Emotional RAG: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Emotional Retrieval

As LLMs exhibit a high degree of human-like capability, increasing attention has been paid to role-playing research areas in which responses generated by LLMs are expected to mimic human replies. This has promoted the exploration of role-playing agents in various applications, such as chatbots that can engage in natural conversations with users and virtual assistants that can provide personalized support and guidance. The crucial factor in the role-playing task is the effective utilization of character memory, which stores characters' profiles, experiences, and historical dialogues. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology is used to access the related memory to enhance the response generation of role-playing agents. Most existing studies retrieve related information based on the semantic similarity of memory to maintain characters' personalized traits, and few attempts have been made to incorporate the emotional factor in the retrieval argument generation (RAG) of LLMs. Inspired by the Mood-Dependent Memory theory, which indicates that people recall an event better if they somehow reinstate during recall the original emotion they experienced during learning, we propose a novel emotion-aware memory retrieval framework, termed Emotional RAG, which recalls the related memory with consideration of emotional state in role-playing agents. Specifically, we design two kinds of retrieval strategies, i.e., combination strategy and sequential strategy, to incorporate both memory semantic and emotional states during the retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three representative role-playing datasets demonstrate that our Emotional RAG framework outperforms the method without considering the emotional factor in maintaining the personalities of role-playing agents. This provides evidence to further reinforce the Mood-Dependent Memory theory in psychology.

GraphTeam: Facilitating Large Language Model-based Graph Analysis via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Graphs are widely used for modeling relational data in real-world scenarios, such as social networks and urban computing. Existing LLM-based graph analysis approaches either integrate graph neural networks (GNNs) for specific machine learning tasks, limiting their transferability, or rely solely on LLMs' internal reasoning ability, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address these limitations, we take advantage of recent advances in LLM-based agents, which have shown capabilities of utilizing external knowledge or tools for problem solving. By simulating human problem-solving strategies such as analogy and collaboration, we propose a multi-agent system based on LLMs named GraphTeam, for graph analysis. GraphTeam consists of five LLM-based agents from three modules, and the agents with different specialities can collaborate with each other to address complex problems. Specifically, (1) input-output normalization module: the question agent extracts and refines four key arguments from the original question, facilitating the problem understanding, and the answer agent organizes the results to meet the output requirement; (2) external knowledge retrieval module: we first build a knowledge base consisting of relevant documentation and experience information, and then the search agent retrieves the most relevant entries for each question. (3) problem-solving module: given the retrieved information from search agent, the coding agent uses established algorithms via programming to generate solutions, and in case the coding agent does not work, the reasoning agent will directly compute the results without programming. Extensive experiments on six graph analysis benchmarks demonstrate that GraphTeam achieves state-of-the-art performance with an average 25.85% improvement over the best baseline in terms of accuracy. The code and data are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/GraphTeam.

Can Large Language Models Analyze Graphs like Professionals? A Benchmark, Datasets and Models

The need to analyze graphs is ubiquitous across various fields, from social networks to biological research and recommendation systems. Therefore, enabling the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process graphs is an important step toward more advanced general intelligence. However, current LLM benchmarks on graph analysis require models to directly reason over the prompts describing graph topology, and are thus limited to small graphs with only a few dozens of nodes. In contrast, human experts typically write programs based on popular libraries for task solving, and can thus handle graphs with different scales. To this end, a question naturally arises: can LLMs analyze graphs like professionals? In this paper, we introduce ProGraph, a manually crafted benchmark containing 3 categories of graph tasks. The benchmark expects solutions based on programming instead of directly reasoning over raw inputs. Our findings reveal that the performance of current LLMs is unsatisfactory, with the best model achieving only 36% accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose LLM4Graph datasets, which include crawled documents and auto-generated codes based on 6 widely used graph libraries. By augmenting closed-source LLMs with document retrieval and fine-tuning open-source ones on the codes, we show 11-32% absolute improvements in their accuracies. Our results underscore that the capabilities of LLMs in handling structured data are still under-explored, and show the effectiveness of LLM4Graph in enhancing LLMs' proficiency of graph analysis. The benchmark, datasets and enhanced open-source models are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/ProGraph.

