Graph Size-imbalanced Learning with Energy-guided Structural Smoothing

Graph is a prevalent data structure employed to represent the relationships between entities, frequently serving as a tool to depict and simulate numerous systems, such as molecules and social networks. However, real-world graphs usually suffer from the size-imbalanced problem in the multi-graph classification, i.e., a long-tailed distribution with respect to the number of nodes. Recent studies find that off-the-shelf Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) would compromise model performance under the long-tailed settings. We investigate this phenomenon and discover that the long-tailed graph distribution greatly exacerbates the discrepancies in structural features. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel energy-based size-imbalanced learning framework named \textbf{SIMBA}, which smooths the features between head and tail graphs and re-weights them based on the energy propagation. Specifically, we construct a higher-level graph abstraction named \textit{Graphs-to-Graph} according to the correlations between graphs to link independent graphs and smooths the structural discrepancies. We further devise an energy-based message-passing belief propagation method for re-weighting lower compatible graphs in the training process and further smooth local feature discrepancies. Extensive experimental results over five public size-imbalanced datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the model for size-imbalanced graph classification tasks.

GraphMoRE: Mitigating Topological Heterogeneity via Mixture of Riemannian Experts

Real-world graphs have inherently complex and diverse topological patterns, known as topological heterogeneity. Most existing works learn graph representation in a single constant curvature space that is insufficient to match the complex geometric shapes, resulting in low-quality embeddings with high distortion. This also constitutes a critical challenge for graph foundation models, which are expected to uniformly handle a wide variety of diverse graph data. Recent studies have indicated that product manifold gains the possibility to address topological heterogeneity. However, the product manifold is still homogeneous, which is inadequate and inflexible for representing the mixed heterogeneous topology. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Mixture of Riemannian Experts (GraphMoRE) framework to effectively tackle topological heterogeneity by personalized fine-grained topology geometry pattern preservation. Specifically, to minimize the embedding distortion, we propose a topology-aware gating mechanism to select the optimal embedding space for each node. By fusing the outputs of diverse Riemannian experts with learned gating weights, we construct personalized mixed curvature spaces for nodes, effectively embedding the graph into a heterogeneous manifold with varying curvatures at different points. Furthermore, to fairly measure pairwise distances between different embedding spaces, we present a concise and effective alignment strategy. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance with lower distortion, highlighting its potential for modeling complex graphs with topological heterogeneity, and providing a novel architectural perspective for graph foundation models.

From Text to Trajectory: Exploring Complex Constraint Representation and Decomposition in Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) requires the agent to finish a given task while obeying specific constraints. Giving constraints in natural language form has great potential for practical scenarios due to its flexible transfer capability and accessibility. Previous safe RL methods with natural language constraints typically need to design cost functions manually for each constraint, which requires domain expertise and lacks flexibility. In this paper, we harness the dual role of text in this task, using it not only to provide constraint but also as a training signal. We introduce the Trajectory-level Textual Constraints Translator (TTCT) to replace the manually designed cost function. Our empirical results demonstrate that TTCT effectively comprehends textual constraint and trajectory, and the policies trained by TTCT can achieve a lower violation rate than the standard cost function. Extra studies are conducted to demonstrate that the TTCT has zero-shot transfer capability to adapt to constraint-shift environments.

DG-Mamba: Robust and Efficient Dynamic Graph Structure Learning with Selective State Space Models

Dynamic graphs exhibit intertwined spatio-temporal evolutionary patterns, widely existing in the real world. Nevertheless, the structure incompleteness, noise, and redundancy result in poor robustness for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs). Dynamic Graph Structure Learning (DGSL) offers a promising way to optimize graph structures. However, aside from encountering unacceptable quadratic complexity, it overly relies on heuristic priors, making it hard to discover underlying predictive patterns. How to efficiently refine the dynamic structures, capture intrinsic dependencies, and learn robust representations, remains under-explored. In this work, we propose the novel DG-Mamba, a robust and efficient Dynamic Graph structure learning framework with the Selective State Space Models (Mamba). To accelerate the spatio-temporal structure learning, we propose a kernelized dynamic message-passing operator that reduces the quadratic time complexity to linear. To capture global intrinsic dynamics, we establish the dynamic graph as a self-contained system with State Space Model. By discretizing the system states with the cross-snapshot graph adjacency, we enable the long-distance dependencies capturing with the selective snapshot scan. To endow learned dynamic structures more expressive with informativeness, we propose the self-supervised Principle of Relevant Information for DGSL to regularize the most relevant yet least redundant information, enhancing global robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the robustness and efficiency of our DG-Mamba compared with the state-of-the-art baselines against adversarial attacks.

Lightweight Contenders: Navigating Semi-Supervised Text Mining through Peer Collaboration and Self Transcendence

The semi-supervised learning (SSL) strategy in lightweight models requires reducing annotated samples and facilitating cost-effective inference. However, the constraint on model parameters, imposed by the scarcity of training labels, limits the SSL performance. In this paper, we introduce PS-NET, a novel framework tailored for semi-supervised text mining with lightweight models. PS-NET incorporates online distillation to train lightweight student models by imitating the Teacher model. It also integrates an ensemble of student peers that collaboratively instruct each other. Additionally, PS-NET implements a constant adversarial perturbation schema to further self-augmentation by progressive generalizing. Our PS-NET, equipped with a 2-layer distilled BERT, exhibits notable performance enhancements over SOTA lightweight SSL frameworks of FLiText and DisCo in SSL text classification with extremely rare labelled data.

