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Oct 16

Improved Bounds for the Bilu--Linial Conjecture via Spectral Recovery from Mixed Determinantal Polynomials

The Bilu--Linial conjecture asks whether every finite d-regular graph with d geq 2 admits an edge signing σ whose signed adjacency matrix A_σ has spectral radius at most 2d-1. We prove that every signing meeting the mixed-root condition r_{A_σ}leq2(d-1) satisfies \[ ρ(A_σ) < 3+\sqrt5{2}d-1, \] where r_{A_σ} is the largest root of the mixed determinantal polynomial χ[A_σ,-A_σ]. The interlacing theorem of Ravichandran and Srivastava guarantees a signing satisfying the mixed-root condition, so our result improves the coefficient 2sqrt2 in their two-sided spectral bound. In the proof, we construct a positive matrix-valued probability measure supported on the roots of χ[A_σ,-A_σ]. The second moment gives a simple matrix inequality A_σ^2 + dI preceq 4r_{A_σ}^2I, which yields a preliminary coefficient 7. Estimates for the fourth moment use information about short walks to obtain the coefficient (3+5)/2. With more graph structural assumptions, the coefficient improves to sqrt6 for triangle-free graphs and to (5+3sqrt5)/2 for graphs of girth at least five. As a result of independent interest, we extend the construction to χ[A_1,ldots,A_k] for Hermitian matrices A_1,ldots,A_k with zero diagonal, and compute the first two moments explicitly. Finally, an explicit signing of K_8 shows that the mixed-root condition alone cannot guarantee a coefficient below (4+sqrt5)/sqrt6.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 13

Parity families and a kernel-averaged L-function for near-Ramanujan signings

For a signing σ of a d-regular graph, the spectrum of A_σ depends only on the signs of cycles. We study the affine mathbb F_2 family of signings making every short even cycle unbalanced, and show that averaging over it converts the sign problem of the Bilu-Linial conjecture into a counting problem: a master identity expresses the family-averaged trace as a parity-weighted sum over wrap classes confined to the span W of the constraint cycles, and the family-averaged Ihara L-function diagonalizes so that every prime whose parity escapes W contributes the Ramanujan rate d-1 automatically. Uniform averaging over all signings, by contrast, provably cannot certify a spectral radius below the Kesten profile. We prove matched upper and lower bounds for the confined walk counts, a doubling injection from below, and from above an ear-decomposition encoding in which the number of fresh runs of a non-backtracking walk equals the cycle rank of its support, combined with a window lemma for bicycle-free graphs and a rank bound via the Moore bound for irregular graphs. Consequences include varepsilon-versions of the Bilu-Linial conjecture: every d-regular graph that is subcritical at scale log n, and every d-regular graph bicycle-free at radius Cloglog n/δ, admits a signing in the parity family with ρ(A_σ)le2d-1(1+Cδlog(1/δ))(1+o(1)). We further identify the necessary hypotheses exactly (K_d-trapping; tree-burst gadgets), give an exact certificate on the hypercube, and record a decisive obstruction to two-sided interlacing: mathbb E_σdet(xI-A_σ^2) is not real-rooted, already for the quadrilateral, where it equals (x^2-4x+2)^2+4.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 18

Efficient Heterogeneous Graph Learning via Random Projection

Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) are powerful tools for deep learning on heterogeneous graphs. Typical HGNNs require repetitive message passing during training, limiting efficiency for large-scale real-world graphs. Recent pre-computation-based HGNNs use one-time message passing to transform a heterogeneous graph into regular-shaped tensors, enabling efficient mini-batch training. Existing pre-computation-based HGNNs can be mainly categorized into two styles, which differ in how much information loss is allowed and efficiency. We propose a hybrid pre-computation-based HGNN, named Random Projection Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network (RpHGNN), which combines the benefits of one style's efficiency with the low information loss of the other style. To achieve efficiency, the main framework of RpHGNN consists of propagate-then-update iterations, where we introduce a Random Projection Squashing step to ensure that complexity increases only linearly. To achieve low information loss, we introduce a Relation-wise Neighbor Collection component with an Even-odd Propagation Scheme, which aims to collect information from neighbors in a finer-grained way. Experimental results indicate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on seven small and large benchmark datasets while also being 230% faster compared to the most effective baseline. Surprisingly, our approach not only surpasses pre-processing-based baselines but also outperforms end-to-end methods.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 22, 2023

Exact Regular-Constrained Variable-Order Markov Generation via Sparse Context-State Belief Propagation

