Leveraging Personalized PageRank and Higher-Order Topological Structures for Heterophily Mitigation in Graph Neural NetworksYumeng Wang, Zengyi Wo, Wenjun Wang et al.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in node classification tasks but often assume homophily, where connected nodes share similar labels. This assumption does not hold in many real-world heterophilic graphs. Existing models for heterophilic graphs primarily rely on pairwise relationships, overlooking multi-scale information from higher-order structures. This leads to suboptimal performance, particularly under noise from conflicting class information across nodes. To address these challenges, we propose HPGNN, a novel model integrating Higher-order Personalized PageRank with Graph Neural Networks. HPGNN introduces an efficient high-order approximation of Personalized PageRank (PPR) to capture long-range and multi-scale node interactions. This approach reduces computational complexity and mitigates noise from surrounding information. By embedding higher-order structural information into convolutional networks, HPGNN effectively models key interactions across diverse graph dimensions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate HPGNN's effectiveness. The model achieves better performance than five out of seven state-of-the-art methods on heterophilic graphs in downstream tasks while maintaining competitive performance on homophilic graphs. HPGNN's ability to balance multi-scale information and robustness to noise makes it a versatile solution for real-world graph learning challenges. Codes are available at https://github.com/streetcorner/HPGNN.
Region-based Cluster Discrimination for Visual Representation LearningYin Xie, Kaicheng Yang, Xiang An et al.
Learning visual representations is foundational for a broad spectrum of downstream tasks. Although recent vision-language contrastive models, such as CLIP and SigLIP, have achieved impressive zero-shot performance via large-scale vision-language alignment, their reliance on global representations constrains their effectiveness for dense prediction tasks, such as grounding, OCR, and segmentation. To address this gap, we introduce Region-Aware Cluster Discrimination (RICE), a novel method that enhances region-level visual and OCR capabilities. We first construct a billion-scale candidate region dataset and propose a Region Transformer layer to extract rich regional semantics. We further design a unified region cluster discrimination loss that jointly supports object and OCR learning within a single classification framework, enabling efficient and scalable distributed training on large-scale data. Extensive experiments show that RICE consistently outperforms previous methods on tasks, including segmentation, dense detection, and visual perception for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). The pre-trained models have been released at https://github.com/deepglint/MVT.
13.1CVApr 23, 2025
Unveiling the Lack of LVLM Robustness to Fundamental Visual Variations: Why and Path ForwardZhiyuan Fan, Yumeng Wang, Sandeep Polisetty et al.
Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) excel in various vision-language tasks. Yet, their robustness to visual variations in position, scale, orientation, and context that objects in natural scenes inevitably exhibit due to changes in viewpoint and environment remains largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, we introduce V$^2$R-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark framework for evaluating Visual Variation Robustness of LVLMs, which encompasses automated evaluation dataset generation and principled metrics for thorough robustness assessment. Through extensive evaluation on 21 LVLMs, we reveal a surprising vulnerability to visual variations, in which even advanced models that excel at complex vision-language tasks significantly underperform on simple tasks such as object recognition. Interestingly, these models exhibit a distinct visual position bias that contradicts theories of effective receptive fields, and demonstrate a human-like visual acuity threshold. To identify the source of these vulnerabilities, we present a systematic framework for component-level analysis, featuring a novel visualization approach for aligned visual features. Results show that these vulnerabilities stem from error accumulation in the pipeline architecture and inadequate multimodal alignment. Complementary experiments with synthetic data further demonstrate that these limitations are fundamentally architectural deficiencies, scoring the need for architectural innovations in future LVLM designs.
7.1LGAug 20, 2025
Improving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Counterfactual DebiasingZengyi Wo, Chang Liu, Yumeng Wang et al.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successful in modeling graph-structured data. However, similar to other machine learning models, GNNs can exhibit bias in predictions based on attributes like race and gender. Moreover, bias in GNNs can be exacerbated by the graph structure and message-passing mechanisms. Recent cutting-edge methods propose mitigating bias by filtering out sensitive information from input or representations, like edge dropping or feature masking. Yet, we argue that such strategies may unintentionally eliminate non-sensitive features, leading to a compromised balance between predictive accuracy and fairness. To tackle this challenge, we present a novel approach utilizing counterfactual data augmentation for bias mitigation. This method involves creating diverse neighborhoods using counterfactuals before message passing, facilitating unbiased node representations learning from the augmented graph. Subsequently, an adversarial discriminator is employed to diminish bias in predictions by conventional GNN classifiers. Our proposed technique, Fair-ICD, ensures the fairness of GNNs under moderate conditions. Experiments on standard datasets using three GNN backbones demonstrate that Fair-ICD notably enhances fairness metrics while preserving high predictive performance.
4.1LGAug 20, 2025
Addressing Graph Anomaly Detection via Causal Edge Separation and SpectrumZengyi Wo, Wenjun Wang, Minglai Shao et al.
In the real world, anomalous entities often add more legitimate connections while hiding direct links with other anomalous entities, leading to heterophilic structures in anomalous networks that most GNN-based techniques fail to address. Several works have been proposed to tackle this issue in the spatial domain. However, these methods overlook the complex relationships between node structure encoding, node features, and their contextual environment and rely on principled guidance, research on solving spectral domain heterophilic problems remains limited. This study analyzes the spectral distribution of nodes with different heterophilic degrees and discovers that the heterophily of anomalous nodes causes the spectral energy to shift from low to high frequencies. To address the above challenges, we propose a spectral neural network CES2-GAD based on causal edge separation for anomaly detection on heterophilic graphs. Firstly, CES2-GAD will separate the original graph into homophilic and heterophilic edges using causal interventions. Subsequently, various hybrid-spectrum filters are used to capture signals from the segmented graphs. Finally, representations from multiple signals are concatenated and input into a classifier to predict anomalies. Extensive experiments with real-world datasets have proven the effectiveness of the method we proposed.