Hongke Zhao

Likang Wu, Zhi Li, Hongke Zhao et al.

Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL), which aims at automatically recognizing unseen objects, is a promising learning paradigm to understand new real-world knowledge for machines continuously. Recently, the Knowledge Graph (KG) has been proven as an effective scheme for handling the zero-shot task with large-scale and non-attribute data. Prior studies always embed relationships of seen and unseen objects into visual information from existing knowledge graphs to promote the cognitive ability of the unseen data. Actually, real-world knowledge is naturally formed by multimodal facts. Compared with ordinary structural knowledge from a graph perspective, multimodal KG can provide cognitive systems with fine-grained knowledge. For example, the text description and visual content can depict more critical details of a fact than only depending on knowledge triplets. Unfortunately, this multimodal fine-grained knowledge is largely unexploited due to the bottleneck of feature alignment between different modalities. To that end, we propose a multimodal intensive ZSL framework that matches regions of images with corresponding semantic embeddings via a designed dense attention module and self-calibration loss. It makes the semantic transfer process of our ZSL framework learns more differentiated knowledge between entities. Our model also gets rid of the performance limitation of only using rough global features. We conduct extensive experiments and evaluate our model on large-scale real-world data. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in standard zero-shot classification tasks.

Chuang Zhao, Hongke Zhao, Ming He et al.

Cross-domain recommendation aims to leverage knowledge from multiple domains to alleviate the data sparsity and cold-start problems in traditional recommender systems. One popular paradigm is to employ overlapping user representations to establish domain connections, thereby improving recommendation performance in all scenarios. Nevertheless, the general practice of this approach is to train user embeddings in each domain separately and then aggregate them in a plain manner, often ignoring potential cross-domain similarities between users and items. Furthermore, considering that their training objective is recommendation task-oriented without specific regularizations, the optimized embeddings disregard the interest alignment among user's views, and even violate the user's original interest distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel cross-domain recommendation framework, namely COAST, to improve recommendation performance on dual domains by perceiving the cross-domain similarity between entities and aligning user interests. Specifically, we first construct a unified cross-domain heterogeneous graph and redefine the message passing mechanism of graph convolutional networks to capture high-order similarity of users and items across domains. Targeted at user interest alignment, we develop deep insights from two more fine-grained perspectives of user-user and user-item interest invariance across domains by virtue of affluent unsupervised and semantic signals. We conduct intensive experiments on multiple tasks, constructed from two large recommendation data sets. Extensive results show COAST consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art cross-domain recommendation algorithms as well as classic single-domain recommendation methods.

Chuang Zhao, Hongke Zhao, Hengshu Zhu et al.

Unsupervised domain adaptation aims to transfer rich knowledge from the annotated source domain to the unlabeled target domain with the same label space. One prevalent solution is the bi-discriminator domain adversarial network, which strives to identify target domain samples outside the support of the source domain distribution and enforces their classification to be consistent on both discriminators. Despite being effective, agnostic accuracy and overconfident estimation for out-of-distribution samples hinder its further performance improvement. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel bi-discriminator domain adversarial neural network with class-level gradient alignment, i.e. BACG. BACG resorts to gradient signals and second-order probability estimation for better alignment of domain distributions. Specifically, for accuracy-awareness, we first design an optimizable nearest neighbor algorithm to obtain pseudo-labels of samples in the target domain, and then enforce the backward gradient approximation of the two discriminators at the class level. Furthermore, following evidential learning theory, we transform the traditional softmax-based optimization method into a Multinomial Dirichlet hierarchical model to infer the class probability distribution as well as samples uncertainty, thereby alleviating misestimation of out-of-distribution samples and guaranteeing high-quality classes alignment. In addition, inspired by contrastive learning, we develop a memory bank-based variant, i.e. Fast-BACG, which can greatly shorten the training process at the cost of a minor decrease in accuracy. Extensive experiments and detailed theoretical analysis on four benchmark data sets validate the effectiveness and robustness of our algorithm.

Likang Wu, Junji Jiang, Hongke Zhao et al.