Sparser Training for On-Device Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems often rely on large embedding tables that map users and items to dense vectors of uniform size, leading to substantial memory consumption and inefficiencies. This is particularly problematic in memory-constrained environments like mobile and Web of Things (WoT) applications, where scalability and real-time performance are critical. Various research efforts have sought to address these issues. Although embedding pruning methods utilizing Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) stand out due to their low training and inference costs, consistent sparsity, and end-to-end differentiability, they face key challenges. Firstly, they typically initializes the mask matrix, which is used to prune redundant parameters, with random uniform sparse initialization. This strategy often results in suboptimal performance as it creates unstructured and inefficient connections. Secondly, they tend to favor the users/items sampled in the single batch immediately before weight exploration when they reactivate pruned parameters with large gradient magnitudes, which does not necessarily improve the overall performance. Thirdly, while they use sparse weights during forward passes, they still need to compute dense gradients during backward passes. In this paper, we propose SparseRec, an lightweight embedding method based on DST, to address these issues. Specifically, SparseRec initializes the mask matrix using Nonnegative Matrix Factorization. It accumulates gradients to identify the inactive parameters that can better improve the model performance after activation. Furthermore, it avoids dense gradients during backpropagation by sampling a subset of important vectors. Gradients are calculated only for parameters in this subset, thus maintaining sparsity during training in both forward and backward passes.

GC-Bench: An Open and Unified Benchmark for Graph Condensation

Graph condensation (GC) has recently garnered considerable attention due to its ability to reduce large-scale graph datasets while preserving their essential properties. The core concept of GC is to create a smaller, more manageable graph that retains the characteristics of the original graph. Despite the proliferation of graph condensation methods developed in recent years, there is no comprehensive evaluation and in-depth analysis, which creates a great obstacle to understanding the progress in this field. To fill this gap, we develop a comprehensive Graph Condensation Benchmark (GC-Bench) to analyze the performance of graph condensation in different scenarios systematically. Specifically, GC-Bench systematically investigates the characteristics of graph condensation in terms of the following dimensions: effectiveness, transferability, and complexity. We comprehensively evaluate 12 state-of-the-art graph condensation algorithms in node-level and graph-level tasks and analyze their performance in 12 diverse graph datasets. Further, we have developed an easy-to-use library for training and evaluating different GC methods to facilitate reproducible research. The GC-Bench library is available at https://github.com/RingBDStack/GC-Bench.

Beyond Human Preferences: Exploring Reinforcement Learning Trajectory Evaluation and Improvement through LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader application of RL within game environments characterized by diverse constraints. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) presents a pioneering framework that capitalizes on human preferences as pivotal reward signals, thereby circumventing the need for meticulous reward engineering. However, obtaining preference data from human experts is costly and inefficient, especially under conditions marked by complex constraints. To tackle this challenge, we propose a LLM-enabled automatic preference generation framework named LLM4PG , which harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to abstract trajectories, rank preferences, and reconstruct reward functions to optimize conditioned policies. Experiments on tasks with complex language constraints demonstrated the effectiveness of our LLM-enabled reward functions, accelerating RL convergence and overcoming stagnation caused by slow or absent progress under original reward structures. This approach mitigates the reliance on specialized human knowledge and demonstrates the potential of LLMs to enhance RL's effectiveness in complex environments in the wild.

IGL-Bench: Establishing the Comprehensive Benchmark for Imbalanced Graph Learning

Deep graph learning has gained grand popularity over the past years due to its versatility and success in representing graph data across a wide range of domains. However, the pervasive issue of imbalanced graph data distributions, where certain parts exhibit disproportionally abundant data while others remain sparse, undermines the efficacy of conventional graph learning algorithms, leading to biased outcomes. To address this challenge, Imbalanced Graph Learning (IGL) has garnered substantial attention, enabling more balanced data distributions and better task performance. Despite the proliferation of IGL algorithms, the absence of consistent experimental protocols and fair performance comparisons pose a significant barrier to comprehending advancements in this field. To bridge this gap, we introduce IGL-Bench, a foundational comprehensive benchmark for imbalanced graph learning, embarking on 16 diverse graph datasets and 24 distinct IGL algorithms with uniform data processing and splitting strategies. Specifically, IGL-Bench systematically investigates state-of-the-art IGL algorithms in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency on node-level and graph-level tasks, with the scope of class-imbalance and topology-imbalance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the potential benefits of IGL algorithms on various imbalanced conditions, offering insights and opportunities in the IGL field. Further, we have developed an open-sourced and unified package to facilitate reproducible evaluation and inspire further innovative research, which is available at https://github.com/RingBDStack/IGL-Bench.

Hyperbolic Geometric Latent Diffusion Model for Graph Generation

Diffusion models have made significant contributions to computer vision, sparking a growing interest in the community recently regarding the application of them to graph generation. Existing discrete graph diffusion models exhibit heightened computational complexity and diminished training efficiency. A preferable and natural way is to directly diffuse the graph within the latent space. However, due to the non-Euclidean structure of graphs is not isotropic in the latent space, the existing latent diffusion models effectively make it difficult to capture and preserve the topological information of graphs. To address the above challenges, we propose a novel geometrically latent diffusion framework HypDiff. Specifically, we first establish a geometrically latent space with interpretability measures based on hyperbolic geometry, to define anisotropic latent diffusion processes for graphs. Then, we propose a geometrically latent diffusion process that is constrained by both radial and angular geometric properties, thereby ensuring the preservation of the original topological properties in the generative graphs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior effectiveness of HypDiff for graph generation with various topologies.