Global Graph Counterfactual Explanation: A Subgraph Mapping Approach

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely deployed in various real-world applications. However, most GNNs are black-box models that lack explanations. One strategy to explain GNNs is through counterfactual explanation, which aims to find minimum perturbations on input graphs that change the GNN predictions. Existing works on GNN counterfactual explanations primarily concentrate on the local-level perspective (i.e., generating counterfactuals for each individual graph), which suffers from information overload and lacks insights into the broader cross-graph relationships. To address such issues, we propose GlobalGCE, a novel global-level graph counterfactual explanation method. GlobalGCE aims to identify a collection of subgraph mapping rules as counterfactual explanations for the target GNN. According to these rules, substituting certain significant subgraphs with their counterfactual subgraphs will change the GNN prediction to the desired class for most graphs (i.e., maximum coverage). Methodologically, we design a significant subgraph generator and a counterfactual subgraph autoencoder in our GlobalGCE, where the subgraphs and the rules can be effectively generated. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our GlobalGCE compared to existing baselines. Our code can be found at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GlobalGCE-92E8.

AMR-Evol: Adaptive Modular Response Evolution Elicits Better Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models in Code Generation

The impressive performance of proprietary LLMs like GPT4 in code generation has led to a trend to replicate these capabilities in open-source models through knowledge distillation (e.g. Code Evol-Instruct). However, these efforts often neglect the crucial aspect of response quality, relying heavily on teacher models for direct response distillation. This paradigm, especially for complex instructions, can degrade the quality of synthesized data, compromising the knowledge distillation process. To this end, our study introduces the Adaptive Modular Response Evolution (AMR-Evol) framework, which employs a two-stage process to refine response distillation. The first stage, modular decomposition, breaks down the direct response into more manageable sub-modules. The second stage, adaptive response evolution, automatically evolves the response with the related function modules. Our experiments with three popular code benchmarks (HumanEval, MBPP, and EvalPlus) attest to the superiority of the AMR-Evol framework over baseline response distillation methods. By comparing with the open-source Code LLMs trained on a similar scale of data, we observed performance enhancements: more than +3.0 points on HumanEval-Plus and +1.0 points on MBPP-Plus, which underscores the effectiveness of our framework. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ChiYeungLaw/AMR-Evol.

A Survey of Out-of-distribution Generalization for Graph Machine Learning from a Causal View

Graph machine learning (GML) has been successfully applied across a wide range of tasks. Nonetheless, GML faces significant challenges in generalizing over out-of-distribution (OOD) data, which raises concerns about its wider applicability. Recent advancements have underscored the crucial role of causality-driven approaches in overcoming these generalization challenges. Distinct from traditional GML methods that primarily rely on statistical dependencies, causality-focused strategies delve into the underlying causal mechanisms of data generation and model prediction, thus significantly improving the generalization of GML across different environments. This paper offers a thorough review of recent progress in causality-involved GML generalization. We elucidate the fundamental concepts of employing causality to enhance graph model generalization and categorize the various approaches, providing detailed descriptions of their methodologies and the connections among them. Furthermore, we explore the incorporation of causality in other related important areas of trustworthy GML, such as explanation, fairness, and robustness. Concluding with a discussion on potential future research directions, this review seeks to articulate the continuing development and future potential of causality in enhancing the trustworthiness of graph machine learning.

Causal Inference with Large Language Model: A Survey

Causal inference has been a pivotal challenge across diverse domains such as medicine and economics, demanding a complicated integration of human knowledge, mathematical reasoning, and data mining capabilities. Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP), particularly with the advent of large language models (LLMs), have introduced promising opportunities for traditional causal inference tasks. This paper reviews recent progress in applying LLMs to causal inference, encompassing various tasks spanning different levels of causation. We summarize the main causal problems and approaches, and present a comparison of their evaluation results in different causal scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss key findings and outline directions for future research, underscoring the potential implications of integrating LLMs in advancing causal inference methodologies.

Certified Causal Defense with Generalizable Robustness

While machine learning models have proven effective across various scenarios, it is widely acknowledged that many models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recently, there have emerged numerous efforts in adversarial defense. Among them, certified defense is well known for its theoretical guarantees against arbitrary adversarial perturbations on input within a certain range (e.g., $l_2$ ball). However, most existing works in this line struggle to generalize their certified robustness in other data domains with distribution shifts. This issue is rooted in the difficulty of eliminating the negative impact of spurious correlations on robustness in different domains. To address this problem, in this work, we propose a novel certified defense framework GLEAN, which incorporates a causal perspective into the generalization problem in certified defense. More specifically, our framework integrates a certifiable causal factor learning component to disentangle the causal relations and spurious correlations between input and label, and thereby exclude the negative effect of spurious correlations on defense. On top of that, we design a causally certified defense strategy to handle adversarial attacks on latent causal factors. In this way, our framework is not only robust against malicious noises on data in the training distribution but also can generalize its robustness across domains with distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets validate the superiority of our framework in certified robustness generalization in different data domains. Code is available in the supplementary materials.

CodeJudge-Eval: Can Large Language Models be Good Judges in Code Understanding?

