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May 22

Graph Neural Networks Based Analog Circuit Link Prediction

Circuit link prediction, which identifies missing component connections from incomplete netlists, is crucial in analog circuit design automation. However, existing methods face three main challenges: 1) Insufficient use of topological patterns in circuit graphs reduces prediction accuracy; 2) Data scarcity due to the complexity of annotations hinders model generalization; 3) Limited adaptability to various netlist formats restricts model flexibility. We propose Graph Neural Networks Based Analog Circuit Link Prediction (GNN-ACLP), a graph neural networks (GNNs) based method featuring three innovations to tackle these challenges. First, we introduce the SEAL (learning from Subgraphs, Embeddings, and Attributes for Link prediction) framework and achieve port-level accuracy in circuit link prediction. Second, we propose Netlist Babel Fish, a netlist format conversion tool that leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a large language model (LLM) to enhance the compatibility of netlist formats. Finally, we build a comprehensive dataset, SpiceNetlist, comprising 775 annotated circuits of 7 different types across 10 component classes. Experiments demonstrate accuracy improvements of 16.08% on SpiceNetlist, 11.38% on Image2Net, and 16.01% on Masala-CHAI compared to the baseline in intra-dataset evaluation, while maintaining accuracy from 92.05% to 99.07% in cross-dataset evaluation, demonstrating robust feature transfer capabilities. However, its linear computational complexity makes processing large-scale netlists challenging and requires future addressing.

  • 9 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

TITAN: T Cell Receptor Specificity Prediction with Bimodal Attention Networks

Motivation: The activity of the adaptive immune system is governed by T-cells and their specific T-cell receptors (TCR), which selectively recognize foreign antigens. Recent advances in experimental techniques have enabled sequencing of TCRs and their antigenic targets (epitopes), allowing to research the missing link between TCR sequence and epitope binding specificity. Scarcity of data and a large sequence space make this task challenging, and to date only models limited to a small set of epitopes have achieved good performance. Here, we establish a k-nearest-neighbor (K-NN) classifier as a strong baseline and then propose TITAN (Tcr epITope bimodal Attention Networks), a bimodal neural network that explicitly encodes both TCR sequences and epitopes to enable the independent study of generalization capabilities to unseen TCRs and/or epitopes. Results: By encoding epitopes at the atomic level with SMILES sequences, we leverage transfer learning and data augmentation to enrich the input data space and boost performance. TITAN achieves high performance in the prediction of specificity of unseen TCRs (ROC-AUC 0.87 in 10-fold CV) and surpasses the results of the current state-of-the-art (ImRex) by a large margin. Notably, our Levenshtein-distance-based K-NN classifier also exhibits competitive performance on unseen TCRs. While the generalization to unseen epitopes remains challenging, we report two major breakthroughs. First, by dissecting the attention heatmaps, we demonstrate that the sparsity of available epitope data favors an implicit treatment of epitopes as classes. This may be a general problem that limits unseen epitope performance for sufficiently complex models. Second, we show that TITAN nevertheless exhibits significantly improved performance on unseen epitopes and is capable of focusing attention on chemically meaningful molecular structures.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 21, 2021

Network Representation of Large-Scale Heterogeneous RNA Sequences with Integration of Diverse Multi-omics, Interactions, and Annotations Data

Long non-coding RNA, microRNA, and messenger RNA enable key regulations of various biological processes through a variety of diverse interaction mechanisms. Identifying the interactions and cross-talk between these heterogeneous RNA classes is essential in order to uncover the functional role of individual RNA transcripts, especially for unannotated and newly-discovered RNA sequences with no known interactions. Recently, sequence-based deep learning and network embedding methods are becoming promising approaches that can either predict RNA-RNA interactions from a sequence or infer missing interactions from patterns that may exist in the network topology. However, the majority of these methods have several limitations, eg, the inability to perform inductive predictions, to distinguish the directionality of interactions, or to integrate various sequence, interaction, and annotation biological datasets. We proposed a novel deep learning-based framework, rna2rna, which learns from RNA sequences to produce a low-dimensional embedding that preserves the proximities in both the interactions topology and the functional affinity topology. In this proposed embedding space, we have designated a two-part" source and target contexts" to capture the targeting and receptive fields of each RNA transcript, while encapsulating the heterogenous cross-talk interactions between lncRNAs and miRNAs. From experimental results, our method exhibits superior performance in AUPR rates compared to state-of-art approaches at predicting missing interactions in different RNA-RNA interaction databases and was shown to accurately perform link predictions to novel RNA sequences not seen at training time, even without any prior information. Additional results suggest that our proposed framework can capture a manifold for heterogeneous RNA sequences to discover novel functional annotations.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 7, 2020

GegenNet: Spectral Convolutional Neural Networks for Link Sign Prediction in Signed Bipartite Graphs

Given a signed bipartite graph (SBG) G with two disjoint node sets U and V, the goal of link sign prediction is to predict the signs of potential links connecting U and V based on known positive and negative edges in G. The majority of existing solutions towards link sign prediction mainly focus on unipartite signed graphs, which are sub-optimal due to the neglect of node heterogeneity and unique bipartite characteristics of SBGs. To this end, recent studies adapt graph neural networks to SBGs by introducing message-passing schemes for both inter-partition (UxV) and intra-partition (UxU or VxV) node pairs. However, the fundamental spectral convolutional operators were originally designed for positive links in unsigned graphs, and thus, are not optimal for inferring missing positive or negative links from known ones in SBGs. Motivated by this, this paper proposes GegenNet, a novel and effective spectral convolutional neural network model for link sign prediction in SBGs. In particular, GegenNet achieves enhanced model capacity and high predictive accuracy through three main technical contributions: (i) fast and theoretically grounded spectral decomposition techniques for node feature initialization; (ii) a new spectral graph filter based on the Gegenbauer polynomial basis; and (iii) multi-layer sign-aware spectral convolutional networks alternating Gegenbauer polynomial filters with positive and negative edges. Our extensive empirical studies reveal that GegenNet can achieve significantly superior performance (up to a gain of 4.28% in AUC and 11.69% in F1) in link sign prediction compared to 11 strong competitors over 6 benchmark SBG datasets.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 27, 2025

Complex Query Answering with Neural Link Predictors

Neural link predictors are immensely useful for identifying missing edges in large scale Knowledge Graphs. However, it is still not clear how to use these models for answering more complex queries that arise in a number of domains, such as queries using logical conjunctions (land), disjunctions (lor) and existential quantifiers (exists), while accounting for missing edges. In this work, we propose a framework for efficiently answering complex queries on incomplete Knowledge Graphs. We translate each query into an end-to-end differentiable objective, where the truth value of each atom is computed by a pre-trained neural link predictor. We then analyse two solutions to the optimisation problem, including gradient-based and combinatorial search. In our experiments, the proposed approach produces more accurate results than state-of-the-art methods -- black-box neural models trained on millions of generated queries -- without the need of training on a large and diverse set of complex queries. Using orders of magnitude less training data, we obtain relative improvements ranging from 8% up to 40% in Hits@3 across different knowledge graphs containing factual information. Finally, we demonstrate that it is possible to explain the outcome of our model in terms of the intermediate solutions identified for each of the complex query atoms. All our source code and datasets are available online, at https://github.com/uclnlp/cqd.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 6, 2020

Unifying Structure and Language Semantic for Efficient Contrastive Knowledge Graph Completion with Structured Entity Anchors

The goal of knowledge graph completion (KGC) is to predict missing links in a KG using trained facts that are already known. In recent, pre-trained language model (PLM) based methods that utilize both textual and structural information are emerging, but their performances lag behind state-of-the-art (SOTA) structure-based methods or some methods lose their inductive inference capabilities in the process of fusing structure embedding to text encoder. In this paper, we propose a novel method to effectively unify structure information and language semantics without losing the power of inductive reasoning. We adopt entity anchors and these anchors and textual description of KG elements are fed together into the PLM-based encoder to learn unified representations. In addition, the proposed method utilizes additional random negative samples which can be reused in the each mini-batch during contrastive learning to learn a generalized entity representations. We verify the effectiveness of the our proposed method through various experiments and analysis. The experimental results on standard benchmark widely used in link prediction task show that the proposed model outperforms existing the SOTA KGC models. Especially, our method show the largest performance improvement on FB15K-237, which is competitive to the SOTA of structure-based KGC methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 7, 2023

Leveraging Pre-trained Language Models for Time Interval Prediction in Text-Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Graphs

