Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung

Jie Liu, Mengting He, Guangtao Wang et al.

Imbalanced node classification widely exists in real-world networks where graph neural networks (GNNs) are usually highly inclined to majority classes and suffer from severe performance degradation on classifying minority class nodes. Various imbalanced node classification methods have been proposed recently which construct synthetic nodes and edges w.r.t. minority classes to balance the label and topology distribution. However, they are all based on the homophilic assumption that nodes of the same label tend to connect despite the wide existence of heterophilic edges in real-world graphs. Thus, they uniformly aggregate features from both homophilic and heterophilic neighbors and rely on feature similarity to generate synthetic edges, which cannot be applied to imbalanced graphs in high heterophily. To address this problem, we propose a novel GraphSANN for imbalanced node classification on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs. Firstly, we propose a unified feature mixer to generate synthetic nodes with both homophilic and heterophilic interpolation in a unified way. Next, by randomly sampling edges between synthetic nodes and existing nodes as candidate edges, we design an adaptive subgraph extractor to adaptively extract the contextual subgraphs of candidate edges with flexible ranges. Finally, we develop a multi-filter subgraph encoder that constructs different filter channels to discriminatively aggregate neighbor's information along the homophilic and heterophilic edges. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model for imbalanced node classification on both homophilic and heterophilic graphs.

Yuandong Wang, Xuhui Ren, Tong Chen et al.

As a branch of advanced artificial intelligence, dialogue systems are prospering. Multi-turn response selection is a general research problem in dialogue systems. With the assistance of background information and pre-trained language models, the performance of state-of-the-art methods on this problem gains impressive improvement. However, existing studies neglect the importance of external commonsense knowledge. Hence, we design a Siamese network where a pre-trained Language model merges with a Graph neural network (SinLG). SinLG takes advantage of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to catch the word correlations in the context and response candidates and utilizes a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to reason helpful common sense from an external knowledge graph. The GNN aims to assist the PLM in fine-tuning, and arousing its related memories to attain better performance. Specifically, we first extract related concepts as nodes from an external knowledge graph to construct a subgraph with the context response pair as a super node for each sample. Next, we learn two representations for the context response pair via both the PLM and GNN. A similarity loss between the two representations is utilized to transfer the commonsense knowledge from the GNN to the PLM. Then only the PLM is used to infer online so that efficiency can be guaranteed. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on two variants of the PERSONA-CHAT dataset, which proves that our solution can not only improve the performance of the PLM but also achieve an efficient inference.

Junliang Yu, Hongzhi Yin, Min Gao et al.

Self-supervised learning (SSL), which can automatically generate ground-truth samples from raw data, holds vast potential to improve recommender systems. Most existing SSL-based methods perturb the raw data graph with uniform node/edge dropout to generate new data views and then conduct the self-discrimination based contrastive learning over different views to learn generalizable representations. Under this scheme, only a bijective mapping is built between nodes in two different views, which means that the self-supervision signals from other nodes are being neglected. Due to the widely observed homophily in recommender systems, we argue that the supervisory signals from other nodes are also highly likely to benefit the representation learning for recommendation. To capture these signals, a general socially-aware SSL framework that integrates tri-training is proposed in this paper. Technically, our framework first augments the user data views with the user social information. And then under the regime of tri-training for multi-view encoding, the framework builds three graph encoders (one for recommendation) upon the augmented views and iteratively improves each encoder with self-supervision signals from other users, generated by the other two encoders. Since the tri-training operates on the augmented views of the same data sources for self-supervision signals, we name it self-supervised tri-training. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets consistently validate the effectiveness of the self-supervised tri-training framework for improving recommendation. The code is released at https://github.com/Coder-Yu/QRec.

Junliang Yu, Hongzhi Yin, Jundong Li et al.

Social relations are often used to improve recommendation quality when user-item interaction data is sparse in recommender systems. Most existing social recommendation models exploit pairwise relations to mine potential user preferences. However, real-life interactions among users are very complicated and user relations can be high-order. Hypergraph provides a natural way to model complex high-order relations, while its potentials for improving social recommendation are under-explored. In this paper, we fill this gap and propose a multi-channel hypergraph convolutional network to enhance social recommendation by leveraging high-order user relations. Technically, each channel in the network encodes a hypergraph that depicts a common high-order user relation pattern via hypergraph convolution. By aggregating the embeddings learned through multiple channels, we obtain comprehensive user representations to generate recommendation results. However, the aggregation operation might also obscure the inherent characteristics of different types of high-order connectivity information. To compensate for the aggregating loss, we innovatively integrate self-supervised learning into the training of the hypergraph convolutional network to regain the connectivity information with hierarchical mutual information maximization. The experimental results on multiple real-world datasets show that the proposed model outperforms the SOTA methods, and the ablation study verifies the effectiveness of the multi-channel setting and the self-supervised task. The implementation of our model is available via https://github.com/Coder-Yu/RecQ.

