Xinming Zhang

Kairui Fu, Tao Zhang, Shuwen Xiao et al.

Semantic identifiers (SIDs) have gained increasing attention in generative retrieval (GR) for recommendation due to their meaningful semantic discriminability. However, current studies in this field primarily (1) offer limited investigation into the construction strategies for better SIDs, and (2) their SID assessment typically relies on costly GR training. To address these challenges, we propose FORGE, a comprehensive benchmark for FOrming semantic identifieRs for Generative rEtrieval. Specifically, FORGE provides a taxonomy of the SID construction process from several perspectives and validates their impact on downstream GR through offline experiments across diverse settings. Notably, these empirical findings have led to a 0.35% increase in transaction count via online A/B experiments in the Guess You Like section of Taobao. The corresponding SID construction strategies have since been deployed at full scale on Taobao, demonstrating their practical effectiveness. To avoid expensive SID assessment that requires full GR training, we propose two novel SID evaluation metrics that are highly correlated with recommendation performance, enabling convenient evaluations without any GR training. Furthermore, to facilitate the community, we release AL-GR, the industrial dataset used in our experiments, comprising 14 billion interactions and 250 million items with the corresponding multimodal features collected from Taobao. All the code and data are available at https://github.com/selous123/al_sid.

Zemin Liu, Xingtong Yu, Yuan Fang et al.

Graphs can model complex relationships between objects, enabling a myriad of Web applications such as online page/article classification and social recommendation. While graph neural networks(GNNs) have emerged as a powerful tool for graph representation learning, in an end-to-end supervised setting, their performance heavily rely on a large amount of task-specific supervision. To reduce labeling requirement, the "pre-train, fine-tune" and "pre-train, prompt" paradigms have become increasingly common. In particular, prompting is a popular alternative to fine-tuning in natural language processing, which is designed to narrow the gap between pre-training and downstream objectives in a task-specific manner. However, existing study of prompting on graphs is still limited, lacking a universal treatment to appeal to different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose GraphPrompt, a novel pre-training and prompting framework on graphs. GraphPrompt not only unifies pre-training and downstream tasks into a common task template, but also employs a learnable prompt to assist a downstream task in locating the most relevant knowledge from the pre-train model in a task-specific manner. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets to evaluate and analyze GraphPrompt.

Yanjun Chen, Yirong Sun, Hanlin Wang et al.

Removing an agent from a cooperative team to measure its contribution seems natural, yet in multi-agent LLM systems this evaluation distorts the result it claims to measure. This failure is not isolated: learned critics, trajectory-level baselines, and agent-removal counterfactuals all inherit from standard multi-agent reinforcement learning a premise that exact counterfactual evaluation requires privileged environment access, and therefore approximate. In cooperative LLM systems, this premise is false. Interaction histories are deterministic functions of observable text with no hidden state, so any decision point can be restored exactly, making direct causal measurement possible without parametric approximation. C3 exploits this property by fixing the complete history at each decision point, sampling alternative actions under a frozen behavior policy, and computing unbiased per-decision advantages through a parameter-free leave-one-out baseline. Across six benchmarks spanning math reasoning and code generation, two model families, and two multi-agent topologies, C3 consistently outperforms all baselines; a controlled decomposition confirms gains originate from credit quality, not architecture, while checkpoint restoration reduces training token consumption. The exact solution proves simpler, cheaper, and more effective than all approximate alternatives. The same structural property that enables exact credit also enables exact verification: three independently computable diagnostics, credit fidelity, within-group variance, and inter-agent influence, constitute the first method-agnostic auditing tool for multi-agent LLM credit assignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/EIT-EAST-Lab/C3

Wenyu Zhang, Xin Deng, Baojun Jia et al.