Most knowledge graph completion (KGC) methods learn latent representations of entities and relations of a given graph by mapping them into a vector space. Although the majority of these methods focus on static knowledge graphs, a large number of publicly available KGs contain temporal information stating the time instant/period over which a certain fact has been true. Such graphs are often known as temporal knowledge graphs. Furthermore, knowledge graphs may also contain textual descriptions of entities and relations. Both temporal information and textual descriptions are not taken into account during representation learning by static KGC methods, and only structural information of the graph is leveraged. Recently, some studies have used temporal information to improve link prediction, yet they do not exploit textual descriptions and do not support inductive inference (prediction on entities that have not been seen in training). We propose a novel framework called TEMT that exploits the power of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for text-enhanced temporal knowledge graph completion. The knowledge stored in the parameters of a PLM allows TEMT to produce rich semantic representations of facts and to generalize on previously unseen entities. TEMT leverages textual and temporal information available in a KG, treats them separately, and fuses them to get plausibility scores of facts. Unlike previous approaches, TEMT effectively captures dependencies across different time points and enables predictions on unseen entities. To assess the performance of TEMT, we carried out several experiments including time interval prediction, both in transductive and inductive settings, and triple classification. The experimental results show that TEMT is competitive with the state-of-the-art.

utrechtuniversity Utrecht University
·
Sep 28, 2023

Neural Common Neighbor with Completion for Link Prediction

Despite its outstanding performance in various graph tasks, vanilla Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) usually fails in link prediction tasks, as it only uses representations of two individual target nodes and ignores the pairwise relation between them. To capture the pairwise relations, some models add manual features to the input graph and use the output of MPNN to produce pairwise representations. In contrast, others directly use manual features as pairwise representations. Though this simplification avoids applying a GNN to each link individually and thus improves scalability, these models still have much room for performance improvement due to the hand-crafted and unlearnable pairwise features. To upgrade performance while maintaining scalability, we propose Neural Common Neighbor (NCN), which uses learnable pairwise representations. To further boost NCN, we study the unobserved link problem. The incompleteness of the graph is ubiquitous and leads to distribution shifts between the training and test set, loss of common neighbor information, and performance degradation of models. Therefore, we propose two intervention methods: common neighbor completion and target link removal. Combining the two methods with NCN, we propose Neural Common Neighbor with Completion (NCNC). NCN and NCNC outperform recent strong baselines by large margins. NCNC achieves state-of-the-art performance in link prediction tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/GraphPKU/NeuralCommonNeighbor.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 2, 2023

Relink: Constructing Query-Driven Evidence Graph On-the-Fly for GraphRAG

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) mitigates hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding them in structured knowledge. However, current GraphRAG methods are constrained by a prevailing build-then-reason paradigm, which relies on a static, pre-constructed Knowledge Graph (KG). This paradigm faces two critical challenges. First, the KG's inherent incompleteness often breaks reasoning paths. Second, the graph's low signal-to-noise ratio introduces distractor facts, presenting query-relevant but misleading knowledge that disrupts the reasoning process. To address these challenges, we argue for a reason-and-construct paradigm and propose Relink, a framework that dynamically builds a query-specific evidence graph. To tackle incompleteness, Relink instantiates required facts from a latent relation pool derived from the original text corpus, repairing broken paths on the fly. To handle misleading or distractor facts, Relink employs a unified, query-aware evaluation strategy that jointly considers candidates from both the KG and latent relations, selecting those most useful for answering the query rather than relying on their pre-existence. This empowers Relink to actively discard distractor facts and construct the most faithful and precise evidence path for each query. Extensive experiments on five Open-Domain Question Answering benchmarks show that Relink achieves significant average improvements of 5.4\% in EM and 5.2\% in F1 over leading GraphRAG baselines, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 11

Revisiting Multivariate Time Series Forecasting with Missing Values

Missing values are common in real-world time series, and multivariate time series forecasting with missing values (MTSF-M) has become a crucial area of research for ensuring reliable predictions. To address the challenge of missing data, current approaches have developed an imputation-then-prediction framework that uses imputation modules to fill in missing values, followed by forecasting on the imputed data. However, this framework overlooks a critical issue: there is no ground truth for the missing values, making the imputation process susceptible to errors that can degrade prediction accuracy. In this paper, we conduct a systematic empirical study and reveal that imputation without direct supervision can corrupt the underlying data distribution and actively degrade prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift that moves away from imputation and directly predicts from the partially observed time series. We introduce Consistency-Regularized Information Bottleneck (CRIB), a novel framework built on the Information Bottleneck principle. CRIB combines a unified-variate attention mechanism with a consistency regularization scheme to learn robust representations that filter out noise introduced by missing values while preserving essential predictive signals. Comprehensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CRIB, which predicts accurately even under high missing rates. Our code is available in https://github.com/Muyiiiii/CRIB.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 27, 2025

SciPaths: Forecasting Pathways to Scientific Discovery

Scientific progress depends on sequences of enabling contributions, yet existing AI4Science benchmarks largely focus on citation prediction, literature retrieval, or idea generation rather than the dependencies that make progress possible. In this paper, we introduce discovery pathway forecasting: given a target scientific contribution and the prior literature available at a specified time, the task is to (1) identify the enabling contributions required to realize it and (2) ground each in prior work when such prior work exists. We present SciPaths, a benchmark of 262 expert-annotated gold pathways and 2,444 silver pathways constructed from machine learning and natural language processing papers, where each pathway records enabling contributions, roles, rationales, and prior-work groundings or unmapped decisions. Evaluating frontier and open-weight language models, we find that the best model reaches only 0.189 F1 under strict semantic matching, with core methodological dependencies hardest to recover. Prior-work grounding improves substantially when gold enabling contributions are provided, showing that decomposition quality is a major bottleneck for end-to-end pathway recovery. SciPaths therefore shifts evaluation toward a missing capability in scientific forecasting: reasoning backward from a target contribution to the enabling scientific building blocks and prior-work dependencies that make it feasible.

  • 7 authors
·
May 13

Inductive Entity Representations from Text via Link Prediction

Knowledge Graphs (KG) are of vital importance for multiple applications on the web, including information retrieval, recommender systems, and metadata annotation. Regardless of whether they are built manually by domain experts or with automatic pipelines, KGs are often incomplete. Recent work has begun to explore the use of textual descriptions available in knowledge graphs to learn vector representations of entities in order to preform link prediction. However, the extent to which these representations learned for link prediction generalize to other tasks is unclear. This is important given the cost of learning such representations. Ideally, we would prefer representations that do not need to be trained again when transferring to a different task, while retaining reasonable performance. In this work, we propose a holistic evaluation protocol for entity representations learned via a link prediction objective. We consider the inductive link prediction and entity classification tasks, which involve entities not seen during training. We also consider an information retrieval task for entity-oriented search. We evaluate an architecture based on a pretrained language model, that exhibits strong generalization to entities not observed during training, and outperforms related state-of-the-art methods (22% MRR improvement in link prediction on average). We further provide evidence that the learned representations transfer well to other tasks without fine-tuning. In the entity classification task we obtain an average improvement of 16% in accuracy compared with baselines that also employ pre-trained models. In the information retrieval task, we obtain significant improvements of up to 8.8% in NDCG@10 for natural language queries. We thus show that the learned representations are not limited KG-specific tasks, and have greater generalization properties than evaluated in previous work.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 7, 2020

Multi-Label Zero-Shot Product Attribute-Value Extraction

E-commerce platforms should provide detailed product descriptions (attribute values) for effective product search and recommendation. However, attribute value information is typically not available for new products. To predict unseen attribute values, large quantities of labeled training data are needed to train a traditional supervised learning model. Typically, it is difficult, time-consuming, and costly to manually label large quantities of new product profiles. In this paper, we propose a novel method to efficiently and effectively extract unseen attribute values from new products in the absence of labeled data (zero-shot setting). We propose HyperPAVE, a multi-label zero-shot attribute value extraction model that leverages inductive inference in heterogeneous hypergraphs. In particular, our proposed technique constructs heterogeneous hypergraphs to capture complex higher-order relations (i.e. user behavior information) to learn more accurate feature representations for graph nodes. Furthermore, our proposed HyperPAVE model uses an inductive link prediction mechanism to infer future connections between unseen nodes. This enables HyperPAVE to identify new attribute values without the need for labeled training data. We conduct extensive experiments with ablation studies on different categories of the MAVE dataset. The results demonstrate that our proposed HyperPAVE model significantly outperforms existing classification-based, generation-based large language models for attribute value extraction in the zero-shot setting.