Recently, Zero-Shot Node Classification (ZNC) has been an emerging and crucial task in graph data analysis. This task aims to predict nodes from unseen classes which are unobserved in the training process. Existing work mainly utilizes Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to associate features' prototypes and labels' semantics thus enabling knowledge transfer from seen to unseen classes. However, the multi-faceted semantic orientation in the feature-semantic alignment has been neglected by previous work, i.e. the content of a node usually covers diverse topics that are relevant to the semantics of multiple labels. It's necessary to separate and judge the semantic factors that tremendously affect the cognitive ability to improve the generality of models. To this end, we propose a Knowledge-Aware Multi-Faceted framework (KMF) that enhances the richness of label semantics via the extracted KG (Knowledge Graph)-based topics. And then the content of each node is reconstructed to a topic-level representation that offers multi-faceted and fine-grained semantic relevancy to different labels. Due to the particularity of the graph's instance (i.e., node) representation, a novel geometric constraint is developed to alleviate the problem of prototype drift caused by node information aggregation. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on several public graph datasets and design an application of zero-shot cross-domain recommendation. The quantitative results demonstrate both the effectiveness and generalization of KMF with the comparison of state-of-the-art baselines.

Likang Wu, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen et al.

Network-aware cascade size prediction aims to predict the final reposted number of user-generated information via modeling the propagation process in social networks. Estimating the user's reposting probability by social influence, namely state activation plays an important role in the information diffusion process. Therefore, Graph Neural Networks (GNN), which can simulate the information interaction between nodes, has been proved as an effective scheme to handle this prediction task. However, existing studies including GNN-based models usually neglect a vital factor of user's preference which influences the state activation deeply. To that end, we propose a novel framework to promote cascade size prediction by enhancing the user preference modeling according to three stages, i.e., preference topics generation, preference shift modeling, and social influence activation. Our end-to-end method makes the user activating process of information diffusion more adaptive and accurate. Extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets have clearly demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed model compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Hongke Zhao, Songming Zheng, Likang Wu et al.

The explainability of recommendation systems is crucial for enhancing user trust and satisfaction. Leveraging large language models (LLMs) offers new opportunities for comprehensive recommendation logic generation. However, in existing related studies, fine-tuning LLM models for recommendation tasks incurs high computational costs and alignment issues with existing systems, limiting the application potential of proven proprietary/closed-source LLM models, such as GPT-4. In this work, our proposed effective strategy LANE aligns LLMs with online recommendation systems without additional LLMs tuning, reducing costs and improving explainability. This innovative approach addresses key challenges in integrating language models with recommendation systems while fully utilizing the capabilities of powerful proprietary models. Specifically, our strategy operates through several key components: semantic embedding, user multi-preference extraction using zero-shot prompting, semantic alignment, and explainable recommendation generation using Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting. By embedding item titles instead of IDs and utilizing multi-head attention mechanisms, our approach aligns the semantic features of user preferences with those of candidate items, ensuring coherent and user-aligned recommendations. Sufficient experimental results including performance comparison, questionnaire voting, and visualization cases prove that our method can not only ensure recommendation performance, but also provide easy-to-understand and reasonable recommendation logic.

Zhong Guan, Yongjian Guo, Haoran Sun et al.

Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves rollout throughput for large language model agents by decoupling sample generation from policy optimization, but it also introduces a critical failure mode for PPO-style off-policy correction. In heterogeneous training systems, the total importance ratio should ideally be decomposed into two semantically distinct factors: a \emph{training--inference discrepancy term} that aligns inference-side and training-side distributions at the same behavior-policy version, and a \emph{policy-staleness term} that constrains the update from the historical policy to the current policy. We show that practical asynchronous pipelines with delayed updates and partial rollouts often lose the required historical training-side logits, or old logits. This missing-old-logit problem entangles discrepancy repair with staleness correction, breaks the intended semantics of decoupled correction, and makes clipping and masking thresholds interact undesirably. To address this issue, we study both exact and approximate correction routes. We propose three exact old-logit acquisition strategies: snapshot-based version tracking, a dedicated old-logit model, and synchronization via partial rollout interruption, and compare their system trade-offs. From the perspective of approximate correction, we focus on preserving the benefits of decoupled correction through a more appropriate approximate policy when exact old logits cannot be recovered at low cost, without incurring extra system overhead. Following this analysis, we adopt a revised PPO-EWMA method, which achieves significant gains in both training speed and optimization performance. Code at https://github.com/millioniron/ROLL.

Zhong Guan, Haoran Sun, Yongjian Guo et al.