Current Scene text image super-resolution approaches primarily focus on extracting robust features, acquiring text information, and complex training strategies to generate super-resolution images. However, the upsampling module, which is crucial in the process of converting low-resolution images to high-resolution ones, has received little attention in existing works. To address this issue, we propose the Pixel Adapter Module (PAM) based on graph attention to address pixel distortion caused by upsampling. The PAM effectively captures local structural information by allowing each pixel to interact with its neighbors and update features. Unlike previous graph attention mechanisms, our approach achieves 2-3 orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency and memory utilization by eliminating the dependency on sparse adjacency matrices and introducing a sliding window approach for efficient parallel computation. Additionally, we introduce the MLP-based Sequential Residual Block (MSRB) for robust feature extraction from text images, and a Local Contour Awareness loss ($\mathcal{L}_{lca}$) to enhance the model's perception of details. Comprehensive experiments on TextZoom demonstrate that our proposed method generates high-quality super-resolution images, surpassing existing methods in recognition accuracy. For single-stage and multi-stage strategies, we achieved improvements of 0.7\% and 2.6\%, respectively, increasing the performance from 52.6\% and 53.7\% to 53.3\% and 56.3\%. The code is available at https://github.com/wenyu1009/RTSRN.

Xingtong Yu, Zemin Liu, Yuan Fang et al.

Subgraph isomorphism counting is an important problem on graphs, as many graph-based tasks exploit recurring subgraph patterns. Classical methods usually boil down to a backtracking framework that needs to navigate a huge search space with prohibitive computational costs. Some recent studies resort to graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn a low-dimensional representation for both the query and input graphs, in order to predict the number of subgraph isomorphisms on the input graph. However, typical GNNs employ a node-centric message passing scheme that receives and aggregates messages on nodes, which is inadequate in complex structure matching for isomorphism counting. Moreover, on an input graph, the space of possible query graphs is enormous, and different parts of the input graph will be triggered to match different queries. Thus, expecting a fixed representation of the input graph to match diversely structured query graphs is unrealistic. In this paper, we propose a novel GNN called Count-GNN for subgraph isomorphism counting, to deal with the above challenges. At the edge level, given that an edge is an atomic unit of encoding graph structures, we propose an edge-centric message passing scheme, where messages on edges are propagated and aggregated based on the edge adjacency to preserve fine-grained structural information. At the graph level, we modulate the input graph representation conditioned on the query, so that the input graph can be adapted to each query individually to improve their matching. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a number of benchmark datasets to demonstrate the superior performance of Count-GNN.

Xingtong Yu, Chang Zhou, Yuan Fang et al.

Graphs can inherently model interconnected objects on the Web, thereby facilitating a series of Web applications, such as web analyzing and content recommendation. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a mainstream technique for graph representation learning. However, their efficacy within an end-to-end supervised framework is significantly tied to the availabilityof task-specific labels. To mitigate labeling costs and enhance robustness in few-shot settings, pre-training on self-supervised tasks has emerged as a promising method, while prompting has been proposed to further narrow the objective gap between pretext and downstream tasks. Although there has been some initial exploration of prompt-based learning on graphs, they primarily leverage a single pretext task, resulting in a limited subset of general knowledge that could be learned from the pre-training data. Hence, in this paper, we propose MultiGPrompt, a novel multi-task pre-training and prompting framework to exploit multiple pretext tasks for more comprehensive pre-trained knowledge. First, in pre-training, we design a set of pretext tokens to synergize multiple pretext tasks. Second, we propose a dual-prompt mechanism consisting of composed and open prompts to leverage task-specific and global pre-training knowledge, to guide downstream tasks in few-shot settings. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on six public datasets to evaluate and analyze MultiGPrompt.

Xingtong Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Yuan Fang et al.

