset. Hanfu, a traditional garment spanning ancient Chinese dynasties, serves as a representative cultural heritage that reflects the profound temporal aspects of Chinese culture while remaining highly popular in Chinese contemporary society. Hanfu-Bench comprises two core tasks: cultural visual understanding and cultural image transcreation. The former task examines temporal-cultural feature recognition based on single- or multi-image inputs through multiple-choice visual question answering, while the latter focuses on transforming traditional attire into modern designs through cultural element inheritance and modern context adaptation. Our evaluation shows that closed VLMs perform comparably to non-experts on visual cutural understanding but fall short by 10% to human experts, while open VLMs lags further behind non-experts. For the transcreation task, multi-faceted human evaluation indicates that the best-performing model achieves a success rate of only 42%. Our benchmark provides an essential testbed, revealing significant challenges in this new direction of temporal cultural understanding and creative adaptation.

Xuan Ma, Zepeng Bao, Ming Zhong et al.

In recent years, origin-destination (OD) demand prediction has gained significant attention for its profound implications in urban development. Existing data-driven deep learning methods primarily focus on the spatial or temporal dependency between regions yet neglecting regions' fundamental functional difference. Though knowledge-driven physical methods have characterised regions' functions by their radiation and attraction capacities, these functions are defined on numerical factors like population without considering regions' intrinsic nominal attributes, e.g., a region is a residential or industrial district. Moreover, the complicated relationships between two types of capacities, e.g., the radiation capacity of a residential district in the morning will be transformed into the attraction capacity in the evening, are totally missing from physical methods. In this paper, we not only generalize the physical radiation and attraction capacities into the deep learning framework with the extended capability to fulfil regions' functions, but also present a new model that captures the relationships between two types of capacities. Specifically, we first model regions' radiation and attraction capacities using a bilateral branch network, each equipped with regions' attribute representations. We then describe the transformation relationship of different capacities of the same region using a hypergraph-based parameter generation method. We finally unveil the competition relationship of different regions with the same attraction capacity through cluster-based adversarial learning. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the consistent improvements of our method over the state-of-the-art baselines, as well as the good explainability of regions' functions using their nominal attributes.

Fang Yu, Daowen Qiu, Xiaoming Wang et al.

New quantum private database (with N elements) query protocols are presented and analyzed. Protocols preserve O(logN) communication complexity of known protocols for the same task, but achieve several significant improvements in security, especially concerning user privacy. For example, the randomized form of our protocol has a cheat-sensitive property - it allows the user to detect a dishonest database with a nonzero probability, while the phase-encoded private query protocols for the same task do not have such a property. Moreover, when the database performs the computational basis measurement, a particular projective measurement which can cause a significant loss of user privacy in the previous private query protocols with O(logN) communication complexity, at most half of the user privacy could leak to such a database in our protocol, while in the QPQ protocol, the entire user privacy could leak out. In addition, it is proved here that for large N, the user could detect a cheating via the computational basis measurement, with a probability close to 1/2 using O(\sqrt{N}) special queries. Finally, it is shown here, for both forms of our protocol, basic and randomized, how a dishonest database has to act in case it could not learn user's queries.