Abstract:Graph neural networks (GNNs) has been predominantly driven by message-passing, where node representations are iteratively updated via local neighborhood aggregation. Despite their success, message-passing suffers from fundamental limitations -- including constrained expressiveness, over-smoothing, over-squashing, and limited capacity to model long-range dependencies. These issues hinder scalability: increasing data size or model size often fails to yield improved performance, limiting the viability of GNNs as backbones for graph foundation models. In this work, we explore pathways beyond message-passing and introduce Generative Graph Pattern Machine (G$^2$PM), a generative Transformer pre-training framework for graphs. G$^2$PM represents graph instances (nodes, edges, or entire graphs) as sequences of substructures, and employs generative pre-training over the sequences to learn generalizable, transferable representations. Empirically, G$^2$PM demonstrates strong scalability: on the ogbn-arxiv benchmark, it continues to improve with model sizes up to 60M parameters, outperforming prior generative approaches that plateau at significantly smaller scales (e.g., 3M). In addition, we systematically analyze the model design space, highlighting key architectural choices that contribute to its scalability and generalization. Across diverse tasks -- including node classification, graph classification, and transfer learning -- G$^2$PM consistently outperforms strong baselines, establishing a compelling foundation for scalable graph learning. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/G2PM.
Abstract:The exponential growth of data-driven systems and AI technologies has intensified the demand for high-quality web-sourced datasets. While existing datasets have proven valuable, conventional web data collection approaches face significant limitations in terms of human effort and scalability. Current data-collecting solutions fall into two categories: wrapper-based methods that struggle with adaptability and reproducibility, and large language model (LLM)-based approaches that incur substantial computational and financial costs. To address these challenges, we propose AutoData, a novel multi-agent system for Automated web Data collection, that requires minimal human intervention, i.e., only necessitating a natural language instruction specifying the desired dataset. In addition, AutoData is designed with a robust multi-agent architecture, featuring a novel oriented message hypergraph coordinated by a central task manager, to efficiently organize agents across research and development squads. Besides, we introduce a novel hypergraph cache system to advance the multi-agent collaboration process that enables efficient automated data collection and mitigates the token cost issues prevalent in existing LLM-based systems. Moreover, we introduce Instruct2DS, a new benchmark dataset supporting live data collection from web sources across three domains: academic, finance, and sports. Comprehensive evaluations over Instruct2DS and three existing benchmark datasets demonstrate AutoData's superior performance compared to baseline methods. Case studies on challenging tasks such as picture book collection and paper extraction from surveys further validate its applicability. Our source code and dataset are available at https://github.com/GraphResearcher/AutoData.
Abstract:Foundation models (FMs) such as CLIP and SAM have recently shown great promise in image segmentation tasks, yet their adaptation to 3D medical imaging-particularly for pathology detection and segmentation-remains underexplored. A critical challenge arises from the domain gap between natural images and medical volumes: existing FMs, pre-trained on 2D data, struggle to capture 3D anatomical context, limiting their utility in clinical applications like tumor segmentation. To address this, we propose an adaptation framework called TAGS: Tumor Adaptive Guidance for SAM, which unlocks 2D FMs for 3D medical tasks through multi-prompt fusion. By preserving most of the pre-trained weights, our approach enhances SAM's spatial feature extraction using CLIP's semantic insights and anatomy-specific prompts. Extensive experiments on three open-source tumor segmentation datasets prove that our model surpasses the state-of-the-art medical image segmentation models (+46.88% over nnUNet), interactive segmentation frameworks, and other established medical FMs, including SAM-Med2D, SAM-Med3D, SegVol, Universal, 3D-Adapter, and SAM-B (at least +13% over them). This highlights the robustness and adaptability of our proposed framework across diverse medical segmentation tasks.