Graph neural networks have emerged as a powerful tool for graph representation learning, but their performance heavily relies on abundant task-specific supervision. To reduce labeling requirement, the "pre-train, prompt" paradigms have become increasingly common. However, existing study of prompting on graphs is limited, lacking a universal treatment to appeal to different downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose GraphPrompt, a novel pre-training and prompting framework on graphs. GraphPrompt not only unifies pre-training and downstream tasks into a common task template but also employs a learnable prompt to assist a downstream task in locating the most relevant knowledge from the pre-trained model in a task-specific manner. To further enhance GraphPrompt in these two stages, we extend it into GraphPrompt+ with two major enhancements. First, we generalize several popular graph pre-training tasks beyond simple link prediction to broaden the compatibility with our task template. Second, we propose a more generalized prompt design that incorporates a series of prompt vectors within every layer of the pre-trained graph encoder, in order to capitalize on the hierarchical information across different layers beyond just the readout layer. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets to evaluate and analyze GraphPrompt and GraphPrompt+.

Xin Deng, WenYu Zhang, Qing Ding et al.

In point cloud analysis, point-based methods have rapidly developed in recent years. These methods have recently focused on concise MLP structures, such as PointNeXt, which have demonstrated competitiveness with Convolutional and Transformer structures. However, standard MLPs are limited in their ability to extract local features effectively. To address this limitation, we propose a Vector-oriented Point Set Abstraction that can aggregate neighboring features through higher-dimensional vectors. To facilitate network optimization, we construct a transformation from scalar to vector using independent angles based on 3D vector rotations. Finally, we develop a PointVector model that follows the structure of PointNeXt. Our experimental results demonstrate that PointVector achieves state-of-the-art performance $\textbf{72.3\% mIOU}$ on the S3DIS Area 5 and $\textbf{78.4\% mIOU}$ on the S3DIS (6-fold cross-validation) with only $\textbf{58\%}$ model parameters of PointNeXt. We hope our work will help the exploration of concise and effective feature representations. The code will be released soon.

Haoyu Xi, Mingao Tan, Xinming Zhang et al.

Visual navigation for cross-embodiment robots is challenging due to variations in robot and camera configurations, which can lead to the failure of navigation tasks. Previous approaches typically rely on collecting massive datasets across different robots, which is highly data-intensive, or fine-tuning models, which is time-consuming. Furthermore, both methods often lack explicit consideration of robot geometry. In this paper, we propose a Cross-embodiment Robot Local Planning (CeRLP) framework for general visual navigation, which abstracts visual information into a unified geometric formulation and applies to heterogeneous robots with varying physical dimensions, camera parameters, and camera types. CeRLP introduces a depth estimation scale correction method that utilizes offline pre-calibration to resolve the scale ambiguity of monocular depth estimation, thereby recovering precise metric depth images. Furthermore, CeRLP designs a visual-to-scan abstraction module that projects varying visual inputs into height-adaptive laser scans, making the policy robust to heterogeneous robots. Experiments in simulation environments demonstrate that CeRLP outperforms comparative methods, validating its robust obstacle avoidance capabilities as a local planner. Additionally, extensive real-world experiments verify the effectiveness of CeRLP in tasks such as point-to-point navigation and vision-language navigation, demonstrating its generalization across varying robot and camera configurations.

Xingtong Yu, Yuan Fang, Zemin Liu et al.

Graph representation learning, a critical step in graph-centric tasks, has seen significant advancements. Earlier techniques often operate in an end-to-end setting, which heavily rely on the availability of ample labeled data. This constraint has spurred the emergence of few-shot learning on graphs, where only a few labels are available for each task. Given the extensive literature in this field, this survey endeavors to synthesize recent developments, provide comparative insights, and identify future directions. We systematically categorize existing studies based on two major taxonomies: (1) Problem taxonomy, which explores different types of data scarcity problems and their applications, and (2) Technique taxonomy, which details key strategies for addressing these data-scarce few-shot problems. The techniques can be broadly categorized into meta-learning, pre-training, and hybrid approaches, with a finer-grained classification in each category to aid readers in their method selection process. Within each category, we analyze the relationships among these methods and compare their strengths and limitations. Finally, we outline prospective directions for few-shot learning on graphs to catalyze continued innovation in this field. The website for this survey can be accessed by \url{https://github.com/smufang/fewshotgraph}.