In recent years, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a crucial pathway towards general embodied intelligence, yet their training efficiency has become a key bottleneck. Although existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based training frameworks like RLinf can enhance model generalization, they still rely on synchronous execution, leading to severe resource underutilization and throughput limitations during environment interaction, policy generation (rollout), and model update phases (actor). To overcome this challenge, this paper, for the first time, proposes and implements a fully-asynchronous policy training framework encompassing the entire pipeline from environment interaction, rollout generation, to actor policy updates. Systematically drawing inspiration from asynchronous optimization ideas in large model RL, our framework designs a multi-level decoupled architecture. This includes asynchronous parallelization of environment interaction and trajectory collection, streaming execution for policy generation, and decoupled scheduling for training updates. We validated the effectiveness of our method across diverse VLA models and environments. On the LIBERO benchmark, the framework achieves throughput improvements of up to 59.25\% compared to existing synchronous strategies. When deeply optimizing separation strategies, throughput can be increased by as much as 126.67\%. We verified the effectiveness of each asynchronous component via ablation studies. Scaling law validation across 8 to 256 GPUs demonstrates our method's excellent scalability under most conditions.

Zhong Guan, Likang Wu, Hongke Zhao et al.

Attention mechanisms are critical to the success of large language models (LLMs), driving significant advancements in multiple fields. However, for graph-structured data, which requires emphasis on topological connections, they fall short compared to message-passing mechanisms on fixed links, such as those employed by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). This raises a question: ``Does attention fail for graphs in natural language settings?'' Motivated by these observations, we embarked on an empirical study from the perspective of attention mechanisms to explore how LLMs process graph-structured data. The goal is to gain deeper insights into the attention behavior of LLMs over graph structures. We uncovered unique phenomena regarding how LLMs apply attention to graph-structured data and analyzed these findings to improve the modeling of such data by LLMs. The primary findings of our research are: 1) While LLMs can recognize graph data and capture text-node interactions, they struggle to model inter-node relationships within graph structures due to inherent architectural constraints. 2) The attention distribution of LLMs across graph nodes does not align with ideal structural patterns, indicating a failure to adapt to graph topology nuances. 3) Neither fully connected attention nor fixed connectivity is optimal; each has specific limitations in its application scenarios. Instead, intermediate-state attention windows improve LLM training performance and seamlessly transition to fully connected windows during inference. Source code: \href{https://github.com/millioniron/LLM_exploration}{LLM4Exploration}

Zipeng Liu, Likang Wu, Ming He et al.

Significant efforts have been dedicated to integrating the powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse modalities, particularly focusing on the fusion of language, vision and audio data. However, the graph-structured data, which is inherently rich in structural and domain-specific knowledge, has not yet been gracefully adapted to LLMs. Existing methods either describe the graph with raw text, suffering the loss of graph structural information, or feed Graph Neural Network (GNN) embeddings into LLMs at the cost of losing explainable prompt semantics. To bridge this gap, we introduce an end-to-end modality-aligning framework for LLM-graph alignment: Dual-Residual Vector Quantized-Variational AutoEncoder, namely Dr.E. Our approach is purposefully designed to facilitate token-level alignment with LLMs, enabling an effective translation of the intrinsic `language' of graphs into comprehensible natural language. We also manage to enhance LLMs' more robust structural understanding of graphs by incorporating multiple views of the central nodes based on their surrounding nodes at various distances. Our experimental evaluations on standard graph tasks demonstrate competitive performance against other state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. Additionally, our framework ensures certain visual interpretability, efficiency, and robustness, marking the promising successful endeavor to achieve token-level alignment between LLMs and GNNs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Timothy914/Dr.E.

Chuang Zhao, Hongke Zhao

This paper presents Top Management Journal Portal, a deployable web artifact for searching, monitoring, and interpreting literature from elite business and management journals. The system integrates the UTD-24 and Financial Times 50 (FT50) journal pools, retrieves live article metadata from the Cross- ref REST API, and organizes scholarly work into an end-to-end workflow spanning query formulation, result filtering, hotspot extraction, citation export, favorites management, and usage analytics. Unlike static journal directories or general-purpose academic search engines, the artifact is explicitly scoped to high-status management outlets and is designed to support sensemaking tasks that matter to researchers, doctoral students, and lab managers: identifying recent work, surfacing topical concentration, and converting search output into actionable research material. Architecturally, the system emphasizes source transparency, modularity, and low-cost public deployability through a lightweight Node.js service layer, a multi-page client interface, optional large-language-model enhancement for hotspot rewriting, and a free-tier persistence path through Supabase. The paper contributes both a functioning design artifact and an extensible architectural pattern for journal-pool-specific scholarly discovery, with implications for digital research infrastructure in information systems and business scholarship.

