Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks for Traffic Forecasting

Recent studies focus on formulating the traffic forecasting as a spatio-temporal graph modeling problem. They typically construct a static spatial graph at each time step and then connect each node with itself between adjacent time steps to construct the spatio-temporal graph. In such a graph, the correlations between different nodes at different time steps are not explicitly reflected, which may restrict the learning ability of graph neural networks. Meanwhile, those models ignore the dynamic spatio-temporal correlations among nodes as they use the same adjacency matrix at different time steps. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Joint Graph Convolutional Networks (STJGCN) for traffic forecasting over several time steps ahead on a road network. Specifically, we construct both pre-defined and adaptive spatio-temporal joint graphs (STJGs) between any two time steps, which represent comprehensive and dynamic spatio-temporal correlations. We further design dilated causal spatio-temporal joint graph convolution layers on STJG to capture the spatio-temporal dependencies from distinct perspectives with multiple ranges. A multi-range attention mechanism is proposed to aggregate the information of different ranges. Experiments on four public traffic datasets demonstrate that STJGCN is computationally efficient and outperforms 11 state-of-the-art baseline methods.

US-Rule: Discovering Utility-driven Sequential Rules

Utility-driven mining is an important task in data science and has many applications in real life. High utility sequential pattern mining (HUSPM) is one kind of utility-driven mining. HUSPM aims to discover all sequential patterns with high utility. However, the existing algorithms of HUSPM can not provide an accurate probability to deal with some scenarios for prediction or recommendation. High-utility sequential rule mining (HUSRM) was proposed to discover all sequential rules with high utility and high confidence. There is only one algorithm proposed for HUSRM, which is not enough efficient. In this paper, we propose a faster algorithm, called US-Rule, to efficiently mine high-utility sequential rules. It utilizes rule estimated utility co-occurrence pruning strategy (REUCP) to avoid meaningless computation. To improve the efficiency on dense and long sequence datasets, four tighter upper bounds (LEEU, REEU, LERSU, RERSU) and their corresponding pruning strategies (LEEUP, REEUP, LERSUP, RERSUP) are proposed. Besides, US-Rule proposes rule estimated utility recomputing pruning strategy (REURP) to deal with sparse datasets. At last, a large number of experiments on different datasets compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm demonstrate that US-Rule can achieve better performance in terms of execution time, memory consumption and scalability.

Pre-training Recommender Systems via Reinforced Attentive Multi-relational Graph Neural Network

Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have proven their effectiveness for recommender systems. Existing studies have applied GNNs to capture collaborative relations in the data. However, in real-world scenarios, the relations in a recommendation graph can be of various kinds. For example, two movies may be associated either by the same genre or by the same director/actor. If we use a single graph to elaborate all these relations, the graph can be too complex to process. To address this issue, we bring the idea of pre-training to process the complex graph step by step. Based on the idea of divide-and-conquer, we separate the large graph into three sub-graphs: user graph, item graph, and user-item interaction graph. Then the user and item embeddings are pre-trained from user and item graphs, respectively. To conduct pre-training, we construct the multi-relational user graph and item graph, respectively, based on their attributes. In this paper, we propose a novel Reinforced Attentive Multi-relational Graph Neural Network (RAM-GNN) to the pre-train user and item embeddings on the user and item graph prior to the recommendation step. Specifically, we design a relation-level attention layer to learn the importance of different relations. Next, a Reinforced Neighbor Sampler (RNS) is applied to search the optimal filtering threshold for sampling top-k similar neighbors in the graph, which avoids the over-smoothing issue. We initialize the recommendation model with the pre-trained user/item embeddings. Finally, an aggregation-based GNN model is utilized to learn from the collaborative relations in the user-item interaction graph and provide recommendations. Our experiments demonstrate that RAM-GNN outperforms other state-of-the-art graph-based recommendation models and multi-relational graph neural networks.

Reinforcement Learning based Path Exploration for Sequential Explainable Recommendation

Recent advances in path-based explainable recommendation systems have attracted increasing attention thanks to the rich information provided by knowledge graphs. Most existing explainable recommendations only utilize static knowledge graphs and ignore the dynamic user-item evolutions, leading to less convincing and inaccurate explanations. Although there are some works that realize that modelling user's temporal sequential behaviour could boost the performance and explainability of the recommender systems, most of them either only focus on modelling user's sequential interactions within a path or independently and separately of the recommendation mechanism. In this paper, we propose a novel Temporal Meta-path Guided Explainable Recommendation leveraging Reinforcement Learning (TMER-RL), which utilizes reinforcement item-item path modelling between consecutive items with attention mechanisms to sequentially model dynamic user-item evolutions on dynamic knowledge graph for explainable recommendation. Compared with existing works that use heavy recurrent neural networks to model temporal information, we propose simple but effective neural networks to capture users' historical item features and path-based context to characterize the next purchased item. Extensive evaluations of TMER on two real-world datasets show state-of-the-art performance compared against recent strong baselines.

Federated Social Recommendation with Graph Neural Network

Recommender systems have become prosperous nowadays, designed to predict users' potential interests in items by learning embeddings. Recent developments of the Graph Neural Networks~(GNNs) also provide recommender systems with powerful backbones to learn embeddings from a user-item graph. However, only leveraging the user-item interactions suffers from the cold-start issue due to the difficulty in data collection. Hence, current endeavors propose fusing social information with user-item interactions to alleviate it, which is the social recommendation problem. Existing work employs GNNs to aggregate both social links and user-item interactions simultaneously. However, they all require centralized storage of the social links and item interactions of users, which leads to privacy concerns. Additionally, according to strict privacy protection under General Data Protection Regulation, centralized data storage may not be feasible in the future, urging a decentralized framework of social recommendation. To this end, we devise a novel framework \textbf{Fe}drated \textbf{So}cial recommendation with \textbf{G}raph neural network (FeSoG). Firstly, FeSoG adopts relational attention and aggregation to handle heterogeneity. Secondly, FeSoG infers user embeddings using local data to retain personalization. Last but not least, the proposed model employs pseudo-labeling techniques with item sampling to protect the privacy and enhance training. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets justify the effectiveness of FeSoG in completing social recommendation and privacy protection. We are the first work proposing a federated learning framework for social recommendation to the best of our knowledge.