Xingtong Yu, Zhongwei Kuai, Chang Zhou et al.

Reasoning-acting frameworks enhance large language models (LLMs) by interleaving reasoning with actions for dynamic information acquisition. However, extending this paradigm to graph learning remains underexplored. Graph data is inherently structured, with information distributed across nodes and edges and encoded through both topology and latent representations. As a result, effective reasoning over graphs requires not only retrieving informative evidence from the graph, but also progressively refining the accumulated context during multi-step inference. In this work, we propose GraphReAct, a graph reasoning-acting framework that enables step-by-step inference over graph-structured data. Specifically, we design a graph-based action space with two complementary retrieval actions: topological retrieval, which captures local structural dependencies, and semantic retrieval, which accesses non-local but relevant evidence in the representation space. These actions dynamically expand the reasoning context. To further support multi-step reasoning, we introduce another type of action, context refinement, which distills and reorganizes accumulated information into a compact representation. By interleaving reasoning with both retrieval and refinement actions, our framework enables a progressive transition from context expansion to compression. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that GraphReAct consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of reasoning-acting for graph learning.

Xingtong Yu, Yuan Fang, Zemin Liu et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) and heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) are prominent techniques for homogeneous and heterogeneous graph representation learning, yet their performance in an end-to-end supervised framework greatly depends on the availability of task-specific supervision. To reduce the labeling cost, pre-training on self-supervised pretext tasks has become a popular paradigm,but there is often a gap between the pre-trained model and downstream tasks, stemming from the divergence in their objectives. To bridge the gap, prompt learning has risen as a promising direction especially in few-shot settings, without the need to fully fine-tune the pre-trained model. While there has been some early exploration of prompt-based learning on graphs, they primarily deal with homogeneous graphs, ignoring the heterogeneous graphs that are prevalent in downstream applications. In this paper, we propose HGPROMPT, a novel pre-training and prompting framework to unify not only pre-training and downstream tasks but also homogeneous and heterogeneous graphs via a dual-template design. Moreover, we propose dual-prompt in HGPROMPT to assist a downstream task in locating the most relevant prior to bridge the gaps caused by not only feature variations but also heterogeneity differences across tasks. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate and analyze HGPROMPT through extensive experiments on three public datasets.

Shanze Wang, Xinming Zhang, Siwei Cheng et al.

Should a single collision necessarily terminate an entire navigation episode? In most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) frameworks for robot navigation, this remains the standard practice: every collision immediately triggers a global environment reset and is penalized as a complete task failure. While a collision during deployment naturally indicates task failure, applying the same treatment during training prevents the agent from exploring challenging obstacle configurations, which slows learning progress in the early training phase. In this work, we challenge this convention and propose a Multi-Collision reset Budget (MCB) framework that decouples local collision termination from global environment resets, allowing the agent to retry difficult configurations within the same episode. Experiments on multiple simulated and real-world robotic platforms show that the framework accelerates early-stage exploration and improves both success rate and navigation efficiency over conventional single-collision reset baselines, with a small collision budget producing the largest gains.

Xingtong Yu, Chang Zhou, Yuan Fang et al.

Given the ubiquity of graph data, it is intriguing to ask: Is it possible to train a graph foundation model on a broad range of graph data across diverse domains? A major hurdle toward this goal lies in the fact that graphs from different domains often exhibit profoundly divergent characteristics. Although there have been some initial efforts in integrating multi-domain graphs for pre-training, they primarily rely on textual descriptions to align the graphs, limiting their application to text-attributed graphs. Moreover, different source domains may conflict or interfere with each other, and their relevance to the target domain can vary significantly. To address these issues, we propose MDGPT, a text free Multi-Domain Graph Pre-Training and adaptation framework designed to exploit multi-domain knowledge for graph learning. First, we propose a set of domain tokens to to align features across source domains for synergistic pre-training. Second, we propose a dual prompts, consisting of a unifying prompt and a mixing prompt, to further adapt the target domain with unified multi-domain knowledge and a tailored mixture of domain-specific knowledge. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments involving six public datasets to evaluate and analyze MDGPT, which outperforms prior art by up to 37.9%.