Variable-order Markov models generate sequences over a finite alphabet by conditioning each symbol on the longest available suffix of the generated history. Regular constraints, by contrast, describe finite-horizon control requirements by an automaton: fixed positions, forced endings, metrical patterns, and forbidden copied fragments are all special cases. Existing exact methods already handle regular constraints with belief propagation for first-order Markov chains. The contribution here is the variable-order extension: identifying the state space on which the existing BP-regular machinery must be run when the generator is a variable-order/backoff model. A first-order constraint layer can enforce useful support conditions, but it computes future mass after merging histories that a variable-order generator deliberately keeps distinct. We formalize this mismatch and give the sparse construction obtained by replacing the first-order Markov state with the observed context state, then taking the standard product with the regular constraint automaton. For a fixed trained context graph and automaton, inference is linear in the sequence horizon; in general it is polynomial in the number of reachable product edges. This gives the correct variable-order distribution conditioned on regular constraints without expanding to all K-tuples. The same finite-source interface supports reversible data augmentation by inverse count lookup, matching materialized transposition augmentation without storing transformed corpora. We also separate exact BP inference from generation-time backoff policies, such as singleton avoidance, whose stochastic semantics must be made explicit if exactness is claimed.

  • 1 authors
·
May 7

Tessellations and Speiser graphs arising from meromorphic functions on simply connected Riemann surfaces

Motivated by W. P. Thurston, we ask: What is the shape of a meromorphic function on a simply connected Riemann surface Ω_z? We consider Speiser functions, i.e. meromorphic functions on a simply connected Riemann surface, that have a finite number q at least 2 of singular (critical or asymptotic) values. As a first result, we make precise the correspondence between: Speiser functions w(z), Speiser Riemann surfaces R_w(z), Speiser q-tessellation, and analytic Speiser graphs of index q. As the second main result, we characterize tessellations with alternating colors (equivalently abstract pre-Speiser graphs) that are realized by Speiser functions on Ω_z. The characterization is in terms of the q-regular extension problem of bipartite planar graphs. As third main results, the Speiser Riemann surface R_w(z) can be constructed by isometric glueing of a finite number of types of sheets, where each sheet is a maximal domain of single-valuedness of the inverse of w(z). Furthermore, a unique decomposition of R_w(z) into maximal logarithmic towers and a soul is provided. Using vector fields we recognize that logarithmic towers come in two flavors: exponential or h-tangent blocks, directly related to the exponential or the hyperbolic tangent functions on the upper half plane. The surface R_w(z) of a finite Speiser function is characterized by surgery of a rational block and a finite number of exponential or h-tangent blocks.

  • 2 authors
·
Jan 30

Systematic Relational Reasoning With Epistemic Graph Neural Networks

Developing models that can learn to reason is a notoriously challenging problem. We focus on reasoning in relational domains, where the use of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) seems like a natural choice. However, previous work has shown that regular GNNs lack the ability to systematically generalize from training examples on test graphs requiring longer inference chains, which fundamentally limits their reasoning abilities. A common solution relies on neuro-symbolic methods that systematically reason by learning rules, but their scalability is often limited and they tend to make unrealistically strong assumptions, e.g.\ that the answer can always be inferred from a single relational path. We propose the Epistemic GNN (EpiGNN), a novel parameter-efficient and scalable GNN architecture with an epistemic inductive bias for systematic reasoning. Node embeddings in EpiGNNs are treated as epistemic states, and message passing is implemented accordingly. We show that EpiGNNs achieve state-of-the-art results on link prediction tasks that require systematic reasoning. Furthermore, for inductive knowledge graph completion, EpiGNNs rival the performance of state-of-the-art specialized approaches. Finally, we introduce two new benchmarks that go beyond standard relational reasoning by requiring the aggregation of information from multiple paths. Here, existing neuro-symbolic approaches fail, yet EpiGNNs learn to reason accurately. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/erg0dic/gnn-sg.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 24, 2024

Neural Snowflakes: Universal Latent Graph Inference via Trainable Latent Geometries