Pre-training Graph Neural Network for Cross Domain Recommendation

A recommender system predicts users' potential interests in items, where the core is to learn user/item embeddings. Nevertheless, it suffers from the data-sparsity issue, which the cross-domain recommendation can alleviate. However, most prior works either jointly learn the source domain and target domain models, or require side-features. However, jointly training and side features would affect the prediction on the target domain as the learned embedding is dominated by the source domain containing bias information. Inspired by the contemporary arts in pre-training from graph representation learning, we propose a pre-training and fine-tuning diagram for cross-domain recommendation. We devise a novel Pre-training Graph Neural Network for Cross-Domain Recommendation (PCRec), which adopts the contrastive self-supervised pre-training of a graph encoder. Then, we transfer the pre-trained graph encoder to initialize the node embeddings on the target domain, which benefits the fine-tuning of the single domain recommender system on the target domain. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of PCRec. Detailed analyses verify the superiority of PCRec in transferring information while avoiding biases from source domains.

CvS: Classification via Segmentation For Small Datasets

Deep learning models have shown promising results in a wide range of computer vision applications across various domains. The success of deep learning methods relies heavily on the availability of a large amount of data. Deep neural networks are prone to overfitting when data is scarce. This problem becomes even more severe for neural network with classification head with access to only a few data points. However, acquiring large-scale datasets is very challenging, laborious, or even infeasible in some domains. Hence, developing classifiers that are able to perform well in small data regimes is crucial for applications with limited data. This paper presents CvS, a cost-effective classifier for small datasets that derives the classification labels from predicting the segmentation maps. We employ the label propagation method to achieve a fully segmented dataset with only a handful of manually segmented data. We evaluate the effectiveness of our framework on diverse problems showing that CvS is able to achieve much higher classification results compared to previous methods when given only a handful of examples.

Dense Hierarchical Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

Dense neural text retrieval has achieved promising results on open-domain Question Answering (QA), where latent representations of questions and passages are exploited for maximum inner product search in the retrieval process. However, current dense retrievers require splitting documents into short passages that usually contain local, partial, and sometimes biased context, and highly depend on the splitting process. As a consequence, it may yield inaccurate and misleading hidden representations, thus deteriorating the final retrieval result. In this work, we propose Dense Hierarchical Retrieval (DHR), a hierarchical framework that can generate accurate dense representations of passages by utilizing both macroscopic semantics in the document and microscopic semantics specific to each passage. Specifically, a document-level retriever first identifies relevant documents, among which relevant passages are then retrieved by a passage-level retriever. The ranking of the retrieved passages will be further calibrated by examining the document-level relevance. In addition, hierarchical title structure and two negative sampling strategies (i.e., In-Doc and In-Sec negatives) are investigated. We apply DHR to large-scale open-domain QA datasets. DHR significantly outperforms the original dense passage retriever and helps an end-to-end QA system outperform the strong baselines on multiple open-domain QA benchmarks.

HETFORMER: Heterogeneous Transformer with Sparse Attention for Long-Text Extractive Summarization

To capture the semantic graph structure from raw text, most existing summarization approaches are built on GNNs with a pre-trained model. However, these methods suffer from cumbersome procedures and inefficient computations for long-text documents. To mitigate these issues, this paper proposes HETFORMER, a Transformer-based pre-trained model with multi-granularity sparse attentions for long-text extractive summarization. Specifically, we model different types of semantic nodes in raw text as a potential heterogeneous graph and directly learn heterogeneous relationships (edges) among nodes by Transformer. Extensive experiments on both single- and multi-document summarization tasks show that HETFORMER achieves state-of-the-art performance in Rouge F1 while using less memory and fewer parameters.

ACE-HGNN: Adaptive Curvature Exploration Hyperbolic Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been widely studied in various graph data mining tasks. Most existingGNNs embed graph data into Euclidean space and thus are less effective to capture the ubiquitous hierarchical structures in real-world networks. Hyperbolic Graph Neural Networks(HGNNs) extend GNNs to hyperbolic space and thus are more effective to capture the hierarchical structures of graphs in node representation learning. In hyperbolic geometry, the graph hierarchical structure can be reflected by the curvatures of the hyperbolic space, and different curvatures can model different hierarchical structures of a graph. However, most existing HGNNs manually set the curvature to a fixed value for simplicity, which achieves a suboptimal performance of graph learning due to the complex and diverse hierarchical structures of the graphs. To resolve this problem, we propose an Adaptive Curvature Exploration Hyperbolic Graph NeuralNetwork named ACE-HGNN to adaptively learn the optimal curvature according to the input graph and downstream tasks. Specifically, ACE-HGNN exploits a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework and contains two agents, ACE-Agent andHGNN-Agent for learning the curvature and node representations, respectively. The two agents are updated by a NashQ-leaning algorithm collaboratively, seeking the optimal hyperbolic space indexed by the curvature. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world graph datasets demonstrate a significant and consistent performance improvement in model quality with competitive performance and good generalization ability.