Chuang Zhao, Hongke Zhao, Xiaofang Zhou et al.

Contextual clinical reasoning demands robust inference grounded in complex, heterogeneous clinical records. While state-of-the-art fine-tuning, in-context learning (ICL), and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enable knowledge exposure, they often fall short of genuine contextual internalization: dynamically adjusting a model's internal representations to the subtle nuances of individual cases at inference time. To address this, we propose Dual-Stream Calibration (DSC), a test-time training framework that transcends superficial knowledge exposure to achieve deep internalization during inference. DSC facilitates input internalization by synergistically aligning two calibration streams. Unlike passive context exposure, the Semantic Calibration Stream enforces a deliberative reflection on core evidence, internalizing semantic anchors by minimizing entropy to stabilize generative trajectories. Simultaneously, the Structural Calibration Stream assimilates latent inferential dependencies through an iterative meta-learning objective. By training on specialized support sets at test-time, this stream enables the model to bridge the gap between external evidence and internal logic, synthesizing fragmented data into a coherent response. Our approach shifts the reasoning paradigm from passive attention-based matching to an active refinement of the latent inferential space. Validated against thirteen clinical datasets, DSC demonstrates superiority across three distinct task paradigms, consistently outstripping state-of-the-art baselines ranging from training-dependent models to test-time learning frameworks.

Chuang Zhao, Hui Tang, Hongke Zhao et al.

Accurate healthcare prediction is critical for improving patient outcomes and reducing operational costs. Bolstered by growing reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) offer a promising path to enhance healthcare predictions by drawing on their rich parametric knowledge. However, LLMs are prone to factual inaccuracies due to limitations in the reliability and coverage of their embedded knowledge. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) frameworks, such as GraphRAG and its variants, have been proposed to mitigate these issues by incorporating external knowledge, they face two key challenges in the healthcare scenario: (1) identifying the clinical necessity to activate the retrieval mechanism, and (2) achieving synergy between the retriever and the generator to craft contextually appropriate retrievals. To address these challenges, we propose GHAR, a \underline{g}enerative \underline{h}ierarchical \underline{a}gentic \underline{R}AG framework that simultaneously resolves when to retrieve and how to optimize the collaboration between submodules in healthcare. Specifically, for the first challenge, we design a dual-agent architecture comprising Agent-Top and Agent-Low. Agent-Top acts as the primary physician, iteratively deciding whether to rely on parametric knowledge or to initiate retrieval, while Agent-Low acts as the consulting service, summarising all task-relevant knowledge once retrieval was triggered. To tackle the second challenge, we innovatively unify the optimization of both agents within a formal Markov Decision Process, designing diverse rewards to align their shared goal of accurate prediction while preserving their distinct roles. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets across three popular tasks demonstrate our superiority over state-of-the-art baselines, highlighting the potential of hierarchical agentic RAG in advancing healthcare systems.

Zhong Guan, Likang Wu, Hongke Zhao et al.

Many existing studies have achieved significant improvements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), while the enhancement of reasoning abilities in small language models (SLMs) has not yet been sufficiently explored. Combining distilled data from larger models with RLVR on small models themselves is a natural approach, but it still faces various challenges and issues. Therefore, we propose \textit{\underline{R}}ecall-\textit{\underline{E}}xtend \textit{\underline{D}}ynamics(RED): Enhancing Small Language Models through Controlled Exploration and Refined Offline Integration. In this paper, we explore the perspective of varying exploration spaces, balancing offline distillation with online reinforcement learning. Simultaneously, we specifically design and optimize for the insertion problem within offline data. By monitoring the ratio of entropy changes in the model concerning offline and online data, we regulate the weight of offline-SFT, thereby addressing the issues of insufficient exploration space in small models and the redundancy and complexity during the distillation process. Furthermore, to tackle the distribution discrepancies between offline data and the current policy, we design a sample-accuracy-based policy shift mechanism that dynamically chooses between imitating offline distilled data and learning from its own policy.

Chuang Zhao, Hui Tang, Hongke Zhao et al.