  • 2 authors
·
Feb 13, 2024

A Retrieve-and-Read Framework for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction

Knowledge graph (KG) link prediction aims to infer new facts based on existing facts in the KG. Recent studies have shown that using the graph neighborhood of a node via graph neural networks (GNNs) provides more useful information compared to just using the query information. Conventional GNNs for KG link prediction follow the standard message-passing paradigm on the entire KG, which leads to superfluous computation, over-smoothing of node representations, and also limits their expressive power. On a large scale, it becomes computationally expensive to aggregate useful information from the entire KG for inference. To address the limitations of existing KG link prediction frameworks, we propose a novel retrieve-and-read framework, which first retrieves a relevant subgraph context for the query and then jointly reasons over the context and the query with a high-capacity reader. As part of our exemplar instantiation for the new framework, we propose a novel Transformer-based GNN as the reader, which incorporates graph-based attention structure and cross-attention between query and context for deep fusion. This simple yet effective design enables the model to focus on salient context information relevant to the query. Empirical results on two standard KG link prediction datasets demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed method. Furthermore, our analysis yields valuable insights for designing improved retrievers within the framework.

  • 5 authors
·
Dec 19, 2022

From Graphs to Hypergraphs: Hypergraph Projection and its Remediation

We study the implications of the modeling choice to use a graph, instead of a hypergraph, to represent real-world interconnected systems whose constituent relationships are of higher order by nature. Such a modeling choice typically involves an underlying projection process that maps the original hypergraph onto a graph, and is common in graph-based analysis. While hypergraph projection can potentially lead to loss of higher-order relations, there exists very limited studies on the consequences of doing so, as well as its remediation. This work fills this gap by doing two things: (1) we develop analysis based on graph and set theory, showing two ubiquitous patterns of hyperedges that are root to structural information loss in all hypergraph projections; we also quantify the combinatorial impossibility of recovering the lost higher-order structures if no extra help is provided; (2) we still seek to recover the lost higher-order structures in hypergraph projection, and in light of (1)'s findings we propose to relax the problem into a learning-based setting. Under this setting, we develop a learning-based hypergraph reconstruction method based on an important statistic of hyperedge distributions that we find. Our reconstruction method is evaluated on 8 real-world datasets under different settings, and exhibits consistently good performance. We also demonstrate benefits of the reconstructed hypergraphs via use cases of protein rankings and link predictions.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 16, 2024

TGB-Seq Benchmark: Challenging Temporal GNNs with Complex Sequential Dynamics

Future link prediction is a fundamental challenge in various real-world dynamic systems. To address this, numerous temporal graph neural networks (temporal GNNs) and benchmark datasets have been developed. However, these datasets often feature excessive repeated edges and lack complex sequential dynamics, a key characteristic inherent in many real-world applications such as recommender systems and ``Who-To-Follow'' on social networks. This oversight has led existing methods to inadvertently downplay the importance of learning sequential dynamics, focusing primarily on predicting repeated edges. In this study, we demonstrate that existing methods, such as GraphMixer and DyGFormer, are inherently incapable of learning simple sequential dynamics, such as ``a user who has followed OpenAI and Anthropic is more likely to follow AI at Meta next.'' Motivated by this issue, we introduce the Temporal Graph Benchmark with Sequential Dynamics (TGB-Seq), a new benchmark carefully curated to minimize repeated edges, challenging models to learn sequential dynamics and generalize to unseen edges. TGB-Seq comprises large real-world datasets spanning diverse domains, including e-commerce interactions, movie ratings, business reviews, social networks, citation networks and web link networks. Benchmarking experiments reveal that current methods usually suffer significant performance degradation and incur substantial training costs on TGB-Seq, posing new challenges and opportunities for future research. TGB-Seq datasets, leaderboards, and example codes are available at https://tgb-seq.github.io/.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 5, 2025

Neural Bellman-Ford Networks: A General Graph Neural Network Framework for Link Prediction

Link prediction is a very fundamental task on graphs. Inspired by traditional path-based methods, in this paper we propose a general and flexible representation learning framework based on paths for link prediction. Specifically, we define the representation of a pair of nodes as the generalized sum of all path representations, with each path representation as the generalized product of the edge representations in the path. Motivated by the Bellman-Ford algorithm for solving the shortest path problem, we show that the proposed path formulation can be efficiently solved by the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm. To further improve the capacity of the path formulation, we propose the Neural Bellman-Ford Network (NBFNet), a general graph neural network framework that solves the path formulation with learned operators in the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm. The NBFNet parameterizes the generalized Bellman-Ford algorithm with 3 neural components, namely INDICATOR, MESSAGE and AGGREGATE functions, which corresponds to the boundary condition, multiplication operator, and summation operator respectively. The NBFNet is very general, covers many traditional path-based methods, and can be applied to both homogeneous graphs and multi-relational graphs (e.g., knowledge graphs) in both transductive and inductive settings. Experiments on both homogeneous graphs and knowledge graphs show that the proposed NBFNet outperforms existing methods by a large margin in both transductive and inductive settings, achieving new state-of-the-art results.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 13, 2021

Does Pre-trained Language Model Actually Infer Unseen Links in Knowledge Graph Completion?

Knowledge graphs (KGs) consist of links that describe relationships between entities. Due to the difficulty of manually enumerating all relationships between entities, automatically completing them is essential for KGs. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) is a task that infers unseen relationships between entities in a KG. Traditional embedding-based KGC methods, such as RESCAL, TransE, DistMult, ComplEx, RotatE, HAKE, HousE, etc., infer missing links using only the knowledge from training data. In contrast, the recent Pre-trained Language Model (PLM)-based KGC utilizes knowledge obtained during pre-training. Therefore, PLM-based KGC can estimate missing links between entities by reusing memorized knowledge from pre-training without inference. This approach is problematic because building KGC models aims to infer unseen links between entities. However, conventional evaluations in KGC do not consider inference and memorization abilities separately. Thus, a PLM-based KGC method, which achieves high performance in current KGC evaluations, may be ineffective in practical applications. To address this issue, we analyze whether PLM-based KGC methods make inferences or merely access memorized knowledge. For this purpose, we propose a method for constructing synthetic datasets specified in this analysis and conclude that PLMs acquire the inference abilities required for KGC through pre-training, even though the performance improvements mostly come from textual information of entities and relations.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 15, 2023

Unbiased Recommender Learning from Missing-Not-At-Random Implicit Feedback

Recommender systems widely use implicit feedback such as click data because of its general availability. Although the presence of clicks signals the users' preference to some extent, the lack of such clicks does not necessarily indicate a negative response from the users, as it is possible that the users were not exposed to the items (positive-unlabeled problem). This leads to a difficulty in predicting the users' preferences from implicit feedback. Previous studies addressed the positive-unlabeled problem by uniformly upweighting the loss for the positive feedback data or estimating the confidence of each data having relevance information via the EM-algorithm. However, these methods failed to address the missing-not-at-random problem in which popular or frequently recommended items are more likely to be clicked than other items even if a user does not have a considerable interest in them. To overcome these limitations, we first define an ideal loss function to be optimized to realize recommendations that maximize the relevance and propose an unbiased estimator for the ideal loss. Subsequently, we analyze the variance of the proposed unbiased estimator and further propose a clipped estimator that includes the unbiased estimator as a special case. We demonstrate that the clipped estimator is expected to improve the performance of the recommender system, by considering the bias-variance trade-off. We conduct semi-synthetic and real-world experiments and demonstrate that the proposed method largely outperforms the baselines. In particular, the proposed method works better for rare items that are less frequently observed in the training data. The findings indicate that the proposed method can better achieve the objective of recommending items with the highest relevance.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 8, 2019

LowFER: Low-rank Bilinear Pooling for Link Prediction

Knowledge graphs are incomplete by nature, with only a limited number of observed facts from the world knowledge being represented as structured relations between entities. To partly address this issue, an important task in statistical relational learning is that of link prediction or knowledge graph completion. Both linear and non-linear models have been proposed to solve the problem. Bilinear models, while expressive, are prone to overfitting and lead to quadratic growth of parameters in number of relations. Simpler models have become more standard, with certain constraints on bilinear map as relation parameters. In this work, we propose a factorized bilinear pooling model, commonly used in multi-modal learning, for better fusion of entities and relations, leading to an efficient and constraint-free model. We prove that our model is fully expressive, providing bounds on the embedding dimensionality and factorization rank. Our model naturally generalizes Tucker decomposition based TuckER model, which has been shown to generalize other models, as efficient low-rank approximation without substantially compromising the performance. Due to low-rank approximation, the model complexity can be controlled by the factorization rank, avoiding the possible cubic growth of TuckER. Empirically, we evaluate on real-world datasets, reaching on par or state-of-the-art performance. At extreme low-ranks, model preserves the performance while staying parameter efficient.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 25, 2020

FOS: A Large-Scale Temporal Graph Benchmark for Scientific Interdisciplinary Link Prediction

