NICE: Scale-Stable Perturbations for Graph Neural Network Explanations via Noise Corruption

Post-hoc Graph Neural Network (GNN) explainers commonly follow a Perturb-Query paradigm, inferring the importance of graph elements based on queried predictions to perturbed inputs. However, such perturbations often introduce substantial distribution shift, undermining the reliability of the queried predictions used to derive explanations. While existing efforts mainly improve perturbed graphs or stabilize model predictions on them, we revisit the perturbation mechanism itself. We show that the widely used Element-wise Masking(EM) suppresses edge-induced messages toward zero, causing deterministic scale contraction that accumulates across message-passing layers, a phenomenon we term Scale Drift. Consequently, prediction changes under EM may conflate information corruption with deviations in propagation scale. As a scale-stable alternative to EM, we introduce Noise Corruption (NC), which perturbs each message through matched-norm random-direction corruption while preserving the expected squared message norm. Building on NC, we propose NICE, a Noise Corruption-based explanation framework, which learns a Stochastic Restoration Boundary (SRB) under NC-induced uncertainty, balancing target-prediction restoration against compactness. Furthermore, Boundary-Integrated Gradient (BIG) converts this boundary into edge attributions by accumulating each edge's contribution to reducing restoration risk along the restoration path. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate stronger explanation performance and model faithfulness while confirming that NC substantially reduces the Scale Drift induced by masking.

Eliminating Propagation Delay: Attention-Based Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Convolution Network for Traffic Flow Prediction

Predicting traffic flow is crucial to optimizing transportation systems and improving urban mobility. Many graph convolution-based models have been proposed to extract spatial-temporal features and predict traffic flow. However, most focus on spatial-temporal and semantic correlation in topological relationships. There are two primary problems to address. Firstly, the convolutional structure in the model focuses on utilizing static spatial dependencies and spatial-temporal relationships in topological structures, while neglecting the different information propagation delays between adjacent nodes in the convolution. Secondly, these methods often stack a large number of complex structures, resulting in a substantial increase in computational time during the model training phase, thereby disregarding the model's requirements for timeliness. In this paper, we propose a novel network called the Attention-Based Spatial-Temporal Fusion Graph Convolution Network (A-STFGCN). We design a spatial-temporal fusion block to extract the spatial-temporal feature correlations with propagation delay errors removed and to capture both long-term and short-term temporal characteristics of the data within a multi-head self-attention mechanism based on a mask matrix. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that our method achieves the best overall performance while having good computation and data utilization efficiency compared with the eight baseline methods.

Uncertainty-Aware Motion Planning for Autonomous Driving in Mixed Traffic Environment

In mixed-traffic environments where autonomous and human-driven vehicles may co-exist, motion planning for autonomous vehicles requires anticipating the future behaviors of surrounding human drivers. Existing reinforcement learning-based methods generally directly incorporate the predicted human intents into the observation to enable a proactive planning. However, human intent is inherently uncertain due to the behavioral diversity, perception noise, and partial observability. Treating predicted intends as deterministic states can result in unsafe decisions for autonomous vehicles. To address this problem, we propose Uncertainty-Aware Motion Planning (UAMP), which incorporates uncertainty in human intent prediction for AV decision-making. Specifically, UAMP first introduces a proximity-aware uncertainty estimator to quantify the interaction-conditioned intent uncertainty and constructs an uncertainty-guided joint intent distribution over surrounding human-driven vehicles. Within this uncertainty set, UAMP further introduces Uncertainty-Calibrated Value Learning (UCVL) to correct value function learning biases arising from directly incorporating uncertain human intent predictions into the observation. Extensive experiments in various mixed-traffic scenarios show that UAMP significantly improves safety and driving comfort, while maintaining traffic efficiency compared with existing approaches. The code is released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/UAMP-5638.