Xingtong Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Xinming Zhang et al.

Dynamic graphs capture evolving interactions between entities, such as in social networks, online learning platforms, and crowdsourcing projects. For dynamic graph modeling, dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) have emerged as a mainstream technique. However, they are generally pre-trained on the link prediction task, leaving a significant gap from the objectives of downstream tasks such as node classification. To bridge the gap, prompt-based learning has gained traction on graphs, but most existing efforts focus on static graphs, neglecting the evolution of dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose DYGPROMPT, a novel pre-training and prompt learning framework for dynamic graph modeling. First, we design dual prompts to address the gap in both task objectives and temporal variations across pre-training and downstream tasks. Second, we recognize that node and time features mutually characterize each other, and propose dual condition-nets to model the evolving node-time patterns in downstream tasks. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate and analyze DYGPROMPT through extensive experiments on four public datasets.

Xianghui Wang, Siwei Cheng, Shanze Wang et al.

Learning from demonstration is widely used for robot navigation, yet it suffers from a fundamental limitation: demonstrations consist predominantly of successful behaviors and provide limited coverage of unsafe states. This limitation leads to poor safety when the robot encounters scenarios beyond the demonstration distribution. Failure experiences, such as collisions, contain essential information about unsafe regions, but remain underutilized. The key difficulty lies in the fact that failure data do not provide valid guidance for action imitation, and their naive incorporation into policy learning often degrades performance. We address this challenge by proposing a failure-aware learning framework that explicitly decouples the roles of success and failure data. In this framework, failure experiences are used to shape value estimation in hazardous regions, while policy learning is restricted to successful demonstrations. This separation enables the effective use of failure data without corrupting policy behavior. We implement this design within an offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting and evaluate it in both simulation and real-world environments. The results show that our framework consistently reduces collision rates while preserving the task success rate, and demonstrate strong generalization across different environments and robot platforms.

Xingtong Yu, Chang Zhou, Zhongwei Kuai et al.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, its vast potential remains largely unexplored for graphs. This raises an interesting question: How can we design CoT prompting for graphs to guide graph models to learn step by step? On one hand, unlike natural languages, graphs are non-linear and characterized by complex topological structures. On the other hand, many graphs lack textual data, making it difficult to formulate language-based CoT prompting. In this work, we propose the first CoT prompt learning framework for text-free graphs, GCoT. Specifically, we decompose the adaptation process for each downstream task into a series of inference steps, with each step consisting of prompt-based inference, ``thought'' generation, and thought-conditioned prompt learning. While the steps mimic CoT prompting in NLP, the exact mechanism differs significantly. Specifically, at each step, an input graph, along with a prompt, is first fed into a pre-trained graph encoder for prompt-based inference. We then aggregate the hidden layers of the encoder to construct a ``thought'', which captures the working state of each node in the current step. Conditioned on this thought, we learn a prompt specific to each node based on the current state. These prompts are fed into the next inference step, repeating the cycle. To evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of GCoT, we conduct comprehensive experiments on eight public datasets, which demonstrate the advantage of our approach.

Mingao Tan, Yiyang Li, Shanze Wang et al.

