Revisiting Edge Perturbation for Graph Neural Network in Graph Data Augmentation and Attack

Edge perturbation is a basic method to modify graph structures. It can be categorized into two veins based on their effects on the performance of graph neural networks (GNNs), i.e., graph data augmentation and attack. Surprisingly, both veins of edge perturbation methods employ the same operations, yet yield opposite effects on GNNs' accuracy. A distinct boundary between these methods in using edge perturbation has never been clearly defined. Consequently, inappropriate perturbations may lead to undesirable outcomes, necessitating precise adjustments to achieve desired effects. Therefore, questions of ``why edge perturbation has a two-faced effect?'' and ``what makes edge perturbation flexible and effective?'' still remain unanswered. In this paper, we will answer these questions by proposing a unified formulation and establishing a clear boundary between two categories of edge perturbation methods. Specifically, we conduct experiments to elucidate the differences and similarities between these methods and theoretically unify the workflow of these methods by casting it to one optimization problem. Then, we devise Edge Priority Detector (EPD) to generate a novel priority metric, bridging these methods up in the workflow. Experiments show that EPD can make augmentation or attack flexibly and achieve comparable or superior performance to other counterparts with less time overhead.

Graph Learning under Distribution Shifts: A Comprehensive Survey on Domain Adaptation, Out-of-distribution, and Continual Learning

Graph learning plays a pivotal role and has gained significant attention in various application scenarios, from social network analysis to recommendation systems, for its effectiveness in modeling complex data relations represented by graph structural data. In reality, the real-world graph data typically show dynamics over time, with changing node attributes and edge structure, leading to the severe graph data distribution shift issue. This issue is compounded by the diverse and complex nature of distribution shifts, which can significantly impact the performance of graph learning methods in degraded generalization and adaptation capabilities, posing a substantial challenge to their effectiveness. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review and summary of the latest approaches, strategies, and insights that address distribution shifts within the context of graph learning. Concretely, according to the observability of distributions in the inference stage and the availability of sufficient supervision information in the training stage, we categorize existing graph learning methods into several essential scenarios, including graph domain adaptation learning, graph out-of-distribution learning, and graph continual learning. For each scenario, a detailed taxonomy is proposed, with specific descriptions and discussions of existing progress made in distribution-shifted graph learning. Additionally, we discuss the potential applications and future directions for graph learning under distribution shifts with a systematic analysis of the current state in this field. The survey is positioned to provide general guidance for the development of effective graph learning algorithms in handling graph distribution shifts, and to stimulate future research and advancements in this area.

ROG$_{PL}$: Robust Open-Set Graph Learning via Region-Based Prototype Learning

Open-set graph learning is a practical task that aims to classify the known class nodes and to identify unknown class samples as unknowns. Conventional node classification methods usually perform unsatisfactorily in open-set scenarios due to the complex data they encounter, such as out-of-distribution (OOD) data and in-distribution (IND) noise. OOD data are samples that do not belong to any known classes. They are outliers if they occur in training (OOD noise), and open-set samples if they occur in testing. IND noise are training samples which are assigned incorrect labels. The existence of IND noise and OOD noise is prevalent, which usually cause the ambiguity problem, including the intra-class variety problem and the inter-class confusion problem. Thus, to explore robust open-set learning methods is necessary and difficult, and it becomes even more difficult for non-IID graph data.To this end, we propose a unified framework named ROG$_{PL}$ to achieve robust open-set learning on complex noisy graph data, by introducing prototype learning. In specific, ROG$_{PL}$ consists of two modules, i.e., denoising via label propagation and open-set prototype learning via regions. The first module corrects noisy labels through similarity-based label propagation and removes low-confidence samples, to solve the intra-class variety problem caused by noise. The second module learns open-set prototypes for each known class via non-overlapped regions and remains both interior and border prototypes to remedy the inter-class confusion problem.The two modules are iteratively updated under the constraints of classification loss and prototype diversity loss. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed ROG$_{PL}$ is the first robust open-set node classification method for graph data with complex noise.

