Abstract:Recently, data-centric AI methodology has been a dominant paradigm in single-cell transcriptomics analysis, which treats data representation rather than model complexity as the fundamental bottleneck. In the review of current studies, earlier sequence methods treat cells as independent entities and adapt prevalent ML models to analyze their directly inherited sequence data. Despite their simplicity and intuition, these methods overlook the latent intercellular relationships driven by the functional mechanisms of biological systems and the inherent quality issues of the raw sequence data. Therefore, a series of structured methods has emerged. Although they employ various heuristic rules to capture intricate intercellular relationships and enhance the raw sequencing data, these methods often neglect biological prior knowledge. This omission incurs substantial overhead and yields suboptimal graph representations, thereby hindering the utility of ML models. To address them, we propose DOGMA, a holistic data-centric framework designed for the structural reshaping and semantic enhancement of raw data through multi-level biological prior knowledge. Transcending reliance on stochastic heuristics, DOGMA redefines graph construction by integrating Statistical Anchors with Cell Ontology and Phylogenetic Trees to enable deterministic structure discovery and robust cross-species alignment. Furthermore, Gene Ontology is utilized to bridge the feature-level semantic gap by incorporating functional priors. In complex multi-species and multi-organ benchmarks, DOGMA achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting superior zero-shot robustness and sample efficiency while operating with significantly lower computational cost.
Abstract:Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) significantly influence therapeutic efficacy and patient safety. As experimental discovery is resource-intensive and time-consuming, efficient computational methodologies have become essential. The predominant paradigm formulates DDI prediction as a drug graph-based link prediction task. However, further progress is hindered by two fundamental challenges: (1) lack of high-quality data: most studies rely on small-scale DDI datasets and single-modal drug representations; (2) lack of standardized evaluation: inconsistent scenarios, varied metrics, and diverse baselines. To address the above issues, we propose OpenDDI, a comprehensive benchmark for DDI prediction. Specifically, (1) from the data perspective, OpenDDI unifies 6 widely used DDI datasets and 2 existing forms of drug representation, while additionally contributing 3 new large-scale LLM-augmented datasets and a new multimodal drug representation covering 5 modalities. (2) From the evaluation perspective, OpenDDI unifies 20 SOTA model baselines across 3 downstream tasks, with standardized protocols for data quality, effectiveness, generalization, robustness, and efficiency. Based on OpenDDI, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation and derive 10 valuable insights for DDI prediction while exposing current limitations to provide critical guidance for this rapidly evolving field. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaoriwuguang/OpenDDI
Abstract:Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) have been widely adopted for modeling complex systems by integrating multi-modal information, such as text and images, on nodes. However, we identify a discrepancy between the implicit semantic structure induced by different modality embeddings and the explicit graph structure. For instance, neighbors in the explicit graph structure may be close in one modality but distant in another. Since existing methods typically perform message passing over the fixed explicit graph structure, they inadvertently aggregate dissimilar features, introducing modality-specific noise and impeding effective node representation learning. To address this, we propose OptiMAG, an Unbalanced Optimal Transport-based regularization framework. OptiMAG employs the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance to explicitly guide cross-modal structural consistency within local neighborhoods, effectively mitigating structural-semantic conflicts. Moreover, a KL divergence penalty enables adaptive handling of cross-modal inconsistencies. This framework can be seamlessly integrated into existing multimodal graph models, acting as an effective drop-in regularizer. Experiments demonstrate that OptiMAG consistently outperforms baselines across multiple tasks, ranging from graph-centric tasks (e.g., node classification, link prediction) to multimodal-centric generation tasks (e.g., graph2text, graph2image). The source code will be available upon acceptance.
Abstract:Multimodal-attributed graphs (MMAGs) provide a unified framework for modeling complex relational data by integrating heterogeneous modalities with graph structures. While centralized learning has shown promising performance, MMAGs in real-world applications are often distributed across isolated platforms and cannot be shared due to privacy concerns or commercial constraints. Federated graph learning (FGL) offers a natural solution for collaborative training under such settings; however, existing studies largely focus on single-modality graphs and do not adequately address the challenges unique to multimodal federated graph learning (MMFGL). To bridge this gap, we present MM-OpenFGL, the first comprehensive benchmark that systematically formalizes the MMFGL paradigm and enables rigorous evaluation. MM-OpenFGL comprises 19 multimodal datasets spanning 7 application domains, 8 simulation strategies capturing modality and topology variations, 6 downstream tasks, and 57 state-of-the-art methods implemented through a modular API. Extensive experiments investigate MMFGL from the perspectives of necessity, effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency, offering valuable insights for future research on MMFGL.
Abstract:Federated graph learning (FGL) enables collaborative training of graph neural networks (GNNs) across decentralized subgraphs without exposing raw data. While existing FGL methods often achieve high overall accuracy, we show that this average performance can conceal severe degradation on disadvantaged node groups. From a fairness perspective, these disparities arise systematically from three coupled sources: label skew toward majority patterns, topology confounding in message propagation, and aggregation dilution of updates from hard clients. To address this, we propose \textbf{BoostFGL}, a boosting-style framework for fairness-aware FGL. BoostFGL introduces three coordinated mechanisms: \ding{182} \emph{Client-side node boosting}, which reshapes local training signals to emphasize systematically under-served nodes; \ding{183} \emph{Client-side topology boosting}, which reallocates propagation emphasis toward reliable yet underused structures and attenuates misleading neighborhoods; and \ding{184} \emph{Server-side model boosting}, which performs difficulty- and reliability-aware aggregation to preserve informative updates from hard clients while stabilizing the global model. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets show that BoostFGL delivers substantial fairness gains, improving Overall-F1 by 8.43\%, while preserving competitive overall performance against strong FGL baselines.