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased impressive code generation capabilities, primarily evaluated through language-to-code benchmarks. However, these benchmarks may not fully capture a model's code understanding abilities. We introduce CodeJudge-Eval (CJ-Eval), a novel benchmark designed to assess LLMs' code understanding abilities from the perspective of code judging rather than code generation. CJ-Eval challenges models to determine the correctness of provided code solutions, encompassing various error types and compilation issues. By leveraging a diverse set of problems and a fine-grained judging system, CJ-Eval addresses the limitations of traditional benchmarks, including the potential memorization of solutions. Evaluation of 12 well-known LLMs on CJ-Eval reveals that even state-of-the-art models struggle, highlighting the benchmark's ability to probe deeper into models' code understanding abilities. Our benchmark will be available at \url{https://github.com/CodeLLM-Research/CodeJudge-Eval}.

View-consistent Object Removal in Radiance Fields

Radiance Fields (RFs) have emerged as a crucial technology for 3D scene representation, enabling the synthesis of novel views with remarkable realism. However, as RFs become more widely used, the need for effective editing techniques that maintain coherence across different perspectives becomes evident. Current methods primarily depend on per-frame 2D image inpainting, which often fails to maintain consistency across views, thus compromising the realism of edited RF scenes. In this work, we introduce a novel RF editing pipeline that significantly enhances consistency by requiring the inpainting of only a single reference image. This image is then projected across multiple views using a depth-based approach, effectively reducing the inconsistencies observed with per-frame inpainting. However, projections typically assume photometric consistency across views, which is often impractical in real-world settings. To accommodate realistic variations in lighting and viewpoint, our pipeline adjusts the appearance of the projected views by generating multiple directional variants of the inpainted image, thereby adapting to different photometric conditions. Additionally, we present an effective and robust multi-view object segmentation approach as a valuable byproduct of our pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses existing frameworks in maintaining content consistency across views and enhancing visual quality. More results are available at https://vulab-ai.github.io/View-consistent_Object_Removal_in_Radiance_Fields.

A Benchmark for Fairness-Aware Graph Learning

Fairness-aware graph learning has gained increasing attention in recent years. Nevertheless, there lacks a comprehensive benchmark to evaluate and compare different fairness-aware graph learning methods, which blocks practitioners from choosing appropriate ones for broader real-world applications. In this paper, we present an extensive benchmark on ten representative fairness-aware graph learning methods. Specifically, we design a systematic evaluation protocol and conduct experiments on seven real-world datasets to evaluate these methods from multiple perspectives, including group fairness, individual fairness, the balance between different fairness criteria, and computational efficiency. Our in-depth analysis reveals key insights into the strengths and limitations of existing methods. Additionally, we provide practical guidance for applying fairness-aware graph learning methods in applications. To the best of our knowledge, this work serves as an initial step towards comprehensively understanding representative fairness-aware graph learning methods to facilitate future advancements in this area.

Causal Inference with Latent Variables: Recent Advances and Future Prospectives

Causality lays the foundation for the trajectory of our world. Causal inference (CI), which aims to infer intrinsic causal relations among variables of interest, has emerged as a crucial research topic. Nevertheless, the lack of observation of important variables (e.g., confounders, mediators, exogenous variables, etc.) severely compromises the reliability of CI methods. The issue may arise from the inherent difficulty in measuring the variables. Additionally, in observational studies where variables are passively recorded, certain covariates might be inadvertently omitted by the experimenter. Depending on the type of unobserved variables and the specific CI task, various consequences can be incurred if these latent variables are carelessly handled, such as biased estimation of causal effects, incomplete understanding of causal mechanisms, lack of individual-level causal consideration, etc. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of recent developments in CI with latent variables. We start by discussing traditional CI techniques when variables of interest are assumed to be fully observed. Afterward, under the taxonomy of circumvention and inference-based methods, we provide an in-depth discussion of various CI strategies to handle latent variables, covering the tasks of causal effect estimation, mediation analysis, counterfactual reasoning, and causal discovery. Furthermore, we generalize the discussion to graph data where interference among units may exist. Finally, we offer fresh aspects for further advancement of CI with latent variables, especially new opportunities in the era of large language models (LLMs).

MFC-Bench: Benchmarking Multimodal Fact-Checking with Large Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have significantly improved multimodal reasoning tasks, such as visual question answering and image captioning. These models embed multimodal facts within their parameters, rather than relying on external knowledge bases to store factual information explicitly. However, the content discerned by LVLMs may deviate from actual facts due to inherent bias or incorrect inference. To address this issue, we introduce MFC-Bench, a rigorous and comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the factual accuracy of LVLMs across three tasks: Manipulation, Out-of-Context, and Veracity Classification. Through our evaluation on MFC-Bench, we benchmarked 12 diverse and representative LVLMs, uncovering that current models still fall short in multimodal fact-checking and demonstrate insensitivity to various forms of manipulated content. We hope that MFC-Bench could raise attention to the trustworthy artificial intelligence potentially assisted by LVLMs in the future. The MFC-Bench and accompanying resources are publicly accessible at https://github.com/wskbest/MFC-Bench, contributing to ongoing research in the multimodal fact-checking field.