Beyond Soft Masks: Hard-Perturbation Mixup Explainer for Robust GNN Explainability

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a range of applications involving graph-structured data, particularly in high-stakes domains. However, the opaque nature of their decision-making processes limits their trustworthiness and broader adoption. Existing post-hoc explanation methods aim to improve explainability by identifying subgraphs that influence GNN predictions and adopt mixup strategies to alleviate the out-of-distribution (OOD) issue caused by using subgraphs for prediction. Yet, these approaches typically rely on soft masks, which are inherently unable to fully eliminate label-irrelevant information, allowing redundant structures to leak into the mixup process and hindering the resolution of the OOD problem, thereby degrading explanation fidelity. In this work, we propose HPME, a Hard-Perturbation Mixup Explanation framework grounded in a generalized Graph Information Bottleneck, which leverages graph pooling to extract discrete explanatory subgraphs and to yield an information-capacity bound to thoroughly compress label-irrelevant components. Furthermore, we introduce a novel mixup strategy built upon structure-level replacement, generating in-distribution explanations to effectively mitigate the distribution shift. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks demonstrate that HPME achieves state-of-the-art performance in generating robust and interpretable explanations across both synthetic and real-world datasets.

Learning Dynamic Graph Representations through Timespan View Contrasts

The rich information underlying graphs has inspired further investigation of unsupervised graph representation. Existing studies mainly depend on node features and topological properties within static graphs to create self-supervised signals, neglecting the temporal components carried by real-world graph data, such as timestamps of edges. To overcome this limitation, this paper explores how to model temporal evolution on dynamic graphs elegantly. Specifically, we introduce a new inductive bias, namely temporal translation invariance, which illustrates the tendency of the identical node to keep similar labels across different timespans. Based on this assumption, we develop a dynamic graph representation framework CLDG that encourages the node to maintain locally consistent temporal translation invariance through contrastive learning on different timespans. Except for standard CLDG which only considers explicit topological links, our further proposed CLDG++ additionally employs graph diffusion to uncover global contextual correlations between nodes, and designs a multi-scale contrastive learning objective composed of local-local, local-global, and global-global contrasts to enhance representation capabilities. Interestingly, by measuring the consistency between different timespans to shape anomaly indicators, CLDG and CLDG++ are seamlessly integrated with the task of spotting anomalies on dynamic graphs, which has broad applications in many high-impact domains, such as finance, cybersecurity, and healthcare. Experiments demonstrate that CLDG and CLDG++ both exhibit desirable performance in downstream tasks including node classification and dynamic graph anomaly detection. Moreover, CLDG significantly reduces time and space complexity by implicitly exploiting temporal cues instead of complicated sequence models.

TED: Related Party Transaction guided Tax Evasion Detection on Heterogeneous Graph

Tax evasion causes severe losses of government revenues and disturbs the economic order of fair competition. To help alleviate this problem, the latest tax evasion detection solutions utilize expert knowledge to extract features and then train classifiers to determine whether a company is suspected of tax evasion. However, existing solutions mainly focus on the statistical features of the company, but fail to exploit the rich interactive information in tax scenarios, which affect the detection performance. In this paper, we first model the tax scenario as a heterogeneous graph and study the tax evasion detection problem under the heterogeneous graph model. To improve the performance of tax evasion detection, a novel graph neural network model is proposed to extract the comprehensive information of heterogeneous graphs. Specifically, we use heterogeneous and complex related party transaction groups to filter low-level noise information. Moreover, a hierarchical attention mechanism is designed to capture the deeper structure and semantic information hidden in the related party transaction group. We apply our method to the real risk management system of the tax bureau, and evaluate it on two human-labeled real-world tax datasets. The results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in the tax evasion detection task.

Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection via Prototype-Based Distillation

Driven by the pressing demand for graph anomaly detection (GAD) in high-stakes domains, the generalist GAD paradigm, which trains a single detector transferable across new graphs, has recently gained growing attention. However, existing methods often rely on scarce and costly annotations for training and sometimes even require few-shot support at inference, which limits their robustness to diverse and unseen anomaly patterns. To address this limitation, we introduce ProMoS, the first unsupervised generalist GAD framework, which detects anomalies by modeling the abundant normality in unlabeled data. ProMoS adopts a knowledge-distillation paradigm to distill normality priors from a frozen self-supervised graph neural network (GNN) teacher to a mixture-of-students model with shared global and lightweight personalized branches, enabling efficient and expressive normality modeling without learning from scratch. We further propose prototype-guided soft-label distillation to align teacher and student in a shared prototype space, enhancing cross-graph generalizability. During inference, ProMoS performs zero-shot anomaly detection on unseen graphs via distillation bias and prototype geometric deviation. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of ProMoS, charting a practical path toward label-free, zero-shot generalist GAD.

Hide and Find: A Distributed Adversarial Attack on Federated Graph Learning

Federated Graph Learning (FedGL) is vulnerable to malicious attacks, yet developing a truly effective and stealthy attack method remains a significant challenge. Existing attack methods suffer from low attack success rates, high computational costs, and are easily identified and smoothed by defense algorithms. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{FedShift}, a novel two-stage "Hide and Find" distributed adversarial attack. In the first stage, before FedGL begins, we inject a learnable and hidden "shifter" into part of the training data, which subtly pushes poisoned graph representations toward a target class's decision boundary without crossing it, ensuring attack stealthiness during training. In the second stage, after FedGL is complete, we leverage the global model information and use the hidden shifter as an optimization starting point to efficiently find the adversarial perturbations. During the final attack, we aggregate these perturbations from multiple malicious clients to form the final effective adversarial sample and trigger the attack. Extensive experiments on six large-scale datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the highest attack effectiveness compared to existing advanced attack methods. In particular, our attack can effectively evade 3 mainstream robust federated learning defense algorithms and converges with a time cost reduction of over 90\%, highlighting its exceptional stealthiness, robustness, and efficiency.

Mitigating Instance Entanglement in Instance-Dependent Partial Label Learning

Partial label learning is a prominent weakly supervised classification task, where each training instance is ambiguously labeled with a set of candidate labels. In real-world scenarios, candidate labels are often influenced by instance features, leading to the emergence of instance-dependent PLL (ID-PLL), a setting that more accurately reflects this relationship. A significant challenge in ID-PLL is instance entanglement, where instances from similar classes share overlapping features and candidate labels, resulting in increased class confusion. To address this issue, we propose a novel Class-specific Augmentation based Disentanglement (CAD) framework, which tackles instance entanglement by both intra- and inter-class regulations. For intra-class regulation, CAD amplifies class-specific features to generate class-wise augmentations and aligns same-class augmentations across instances. For inter-class regulation, CAD introduces a weighted penalty loss function that applies stronger penalties to more ambiguous labels, encouraging larger inter-class distances. By jointly applying intra- and inter-class regulations, CAD improves the clarity of class boundaries and reduces class confusion caused by entanglement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of CAD in mitigating the entanglement problem and enhancing ID-PLL performance. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanZhaoIc/CAD.git.

Quantum Optimization via Gradient-Based Hamiltonian Descent

With rapid advancements in machine learning, first-order algorithms have emerged as the backbone of modern optimization techniques, owing to their computational efficiency and low memory requirements. Recently, the connection between accelerated gradient methods and damped heavy-ball motion, particularly within the framework of Hamiltonian dynamics, has inspired the development of innovative quantum algorithms for continuous optimization. One such algorithm, Quantum Hamiltonian Descent (QHD), leverages quantum tunneling to escape saddle points and local minima, facilitating the discovery of global solutions in complex optimization landscapes. However, QHD faces several challenges, including slower convergence rates compared to classical gradient methods and limited robustness in highly non-convex problems due to the non-local nature of quantum states. Furthermore, the original QHD formulation primarily relies on function value information, which limits its effectiveness. Inspired by insights from high-resolution differential equations that have elucidated the acceleration mechanisms in classical methods, we propose an enhancement to QHD by incorporating gradient information, leading to what we call gradient-based QHD. Gradient-based QHD achieves faster convergence and significantly increases the likelihood of identifying global solutions. Numerical simulations on challenging problem instances demonstrate that gradient-based QHD outperforms existing quantum and classical methods by at least an order of magnitude.

