Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey

Recommender systems are effective tools for mitigating information overload and have seen extensive applications across various domains. However, the single focus on utility goals proves to be inadequate in addressing real-world concerns, leading to increasing attention to fairness-aware and diversity-aware recommender systems. While most existing studies explore fairness and diversity independently, we identify strong connections between these two domains. In this survey, we first discuss each of them individually and then dive into their connections. Additionally, motivated by the concepts of user-level and item-level fairness, we broaden the understanding of diversity to encompass not only the item level but also the user level. With this expanded perspective on user and item-level diversity, we re-interpret fairness studies from the viewpoint of diversity. This fresh perspective enhances our understanding of fairness-related work and paves the way for potential future research directions. Papers discussed in this survey along with public code links are available at https://github.com/YuyingZhao/Awesome-Fairness-and-Diversity-Papers-in-Recommender-Systems .

A Survey on Explainability of Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful graph-based deep-learning models that have gained significant attention and demonstrated remarkable performance in various domains, including natural language processing, drug discovery, and recommendation systems. However, combining feature information and combinatorial graph structures has led to complex non-linear GNN models. Consequently, this has increased the challenges of understanding the workings of GNNs and the underlying reasons behind their predictions. To address this, numerous explainability methods have been proposed to shed light on the inner mechanism of the GNNs. Explainable GNNs improve their security and enhance trust in their recommendations. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing explainability techniques for GNNs. We create a novel taxonomy and hierarchy to categorize these methods based on their objective and methodology. We also discuss the strengths, limitations, and application scenarios of each category. Furthermore, we highlight the key evaluation metrics and datasets commonly used to assess the explainability of GNNs. This survey aims to assist researchers and practitioners in understanding the existing landscape of explainability methods, identifying gaps, and fostering further advancements in interpretable graph-based machine learning.

Counterfactual Learning on Graphs: A Survey

Graph-structured data are pervasive in the real-world such as social networks, molecular graphs and transaction networks. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved great success in representation learning on graphs, facilitating various downstream tasks. However, GNNs have several drawbacks such as lacking interpretability, can easily inherit the bias of the training data and cannot model the casual relations. Recently, counterfactual learning on graphs has shown promising results in alleviating these drawbacks. Various graph counterfactual learning approaches have been proposed for counterfactual fairness, explainability, link prediction and other applications on graphs. To facilitate the development of this promising direction, in this survey, we categorize and comprehensively review papers on graph counterfactual learning. We divide existing methods into four categories based on research problems studied. For each category, we provide background and motivating examples, a general framework summarizing existing works and a detailed review of these works. We point out promising future research directions at the intersection of graph-structured data, counterfactual learning, and real-world applications. To offer a comprehensive view of resources for future studies, we compile a collection of open-source implementations, public datasets, and commonly-used evaluation metrics. This survey aims to serve as a ``one-stop-shop'' for building a unified understanding of graph counterfactual learning categories and current resources. We also maintain a repository for papers and resources and will keep updating the repository https://github.com/TimeLovercc/Awesome-Graph-Causal-Learning.

A Comprehensive Survey of Graph-level Learning

Graphs have a superior ability to represent relational data, like chemical compounds, proteins, and social networks. Hence, graph-level learning, which takes a set of graphs as input, has been applied to many tasks including comparison, regression, classification, and more. Traditional approaches to learning a set of graphs tend to rely on hand-crafted features, such as substructures. But while these methods benefit from good interpretability, they often suffer from computational bottlenecks as they cannot skirt the graph isomorphism problem. Conversely, deep learning has helped graph-level learning adapt to the growing scale of graphs by extracting features automatically and decoding graphs into low-dimensional representations. As a result, these deep graph learning methods have been responsible for many successes. Yet, there is no comprehensive survey that reviews graph-level learning starting with traditional learning and moving through to the deep learning approaches. This article fills this gap and frames the representative algorithms into a systematic taxonomy covering traditional learning, graph-level deep neural networks, graph-level graph neural networks, and graph pooling. To ensure a thoroughly comprehensive survey, the evolutions, interactions, and communications between methods from four different branches of development are also examined. This is followed by a brief review of the benchmark data sets, evaluation metrics, and common downstream applications. The survey concludes with 13 future directions of necessary research that will help to overcome the challenges facing this booming field.

Link Prediction on Heterophilic Graphs via Disentangled Representation Learning

Link prediction is an important task that has wide applications in various domains. However, the majority of existing link prediction approaches assume the given graph follows homophily assumption, and designs similarity-based heuristics or representation learning approaches to predict links. However, many real-world graphs are heterophilic graphs, where the homophily assumption does not hold, which challenges existing link prediction methods. Generally, in heterophilic graphs, there are many latent factors causing the link formation, and two linked nodes tend to be similar in one or two factors but might be dissimilar in other factors, leading to low overall similarity. Thus, one way is to learn disentangled representation for each node with each vector capturing the latent representation of a node on one factor, which paves a way to model the link formation in heterophilic graphs, resulting in better node representation learning and link prediction performance. However, the work on this is rather limited. Therefore, in this paper, we study a novel problem of exploring disentangled representation learning for link prediction on heterophilic graphs. We propose a novel framework DisenLink which can learn disentangled representations by modeling the link formation and perform factor-aware message-passing to facilitate link prediction. Extensive experiments on 13 real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DisenLink for link prediction on both heterophilic and hemophiliac graphs. Our codes are available at https://github.com/sjz5202/DisenLink