FineMolTex: Towards Fine-grained Molecular Graph-Text Pre-training

Understanding molecular structure and related knowledge is crucial for scientific research. Recent studies integrate molecular graphs with their textual descriptions to enhance molecular representation learning. However, they focus on the whole molecular graph and neglect frequently occurring subgraphs, known as motifs,which are essential for determining molecular properties. Without such fine-grained knowledge, these models struggle to generalize to unseen molecules and tasks that require motif-level insights. To bridge this gap, we propose FineMolTex, a novel Fine-grained Molecular graph-Text pre-training framework to jointly learn coarse-grained molecule-level knowledge and fine-grained motif-level knowledge. Specifically, FineMolTex consists of two pre-training tasks: a contrastive alignment task for coarse-grained matching and a masked multi-modal modeling task for fine-grained matching. In particular, the latter predicts the labels of masked motifs and words, leveraging insights from each other, thereby enabling FineMolTex to understand the fine-grained matching between motifs and words. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across three downstream tasks, achieving up to 230% improvement in the text-based molecule editing task. Additionally, our case studies reveal that FineMolTex successfully captures fine-grained knowledge, potentially offering valuable insights for drug discovery and catalyst design.

Efficient Multi-task Prompt Tuning for Recommendation

With the expansion of business scenarios, real recommender systems are facing challenges in dealing with the constantly emerging new tasks in multi-task learning frameworks. In this paper, we attempt to improve the generalization ability of multi-task recommendations when dealing with new tasks. We find that joint training will enhance the performance of the new task but always negatively impact existing tasks in most multi-task learning methods. Besides, such a re-training mechanism with new tasks increases the training costs, limiting the generalization ability of multi-task recommendation models. Based on this consideration, we aim to design a suitable sharing mechanism among different tasks while maintaining joint optimization efficiency in new task learning. A novel two-stage prompt-tuning MTL framework (MPT-Rec) is proposed to address task irrelevance and training efficiency problems in multi-task recommender systems. Specifically, we disentangle the task-specific and task-sharing information in the multi-task pre-training stage, then use task-aware prompts to transfer knowledge from other tasks to the new task effectively. By freezing parameters in the pre-training tasks, MPT-Rec solves the negative impacts that may be brought by the new task and greatly reduces the training costs. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed multi-task learning framework. MPT-Rec achieves the best performance compared to the SOTA multi-task learning method. Besides, it maintains comparable model performance but vastly improves the training efficiency (i.e., with up to 10% parameters in the full training way) in the new task learning.

Can Large Language Models Improve the Adversarial Robustness of Graph Neural Networks?

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, especially for topology attacks, and many methods that improve the robustness of GNNs have received considerable attention. Recently, we have witnessed the significant success of large language models (LLMs), leading many to explore the great potential of LLMs on GNNs. However, they mainly focus on improving the performance of GNNs by utilizing LLMs to enhance the node features. Therefore, we ask: Will the robustness of GNNs also be enhanced with the powerful understanding and inference capabilities of LLMs? By presenting the empirical results, we find that despite that LLMs can improve the robustness of GNNs, there is still an average decrease of 23.1% in accuracy, implying that the GNNs remain extremely vulnerable against topology attack. Therefore, another question is how to extend the capabilities of LLMs on graph adversarial robustness. In this paper, we propose an LLM-based robust graph structure inference framework, LLM4RGNN, which distills the inference capabilities of GPT-4 into a local LLM for identifying malicious edges and an LM-based edge predictor for finding missing important edges, so as to recover a robust graph structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLM4RGNN consistently improves the robustness across various GNNs. Even in some cases where the perturbation ratio increases to 40%, the accuracy of GNNs is still better than that on the clean graph.