Advanced healthcare predictions offer significant improvements in patient outcomes by leveraging predictive analytics. Existing works primarily utilize various views of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data, such as diagnoses, lab tests, or clinical notes, for model training. These methods typically assume the availability of complete EHR views and that the designed model could fully leverage the potential of each view. However, in practice, random missing views and view laziness present two significant challenges that hinder further improvements in multi-view utilization. To address these challenges, we introduce Diffmv, an innovative diffusion-based generative framework designed to advance the exploitation of multiple views of EHR data. Specifically, to address random missing views, we integrate various views of EHR data into a unified diffusion-denoising framework, enriched with diverse contextual conditions to facilitate progressive alignment and view transformation. To mitigate view laziness, we propose a novel reweighting strategy that assesses the relative advantages of each view, promoting a balanced utilization of various data views within the model. Our proposed strategy achieves superior performance across multiple health prediction tasks derived from three popular datasets, including multi-view and multi-modality scenarios.

Zhichen Xiang, Hongke Zhao, Chuang Zhao et al.

Data bias, e.g., popularity impairs the dynamics of two-sided markets within recommender systems. This overshadows the less visible but potentially intriguing long-tail items that could capture user interest. Despite the abundance of research surrounding this issue, it still poses challenges and remains a hot topic in academic circles. Along this line, in this paper, we developed a re-ranking approach in dynamic settings with fair-exposure optimization driven by strategic agents. Designed for the producer side, the execution of agents assumes content creators can modify item features based on strategic incentives to maximize their exposure. This iterative process entails an end-to-end optimization, employing differentiable ranking operators that simultaneously target accuracy and fairness. Joint objectives ensure the performance of recommendations while enhancing the visibility of tail items. We also leveraged the performativity nature of predictions to illustrate how strategic learning influences content creators to shift towards fairness efficiently, thereby incentivizing features of tail items. Through comprehensive experiments on both public and industrial datasets, we have substantiated the effectiveness and dominance of the proposed method especially on unveiling the potential of tail items.

Chuang Zhao, Hongke Zhao, Ming He et al.

Cross-domain recommendation offers a potential avenue for alleviating data sparsity and cold-start problems. Embedding and mapping, as a classic cross-domain research genre, aims to identify a common mapping function to perform representation transformation between two domains. Nevertheless, previous coarse-grained preference representations, non-personalized mapping functions, and excessive reliance on overlapping users limit their performance, especially in scenarios where overlapping users are sparse. To address aforementioned challenges, we propose a novel cross-domain approach, namely CVPM. CVPM formalizes cross-domain interest transfer as a hybrid architecture of parametric meta-learning and self-supervised learning, which not only transfers user preferences at a finer level, but also enables signal enhancement with the knowledge of non-overlapping users. Specifically, with deep insights into user preferences and valence preference theory, we believe that there exists significant difference between users' positive preferences and negative behaviors, and thus employ differentiated encoders to learn their distributions. In particular, we further utilize the pre-trained model and item popularity to sample pseudo-interaction items to ensure the integrity of both distributions. To guarantee the personalization of preference transfer, we treat each user's mapping as two parts, the common transformation and the personalized bias, where the network used to generate the personalized bias is output by a meta-learner. Furthermore, in addition to the supervised loss for overlapping users, we design contrastive tasks for non-overlapping users from both group and individual-levels to avoid model skew and enhance the semantics of representations. Exhaustive data analysis and extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and advancement of our proposed framework.

Zhong Guan, Hongke Zhao, Likang Wu et al.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been widely researched in the field of graph machine learning due to their outstanding abilities in language comprehension and learning. However, the significant gap between natural language tasks and topological structure modeling poses a nonnegligible challenge. Specifically, since natural language descriptions are not sufficient for LLMs to understand and process graph-structured data, fine-tuned LLMs perform even worse than some traditional GNN models on graph tasks, lacking inherent modeling capabilities for graph structures. Existing research overly emphasizes LLMs' understanding of semantic information captured by external models, while inadequately exploring graph topological structure modeling, thereby overlooking the genuine capabilities that LLMs lack. Consequently, in this paper, we introduce a new framework, LangTopo, which aligns graph structure modeling with natural language understanding at the token level. LangTopo quantifies the graph structure modeling capabilities of GNNs and LLMs by constructing a codebook for the graph modality and performs consistency maximization. This process aligns the text description of LLM with the topological modeling of GNN, allowing LLM to learn the ability of GNN to capture graph structures, enabling LLM to handle graph-structured data independently. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method on multiple datasets.