Feature Overcorrelation in Deep Graph Neural Networks: A New Perspective

Recent years have witnessed remarkable success achieved by graph neural networks (GNNs) in many real-world applications such as recommendation and drug discovery. Despite the success, oversmoothing has been identified as one of the key issues which limit the performance of deep GNNs. It indicates that the learned node representations are highly indistinguishable due to the stacked aggregators. In this paper, we propose a new perspective to look at the performance degradation of deep GNNs, i.e., feature overcorrelation. Through empirical and theoretical study on this matter, we demonstrate the existence of feature overcorrelation in deeper GNNs and reveal potential reasons leading to this issue. To reduce the feature correlation, we propose a general framework DeCorr which can encourage GNNs to encode less redundant information. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that DeCorr can help enable deeper GNNs and is complementary to existing techniques tackling the oversmoothing issue.

Graph-level Neural Networks: Current Progress and Future Directions

Graph-structured data consisting of objects (i.e., nodes) and relationships among objects (i.e., edges) are ubiquitous. Graph-level learning is a matter of studying a collection of graphs instead of a single graph. Traditional graph-level learning methods used to be the mainstream. However, with the increasing scale and complexity of graphs, Graph-level Neural Networks (GLNNs, deep learning-based graph-level learning methods) have been attractive due to their superiority in modeling high-dimensional data. Thus, a survey on GLNNs is necessary. To frame this survey, we propose a systematic taxonomy covering GLNNs upon deep neural networks, graph neural networks, and graph pooling. The representative and state-of-the-art models in each category are focused on this survey. We also investigate the reproducibility, benchmarks, and new graph datasets of GLNNs. Finally, we conclude future directions to further push forward GLNNs. The repository of this survey is available at https://github.com/GeZhangMQ/Awesome-Graph-level-Neural-Networks.

Sequential/Session-based Recommendations: Challenges, Approaches, Applications and Opportunities

In recent years, sequential recommender systems (SRSs) and session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) have emerged as a new paradigm of RSs to capture users' short-term but dynamic preferences for enabling more timely and accurate recommendations. Although SRSs and SBRSs have been extensively studied, there are many inconsistencies in this area caused by the diverse descriptions, settings, assumptions and application domains. There is no work to provide a unified framework and problem statement to remove the commonly existing and various inconsistencies in the area of SR/SBR. There is a lack of work to provide a comprehensive and systematic demonstration of the data characteristics, key challenges, most representative and state-of-the-art approaches, typical real-world applications and important future research directions in the area. This work aims to fill in these gaps so as to facilitate further research in this exciting and vibrant area.

Graph Lifelong Learning: A Survey

Graph learning substantially contributes to solving artificial intelligence (AI) tasks in various graph-related domains such as social networks, biological networks, recommender systems, and computer vision. However, despite its unprecedented prevalence, addressing the dynamic evolution of graph data over time remains a challenge. In many real-world applications, graph data continuously evolves. Current graph learning methods that assume graph representation is complete before the training process begins are not applicable in this setting. This challenge in graph learning motivates the development of a continuous learning process called graph lifelong learning to accommodate the future and refine the previous knowledge in graph data. Unlike existing survey papers that focus on either lifelong learning or graph learning separately, this survey paper covers the motivations, potentials, state-of-the-art approaches (that are well categorized), and open issues of graph lifelong learning. We expect extensive research and development interest in this emerging field.

Distance-wise Prototypical Graph Neural Network in Node Imbalance Classification

Recent years have witnessed the significant success of applying graph neural networks (GNNs) in learning effective node representations for classification. However, current GNNs are mostly built under the balanced data-splitting, which is inconsistent with many real-world networks where the number of training nodes can be extremely imbalanced among the classes. Thus, directly utilizing current GNNs on imbalanced data would generate coarse representations of nodes in minority classes and ultimately compromise the classification performance. This therefore portends the importance of developing effective GNNs for handling imbalanced graph data. In this work, we propose a novel Distance-wise Prototypical Graph Neural Network (DPGNN), which proposes a class prototype-driven training to balance the training loss between majority and minority classes and then leverages distance metric learning to differentiate the contributions of different dimensions of representations and fully encode the relative position of each node to each class prototype. Moreover, we design a new imbalanced label propagation mechanism to derive extra supervision from unlabeled nodes and employ self-supervised learning to smooth representations of adjacent nodes while separating inter-class prototypes. Comprehensive node classification experiments and parameter analysis on multiple networks are conducted and the proposed DPGNN almost always significantly outperforms all other baselines, which demonstrates its effectiveness in imbalanced node classification. The implementation of DPGNN is available at \url{https://github.com/YuWVandy/DPGNN}.