Abstract:Graph-structured data pervades domains such as social networks, biological systems, knowledge graphs, and recommender systems. While foundation models have transformed natural language processing, vision, and multimodal learning through large-scale pretraining and generalization, extending these capabilities to graphs -- characterized by non-Euclidean structures and complex relational semantics -- poses unique challenges and opens new opportunities. To this end, Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) aim to bring scalable, general-purpose intelligence to structured data, enabling broad transfer across graph-centric tasks and domains. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of GFMs, unifying diverse efforts under a modular framework comprising three key components: backbone architectures, pretraining strategies, and adaptation mechanisms. We categorize GFMs by their generalization scope -- universal, task-specific, and domain-specific -- and review representative methods, key innovations, and theoretical insights within each category. Beyond methodology, we examine theoretical foundations including transferability and emergent capabilities, and highlight key challenges such as structural alignment, heterogeneity, scalability, and evaluation. Positioned at the intersection of graph learning and general-purpose AI, GFMs are poised to become foundational infrastructure for open-ended reasoning over structured data. This survey consolidates current progress and outlines future directions to guide research in this rapidly evolving field. Resources are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/Awesome-Foundation-Models-on-Graphs.
Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven significant progress, yet their growing parameter counts and context windows incur prohibitive compute, energy, and monetary costs. We introduce EfficientLLM, a novel benchmark and the first comprehensive empirical study evaluating efficiency techniques for LLMs at scale. Conducted on a production-class cluster (48xGH200, 8xH200 GPUs), our study systematically explores three key axes: (1) architecture pretraining (efficient attention variants: MQA, GQA, MLA, NSA; sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)), (2) fine-tuning (parameter-efficient methods: LoRA, RSLoRA, DoRA), and (3) inference (quantization methods: int4, float16). We define six fine-grained metrics (Memory Utilization, Compute Utilization, Latency, Throughput, Energy Consumption, Compression Rate) to capture hardware saturation, latency-throughput balance, and carbon cost. Evaluating over 100 model-technique pairs (0.5B-72B parameters), we derive three core insights: (i) Efficiency involves quantifiable trade-offs: no single method is universally optimal; e.g., MoE reduces FLOPs and improves accuracy but increases VRAM by 40%, while int4 quantization cuts memory/energy by up to 3.9x at a 3-5% accuracy drop. (ii) Optima are task- and scale-dependent: MQA offers optimal memory-latency trade-offs for constrained devices, MLA achieves lowest perplexity for quality-critical tasks, and RSLoRA surpasses LoRA efficiency only beyond 14B parameters. (iii) Techniques generalize across modalities: we extend evaluations to Large Vision Models (Stable Diffusion 3.5, Wan 2.1) and Vision-Language Models (Qwen2.5-VL), confirming effective transferability. By open-sourcing datasets, evaluation pipelines, and leaderboards, EfficientLLM provides essential guidance for researchers and engineers navigating the efficiency-performance landscape of next-generation foundation models.
Abstract:Advertisement videos serve as a rich and valuable source of purpose-driven information, encompassing high-quality visual, textual, and contextual cues designed to engage viewers. They are often more complex than general videos of similar duration due to their structured narratives and rapid scene transitions, posing significant challenges to multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). In this work, we introduce VideoAds, the first dataset tailored for benchmarking the performance of MLLMs on advertisement videos. VideoAds comprises well-curated advertisement videos with complex temporal structures, accompanied by \textbf{manually} annotated diverse questions across three core tasks: visual finding, video summary, and visual reasoning. We propose a quantitative measure to compare VideoAds against existing benchmarks in terms of video complexity. Through extensive experiments, we find that Qwen2.5-VL-72B, an opensource MLLM, achieves 73.35\% accuracy on VideoAds, outperforming GPT-4o (66.82\%) and Gemini-1.5 Pro (69.66\%); the two proprietary models especially fall behind the opensource model in video summarization and reasoning, but perform the best in visual finding. Notably, human experts easily achieve a remarkable accuracy of 94.27\%. These results underscore the necessity of advancing MLLMs' temporal modeling capabilities and highlight VideoAds as a potentially pivotal benchmark for future research in understanding video that requires high FPS sampling. The dataset and evaluation code will be publicly available at https://videoadsbenchmark.netlify.app.