Current vision-language navigation methods face substantial bottlenecks regarding heterogeneous robot compatibility, real-time performance, and navigation safety. Furthermore, they struggle to support open-vocabulary semantic generalization and multimodal task inputs. To address these challenges, this paper proposes FSUNav: a Cerebrum-Cerebellum architecture for fast, safe, and universal zero-shot goal-oriented navigation, which innovatively integrates vision-language models (VLMs) with the proposed architecture. The cerebellum module, a high-frequency end-to-end module, develops a universal local planner based on deep reinforcement learning, enabling unified navigation across heterogeneous platforms (e.g., humanoid, quadruped, wheeled robots) to improve navigation efficiency while significantly reducing collision risk. The cerebrum module constructs a three-layer reasoning model and leverages VLMs to build an end-to-end detection and verification mechanism, enabling zero-shot open-vocabulary goal navigation without predefined IDs and improving task success rates in both simulation and real-world environments. Additionally, the framework supports multimodal inputs (e.g., text, target descriptions, and images), further enhancing generalization, real-time performance, safety, and robustness. Experimental results on MP3D, HM3D, and OVON benchmarks demonstrate that FSUNav achieves state-of-the-art performance on object, instance image, and task navigation, significantly outperforming existing methods. Real-world deployments on diverse robotic platforms further validate its robustness and practical applicability.

Jun Xue, Junze Wang, Xinming Zhang et al.

Scaling Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (RL) to high-dimensional humanoid control remains a formidable challenge, as the ``curse of dimensionality'' induces severe exploration inefficiency and training instability in expansive action spaces. Consequently, recent high-throughput paradigms have largely converged on deterministic policy gradients combined with massive parallel simulation. We challenge this compromise with FastDSAC, a framework that effectively unlocks the potential of maximum entropy stochastic policies for complex continuous control. We introduce Dimension-wise Entropy Modulation (DEM) to dynamically redistribute the exploration budget and enforce diversity, alongside a continuous distributional critic tailored to ensure value fidelity and mitigate high-dimensional value overestimation. Extensive evaluations on HumanoidBench and other continuous control tasks demonstrate that rigorously designed stochastic policies can consistently match or outperform deterministic baselines, achieving notable gains of 180\% and 400\% on the challenging \textit{Basketball} and \textit{Balance Hard} tasks.

Xingtong Yu, Ruijuan Liang, Xinming Zhang et al.

Real-world graph typically evolve via a series of events, modeling dynamic interactions between objects across various domains. For dynamic graph learning, dynamic graph neural networks (DGNNs) have emerged as popular solutions. Recently, prompt learning methods have been explored on dynamic graphs. However, existing methods generally focus on capturing the relationship between nodes and time, while overlooking the impact of historical events. In this paper, we propose EVP, an event-aware dynamic graph prompt learning framework that can serve as a plug-in to existing methods, enhancing their ability to leverage historical events knowledge. First, we extract a series of historical events for each node and introduce an event adaptation mechanism to align the fine-grained characteristics of these events with downstream tasks. Second, we propose an event aggregation mechanism to effectively integrate historical knowledge into node representations. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on four public datasets to evaluate and analyze EVP.

Xingtong Yu, Chang Zhou, Xinming Zhang et al.

Molecular graph representation learning is widely used in chemical and biomedical research. While pre-trained 2D graph encoders have demonstrated strong performance, they overlook the rich molecular domain knowledge associated with submolecular instances (atoms and bonds). While molecular pre-training approaches incorporate such knowledge into their pre-training objectives, they typically employ designs tailored to a specific type of knowledge, lacking the flexibility to integrate diverse knowledge present in molecules. Hence, reusing widely available and well-validated pre-trained 2D encoders, while incorporating molecular domain knowledge during downstream adaptation, offers a more practical alternative. In this work, we propose MolGA, which adapts pre-trained 2D graph encoders to downstream molecular applications by flexibly incorporating diverse molecular domain knowledge. First, we propose a molecular alignment strategy that bridge the gap between pre-trained topological representations with domain-knowledge representations. Second, we introduce a conditional adaptation mechanism that generates instance-specific tokens to enable fine-grained integration of molecular domain knowledge for downstream tasks. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on eleven public datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of MolGA.