Interdisciplinary scientific breakthroughs mostly emerge unexpectedly, and forecasting the formation of novel research fields remains a major challenge. We introduce FOS (Future Of Science), a comprehensive time-aware graph-based benchmark that reconstructs annual co-occurrence graphs of 65,027 research sub-fields (spanning 19 general domains) over the period 1827-2024. In these graphs, edges denote the co-occurrence of two fields in a single publication and are timestamped with the corresponding publication year. Nodes are enriched with semantic embeddings, and edges are characterized by temporal and topological descriptors. We formulate the prediction of new field-pair linkages as a temporal link-prediction task, emphasizing the "first-time" connections that signify pioneering interdisciplinary directions. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate a suite of state-of-the-art temporal graph architectures under multiple negative-sampling regimes and show that (i) embedding long-form textual descriptions of fields significantly boosts prediction accuracy, and (ii) distinct model classes excel under different evaluation settings. Case analyses show that top-ranked link predictions on FOS align with field pairings that emerge in subsequent years of academic publications. We publicly release FOS, along with its temporal data splits and evaluation code, to establish a reproducible benchmark for advancing research in predicting scientific frontiers.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 23, 2025

Enhancing Automated Software Traceability by Transfer Learning from Open-World Data

Software requirements traceability is a critical component of the software engineering process, enabling activities such as requirements validation, compliance verification, and safety assurance. However, the cost and effort of manually creating a complete set of trace links across natural language artifacts such as requirements, design, and test-cases can be prohibitively expensive. Researchers have therefore proposed automated link-generation solutions primarily based on information-retrieval (IR) techniques; however, these solutions have failed to deliver the accuracy needed for full adoption in industrial projects. Improvements can be achieved using deep-learning traceability models; however, their efficacy is impeded by the limited size and availability of project-level artifacts and links to serve as training data. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing and evaluating several deep-learning approaches for text-to-text traceability. Our method, named NLTrace, explores three transfer learning strategies that use datasets mined from open world platforms. Through pretraining Language Models (LMs) and leveraging adjacent tracing tasks, we demonstrate that NLTrace can significantly improve the performance of LM based trace models when training links are available. In such scenarios NLTrace outperforms the best performing classical IR method with an 188% improvement in F2 score and 94.01% in Mean Average Precision (MAP). It also outperforms the general LM based trace model by 7% and 23% for F2 and MAP respectively. In addition, NLTrace can adapt to low-resource tracing scenarios where other LM models can not. The knowledge learned from adjacent tasks enables NLTrace to outperform VSM models by 28% F2 on generation challenges when presented with a small number of training examples.

THE-Tree: Can Tracing Historical Evolution Enhance Scientific Verification and Reasoning?

Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating scientific idea generation, but rigorously evaluating these numerous, often superficial, AI-generated propositions for novelty and factual accuracy is a critical bottleneck; manual verification is too slow. Existing validation methods are inadequate: LLMs as standalone verifiers may hallucinate and lack domain knowledge (our findings show 60% unawareness of relevant papers in specific domains), while traditional citation networks lack explicit causality and narrative surveys are unstructured. This underscores a core challenge: the absence of structured, verifiable, and causally-linked historical data of scientific evolution.To address this,we introduce THE-Tree (Technology History Evolution Tree), a computational framework that constructs such domain-specific evolution trees from scientific literature. THE-Tree employs a search algorithm to explore evolutionary paths. During its node expansion, it utilizes a novel "Think-Verbalize-Cite-Verify" process: an LLM proposes potential advancements and cites supporting literature. Critically, each proposed evolutionary link is then validated for logical coherence and evidential support by a recovered natural language inference mechanism that interrogates the cited literature, ensuring that each step is grounded. We construct and validate 88 THE-Trees across diverse domains and release a benchmark dataset including up to 71k fact verifications covering 27k papers to foster further research. Experiments demonstrate that i) in graph completion, our THE-Tree improves hit@1 by 8% to 14% across multiple models compared to traditional citation networks; ii) for predicting future scientific developments, it improves hit@1 metric by nearly 10%; and iii) when combined with other methods, it boosts the performance of evaluating important scientific papers by almost 100%.

  • 8 authors
·
Jun 26, 2025

HINT: Hierarchical Interaction Network for Trial Outcome Prediction Leveraging Web Data

Clinical trials are crucial for drug development but are time consuming, expensive, and often burdensome on patients. More importantly, clinical trials face uncertain outcomes due to issues with efficacy, safety, or problems with patient recruitment. If we were better at predicting the results of clinical trials, we could avoid having to run trials that will inevitably fail more resources could be devoted to trials that are likely to succeed. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical INteraction Network (HINT) for more general, clinical trial outcome predictions for all diseases based on a comprehensive and diverse set of web data including molecule information of the drugs, target disease information, trial protocol and biomedical knowledge. HINT first encode these multi-modal data into latent embeddings, where an imputation module is designed to handle missing data. Next, these embeddings will be fed into the knowledge embedding module to generate knowledge embeddings that are pretrained using external knowledge on pharmaco-kinetic properties and trial risk from the web. Then the interaction graph module will connect all the embedding via domain knowledge to fully capture various trial components and their complex relations as well as their influences on trial outcomes. Finally, HINT learns a dynamic attentive graph neural network to predict trial outcome. Comprehensive experimental results show that HINT achieves strong predictive performance, obtaining 0.772, 0.607, 0.623, 0.703 on PR-AUC for Phase I, II, III, and indication outcome prediction, respectively. It also consistently outperforms the best baseline method by up to 12.4\% on PR-AUC.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 8, 2021

Adapting Neural Link Predictors for Data-Efficient Complex Query Answering

Answering complex queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task where a model needs to answer complex logical queries in the presence of missing knowledge. Prior work in the literature has proposed to address this problem by designing architectures trained end-to-end for the complex query answering task with a reasoning process that is hard to interpret while requiring data and resource-intensive training. Other lines of research have proposed re-using simple neural link predictors to answer complex queries, reducing the amount of training data by orders of magnitude while providing interpretable answers. The neural link predictor used in such approaches is not explicitly optimised for the complex query answering task, implying that its scores are not calibrated to interact together. We propose to address these problems via CQD^{A}, a parameter-efficient score adaptation model optimised to re-calibrate neural link prediction scores for the complex query answering task. While the neural link predictor is frozen, the adaptation component -- which only increases the number of model parameters by 0.03% -- is trained on the downstream complex query answering task. Furthermore, the calibration component enables us to support reasoning over queries that include atomic negations, which was previously impossible with link predictors. In our experiments, CQD^{A} produces significantly more accurate results than current state-of-the-art methods, improving from 34.4 to 35.1 Mean Reciprocal Rank values averaged across all datasets and query types while using leq 30% of the available training query types. We further show that CQD^{A} is data-efficient, achieving competitive results with only 1% of the training complex queries, and robust in out-of-domain evaluations.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 28, 2023

Simplicial Closure and higher-order link prediction

Networks provide a powerful formalism for modeling complex systems by using a model of pairwise interactions. But much of the structure within these systems involves interactions that take place among more than two nodes at once; for example, communication within a group rather than person-to person, collaboration among a team rather than a pair of coauthors, or biological interaction between a set of molecules rather than just two. Such higher-order interactions are ubiquitous, but their empirical study has received limited attention, and little is known about possible organizational principles of such structures. Here we study the temporal evolution of 19 datasets with explicit accounting for higher-order interactions. We show that there is a rich variety of structure in our datasets but datasets from the same system types have consistent patterns of higher-order structure. Furthermore, we find that tie strength and edge density are competing positive indicators of higher-order organization, and these trends are consistent across interactions involving differing numbers of nodes. To systematically further the study of theories for such higher-order structures, we propose higher-order link prediction as a benchmark problem to assess models and algorithms that predict higher-order structure. We find a fundamental differences from traditional pairwise link prediction, with a greater role for local rather than long-range information in predicting the appearance of new interactions.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 19, 2018

A Topological Perspective on Demystifying GNN-Based Link Prediction Performance

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in learning node embeddings for link prediction (LP). While numerous studies aim to improve the overall LP performance of GNNs, none have explored its varying performance across different nodes and its underlying reasons. To this end, we aim to demystify which nodes will perform better from the perspective of their local topology. Despite the widespread belief that low-degree nodes exhibit poorer LP performance, our empirical findings provide nuances to this viewpoint and prompt us to propose a better metric, Topological Concentration (TC), based on the intersection of the local subgraph of each node with the ones of its neighbors. We empirically demonstrate that TC has a higher correlation with LP performance than other node-level topological metrics like degree and subgraph density, offering a better way to identify low-performing nodes than using cold-start. With TC, we discover a novel topological distribution shift issue in which newly joined neighbors of a node tend to become less interactive with that node's existing neighbors, compromising the generalizability of node embeddings for LP at testing time. To make the computation of TC scalable, We further propose Approximated Topological Concentration (ATC) and theoretically/empirically justify its efficacy in approximating TC and reducing the computation complexity. Given the positive correlation between node TC and its LP performance, we explore the potential of boosting LP performance via enhancing TC by re-weighting edges in the message-passing and discuss its effectiveness with limitations. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuWVandy/Topo_LP_GNN.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 6, 2023