Zhong Guan, Likang Wu, Hongke Zhao et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly prominent in the recommendation systems domain. Existing studies usually utilize in-context learning or supervised fine-tuning on task-specific data to align LLMs into recommendations. However, the substantial bias in semantic spaces between language processing tasks and recommendation tasks poses a nonnegligible challenge. Specifically, without the adequate capturing ability of collaborative information, existing modeling paradigms struggle to capture behavior patterns within community groups, leading to LLMs' ineffectiveness in discerning implicit interaction semantic in recommendation scenarios. To address this, we consider enhancing the learning capability of language model-driven recommendation models for structured data, specifically by utilizing interaction graphs rich in collaborative semantics. We propose a Graph-Aware Learning for Language Model-Driven Recommendations (GAL-Rec). GAL-Rec enhances the understanding of user-item collaborative semantics by imitating the intent of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to aggregate multi-hop information, thereby fully exploiting the substantial learning capacity of LLMs to independently address the complex graphs in the recommendation system. Sufficient experimental results on three real-world datasets demonstrate that GAL-Rec significantly enhances the comprehension of collaborative semantics, and improves recommendation performance.

Kai Zhang, Kun Zhang, Mengdi Zhang et al.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in the given sentence. While pre-trained language models such as BERT have achieved great success, incorporating dynamic semantic changes into ABSA remains challenging. To this end, in this paper, we propose to address this problem by Dynamic Re-weighting BERT (DR-BERT), a novel method designed to learn dynamic aspect-oriented semantics for ABSA. Specifically, we first take the Stack-BERT layers as a primary encoder to grasp the overall semantic of the sentence and then fine-tune it by incorporating a lightweight Dynamic Re-weighting Adapter (DRA). Note that the DRA can pay close attention to a small region of the sentences at each step and re-weigh the vitally important words for better aspect-aware sentiment understanding. Finally, experimental results on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and the rationality of our proposed model and provide good interpretable insights for future semantic modeling.

Likang Wu, Zhi Li, Hongke Zhao et al.

In the online innovation market, the fund-raising performance of the start-up project is a concerning issue for creators, investors and platforms. Unfortunately, existing studies always focus on modeling the fund-raising process after the publishment of a project but the predicting of a project attraction in the market before setting up is largely unexploited. Usually, this prediction is always with great challenges to making a comprehensive understanding of both the start-up project and market environment. To that end, in this paper, we present a focused study on this important problem from a market graph perspective. Specifically, we propose a Graph-based Market Environment (GME) model for predicting the fund-raising performance of the unpublished project by exploiting the market environment. In addition, we discriminatively model the project competitiveness and market preferences by designing two graph-based neural network architectures and incorporating them into a joint optimization stage. Furthermore, to explore the information propagation problem with dynamic environment in a large-scale market graph, we extend the GME model with parallelizing competitiveness quantification and hierarchical propagation algorithm. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world data. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

Likang Wu, Zhi Li, Hongke Zhao et al.

Existing representation learning methods in graph convolutional networks are mainly designed by describing the neighborhood of each node as a perceptual whole, while the implicit semantic associations behind highly complex interactions of graphs are largely unexploited. In this paper, we propose a Semantic Graph Convolutional Networks (SGCN) that explores the implicit semantics by learning latent semantic-paths in graphs. In previous work, there are explorations of graph semantics via meta-paths. However, these methods mainly rely on explicit heterogeneous information that is hard to be obtained in a large amount of graph-structured data. SGCN first breaks through this restriction via leveraging the semantic-paths dynamically and automatically during the node aggregating process. To evaluate our idea, we conduct sufficient experiments on several standard datasets, and the empirical results show the superior performance of our model.

Zhi Li, Bo Wu, Qi Liu et al.

Complementary recommendations, which aim at providing users product suggestions that are supplementary and compatible with their obtained items, have become a hot topic in both academia and industry in recent years. %However, it is challenging due to its complexity and subjectivity. Existing work mainly focused on modeling the co-purchased relations between two items, but the compositional associations of item collections are largely unexplored. Actually, when a user chooses the complementary items for the purchased products, it is intuitive that she will consider the visual semantic coherence (such as color collocations, texture compatibilities) in addition to global impressions. Towards this end, in this paper, we propose a novel Content Attentive Neural Network (CANN) to model the comprehensive compositional coherence on both global contents and semantic contents. Specifically, we first propose a \textit{Global Coherence Learning} (GCL) module based on multi-heads attention to model the global compositional coherence. Then, we generate the semantic-focal representations from different semantic regions and design a \textit{Focal Coherence Learning} (FCL) module to learn the focal compositional coherence from different semantic-focal representations. Finally, we optimize the CANN in a novel compositional optimization strategy. Extensive experiments on the large-scale real-world data clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of CANN compared with several state-of-the-art methods.