The inductive bias of a graph neural network (GNN) is largely encoded in its specified graph. Latent graph inference relies on latent geometric representations to dynamically rewire or infer a GNN's graph to maximize the GNN's predictive downstream performance, but it lacks solid theoretical foundations in terms of embedding-based representation guarantees. This paper addresses this issue by introducing a trainable deep learning architecture, coined neural snowflake, that can adaptively implement fractal-like metrics on R^d. We prove that any given finite weights graph can be isometrically embedded by a standard MLP encoder. Furthermore, when the latent graph can be represented in the feature space of a sufficiently regular kernel, we show that the combined neural snowflake and MLP encoder do not succumb to the curse of dimensionality by using only a low-degree polynomial number of parameters in the number of nodes. This implementation enables a low-dimensional isometric embedding of the latent graph. We conduct synthetic experiments to demonstrate the superior metric learning capabilities of neural snowflakes when compared to more familiar spaces like Euclidean space. Additionally, we carry out latent graph inference experiments on graph benchmarks. Consistently, the neural snowflake model achieves predictive performance that either matches or surpasses that of the state-of-the-art latent graph inference models. Importantly, this performance improvement is achieved without requiring random search for optimal latent geometry. Instead, the neural snowflake model achieves this enhancement in a differentiable manner.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 23, 2023

Enhancing Chess Reinforcement Learning with Graph Representation

Mastering games is a hard task, as games can be extremely complex, and still fundamentally different in structure from one another. While the AlphaZero algorithm has demonstrated an impressive ability to learn the rules and strategy of a large variety of games, ranging from Go and Chess, to Atari games, its reliance on extensive computational resources and rigid Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture limits its adaptability and scalability. A model trained to play on a 19times 19 Go board cannot be used to play on a smaller 13times 13 board, despite the similarity between the two Go variants. In this paper, we focus on Chess, and explore using a more generic Graph-based Representation of a game state, rather than a grid-based one, to introduce a more general architecture based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN). We also expand the classical Graph Attention Network (GAT) layer to incorporate edge-features, to naturally provide a generic policy output format. Our experiments, performed on smaller networks than the initial AlphaZero paper, show that this new architecture outperforms previous architectures with a similar number of parameters, being able to increase playing strength an order of magnitude faster. We also show that the model, when trained on a smaller 5times 5 variant of chess, is able to be quickly fine-tuned to play on regular 8times 8 chess, suggesting that this approach yields promising generalization abilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/akulen/AlphaGateau.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 30, 2024

Emotion Classification from Multi-Channel EEG Signals Using HiSTN: A Hierarchical Graph-based Spatial-Temporal Approach

This study introduces a parameter-efficient Hierarchical Spatial Temporal Network (HiSTN) specifically designed for the task of emotion classification using multi-channel electroencephalogram data. The network incorporates a graph hierarchy constructed from bottom-up at various abstraction levels, offering the dual advantages of enhanced task-relevant deep feature extraction and a lightweight design. The model's effectiveness is further amplified when used in conjunction with a proposed unique label smoothing method. Comprehensive benchmark experiments reveal that this combined approach yields high, balanced performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative predictions. HiSTN, which has approximately 1,000 parameters, achieves mean F1 scores of 96.82% (valence) and 95.62% (arousal) in subject-dependent tests on the rarely-utilized 5-classification task problem from the DREAMER dataset. In the subject-independent settings, the same model yields mean F1 scores of 78.34% for valence and 81.59% for arousal. The adoption of the Sequential Top-2 Hit Rate (Seq2HR) metric highlights the significant enhancements in terms of the balance between model's quantitative and qualitative for predictions achieved through our approach when compared to training with regular one-hot labels. These improvements surpass 50% in subject-dependent tasks and 30% in subject-independent tasks. The study also includes relevant ablation studies and case explorations to further elucidate the workings of the proposed model and enhance its interpretability.

  • 3 authors
·
Aug 9, 2024

Geometry-Informed Neural Operator for Large-Scale 3D PDEs

We propose the geometry-informed neural operator (GINO), a highly efficient approach to learning the solution operator of large-scale partial differential equations with varying geometries. GINO uses a signed distance function and point-cloud representations of the input shape and neural operators based on graph and Fourier architectures to learn the solution operator. The graph neural operator handles irregular grids and transforms them into and from regular latent grids on which Fourier neural operator can be efficiently applied. GINO is discretization-convergent, meaning the trained model can be applied to arbitrary discretization of the continuous domain and it converges to the continuum operator as the discretization is refined. To empirically validate the performance of our method on large-scale simulation, we generate the industry-standard aerodynamics dataset of 3D vehicle geometries with Reynolds numbers as high as five million. For this large-scale 3D fluid simulation, numerical methods are expensive to compute surface pressure. We successfully trained GINO to predict the pressure on car surfaces using only five hundred data points. The cost-accuracy experiments show a 26,000 times speed-up compared to optimized GPU-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulators on computing the drag coefficient. When tested on new combinations of geometries and boundary conditions (inlet velocities), GINO obtains a one-fourth reduction in error rate compared to deep neural network approaches.