LaundroGraph: Self-Supervised Graph Representation Learning for Anti-Money Laundering

Anti-money laundering (AML) regulations mandate financial institutions to deploy AML systems based on a set of rules that, when triggered, form the basis of a suspicious alert to be assessed by human analysts. Reviewing these cases is a cumbersome and complex task that requires analysts to navigate a large network of financial interactions to validate suspicious movements. Furthermore, these systems have very high false positive rates (estimated to be over 95\%). The scarcity of labels hinders the use of alternative systems based on supervised learning, reducing their applicability in real-world applications. In this work we present LaundroGraph, a novel self-supervised graph representation learning approach to encode banking customers and financial transactions into meaningful representations. These representations are used to provide insights to assist the AML reviewing process, such as identifying anomalous movements for a given customer. LaundroGraph represents the underlying network of financial interactions as a customer-transaction bipartite graph and trains a graph neural network on a fully self-supervised link prediction task. We empirically demonstrate that our approach outperforms other strong baselines on self-supervised link prediction using a real-world dataset, improving the best non-graph baseline by 12 p.p. of AUC. The goal is to increase the efficiency of the reviewing process by supplying these AI-powered insights to the analysts upon review. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully self-supervised system within the context of AML detection.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 24, 2022

Traceability Transformed: Generating more Accurate Links with Pre-Trained BERT Models

Software traceability establishes and leverages associations between diverse development artifacts. Researchers have proposed the use of deep learning trace models to link natural language artifacts, such as requirements and issue descriptions, to source code; however, their effectiveness has been restricted by availability of labeled data and efficiency at runtime. In this study, we propose a novel framework called Trace BERT (T-BERT) to generate trace links between source code and natural language artifacts. To address data sparsity, we leverage a three-step training strategy to enable trace models to transfer knowledge from a closely related Software Engineering challenge, which has a rich dataset, to produce trace links with much higher accuracy than has previously been achieved. We then apply the T-BERT framework to recover links between issues and commits in Open Source Projects. We comparatively evaluated accuracy and efficiency of three BERT architectures. Results show that a Single-BERT architecture generated the most accurate links, while a Siamese-BERT architecture produced comparable results with significantly less execution time. Furthermore, by learning and transferring knowledge, all three models in the framework outperform classical IR trace models. On the three evaluated real-word OSS projects, the best T-BERT stably outperformed the VSM model with average improvements of 60.31% measured using Mean Average Precision (MAP). RNN severely underperformed on these projects due to insufficient training data, while T-BERT overcame this problem by using pretrained language models and transfer learning.

Fine-Grained Entity Typing for Domain Independent Entity Linking

Neural entity linking models are very powerful, but run the risk of overfitting to the domain they are trained in. For this problem, a domain is characterized not just by genre of text but even by factors as specific as the particular distribution of entities, as neural models tend to overfit by memorizing properties of frequent entities in a dataset. We tackle the problem of building robust entity linking models that generalize effectively and do not rely on labeled entity linking data with a specific entity distribution. Rather than predicting entities directly, our approach models fine-grained entity properties, which can help disambiguate between even closely related entities. We derive a large inventory of types (tens of thousands) from Wikipedia categories, and use hyperlinked mentions in Wikipedia to distantly label data and train an entity typing model. At test time, we classify a mention with this typing model and use soft type predictions to link the mention to the most similar candidate entity. We evaluate our entity linking system on the CoNLL-YAGO dataset (Hoffart et al., 2011) and show that our approach outperforms prior domain-independent entity linking systems. We also test our approach in a harder setting derived from the WikilinksNED dataset (Eshel et al., 2017) where all the mention-entity pairs are unseen during test time. Results indicate that our approach generalizes better than a state-of-the-art neural model on the dataset.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 12, 2019

Integrating Knowledge Graph embedding and pretrained Language Models in Hypercomplex Spaces

Knowledge Graphs, such as Wikidata, comprise structural and textual knowledge in order to represent knowledge. For each of the two modalities dedicated approaches for graph embedding and language models learn patterns that allow for predicting novel structural knowledge. Few approaches have integrated learning and inference with both modalities and these existing ones could only partially exploit the interaction of structural and textual knowledge. In our approach, we build on existing strong representations of single modalities and we use hypercomplex algebra to represent both, (i), single-modality embedding as well as, (ii), the interaction between different modalities and their complementary means of knowledge representation. More specifically, we suggest Dihedron and Quaternion representations of 4D hypercomplex numbers to integrate four modalities namely structural knowledge graph embedding, word-level representations (e.g.\ Word2vec, Fasttext), sentence-level representations (Sentence transformer), and document-level representations (sentence transformer, Doc2vec). Our unified vector representation scores the plausibility of labelled edges via Hamilton and Dihedron products, thus modeling pairwise interactions between different modalities. Extensive experimental evaluation on standard benchmark datasets shows the superiority of our two new models using abundant textual information besides sparse structural knowledge to enhance performance in link prediction tasks.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 4, 2022

Linking Datasets on Organizations Using Half A Billion Open Collaborated Records

Scholars studying organizations often work with multiple datasets lacking shared unique identifiers or covariates. In such situations, researchers may turn to approximate string matching methods to combine datasets. String matching, although useful, faces fundamental challenges. Even when two strings appear similar to humans, fuzzy matching often does not work because it fails to adapt to the informativeness of the character combinations presented. Worse, many entities have multiple names that are dissimilar (e.g., "Fannie Mae" and "Federal National Mortgage Association"), a case where string matching has little hope of succeeding. This paper introduces data from a prominent employment-related networking site (LinkedIn) as a tool to address these problems. We propose interconnected approaches to leveraging the massive amount of information from LinkedIn regarding organizational name-to-name links. The first approach builds a machine learning model for predicting matches from character strings, treating the trillions of user-contributed organizational name pairs as a training corpus: this approach constructs a string matching metric that explicitly maximizes match probabilities. A second approach identifies relationships between organization names using network representations of the LinkedIn data. A third approach combines the first and second. We document substantial improvements over fuzzy matching in applications, making all methods accessible in open-source software ("LinkOrgs").

JerzakLabs Jerzak Labs
·
Feb 5, 2023 1

An Embarrassingly Simple Graph Heuristic Reveals Shortcut-Solvable Benchmarks for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation has increasingly shifted toward generative recommenders that combine sequential patterns with semantic item information. Yet these methods are often evaluated on a small set of widely used benchmarks, raising a key question: do these benchmarks actually require the advanced modeling capabilities that modern generative recommenders claim to provide? We conduct a benchmark audit with an intentionally simple graph heuristic. Starting from only the last one or two interacted items, it retrieves candidates from a few-hop item-transition graph and ranks them by item-feature similarity. Despite using no sequence encoder, generative objective, or training, this heuristic matches or outperforms many modern baselines, with relative NDCG@10 improvements of 38.10% and 44.18% over the best competing baseline on Amazon Review Sports and CDs. We show that this behavior reflects shortcut solvability rather than an artifact of one heuristic. We identify three shortcut structures that can make next-item prediction easier than expected: low-branching local transitions, feature-smooth transitions, and limited dependence on long user histories. These shortcuts need not appear together; even one or two strong signals can make simple local retrieval highly competitive, while weakening them makes the benefits of more sophisticated models clearer. Across 14 datasets, model rankings vary substantially with dataset properties, yet the heuristic remains competitive on 10 of them. Our findings suggest that strong performance on standard benchmarks does not always demonstrate advanced sequential, semantic, or generative modeling ability. We call for more careful dataset selection and dataset-level diagnostic analysis when using benchmarks to support claims about new recommendation models.