Non-autoregressive Personalized Bundle Generation

The personalized bundle generation problem, which aims to create a preferred bundle for user from numerous candidate items, receives increasing attention in recommendation. However, existing works ignore the order-invariant nature of the bundle and adopt sequential modeling methods as the solution, which might introduce inductive bias and cause a large latency in prediction. To address this problem, we propose to perform the bundle generation via non-autoregressive mechanism and design a novel encoder-decoder framework named BundleNAT, which can effectively output the targeted bundle in one-shot without relying on any inherent order. In detail, instead of learning sequential dependency, we propose to adopt pre-training techniques and graph neural network to fully embed user-based preference and item-based compatibility information, and use a self-attention based encoder to further extract global dependency pattern. We then design a permutation-equivariant decoding architecture that is able to directly output the desired bundle in a one-shot manner. Experiments on three real-world datasets from Youshu and Netease show the proposed BundleNAT significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods in average by up to 35.92%, 10.97% and 23.67% absolute improvements in Precision, Precision+, and Recall, respectively.

Speech-based Clinical Depression Screening: An Empirical Study

This study investigates the utility of speech signals for AI-based depression screening across varied interaction scenarios, including psychiatric interviews, chatbot conversations, and text readings. Participants includes depressed patients recruited from the outpatient clinics of Peking University Sixth Hospital and control group members from the community, all diagnosed by psychiatrists following standardized diagnostic protocols. We extracted acoustic and deep speech features from each participant's segmented recordings. Classifications were made using neural networks or SVMs, with aggregated clip outcomes determining final assessments. Our analysis across interaction scenarios, speech processing techniques, and feature types confirms speech as a crucial marker for depression screening. Specifically, human-computer interaction matches clinical interview efficacy, surpassing reading tasks. Segment duration and quantity significantly affect model performance, with deep speech features substantially outperforming traditional acoustic features.

Learning Social Graph for Inactive User Recommendation

Social relations have been widely incorporated into recommender systems to alleviate data sparsity problem. However, raw social relations don't always benefit recommendation due to their inferior quality and insufficient quantity, especially for inactive users, whose interacted items are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel social recommendation method called LSIR (\textbf{L}earning \textbf{S}ocial Graph for \textbf{I}nactive User \textbf{R}ecommendation) that learns an optimal social graph structure for social recommendation, especially for inactive users. LSIR recursively aggregates user and item embeddings to collaboratively encode item and user features. Then, graph structure learning (GSL) is employed to refine the raw user-user social graph, by removing noisy edges and adding new edges based on the enhanced embeddings. Meanwhile, mimic learning is implemented to guide active users in mimicking inactive users during model training, which improves the construction of new edges for inactive users. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LSIR achieves significant improvements of up to 129.58\% on NDCG in inactive user recommendation. Our code is available at~\url{https://github.com/liun-online/LSIR}.

Less is More: on the Over-Globalizing Problem in Graph Transformers

Graph Transformer, due to its global attention mechanism, has emerged as a new tool in dealing with graph-structured data. It is well recognized that the global attention mechanism considers a wider receptive field in a fully connected graph, leading many to believe that useful information can be extracted from all the nodes. In this paper, we challenge this belief: does the globalizing property always benefit Graph Transformers? We reveal the over-globalizing problem in Graph Transformer by presenting both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis, i.e., the current attention mechanism overly focuses on those distant nodes, while the near nodes, which actually contain most of the useful information, are relatively weakened. Then we propose a novel Bi-Level Global Graph Transformer with Collaborative Training (CoBFormer), including the inter-cluster and intra-cluster Transformers, to prevent the over-globalizing problem while keeping the ability to extract valuable information from distant nodes. Moreover, the collaborative training is proposed to improve the model's generalization ability with a theoretical guarantee. Extensive experiments on various graphs well validate the effectiveness of our proposed CoBFormer.