Likang Wu, Zhi Li, Hongke Zhao et al.

Well begun is half done. In the crowdfunding market, the early fundraising performance of the project is a concerned issue for both creators and platforms. However, estimating the early fundraising performance before the project published is very challenging and still under-explored. To that end, in this paper, we present a focused study on this important problem in a market modeling view. Specifically, we propose a Graph-based Market Environment model (GME) for estimating the early fundraising performance of the target project by exploiting the market environment. In addition, we discriminatively model the market competition and market evolution by designing two graph-based neural network architectures and incorporating them into the joint optimization stage. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on the real-world crowdfunding data collected from Indiegogo.com. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model for modeling and estimating the early fundraising performance of the target project.

Binbin Jin, Enhong Chen, Hongke Zhao et al.

In the area of community question answering (CQA), answer selection and answer ranking are two tasks which are applied to help users quickly access valuable answers. Existing solutions mainly exploit the syntactic or semantic correlation between a question and its related answers (Q&A), where the multi-facet domain effects in CQA are still underexplored. In this paper, we propose a unified model, Enhanced Attentive Recurrent Neural Network (EARNN), for both answer selection and answer ranking tasks by taking full advantages of both Q&A semantics and multi-facet domain effects (i.e., topic effects and timeliness). Specifically, we develop a serialized LSTM to learn the unified representations of Q&A, where two attention mechanisms at either sentence-level or word-level are designed for capturing the deep effects of topics. Meanwhile, the emphasis of Q&A can be automatically distinguished. Furthermore, we design a time-sensitive ranking function to model the timeliness in CQA. To effectively train EARNN, a question-dependent pairwise learning strategy is also developed. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset from Quora. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and interpretability of our proposed EARNN model.

Qi Liu, Shiwei Tong, Chuanren Liu et al.

Adaptive learning, also known as adaptive teaching, relies on learning path recommendation, which sequentially recommends personalized learning items (e.g., lectures, exercises) to satisfy the unique needs of each learner. Although it is well known that modeling the cognitive structure including knowledge level of learners and knowledge structure (e.g., the prerequisite relations) of learning items is important for learning path recommendation, existing methods for adaptive learning often separately focus on either knowledge levels of learners or knowledge structure of learning items. To fully exploit the multifaceted cognitive structure for learning path recommendation, we propose a Cognitive Structure Enhanced framework for Adaptive Learning, named CSEAL. By viewing path recommendation as a Markov Decision Process and applying an actor-critic algorithm, CSEAL can sequentially identify the right learning items to different learners. Specifically, we first utilize a recurrent neural network to trace the evolving knowledge levels of learners at each learning step. Then, we design a navigation algorithm on the knowledge structure to ensure the logicality of learning paths, which reduces the search space in the decision process. Finally, the actor-critic algorithm is used to determine what to learn next and whose parameters are dynamically updated along the learning path. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CSEAL.

Zhi Li, Hongke Zhao, Qi Liu et al.

In the modern e-commerce, the behaviors of customers contain rich information, e.g., consumption habits, the dynamics of preferences. Recently, session-based recommendations are becoming popular to explore the temporal characteristics of customers' interactive behaviors. However, existing works mainly exploit the short-term behaviors without fully taking the customers' long-term stable preferences and evolutions into account. In this paper, we propose a novel Behavior-Intensive Neural Network (BINN) for next-item recommendation by incorporating both users' historical stable preferences and present consumption motivations. Specifically, BINN contains two main components, i.e., Neural Item Embedding, and Discriminative Behaviors Learning. Firstly, a novel item embedding method based on user interactions is developed for obtaining an unified representation for each item. Then, with the embedded items and the interactive behaviors over item sequences, BINN discriminatively learns the historical preferences and present motivations of the target users. Thus, BINN could better perform recommendations of the next items for the target users. Finally, for evaluating the performances of BINN, we conduct extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, i.e., Tianchi and JD. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of BINN compared with several state-of-the-art methods.