  • 12 authors
·
May 7

Breaking the Static Graph: Context-Aware Traversal for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Recent advances in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have shifted from simple vector similarity to structure-aware approaches like HippoRAG, which leverage Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and Personalized PageRank (PPR) to capture multi-hop dependencies. However, these methods suffer from a "Static Graph Fallacy": they rely on fixed transition probabilities determined during indexing. This rigidity ignores the query-dependent nature of edge relevance, causing semantic drift where random walks are diverted into high-degree "hub" nodes before reaching critical downstream evidence. Consequently, models often achieve high partial recall but fail to retrieve the complete evidence chain required for multi-hop queries. To address this, we propose CatRAG, Context-Aware Traversal for robust RAG, a framework that builds on the HippoRAG 2 architecture and transforms the static KG into a query-adaptive navigation structure. We introduce a multi-faceted framework to steer the random walk: (1) Symbolic Anchoring, which injects weak entity constraints to regularize the random walk; (2) Query-Aware Dynamic Edge Weighting, which dynamically modulates graph structure, to prune irrelevant paths while amplifying those aligned with the query's intent; and (3) Key-Fact Passage Weight Enhancement, a cost-efficient bias that structurally anchors the random walk to likely evidence. Experiments across four multi-hop benchmarks demonstrate that CatRAG consistently outperforms state of the art baselines. Our analysis reveals that while standard Recall metrics show modest gains, CatRAG achieves substantial improvements in reasoning completeness, the capacity to recover the entire evidence path without gaps. These results reveal that our approach effectively bridges the gap between retrieving partial context and enabling fully grounded reasoning. Resources are available at https://github.com/kwunhang/CatRAG.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 2 3

Self-Exploring Language Models for Explainable Link Forecasting on Temporal Graphs via Reinforcement Learning

Forecasting future links is a central task in temporal graph (TG) reasoning, requiring models to leverage historical interactions to predict upcoming ones. Traditional neural approaches, such as temporal graph neural networks, achieve strong performance but lack explainability and cannot be applied to unseen graphs without retraining. Recent studies have begun to explore using large language models (LLMs) for graph reasoning, but most of them are constrained to static graphs or small synthetic TGs and lack the evaluation of the quality of reasoning traces generated by LLMs. In this work, we present Reasoning-Enhanced Learning for Temporal Graphs (ReaL-TG), a reinforcement learning framework that fine-tunes LLMs to perform explainable link forecasting on real-world TGs. ReaL-TG uses outcome-based reward to encourage models to self-explore reasoning strategies from graph structure and to produce explanations that directly justify their predictions. To enable evaluation on LLM-generated reasoning traces, we propose a new evaluation protocol combining ranking metrics with an LLM-as-a-Judge system that assesses both the quality of reasoning and the impact of hallucinations. Experiments with ReaL-TG-4B, obtained by fine-tuning Qwen3-4B under our framework, show that it outperforms much larger frontier LLMs, including GPT-5 mini, on ranking metrics, while producing high-quality explanations confirmed by both the LLM judge and human evaluation.

  • 14 authors
·
Aug 31, 2025

AutoInt: Automatic Feature Interaction Learning via Self-Attentive Neural Networks

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction, which aims to predict the probability of a user clicking on an ad or an item, is critical to many online applications such as online advertising and recommender systems. The problem is very challenging since (1) the input features (e.g., the user id, user age, item id, item category) are usually sparse and high-dimensional, and (2) an effective prediction relies on high-order combinatorial features (a.k.a. cross features), which are very time-consuming to hand-craft by domain experts and are impossible to be enumerated. Therefore, there have been efforts in finding low-dimensional representations of the sparse and high-dimensional raw features and their meaningful combinations. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient method called the AutoInt to automatically learn the high-order feature interactions of input features. Our proposed algorithm is very general, which can be applied to both numerical and categorical input features. Specifically, we map both the numerical and categorical features into the same low-dimensional space. Afterwards, a multi-head self-attentive neural network with residual connections is proposed to explicitly model the feature interactions in the low-dimensional space. With different layers of the multi-head self-attentive neural networks, different orders of feature combinations of input features can be modeled. The whole model can be efficiently fit on large-scale raw data in an end-to-end fashion. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that our proposed approach not only outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for prediction but also offers good explainability. Code is available at: https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/RecommenderSystems.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 28, 2018

In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search

Since large language models have approached human-level performance on many tasks, it has become increasingly harder for researchers to find tasks that are still challenging to the models. Failure cases usually come from the long-tail distribution - data that an oracle language model could assign a probability on the lower end of its distribution. Current methodology such as prompt engineering or crowdsourcing are insufficient for creating long-tail examples because humans are constrained by cognitive bias. We propose a Logic-Induced-Knowledge-Search (LINK) framework for systematically generating long-tail knowledge statements. Grounded by a symbolic rule, we search for long-tail values for each variable of the rule by first prompting a LLM, then verifying the correctness of the values with a critic, and lastly pushing for the long-tail distribution with a reranker. With this framework we construct a dataset, Logic-Induced-Long-Tail (LINT), consisting of 200 symbolic rules and 50K knowledge statements spanning across four domains. Human annotations find that 84% of the statements in LINT are factually correct. In contrast, ChatGPT and GPT4 struggle with directly generating long-tail statements under the guidance of logic rules, each only getting 56% and 78% of their statements correct. Moreover, their "long-tail" generations in fact fall into the higher likelihood range, and thus are not really long-tail. Our findings suggest that LINK is effective for generating data in the long-tail distribution while enforcing quality. LINT can be useful for systematically evaluating LLMs' capabilities in the long-tail distribution. We challenge the models with a simple entailment classification task using samples from LINT. We find that ChatGPT and GPT4's capability in identifying incorrect knowledge drop by ~3% in the long-tail distribution compared to head distribution.

  • 10 authors
·
Nov 13, 2023

Link-Context Learning for Multimodal LLMs

The ability to learn from context with novel concepts, and deliver appropriate responses are essential in human conversations. Despite current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) being trained on mega-scale datasets, recognizing unseen images or understanding novel concepts in a training-free manner remains a challenge. In-Context Learning (ICL) explores training-free few-shot learning, where models are encouraged to ``learn to learn" from limited tasks and generalize to unseen tasks. In this work, we propose link-context learning (LCL), which emphasizes "reasoning from cause and effect" to augment the learning capabilities of MLLMs. LCL goes beyond traditional ICL by explicitly strengthening the causal relationship between the support set and the query set. By providing demonstrations with causal links, LCL guides the model to discern not only the analogy but also the underlying causal associations between data points, which empowers MLLMs to recognize unseen images and understand novel concepts more effectively. To facilitate the evaluation of this novel approach, we introduce the ISEKAI dataset, comprising exclusively of unseen generated image-label pairs designed for link-context learning. Extensive experiments show that our LCL-MLLM exhibits strong link-context learning capabilities to novel concepts over vanilla MLLMs. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/isekai-portal/Link-Context-Learning.

  • 6 authors
·
Aug 15, 2023 1

Influence-guided Data Augmentation for Neural Tensor Completion

How can we predict missing values in multi-dimensional data (or tensors) more accurately? The task of tensor completion is crucial in many applications such as personalized recommendation, image and video restoration, and link prediction in social networks. Many tensor factorization and neural network-based tensor completion algorithms have been developed to predict missing entries in partially observed tensors. However, they can produce inaccurate estimations as real-world tensors are very sparse, and these methods tend to overfit on the small amount of data. Here, we overcome these shortcomings by presenting a data augmentation technique for tensors. In this paper, we propose DAIN, a general data augmentation framework that enhances the prediction accuracy of neural tensor completion methods. Specifically, DAIN first trains a neural model and finds tensor cell importances with influence functions. After that, DAIN aggregates the cell importance to calculate the importance of each entity (i.e., an index of a dimension). Finally, DAIN augments the tensor by weighted sampling of entity importances and a value predictor. Extensive experimental results show that DAIN outperforms all data augmentation baselines in terms of enhancing imputation accuracy of neural tensor completion on four diverse real-world tensors. Ablation studies of DAIN substantiate the effectiveness of each component of DAIN. Furthermore, we show that DAIN scales near linearly to large datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 23, 2021

Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Missing Modality Completion in Product Catalogues

Missing-modality information on e-commerce platforms, such as absent product images or textual descriptions, often arises from annotation errors or incomplete metadata, impairing both product presentation and downstream applications such as recommendation systems. Motivated by the multimodal generative capabilities of recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), this work investigates a fundamental yet underexplored question: can MLLMs generate missing modalities for products in e-commerce scenarios? We propose the Missing Modality Product Completion Benchmark (MMPCBench), which consists of two sub-benchmarks: a Content Quality Completion Benchmark and a Recommendation Benchmark. We further evaluate six state-of-the-art MLLMs from the Qwen2.5-VL and Gemma-3 model families across nine real-world e-commerce categories, focusing on image-to-text and text-to-image completion tasks. Experimental results show that while MLLMs can capture high-level semantics, they struggle with fine-grained word-level and pixel- or patch-level alignment. In addition, performance varies substantially across product categories and model scales, and we observe no trivial correlation between model size and performance, in contrast to trends commonly reported in mainstream benchmarks. We also explore Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to better align MLLMs with this task. GRPO improves image-to-text completion but does not yield gains for text-to-image completion. Overall, these findings expose the limitations of current MLLMs in real-world cross-modal generation and represent an early step toward more effective missing-modality product completion.