Attractor Memory for Long-Term Time Series Forecasting: A Chaos Perspective

In long-term time series forecasting (LTSF) tasks, existing deep learning models overlook the crucial characteristic that discrete time series originate from underlying continuous dynamic systems, resulting in a lack of extrapolation and evolution capabilities. Recognizing the chaotic nature of real-world data, our model, \textbf{\textit{Attraos}}, incorporates chaos theory into LTSF, perceiving real-world time series as observations from unknown high-dimensional chaotic dynamic systems. Under the concept of attractor invariance, Attraos utilizes the proposed multi-scale dynamic memory unit to memorize historical dynamics structure and predicts by a frequency-enhanced local evolution strategy. Detailed theoretical analysis and abundant empirical evidence consistently show that Attraos outperforms various LTSF methods on mainstream LTSF datasets and chaotic datasets.

Continual Learning for Large Language Models: A Survey

Large language models (LLMs) are not amenable to frequent re-training, due to high training costs arising from their massive scale. However, updates are necessary to endow LLMs with new skills and keep them up-to-date with rapidly evolving human knowledge. This paper surveys recent works on continual learning for LLMs. Due to the unique nature of LLMs, we catalog continue learning techniques in a novel multi-staged categorization scheme, involving continual pretraining, instruction tuning, and alignment. We contrast continual learning for LLMs with simpler adaptation methods used in smaller models, as well as with other enhancement strategies like retrieval-augmented generation and model editing. Moreover, informed by a discussion of benchmarks and evaluation, we identify several challenges and future work directions for this crucial task.

Position Paper: What Can Large Language Models Tell Us about Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is essential for comprehending the complexities inherent in various real-world systems and applications. Although large language models (LLMs) have recently made significant strides, the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) equipped with time series analysis capabilities remains in its nascent phase. Most existing time series models heavily rely on domain knowledge and extensive model tuning, predominantly focusing on prediction tasks. In this paper, we argue that current LLMs have the potential to revolutionize time series analysis, thereby promoting efficient decision-making and advancing towards a more universal form of time series analytical intelligence. Such advancement could unlock a wide range of possibilities, including modality switching and time series question answering. We encourage researchers and practitioners to recognize the potential of LLMs in advancing time series analysis and emphasize the need for trust in these related efforts. Furthermore, we detail the seamless integration of time series analysis with existing LLM technologies and outline promising avenues for future research.

Two Heads Are Better Than One: Boosting Graph Sparse Training via Semantic and Topological Awareness

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in various graph learning tasks but face computational challenges when applied to large-scale graphs. A promising solution is to remove non-essential edges to reduce the computational overheads in GNN. Previous literature generally falls into two categories: topology-guided and semantic-guided. The former maintains certain graph topological properties yet often underperforms on GNNs due to low integration with neural network training. The latter performs well at lower sparsity on GNNs but faces performance collapse at higher sparsity levels. With this in mind, we take the first step to propose a new research line and concept termed Graph Sparse Training (GST), which dynamically manipulates sparsity at the data level. Specifically, GST initially constructs a topology & semantic anchor at a low training cost, followed by performing dynamic sparse training to align the sparse graph with the anchor. We introduce the Equilibria Sparsification Principle to guide this process, effectively balancing the preservation of both topological and semantic information. Ultimately, GST produces a sparse graph with maximum topological integrity and no performance degradation. Extensive experiments on 6 datasets and 5 backbones showcase that GST (I) identifies subgraphs at higher graph sparsity levels (1.67%~15.85% $\uparrow$) than state-of-the-art sparsification methods, (II) preserves more key spectral properties, (III) achieves 1.27-3.42$\times$ speedup in GNN inference and (IV) successfully helps graph adversarial defense and graph lottery tickets.