Software Development Life Cycle Perspective: A Survey of Benchmarks for CodeLLMs and Agents

Code large language models (CodeLLMs) and agents have shown great promise in tackling complex software engineering tasks.Compared to traditional software engineering methods, CodeLLMs and agents offer stronger abilities, and can flexibly process inputs and outputs in both natural and code. Benchmarking plays a crucial role in evaluating the capabilities of CodeLLMs and agents, guiding their development and deployment. However, despite their growing significance, there remains a lack of comprehensive reviews of benchmarks for CodeLLMs and agents. To bridge this gap, this paper provides a comprehensive review of existing benchmarks for CodeLLMs and agents, studying and analyzing 181 benchmarks from 461 relevant papers, covering the different phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Our findings reveal a notable imbalance in the coverage of current benchmarks, with approximately 60% focused on the software development phase in SDLC, while requirements engineering and software design phases receive minimal attention at only 5% and 3%, respectively. Additionally, Python emerges as the dominant programming language across the reviewed benchmarks. Finally, this paper highlights the challenges of current research and proposes future directions, aiming to narrow the gap between the theoretical capabilities of CodeLLMs and agents and their application in real-world scenarios.

A Family of Controllable Momentum Coefficients for Forward-Backward Accelerated Algorithms

Nesterov's accelerated gradient method (NAG) marks a pivotal advancement in gradient-based optimization, achieving faster convergence compared to the vanilla gradient descent method for convex functions. However, its algorithmic complexity when applied to strongly convex functions remains unknown, as noted in the comprehensive review by Chambolle and Pock [2016]. This issue, aside from the critical step size, was addressed by Li et al. [2024b], with the monotonic case further explored by Fu and Shi [2024]. In this paper, we introduce a family of controllable momentum coefficients for forward-backward accelerated methods, focusing on the critical step size $s=1/L$. Unlike traditional linear forms, the proposed momentum coefficients follow an $\alpha$-th power structure, where the parameter $r$ is adaptively tuned to $\alpha$. Using a Lyapunov function specifically designed for $\alpha$, we establish a controllable $O\left(1/k^{2\alpha} \right)$ convergence rate for the NAG-$\alpha$ method, provided that $r > 2\alpha$. At the critical step size, NAG-$\alpha$ achieves an inverse polynomial convergence rate of arbitrary degree by adjusting $r$ according to $\alpha > 0$. We further simplify the Lyapunov function by expressing it in terms of the iterative sequences $x_k$ and $y_k$, eliminating the need for phase-space representations. This simplification enables us to extend the controllable $O \left(1/k^{2\alpha} \right)$ rate to the monotonic variant, M-NAG-$\alpha$, thereby enhancing optimization efficiency. Finally, by leveraging the fundamental inequality for composite functions, we extended the controllable $O\left(1/k^{2\alpha} \right)$ rate to proximal algorithms, including the fast iterative shrinkage-thresholding algorithm (FISTA-$\alpha$) and its monotonic counterpart (M-FISTA-$\alpha$).

CLDG: Contrastive Learning on Dynamic Graphs

The graph with complex annotations is the most potent data type, whose constantly evolving motivates further exploration of the unsupervised dynamic graph representation. One of the representative paradigms is graph contrastive learning. It constructs self-supervised signals by maximizing the mutual information between the statistic graph's augmentation views. However, the semantics and labels may change within the augmentation process, causing a significant performance drop in downstream tasks. This drawback becomes greatly magnified on dynamic graphs. To address this problem, we designed a simple yet effective framework named CLDG. Firstly, we elaborate that dynamic graphs have temporal translation invariance at different levels. Then, we proposed a sampling layer to extract the temporally-persistent signals. It will encourage the node to maintain consistent local and global representations, i.e., temporal translation invariance under the timespan views. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the method on seven datasets by outperforming eight unsupervised state-of-the-art baselines and showing competitiveness against four semi-supervised methods. Compared with the existing dynamic graph method, the number of model parameters and training time is reduced by an average of 2,001.86 times and 130.31 times on seven datasets, respectively.