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 27

K-Paths: Reasoning over Graph Paths for Drug Repurposing and Drug Interaction Prediction

Drug discovery is a complex and time-intensive process that requires identifying and validating new therapeutic candidates. Computational approaches using large-scale biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) offer a promising solution to accelerate this process. However, extracting meaningful insights from large-scale KGs remains challenging due to the complexity of graph traversal. Existing subgraph-based methods are tailored to graph neural networks (GNNs), making them incompatible with other models, such as large language models (LLMs). We introduce K-Paths, a retrieval framework that extracts structured, diverse, and biologically meaningful paths from KGs. Integrating these paths enables LLMs and GNNs to effectively predict unobserved drug-drug and drug-disease interactions. Unlike traditional path-ranking approaches, K-Paths retrieves and transforms paths into a structured format that LLMs can directly process, facilitating explainable reasoning. K-Paths employs a diversity-aware adaptation of Yen's algorithm to retrieve the K shortest loopless paths between entities in an interaction query, prioritizing biologically relevant and diverse relationships. Our experiments on benchmark datasets show that K-Paths improves the zero-shot performance of Llama 8.1B's F1-score by 12.45 points on drug repurposing and 13.42 points on interaction severity prediction. We also show that Llama 70B achieves F1-score gains of 6.18 and 8.46 points, respectively. K-Paths also improves the supervised training efficiency of EmerGNN, a state-of-the-art GNN, by reducing KG size by 90% while maintaining strong predictive performance. Beyond its scalability and efficiency, K-Paths uniquely bridges the gap between KGs and LLMs, providing explainable rationales for predicted interactions. These capabilities show that K-Paths is a valuable tool for efficient data-driven drug discovery.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025

Variationally Regularized Graph-based Representation Learning for Electronic Health Records

Electronic Health Records (EHR) are high-dimensional data with implicit connections among thousands of medical concepts. These connections, for instance, the co-occurrence of diseases and lab-disease correlations can be informative when only a subset of these variables is documented by the clinician. A feasible approach to improving the representation learning of EHR data is to associate relevant medical concepts and utilize these connections. Existing medical ontologies can be the reference for EHR structures, but they place numerous constraints on the data source. Recent progress on graph neural networks (GNN) enables end-to-end learning of topological structures for non-grid or non-sequential data. However, there are problems to be addressed on how to learn the medical graph adaptively and how to understand the effect of the medical graph on representation learning. In this paper, we propose a variationally regularized encoder-decoder graph network that achieves more robustness in graph structure learning by regularizing node representations. Our model outperforms the existing graph and non-graph based methods in various EHR predictive tasks based on both public data and real-world clinical data. Besides the improvements in empirical experiment performances, we provide an interpretation of the effect of variational regularization compared to standard graph neural network, using singular value analysis.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 8, 2019

With Argus Eyes: Assessing Retrieval Gaps via Uncertainty Scoring to Detect and Remedy Retrieval Blind Spots

Reliable retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems depend fundamentally on the retriever's ability to find relevant information. We show that neural retrievers used in RAG systems have blind spots, which we define as the failure to retrieve entities that are relevant to the query, but have low similarity to the query embedding. We investigate the training-induced biases that cause such blind spot entities to be mapped to inaccessible parts of the embedding space, resulting in low retrievability. Using a large-scale dataset constructed from Wikidata relations and first paragraphs of Wikipedia, and our proposed Retrieval Probability Score (RPS), we show that blind spot risk in standard retrievers (e.g., CONTRIEVER, REASONIR) can be predicted pre-index from entity embedding geometry, avoiding expensive retrieval evaluations. To address these blind spots, we introduce ARGUS, a pipeline that enables the retrievability of high-risk (low-RPS) entities through targeted document augmentation from a knowledge base (KB), first paragraphs of Wikipedia, in our case. Extensive experiments on BRIGHT, IMPLIRET, and RAR-B show that ARGUS achieves consistent improvements across all evaluated retrievers (averaging +3.4 nDCG@5 and +4.5 nDCG@10 absolute points), with substantially larger gains in challenging subsets. These results establish that preemptively remedying blind spots is critical for building robust and trustworthy RAG systems (Code and Data).

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 9

Perturbation Ontology based Graph Attention Networks

In recent years, graph representation learning has undergone a paradigm shift, driven by the emergence and proliferation of graph neural networks (GNNs) and their heterogeneous counterparts. Heterogeneous GNNs have shown remarkable success in extracting low-dimensional embeddings from complex graphs that encompass diverse entity types and relationships. While meta-path-based techniques have long been recognized for their ability to capture semantic affinities among nodes, their dependence on manual specification poses a significant limitation. In contrast, matrix-focused methods accelerate processing by utilizing structural cues but often overlook contextual richness. In this paper, we challenge the current paradigm by introducing ontology as a fundamental semantic primitive within complex graphs. Our goal is to integrate the strengths of both matrix-centric and meta-path-based approaches into a unified framework. We propose perturbation Ontology-based Graph Attention Networks (POGAT), a novel methodology that combines ontology subgraphs with an advanced self-supervised learning paradigm to achieve a deep contextual understanding. The core innovation of POGAT lies in our enhanced homogeneous perturbing scheme designed to generate rigorous negative samples, encouraging the model to explore minimal contextual features more thoroughly. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we demonstrate that POGAT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a groundbreaking improvement of up to 10.78\% in F1-score for the critical task of link prediction and 12.01\% in Micro-F1 for the critical task of node classification.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 27, 2024

Cluster Aware Graph Anomaly Detection

Graph anomaly detection has gained significant attention across various domains, particularly in critical applications like fraud detection in e-commerce platforms and insider threat detection in cybersecurity. Usually, these data are composed of multiple types (e.g., user information and transaction records for financial data), thus exhibiting view heterogeneity. However, in the era of big data, the heterogeneity of views and the lack of label information pose substantial challenges to traditional approaches. Existing unsupervised graph anomaly detection methods often struggle with high-dimensionality issues, rely on strong assumptions about graph structures or fail to handle complex multi-view graphs. To address these challenges, we propose a cluster aware multi-view graph anomaly detection method, called CARE. Our approach captures both local and global node affinities by augmenting the graph's adjacency matrix with the pseudo-label (i.e., soft membership assignments) without any strong assumption about the graph. To mitigate potential biases from the pseudo-label, we introduce a similarity-guided loss. Theoretically, we show that the proposed similarity-guided loss is a variant of contrastive learning loss, and we present how this loss alleviates the bias introduced by pseudo-label with the connection to graph spectral clustering. Experimental results on several datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed framework. Specifically, CARE outperforms the second-best competitors by more than 39% on the Amazon dataset with respect to AUPRC and 18.7% on the YelpChi dataset with respect to AUROC. The code of our method is available at the GitHub link: https://github.com/zhenglecheng/CARE-demo.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 15, 2024

LADDER: Language Driven Slice Discovery and Error Rectification

Error slice discovery is crucial to diagnose and mitigate model errors. Current clustering or discrete attribute-based slice discovery methods face key limitations: 1) clustering results in incoherent slices, while assigning discrete attributes to slices leads to incomplete coverage of error patterns due to missing or insufficient attributes; 2) these methods lack complex reasoning, preventing them from fully explaining model biases; 3) they fail to integrate domain knowledge, limiting their usage in specialized fields \eg radiology. We propose\ladder (Language-Driven Discovery and Error Rectification), to address the limitations by: (1) leveraging the flexibility of natural language to address incompleteness, (2) employing LLM's latent domain knowledge and advanced reasoning to analyze sentences and derive testable hypotheses directly, identifying biased attributes, and form coherent error slices without clustering. Existing mitigation methods typically address only the worst-performing group, often amplifying errors in other subgroups. In contrast,\ladder generates pseudo attributes from the discovered hypotheses to mitigate errors across all biases without explicit attribute annotations or prior knowledge of bias. Rigorous evaluations on 6 datasets spanning natural and medical images -- comparing 200+ classifiers with diverse architectures, pretraining strategies, and LLMs -- show that\ladder consistently outperforms existing baselines in discovering and mitigating biases.