Abstract:Image geo-localization is the task of predicting the specific location of an image and requires complex reasoning across visual, geographical, and cultural contexts. While prior Vision Language Models (VLMs) have the best accuracy at this task, there is a dearth of high-quality datasets and models for analytical reasoning. We first create NaviClues, a high-quality dataset derived from GeoGuessr, a popular geography game, to supply examples of expert reasoning from language. Using this dataset, we present Navig, a comprehensive image geo-localization framework integrating global and fine-grained image information. By reasoning with language, Navig reduces the average distance error by 14% compared to previous state-of-the-art models while requiring fewer than 1000 training samples. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/SparrowZheyuan18/Navig/.
Abstract:Graph learning tasks require models to comprehend essential substructure patterns relevant to downstream tasks, such as triadic closures in social networks and benzene rings in molecular graphs. Due to the non-Euclidean nature of graphs, existing graph neural networks (GNNs) rely on message passing to iteratively aggregate information from local neighborhoods. Despite their empirical success, message passing struggles to identify fundamental substructures, such as triangles, limiting its expressiveness. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Neural Graph Pattern Machine (GPM), a framework designed to learn directly from graph patterns. GPM efficiently extracts and encodes substructures while identifying the most relevant ones for downstream tasks. We also demonstrate that GPM offers superior expressivity and improved long-range information modeling compared to message passing. Empirical evaluations on node classification, link prediction, graph classification, and regression show the superiority of GPM over state-of-the-art baselines. Further analysis reveals its desirable out-of-distribution robustness, scalability, and interpretability. We consider GPM to be a step toward going beyond message passing.
Abstract:Foundation models aim to create general, cross-task, and cross-domain machine learning models by pretraining on large-scale datasets to capture shared patterns or concepts (generalities), such as contours, colors, textures, and edges in images, or tokens, words, and sentences in text. However, discovering generalities across graphs remains challenging, which has hindered the development of graph foundation models. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to learn generalities across graphs via task-trees. Specifically, we first define the basic learning instances in graphs as task-trees and assume that the generalities shared across graphs are, at least partially, preserved in the task-trees of the given graphs. To validate the assumption, we first perform a theoretical analysis of task-trees in terms of stability, transferability, and generalization. We find that if a graph neural network (GNN) model is pretrained on diverse task-trees through a reconstruction task, it can learn sufficient transferable knowledge for downstream tasks using an appropriate set of fine-tuning samples. To empirically validate the assumption, we further instantiate the theorems by developing a cross-task, cross-domain graph foundation model named Graph generality Identifier on task-Trees (GIT). The extensive experiments over 30 graphs from five domains demonstrate the effectiveness of GIT in fine-tuning, in-context learning, and zero-shot learning scenarios. Particularly, the general GIT model pretrained on large-scale datasets can be quickly adapted to specific domains, matching or even surpassing expert models designed for those domains. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/GIT.
Abstract:Diet plays a critical role in human health, yet tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a major challenge. Nutrition Question Answering (QA) has emerged as a popular method for addressing this problem. However, current research faces two critical limitations. On one hand, the absence of datasets involving user-specific medical information severely limits \textit{personalization}. This challenge is further compounded by the wide variability in individual health needs. On the other hand, while large language models (LLMs), a popular solution for this task, demonstrate strong reasoning abilities, they struggle with the domain-specific complexities of personalized healthy dietary reasoning, and existing benchmarks fail to capture these challenges. To address these gaps, we introduce the Nutritional Graph Question Answering (NGQA) benchmark, the first graph question answering dataset designed for personalized nutritional health reasoning. NGQA leverages data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and the Food and Nutrient Database for Dietary Studies (FNDDS) to evaluate whether a food is healthy for a specific user, supported by explanations of the key contributing nutrients. The benchmark incorporates three question complexity settings and evaluates reasoning across three downstream tasks. Extensive experiments with LLM backbones and baseline models demonstrate that the NGQA benchmark effectively challenges existing models. In sum, NGQA addresses a critical real-world problem while advancing GraphQA research with a novel domain-specific benchmark.