Time-Aware Diffusion based on Preference Disentanglement for Generative Recommendation

Recently, Generative Recommenders (GRs) have emerged as a transformative recommendation paradigm by replacing traditional item IDs with semantic indices (SIDs). Owing to the exceptional generative capabilities of diffusion models, a few pioneering works explore developing GRs with diffusion architectures as the backbone. However, a fatal limitation of existing diffusion-based GRs is that the diffusion process applies uniformly to all items within the historical interactions. In contrast, the user preference is shaped by multifaceted time-evolving factors and thus exhibits a non-stationary distribution in the temporal aspect. To bridge this gap, this study proposes a novel GR framework, named TDPM, by designing the time-aware diffusion on SID tokens. Specifically, TDPM explicitly integrates the impact of time-evolving user preferences into the diffusion process. In detail, the user preference is disentangled into (i) the period preference, which remains consistent over a long time-span, and (ii) the point preference, which is triggered by recent focal events. Extensive experiments on three public real-world datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of TDPM over the state-of-the-art baselines. TDPM achieves average improvements of up to 29.21% and 25.45% in terms of HR@20 and NDCG@20, respectively. The ablation study further underscores the necessity of time-aware token diffusion in diffusion-based GRs.

Beyond the Aggregation Dilemma: Prior-Retaining Decoupled Learning for Multimodal Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graph Learning (MAGL) integrates intrinsic node attributes with structural topology via graph aggregation. However, as pretrained encoders evolve into Large Foundation Models (LFMs), the landscape of MAGL fundamentally shifts: under high-confidence LFM priors, mandatory aggregation introduces topological noise that overwhelms discriminative signals, triggering a counter-intuitive performance inversion where sophisticated MAGL architectures underperform simple topology-agnostic MLPs. Through systematic empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify that this inversion stems from a fundamental aggregation dilemma characterized by two concurrent pathologies: (1) Representational Pathology (SNR Degradation) - mandatory aggregation dilutes robust intrinsic features with topological noise, causing the noise penalty to outweigh its collaborative benefit; and (2) Optimization Pathology (Gradient Starvation) - topological aggregation attenuates gradient flow, while a shared task loss causes dominant modalities to prematurely suppress weaker ones. To resolve this dilemma, we propose SUPRA (Shared-Unique Prior-Retaining Architecture), a decoupled dual-pathway paradigm. SUPRA processes modality-specific features through topology-agnostic MLPs while capturing structural synergy via a lightweight shared GNN, with auxiliary deep supervision counteracting gradient starvation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SUPRA achieves state-of-the-art performance while requiring 3.5x lower peak GPU memory and up to 4.4x faster training time than Multimodal Graph Transformers.

Rel-MOSS: Towards Imbalanced Relational Deep Learning on Relational Databases

In recent advances, to enable a fully data-driven learning paradigm on relational databases (RDB), relational deep learning (RDL) is proposed to structure the RDB as a heterogeneous entity graph and adopt the graph neural network (GNN) as the predictive model. However, existing RDL methods neglect the imbalance problem of relational data in RDBs and risk under-representing the minority entities, leading to an unusable model in practice. In this work, we investigate, for the first time, class imbalance problem in RDB entity classification and design the relation-centric minority synthetic over-sampling GNN (Rel-MOSS), in order to fill a critical void in the current literature. Specifically, to mitigate the issue of minority-related information being submerged by majority counterparts, we design the relation-wise gating controller to modulate neighborhood messages from each individual relation type. Based on the relational-gated representations, we further propose the relation-guided minority synthesizer for over-sampling, which integrates the entity relational signatures to maintain relational consistency. Extensive experiments on 12 entity classification datasets provide compelling evidence for the superiority of Rel-MOSS, yielding an average improvement of up to 2.46% and 4.00% in terms of Balanced Accuracy and G-Mean, compared with SOTA RDL methods and classic methods for handling class imbalance.

SurveyLens: A Research Discipline-Aware Benchmark for Automatic Survey Generation

The exponential growth of scientific literature has driven the evolution of Automatic Survey Generation (ASG) from simple pipelines to multi-agent frameworks and commercial Deep Research agents. However, current ASG evaluation methods rely on generic metrics and are heavily biased toward Computer Science (CS), failing to assess whether ASG methods adhere to the distinct standards of various academic disciplines. Consequently, researchers, especially those outside CS, lack clear guidance on using ASG systems to yield high-quality surveys compliant with specific discipline standards. To bridge this gap, we introduce SurveyLens, the first discipline-aware benchmark evaluating ASG methods across diverse research disciplines. We construct SurveyLens-1k, a curated dataset of 1,000 high-quality human-written surveys spanning 10 disciplines. Subsequently, we propose a dual-lens evaluation framework: (1) Discipline-Aware Rubric Evaluation, which utilizes LLMs with human preference-aligned weights to assess adherence to domain-specific writing standards; and (2) Canonical Alignment Evaluation to rigorously measure content coverage and synthesis quality against human-written survey papers. We conduct extensive experiments by evaluating 11 state-of-the-art ASG methods on SurveyLens, including Vanilla LLMs, ASG systems, and Deep Research agents. Our analysis reveals the distinct strengths and weaknesses of each paradigm across fields, providing essential guidance for selecting tools tailored to specific disciplinary requirements.