BostonU Boston University
·
Jul 31, 2024

Knowledge-Rich Self-Supervision for Biomedical Entity Linking

Entity linking faces significant challenges such as prolific variations and prevalent ambiguities, especially in high-value domains with myriad entities. Standard classification approaches suffer from the annotation bottleneck and cannot effectively handle unseen entities. Zero-shot entity linking has emerged as a promising direction for generalizing to new entities, but it still requires example gold entity mentions during training and canonical descriptions for all entities, both of which are rarely available outside of Wikipedia. In this paper, we explore Knowledge-RIch Self-Supervision (tt KRISS) for biomedical entity linking, by leveraging readily available domain knowledge. In training, it generates self-supervised mention examples on unlabeled text using a domain ontology and trains a contextual encoder using contrastive learning. For inference, it samples self-supervised mentions as prototypes for each entity and conducts linking by mapping the test mention to the most similar prototype. Our approach can easily incorporate entity descriptions and gold mention labels if available. We conducted extensive experiments on seven standard datasets spanning biomedical literature and clinical notes. Without using any labeled information, our method produces tt KRISSBERT, a universal entity linker for four million UMLS entities that attains new state of the art, outperforming prior self-supervised methods by as much as 20 absolute points in accuracy.

  • 9 authors
·
Dec 15, 2021

Disentangled Structural and Featural Representation for Task-Agnostic Graph Valuation

With the emergence of data marketplaces, the demand for methods to assess the value of data has increased significantly. While numerous techniques have been proposed for this purpose, none have specifically addressed graphs as the main data modality. Graphs are widely used across various fields, ranging from chemical molecules to social networks. In this study, we break down graphs into two main components: structural and featural, and we focus on evaluating data without relying on specific task-related metrics, making it applicable in practical scenarios where validation requirements may be lacking. We introduce a novel framework called blind message passing, which aligns the seller's and buyer's graphs using a shared node permutation based on graph matching. This allows us to utilize the graph Wasserstein distance to quantify the differences in the structural distribution of graph datasets, called the structural disparities. We then consider featural aspects of buyers' and sellers' graphs for data valuation and capture their statistical similarities and differences, referred to as relevance and diversity, respectively. Our approach ensures that buyers and sellers remain unaware of each other's datasets. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in capturing the relevance, diversity, and structural disparities of seller data for buyers, particularly in graph-based data valuation scenarios.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 22, 2024

STD-PLM: Understanding Both Spatial and Temporal Properties of Spatial-Temporal Data with PLM

Spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation are important for real-world intelligent systems. Most existing methods are tailored for individual forecasting or imputation tasks but are not designed for both. Additionally, they are less effective for zero-shot and few-shot learning. While pre-trained language model (PLM) have exhibited strong pattern recognition and reasoning abilities across various tasks, including few-shot and zero-shot learning, their applications in spatial-temporal data understanding has been constrained by insufficient modeling of complex correlations such as the temporal correlations, spatial connectivity, non-pairwise and high-order spatial-temporal correlations within data. In this paper, we propose STD-PLM for understanding both spatial and temporal properties of Spatial-Temporal Data with PLM, which is capable of implementing both spatial-temporal forecasting and imputation tasks. STD-PLM understands spatial-temporal correlations via explicitly designed spatial and temporal tokenizers. Topology-aware node embeddings are designed for PLM to comprehend and exploit the topology structure of data in inductive manner. Furthermore, to mitigate the efficiency issues introduced by the PLM, we design a sandglass attention module (SGA) combined with a specific constrained loss function, which significantly improves the model's efficiency while ensuring performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STD-PLM exhibits competitive performance and generalization capabilities across the forecasting and imputation tasks on various datasets. Moreover, STD-PLM achieves promising results on both few-shot and zero-shot tasks.The code is made available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STD-PLM-F3BA{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/STD-PLM-F3BA}

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 12, 2024

IRWE: Inductive Random Walk for Joint Inference of Identity and Position Network Embedding

Network embedding, which maps graphs to distributed representations, is a unified framework for various graph inference tasks. According to the topology properties (e.g., structural roles and community memberships of nodes) to be preserved, it can be categorized into the identity and position embedding. However, existing methods can only capture one type of property. Some approaches can support the inductive inference that generalizes the embedding model to new nodes or graphs but relies on the availability of attributes. Due to the complicated correlations between topology and attributes, it is unclear for some inductive methods which type of property they can capture. In this study, we explore a unified framework for the joint inductive inference of identity and position embeddings without attributes. An inductive random walk embedding (IRWE) method is proposed, which combines multiple attention units to handle the random walk on graph topology and simultaneously derives identity and position embeddings that are jointly optimized. In particular, we demonstrate that some random walk statistics can be informative features to characterize node identities and positions while supporting the inductive embedding inference. Experiments validate the superior performance of IRWE beyond various baselines for the transductive and inductive inference of identity and position embeddings.

  • 2 authors
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Dec 31, 2023

The 17% Gap: Quantifying Epistemic Decay in AI-Assisted Survey Papers

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in scientific writing promises efficiency but risks introducing informational entropy. While "hallucinated papers" are a known artifact, the systematic degradation of valid citation chains remains unquantified. We conducted a forensic audit of 50 recent survey papers in Artificial Intelligence (N=5,514 citations) published between September 2024 and January 2026. We utilized a hybrid verification pipeline combining DOI resolution, Crossref metadata analysis, Semantic Scholar queries, and fuzzy text matching to distinguish between formatting errors ("Sloppiness") and verifiable non-existence ("Phantoms). We detect a persistent 17.0% Phantom Rate -- citations that cannot be resolved to any digital object despite aggressive forensic recovery. Diagnostic categorization reveals three distinct failure modes: pure hallucinations (5.1%), hallucinated identifiers with valid titles (16.4%), and parsing-induced matching failures (78.5%). Longitudinal analysis reveals a flat trend (+0.07 pp/month), suggesting that high-entropy citation practices have stabilized as an endemic feature of the field. The scientific citation graph in AI survey literature exhibits "link rot" at scale. This suggests a mechanism where AI tools act as "lazy research assistants," retrieving correct titles but hallucinating metadata, thereby severing the digital chain of custody required for reproducible science.

  • 1 authors
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Jan 23

Overlooked factors in concept-based explanations: Dataset choice, concept learnability, and human capability

Concept-based interpretability methods aim to explain deep neural network model predictions using a predefined set of semantic concepts. These methods evaluate a trained model on a new, "probe" dataset and correlate model predictions with the visual concepts labeled in that dataset. Despite their popularity, they suffer from limitations that are not well-understood and articulated by the literature. In this work, we analyze three commonly overlooked factors in concept-based explanations. First, the choice of the probe dataset has a profound impact on the generated explanations. Our analysis reveals that different probe datasets may lead to very different explanations, and suggests that the explanations are not generalizable outside the probe dataset. Second, we find that concepts in the probe dataset are often less salient and harder to learn than the classes they claim to explain, calling into question the correctness of the explanations. We argue that only visually salient concepts should be used in concept-based explanations. Finally, while existing methods use hundreds or even thousands of concepts, our human studies reveal a much stricter upper bound of 32 concepts or less, beyond which the explanations are much less practically useful. We make suggestions for future development and analysis of concept-based interpretability methods. Code for our analysis and user interface can be found at https://github.com/princetonvisualai/OverlookedFactors

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 19, 2022

COKE: Causal Discovery with Chronological Order and Expert Knowledge in High Proportion of Missing Manufacturing Data

Understanding causal relationships between machines is crucial for fault diagnosis and optimization in manufacturing processes. Real-world datasets frequently exhibit up to 90% missing data and high dimensionality from hundreds of sensors. These datasets also include domain-specific expert knowledge and chronological order information, reflecting the recording order across different machines, which is pivotal for discerning causal relationships within the manufacturing data. However, previous methods for handling missing data in scenarios akin to real-world conditions have not been able to effectively utilize expert knowledge. Conversely, prior methods that can incorporate expert knowledge struggle with datasets that exhibit missing values. Therefore, we propose COKE to construct causal graphs in manufacturing datasets by leveraging expert knowledge and chronological order among sensors without imputing missing data. Utilizing the characteristics of the recipe, we maximize the use of samples with missing values, derive embeddings from intersections with an initial graph that incorporates expert knowledge and chronological order, and create a sensor ordering graph. The graph-generating process has been optimized by an actor-critic architecture to obtain a final graph that has a maximum reward. Experimental evaluations in diverse settings of sensor quantities and missing proportions demonstrate that our approach compared with the benchmark methods shows an average improvement of 39.9% in the F1-score. Moreover, the F1-score improvement can reach 62.6% when considering the configuration similar to real-world datasets, and 85.0% in real-world semiconductor datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/OuTingYun/COKE.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 16, 2024