Don't Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfaces

Vision-language model (VLM) based web agents demonstrate impressive autonomous GUI interaction but remain vulnerable to deceptive interface elements. Existing approaches either detect deception without task integration or document attacks without proposing defenses. We formalize deception-aware web agent defense and propose DUDE (Deceptive UI Detector & Evaluator), a two-stage framework combining hybrid-reward learning with asymmetric penalties and experience summarization to distill failure patterns into transferable guidance. We introduce RUC (Real UI Clickboxes), a benchmark of 1,407 scenarios spanning four domains and deception categories. Experiments show DUDE reduces deception susceptibility by 53.8% while maintaining task performance, establishing an effective foundation for robust web agent deployment.

Balanced Anomaly-guided Ego-graph Diffusion Model for Inductive Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection (GAD) is crucial in applications like fraud detection and cybersecurity. Despite recent advancements using graph neural networks (GNNs), two major challenges persist. At the model level, most methods adopt a transductive learning paradigm, which assumes static graph structures, making them unsuitable for dynamic, evolving networks. At the data level, the extreme class imbalance, where anomalous nodes are rare, leads to biased models that fail to generalize to unseen anomalies. These challenges are interdependent: static transductive frameworks limit effective data augmentation, while imbalance exacerbates model distortion in inductive learning settings. To address these challenges, we propose a novel data-centric framework that integrates dynamic graph modeling with balanced anomaly synthesis. Our framework features: (1) a discrete ego-graph diffusion model, which captures the local topology of anomalies to generate ego-graphs aligned with anomalous structural distribution, and (2) a curriculum anomaly augmentation mechanism, which dynamically adjusts synthetic data generation during training, focusing on underrepresented anomaly patterns to improve detection and generalization. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that the effectiveness of our framework.

T-Retriever: Tree-based Hierarchical Retrieval Augmented Generation for Textual Graphs

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models' ability to access external knowledge, yet current graph-based RAG approaches face two critical limitations in managing hierarchical information: they impose rigid layer-specific compression quotas that damage local graph structures, and they prioritize topological structure while neglecting semantic content. We introduce T-Retriever, a novel framework that reformulates attributed graph retrieval as tree-based retrieval using a semantic and structure-guided encoding tree. Our approach features two key innovations: (1) Adaptive Compression Encoding, which replaces artificial compression quotas with a global optimization strategy that preserves the graph's natural hierarchical organization, and (2) Semantic-Structural Entropy ($S^2$-Entropy), which jointly optimizes for both structural cohesion and semantic consistency when creating hierarchical partitions. Experiments across diverse graph reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that T-Retriever significantly outperforms state-of-the-art RAG methods, providing more coherent and contextually relevant responses to complex queries.

Graph-based Diffusion Model for Collaborative Filtering

Recently, diffusion-based recommendation methods have achieved impressive results. However, existing approaches predominantly treat each user's historical interactions as independent training samples, overlooking the potential of higher-order collaborative signals between users and items. Such signals, which encapsulate richer and more nuanced relationships, can be naturally captured using graph-based data structures. To address this limitation, we extend diffusion-based recommendation methods to the graph domain by directly modeling user-item bipartite graphs with diffusion models. This enables better modeling of the higher-order connectivity inherent in complex interaction dynamics. However, this extension introduces two primary challenges: (1) Noise Heterogeneity, where interactions are influenced by various forms of continuous and discrete noise, and (2) Relation Explosion, referring to the high computational costs of processing large-scale graphs. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Graph-based Diffusion Model for Collaborative Filtering (GDMCF). To address noise heterogeneity, we introduce a multi-level noise corruption mechanism that integrates both continuous and discrete noise, effectively simulating real-world interaction complexities. To mitigate relation explosion, we design a user-active guided diffusion process that selectively focuses on the most meaningful edges and active users, reducing inference costs while preserving the graph's topological integrity. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that GDMCF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, highlighting its effectiveness in capturing higher-order collaborative signals and improving recommendation performance.