Jingtao Liu, Xinming Zhang

Continual Graph Learning(CGL)focuses on acquiring new knowledge while retaining previously learned information, essential for real-world graph applications. Current methods grapple with two main issues:1) The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma: Replay-based methods often create an imbalance between the Dilemma, while incurring significant storage costs.2) The Resource-Heavy Pre-training: Leading replay-free methods critically depend on extensively pre-trained backbones, this reliance imposes a substantial resource burden.In this paper, we argue that the key to overcoming these challenges lies not in replaying data or fine-tuning the entire network, but in dynamically modulating the internal computational flow of a frozen backbone. We posit that lightweight, task-specific modules can effectively steer a GNN's reasoning process. Motivated by this insight, we propose Task-Aware Adaptive Modulation(TAAM), a replay-free, resource-efficient approach that charts a new path for navigating the stability-plasticity dilemma. TAAM's core is its Neural Synapse Modulators(NSM), which are trained and then frozen for each task to store expert knowledge. A pivotal prototype-guided strategy governs these modulators: 1) For training, it initializes a new NSM by deep-copying from a similar past modulator to boost knowledge transfer. 2) For inference, it selects the most relevant frozen NSM for each task. These NSMs insert into a frozen GNN backbone to perform fine-grained, node-attentive modulation of its internal flow-different from the static perturbations of prior methods. Extensive experiments show that TAAM comprehensively outperforms state-of-the-art methods across six GCIL benchmark datasets. The code will be released upon acceptance of the paper.

Ji Shi, Chengxun Xie, Zhonghao Li et al.

The discovery of new molecules based on the original chemical molecule distributions is of great importance in medicine. The graph transformer, with its advantages of high performance and scalability compared to traditional graph networks, has been widely explored in recent research for applications of graph structures. However, current transformer-based graph decoders struggle to effectively utilize graph information, which limits their capacity to leverage only sequences of nodes rather than the complex topological structures of molecule graphs. This paper focuses on building a graph transformer-based framework for molecular generation, which we call \textbf{JTreeformer} as it transforms graph generation into junction tree generation. It combines GCN parallel with multi-head attention as the encoder. It integrates a directed acyclic GCN into a graph-based Transformer to serve as a decoder, which can iteratively synthesize the entire molecule by leveraging information from the partially constructed molecular structure at each step. In addition, a diffusion model is inserted in the latent space generated by the encoder, to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of sampling further. The empirical results demonstrate that our novel framework outperforms existing molecule generation methods, thus offering a promising tool to advance drug discovery (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/JTreeformer-C74C).

Zhonghao Li, Ji Shi, Xinming Zhang et al.

Graph Transformers (GTs) have demonstrated superior performance compared to traditional message-passing graph neural networks in many studies, especially in processing graph data with long-range dependencies. However, GTs tend to suffer from weak inductive bias, overfitting and over-globalizing problems due to the dense attention. In this paper, we introduce SFi-attention, a novel attention mechanism designed to learn sparse pattern by minimizing an energy function based on network flows with l1-norm regularization, to relieve those issues caused by dense attention. Furthermore, SFi-Former is accordingly devised which can leverage the sparse attention pattern of SFi-attention to generate sparse network flows beyond adjacency matrix of graph data. Specifically, SFi-Former aggregates features selectively from other nodes through flexible adaptation of the sparse attention, leading to a more robust model. We validate our SFi-Former on various graph datasets, especially those graph data exhibiting long-range dependencies. Experimental results show that our SFi-Former obtains competitive performance on GNN Benchmark datasets and SOTA performance on LongRange Graph Benchmark (LRGB) datasets. Additionally, our model gives rise to smaller generalization gaps, which indicates that it is less prone to over-fitting. Click here for codes.

Wenyu Zhang, Jie Luo, Xinming Zhang et al.

With the explosive growth of multimodal content online, pre-trained visual-language models have shown great potential for multimodal recommendation. However, while these models achieve decent performance when applied in a frozen manner, surprisingly, due to significant domain gaps (e.g., feature distribution discrepancy and task objective misalignment) between pre-training and personalized recommendation, adopting a joint training approach instead leads to performance worse than baseline. Existing approaches either rely on simple feature extraction or require computationally expensive full model fine-tuning, struggling to balance effectiveness and efficiency. To tackle these challenges, we propose \textbf{P}arameter-efficient \textbf{T}uning for \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{Rec}ommendation (\textbf{PTMRec}), a novel framework that bridges the domain gap between pre-trained models and recommendation systems through a knowledge-guided dual-stage parameter-efficient training strategy. This framework not only eliminates the need for costly additional pre-training but also flexibly accommodates various parameter-efficient tuning methods.