Yufan Zheng, Wei Jiang, Alexander Zhou et al.

Among various spatio-temporal prediction tasks, epidemic forecasting plays a critical role in public health management. Recent studies have demonstrated the strong potential of spatio-temporal graph neural networks (STGNNs) in extracting heterogeneous spatio-temporal patterns for epidemic forecasting. However, most of these methods bear an over-simplified assumption that two locations (e.g., cities) with similar observed features in previous time steps will develop similar infection numbers in the future. In fact, for any epidemic disease, there exists strong heterogeneity of its intrinsic evolution mechanisms across geolocation and time, which can eventually lead to diverged infection numbers in two ``similar'' locations. However, such mechanistic heterogeneity is non-trivial to be captured due to the existence of numerous influencing factors like medical resource accessibility, virus mutations, mobility patterns, etc., most of which are spatio-temporal yet unreachable or even unobservable. To address this challenge, we propose a Heterogeneous Epidemic-Aware Transmission Graph Neural Network (HeatGNN), a novel epidemic forecasting framework. By binding the epidemiology mechanistic model into a GNN, HeatGNN learns epidemiology-informed location embeddings of different locations that reflect their own transmission mechanisms over time. With the time-varying mechanistic affinity graphs computed with the epidemiology-informed location embeddings, a heterogeneous transmission graph network is designed to encode the mechanistic heterogeneity among locations, providing additional predictive signals to facilitate accurate forecasting. Experiments on three benchmark datasets have revealed that HeatGNN outperforms various strong baselines. Moreover, our efficiency analysis verifies the real-world practicality of HeatGNN on datasets of different sizes.

Haiyang Jiang, Tong Chen, Wentao Zhang et al.

Urban flow prediction is a classic spatial-temporal forecasting task that estimates the amount of future traffic flow for a given location. Though models represented by Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Networks (STGNNs) have established themselves as capable predictors, they tend to suffer from distribution shifts that are common with the urban flow data due to the dynamics and unpredictability of spatial-temporal events. Unfortunately, in spatial-temporal applications, the dynamic environments can hardly be quantified via a fixed number of parameters, whereas learning time- and location-specific environments can quickly become computationally prohibitive. In this paper, we propose a novel framework named Memory-enhanced Invariant Prompt learning (MIP) for urban flow prediction under constant distribution shifts. Specifically, MIP is equipped with a learnable memory bank that is trained to memorize the causal features within the spatial-temporal graph. By querying a trainable memory bank that stores the causal features, we adaptively extract invariant and variant prompts (i.e., patterns) for a given location at every time step. Then, instead of intervening the raw data based on simulated environments, we directly perform intervention on variant prompts across space and time. With the intervened variant prompts in place, we use invariant learning to minimize the variance of predictions, so as to ensure that the predictions are only made with invariant features. With extensive comparative experiments on two public urban flow datasets, we thoroughly demonstrate the robustness of MIP against OOD data.

Jing Long, Tong Chen, Nguyen Quoc Viet Hung et al.

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has become an indispensable functionality in Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) due to its effectiveness in helping people decide the next POI to visit. However, accurate recommendation requires a vast amount of historical check-in data, thus threatening user privacy as the location-sensitive data needs to be handled by cloud servers. Although there have been several on-device frameworks for privacy-preserving POI recommendations, they are still resource-intensive when it comes to storage and computation, and show limited robustness to the high sparsity of user-POI interactions. On this basis, we propose a novel decentralized collaborative learning framework for POI recommendation (DCLR), which allows users to train their personalized models locally in a collaborative manner. DCLR significantly reduces the local models' dependence on the cloud for training, and can be used to expand arbitrary centralized recommendation models. To counteract the sparsity of on-device user data when learning each local model, we design two self-supervision signals to pretrain the POI representations on the server with geographical and categorical correlations of POIs. To facilitate collaborative learning, we innovatively propose to incorporate knowledge from either geographically or semantically similar users into each local model with attentive aggregation and mutual information maximization. The collaborative learning process makes use of communications between devices while requiring only minor engagement from the central server for identifying user groups, and is compatible with common privacy preservation mechanisms like differential privacy. We evaluate DCLR with two real-world datasets, where the results show that DCLR outperforms state-of-the-art on-device frameworks and yields competitive results compared with centralized counterparts.