Graph Spatiotemporal Process for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection with Missing Values

The detection of anomalies in multivariate time series data is crucial for various practical applications, including smart power grids, traffic flow forecasting, and industrial process control. However, real-world time series data is usually not well-structured, posting significant challenges to existing approaches: (1) The existence of missing values in multivariate time series data along variable and time dimensions hinders the effective modeling of interwoven spatial and temporal dependencies, resulting in important patterns being overlooked during model training; (2) Anomaly scoring with irregularly-sampled observations is less explored, making it difficult to use existing detectors for multivariate series without fully-observed values. In this work, we introduce a novel framework called GST-Pro, which utilizes a graph spatiotemporal process and anomaly scorer to tackle the aforementioned challenges in detecting anomalies on irregularly-sampled multivariate time series. Our approach comprises two main components. First, we propose a graph spatiotemporal process based on neural controlled differential equations. This process enables effective modeling of multivariate time series from both spatial and temporal perspectives, even when the data contains missing values. Second, we present a novel distribution-based anomaly scoring mechanism that alleviates the reliance on complete uniform observations. By analyzing the predictions of the graph spatiotemporal process, our approach allows anomalies to be easily detected. Our experimental results show that the GST-Pro method can effectively detect anomalies in time series data and outperforms state-of-the-art methods, regardless of whether there are missing values present in the data. Our code is available: https://github.com/huankoh/GST-Pro.

GOODAT: Towards Test-time Graph Out-of-Distribution Detection

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have found widespread application in modeling graph data across diverse domains. While GNNs excel in scenarios where the testing data shares the distribution of their training counterparts (in distribution, ID), they often exhibit incorrect predictions when confronted with samples from an unfamiliar distribution (out-of-distribution, OOD). To identify and reject OOD samples with GNNs, recent studies have explored graph OOD detection, often focusing on training a specific model or modifying the data on top of a well-trained GNN. Despite their effectiveness, these methods come with heavy training resources and costs, as they need to optimize the GNN-based models on training data. Moreover, their reliance on modifying the original GNNs and accessing training data further restricts their universality. To this end, this paper introduces a method to detect Graph Out-of-Distribution At Test-time (namely GOODAT), a data-centric, unsupervised, and plug-and-play solution that operates independently of training data and modifications of GNN architecture. With a lightweight graph masker, GOODAT can learn informative subgraphs from test samples, enabling the capture of distinct graph patterns between OOD and ID samples. To optimize the graph masker, we meticulously design three unsupervised objective functions based on the graph information bottleneck principle, motivating the masker to capture compact yet informative subgraphs for OOD detection. Comprehensive evaluations confirm that our GOODAT method outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks across a variety of real-world datasets. The code is available at Github: https://github.com/Ee1s/GOODAT

Knowledge Graphs and Pre-trained Language Models enhanced Representation Learning for Conversational Recommender Systems

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) utilize natural language interactions and dialogue history to infer user preferences and provide accurate recommendations. Due to the limited conversation context and background knowledge, existing CRSs rely on external sources such as knowledge graphs to enrich the context and model entities based on their inter-relations. However, these methods ignore the rich intrinsic information within entities. To address this, we introduce the Knowledge-Enhanced Entity Representation Learning (KERL) framework, which leverages both the knowledge graph and a pre-trained language model to improve the semantic understanding of entities for CRS. In our KERL framework, entity textual descriptions are encoded via a pre-trained language model, while a knowledge graph helps reinforce the representation of these entities. We also employ positional encoding to effectively capture the temporal information of entities in a conversation. The enhanced entity representation is then used to develop a recommender component that fuses both entity and contextual representations for more informed recommendations, as well as a dialogue component that generates informative entity-related information in the response text. A high-quality knowledge graph with aligned entity descriptions is constructed to facilitate our study, namely the Wiki Movie Knowledge Graph (WikiMKG). The experimental results show that KERL achieves state-of-the-art results in both recommendation and response generation tasks.