Yanjun Chen, Xinming Zhang, Xianghui Wang et al.

Soft Actor-Critic algorithm is widely recognized for its robust performance across a range of deep reinforcement learning tasks, where it leverages the tanh transformation to constrain actions within bounded limits. However, this transformation induces a distribution shift, distorting the original Gaussian action distribution and potentially leading the policy to select suboptimal actions, particularly in high-dimensional action spaces. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive theoretical and empirical analysis of this distribution shift, deriving the precise probability density function (PDF) for actions following the tanh transformation to clarify the misalignment introduced between the transformed distribution's mode and the intended action output. We substantiate these theoretical insights through extensive experiments on high-dimensional tasks within the HumanoidBench benchmark. Our findings indicate that accounting for this distribution shift substantially enhances SAC's performance, resulting in notable improvements in cumulative rewards, sample efficiency, and reliability across tasks. These results underscore a critical consideration for SAC and similar algorithms: addressing transformation-induced distribution shifts is essential to optimizing policy effectiveness in high-dimensional deep reinforcement learning environments, thereby expanding the robustness and applicability of SAC in complex control tasks.

Nan Lin, Yuxuan Li, Yujun Zhu et al.

Traditionally, reinforcement learning methods predict the next action based on the current state. However, in many situations, directly applying actions to control systems or robots is dangerous and may lead to unexpected behaviors because action is rather low-level. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework without explicit action. Our meta policy tries to manipulate the next optimal state and actual action is produced by the inverse dynamics model. To stabilize the training process, we integrate adversarial learning and information bottleneck into our framework. Under our framework, widely available state-only demonstrations can be exploited effectively for imitation learning. Also, prior knowledge and constraints can be applied to meta policy. We test our algorithm in simulation tasks and its combination with imitation learning. The experimental results show the reliability and robustness of our algorithms.

Xinming Zhang, Ling Ma

From the viewpoint of inverse problem, the optimization of drug release based on the multi-laminated drug controlled release devices has been regarded as the solution problem of the diffusion equation initial value inverse problem. In view of the ill-posedness of the corresponding inverse problem, a modified Tikhonov regularization method is proposed by constructing a new regularizing filter function based on the singular value theory of compact operator. The convergence and the optimal asymptotic order of the regularized solution are obtained. Then the classical Tikhonov regularization method and the modified Tikhonov regularization method are applied to the optimization problem of the initial drug concentration distribution. For three various desired release profiles (constant release, linear decrease release and linear increase followed by a constant release profiles), better results can be obtained by using the modified Tikhonov regularization method. The numerical results demonstrate that the modified Tikhonov regularization method not only has the optimal asymptotic order, but also is suitable for the optimization and design of multi-laminated drug controlled release devices.

Di Yuan, Xiaohuan Lu, Donghao Li et al.

Most of the correlation filter based tracking algorithms can achieve good performance and maintain fast computational speed. However, in some complicated tracking scenes, there is a fatal defect that causes the object to be located inaccurately. In order to address this problem, we propose a particle filter redetection based tracking approach for accurate object localization. During the tracking process, the kernelized correlation filter (KCF) based tracker locates the object by relying on the maximum response value of the response map; when the response map becomes ambiguous, the KCF tracking result becomes unreliable. Our method can provide more candidates by particle resampling to detect the object accordingly. Additionally, we give a new object scale evaluation mechanism, which merely considers the differences between the maximum response values in consecutive frames. Extensive experiments on OTB2013 and OTB2015 datasets demonstrate that the proposed tracker performs favorably in relation to the state-of-the-art methods.