SimGR: Escaping the Pitfalls of Generative Decoding in LLM-based Recommendation

A core objective in recommender systems is to accurately model the distribution of user preferences over items to enable personalized recommendations. Recently, driven by the strong generative capabilities of large language models (LLMs), LLM-based generative recommendation has become increasingly popular. However, we observe that existing methods inevitably introduce systematic bias when estimating item-level preference distributions. Specifically, autoregressive generation suffers from incomplete coverage due to beam search pruning, while parallel generation distorts probabilities by assuming token independence. We attribute this issue to a fundamental modeling mismatch: these methods approximate item-level distributions via token-level generation, which inherently induces approximation errors. Through both theoretical analysis and empirical validation, we demonstrate that token-level generation cannot faithfully substitute item-level generation, leading to biased item distributions. To address this, we propose \textbf{Sim}ply \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{R}ecommendation (\textbf{SimGR}), a framework that directly models item-level preference distributions in a shared latent space and ranks items by similarity, thereby aligning the modeling objective with recommendation and mitigating distributional distortion. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and LLM backbones show that SimGR consistently outperforms existing generative recommenders. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SimGR-C408/

STAMImputer: Spatio-Temporal Attention MoE for Traffic Data Imputation

Traffic data imputation is fundamentally important to support various applications in intelligent transportation systems such as traffic flow prediction. However, existing time-to-space sequential methods often fail to effectively extract features in block-wise missing data scenarios. Meanwhile, the static graph structure for spatial feature propagation significantly constrains the models flexibility in handling the distribution shift issue for the nonstationary traffic data. To address these issues, this paper proposes a SpatioTemporal Attention Mixture of experts network named STAMImputer for traffic data imputation. Specifically, we introduce a Mixture of Experts (MoE) framework to capture latent spatio-temporal features and their influence weights, effectively imputing block missing. A novel Low-rank guided Sampling Graph ATtention (LrSGAT) mechanism is designed to dynamically balance the local and global correlations across road networks. The sampled attention vectors are utilized to generate dynamic graphs that capture real-time spatial correlations. Extensive experiments are conducted on four traffic datasets for evaluation. The result shows STAMImputer achieves significantly performance improvement compared with existing SOTA approaches. Our codes are available at https://github.com/RingBDStack/STAMImupter.

FilterLLM: Text-To-Distribution LLM for Billion-Scale Cold-Start Recommendation

Large Language Model (LLM)-based cold-start recommendation systems continue to face significant computational challenges in billion-scale scenarios, as they follow a "Text-to-Judgment" paradigm. This approach processes user-item content pairs as input and evaluates each pair iteratively. To maintain efficiency, existing methods rely on pre-filtering a small candidate pool of user-item pairs. However, this severely limits the inferential capabilities of LLMs by reducing their scope to only a few hundred pre-filtered candidates. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel "Text-to-Distribution" paradigm, which predicts an item's interaction probability distribution for the entire user set in a single inference. Specifically, we present FilterLLM, a framework that extends the next-word prediction capabilities of LLMs to billion-scale filtering tasks. FilterLLM first introduces a tailored distribution prediction and cold-start framework. Next, FilterLLM incorporates an efficient user-vocabulary structure to train and store the embeddings of billion-scale users. Finally, we detail the training objectives for both distribution prediction and user-vocabulary construction. The proposed framework has been deployed on the Alibaba platform, where it has been serving cold-start recommendations for two months, processing over one billion cold items. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FilterLLM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in cold-start recommendation tasks, achieving over 30 times higher efficiency. Furthermore, an online A/B test validates its effectiveness in billion-scale recommendation systems.