Shichao Zhang

Zhirong Huang, Debo Cheng, Jiuyong Li et al.

It is often challenging to identify a valid instrumental variable (IV), although the IV methods have been regarded as effective tools of addressing the confounding bias introduced by latent variables. To deal with this issue, an Interaction-Data-guided Conditional IV (IDCIV) debiasing method is proposed for Recommender Systems, called IDCIV-RS. The IDCIV-RS automatically generates the representations of valid CIVs and their corresponding conditioning sets directly from interaction data, significantly reducing the complexity of IV selection while effectively mitigating the confounding bias caused by latent variables in recommender systems. Specifically, the IDCIV-RS leverages a variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn both the CIV representations and their conditioning sets from interaction data, followed by the application of least squares to derive causal representations for click prediction. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, Movielens-10M and Douban-Movie, demonstrate that IDCIV-RS successfully learns the representations of valid CIVs, effectively reduces bias, and consequently improves recommendation accuracy.

Qingfeng Chen, Haojin Zeng, Jingyi Jie et al.

With the rapid growth of graph-structured data in critical domains, unsupervised graph-level anomaly detection (UGAD) has become a pivotal task. UGAD seeks to identify entire graphs that deviate from normal behavioral patterns. However, most Graph Neural Network (GNN) approaches implicitly assume that the training set is clean, containing only normal graphs, which is rarely true in practice. Even modest contamination by anomalous graphs can distort learned representations and sharply degrade performance. To address this challenge, we propose DeNoise, a robust UGAD framework explicitly designed for contaminated training data. It jointly optimizes a graph-level encoder, an attribute decoder, and a structure decoder via an adversarial objective to learn noise-resistant embeddings. Further, DeNoise introduces an encoder anchor-alignment denoising mechanism that fuses high-information node embeddings from normal graphs into all graph embeddings, improving representation quality while suppressing anomaly interference. A contrastive learning component then compacts normal graph embeddings and repels anomalous ones in the latent space. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate that DeNoise consistently learns reliable graph-level representations under varying noise intensities and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art UGAD baselines.

Wenzhen Zhang, Debo Cheng, Guangquan Lu et al.

Deep neural networks are highly susceptible to overfitting noisy labels, which leads to degraded performance. Existing methods address this issue by employing manually defined criteria, aiming to achieve optimal partitioning in each iteration to avoid fitting noisy labels while thoroughly learning clean samples. However, this often results in overly complex and difficult-to-train models. To address this issue, we decouple the tasks of avoiding fitting incorrect labels and thoroughly learning clean samples and propose a simple yet highly applicable method called Adaptive Label Refinement (ALR). First, inspired by label refurbishment techniques, we update the original hard labels to soft labels using the model's predictions to reduce the risk of fitting incorrect labels. Then, by introducing the entropy loss, we gradually `harden' the high-confidence soft labels, guiding the model to better learn from clean samples. This approach is simple and efficient, requiring no prior knowledge of noise or auxiliary datasets, making it more accessible compared to existing methods. We validate ALR's effectiveness through experiments on benchmark datasets with artificial label noise (CIFAR-10/100) and real-world datasets with inherent noise (ANIMAL-10N, Clothing1M, WebVision). The results show that ALR outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Chunwei Tian, Mingjian Song, Wangmeng Zuo et al.

Due to strong learning abilities of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), they have become mainstream methods for image super-resolution. However, there are big differences of different deep learning methods with different types. There is little literature to summarize relations and differences of different methods in image super-resolution. Thus, summarizing these literatures are important, according to loading capacity and execution speed of devices. This paper first introduces principles of CNNs in image super-resolution, then introduces CNNs based bicubic interpolation, nearest neighbor interpolation, bilinear interpolation, transposed convolution, sub-pixel layer, meta up-sampling for image super-resolution to analyze differences and relations of different CNNs based interpolations and modules, and compare performance of these methods by experiments. Finally, this paper gives potential research points and drawbacks and summarizes the whole paper, which can facilitate developments of CNNs in image super-resolution.

Chengyu Li, Debo Cheng, Guixian Zhang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance in graph representation learning across various real-world applications. However, they often produce biased predictions caused by sensitive attributes, such as religion or gender, an issue that has been largely overlooked in existing methods. Recently, numerous studies have focused on reducing biases in GNNs. However, these approaches often rely on training with partial data (e.g., using either node features or graph structure alone), which can enhance fairness but frequently compromises model utility due to the limited utilization of available graph information. To address this tradeoff, we propose an effective strategy to balance fairness and utility in knowledge distillation. Specifically, we introduce FairDTD, a novel Fair representation learning framework built on Dual-Teacher Distillation, leveraging a causal graph model to guide and optimize the design of the distillation process. Specifically, FairDTD employs two fairness-oriented teacher models: a feature teacher and a structure teacher, to facilitate dual distillation, with the student model learning fairness knowledge from the teachers while also leveraging full data to mitigate utility loss. To enhance information transfer, we incorporate graph-level distillation to provide an indirect supplement of graph information during training, as well as a node-specific temperature module to improve the comprehensive transfer of fair knowledge. Experiments on diverse benchmark datasets demonstrate that FairDTD achieves optimal fairness while preserving high model utility, showcasing its effectiveness in fair representation learning for GNNs.