  • 11 authors
·
Aug 31, 2023

Differentiable Sensor Layouts for End-to-End Learning of Task-Specific Camera Parameters

The success of deep learning is frequently described as the ability to train all parameters of a network on a specific application in an end-to-end fashion. Yet, several design choices on the camera level, including the pixel layout of the sensor, are considered as pre-defined and fixed, and high resolution, regular pixel layouts are considered to be the most generic ones in computer vision and graphics, treating all regions of an image as equally important. While several works have considered non-uniform, \eg, hexagonal or foveated, pixel layouts in hardware and image processing, the layout has not been integrated into the end-to-end learning paradigm so far. In this work, we present the first truly end-to-end trained imaging pipeline that optimizes the size and distribution of pixels on the imaging sensor jointly with the parameters of a given neural network on a specific task. We derive an analytic, differentiable approach for the sensor layout parameterization that allows for task-specific, local varying pixel resolutions. We present two pixel layout parameterization functions: rectangular and curvilinear grid shapes that retain a regular topology. We provide a drop-in module that approximates sensor simulation given existing high-resolution images to directly connect our method with existing deep learning models. We show that network predictions benefit from learnable pixel layouts for two different downstream tasks, classification and semantic segmentation.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 28, 2023

A Survey on Machine Learning Solutions for Graph Pattern Extraction

A subgraph is constructed by using a subset of vertices and edges of a given graph. There exist many graph properties that are hereditary for subgraphs. Hence, researchers from different communities have paid a great deal of attention in studying numerous subgraph problems, on top of the ordinary graph problems. Many algorithms are proposed in studying subgraph problems, where one common approach is by extracting the patterns and structures of a given graph. Due to the complex structures of certain types of graphs and to improve overall performances of the existing frameworks, machine learning techniques have recently been employed in dealing with various subgraph problems. In this article, we present a comprehensive review on five well known subgraph problems that have been tackled by using machine learning methods. They are subgraph isomorphism (both counting and matching), maximum common subgraph, community detection and community search problems. We provide an outline of each proposed method, and examine its designs and performances. We also explore non-learning-based algorithms for each problem and a brief discussion is given. We then suggest some promising research directions in this area, hoping that relevant subgraph problems can be tackled by using a similar strategy. Since there is a huge growth in employing machine learning techniques in recent years, we believe that this survey will serve as a good reference point to relevant research communities.

  • 6 authors
·
Apr 3, 2022

Understanding Graph Databases: A Comprehensive Tutorial and Survey

This tutorial serves as a comprehensive guide for understanding graph databases, focusing on the fundamentals of graph theory while showcasing practical applications across various fields. It starts by introducing foundational concepts and delves into the structure of graphs through nodes and edges, covering different types such as undirected, directed, weighted, and unweighted graphs. Key graph properties, terminologies, and essential algorithms for network analysis are outlined, including Dijkstras shortest path algorithm and methods for calculating node centrality and graph connectivity. The tutorial highlights the advantages of graph databases over traditional relational databases, particularly in efficiently managing complex, interconnected data. It examines leading graph database systems such as Neo4j, Amazon Neptune, and ArangoDB, emphasizing their unique features for handling large datasets. Practical instructions on graph operations using NetworkX and Neo4j are provided, covering node and edge creation, attribute assignment, and advanced queries with Cypher. Additionally, the tutorial explores common graph visualization techniques using tools like Plotly and Neo4j Bloom, which enhance the interpretation and usability of graph data. It also delves into community detection algorithms, including the Louvain method, which facilitates clustering in large networks. Finally, the paper concludes with recommendations for researchers interested in exploring the vast potential of graph technologies.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 15, 2024

SUREL+: Moving from Walks to Sets for Scalable Subgraph-based Graph Representation Learning

Subgraph-based graph representation learning (SGRL) has recently emerged as a powerful tool in many prediction tasks on graphs due to its advantages in model expressiveness and generalization ability. Most previous SGRL models face computational challenges associated with the high cost of subgraph extraction for each training or test query. Recently, SUREL was proposed to accelerate SGRL, which samples random walks offline and joins these walks online as a proxy of subgraph for representation learning. Thanks to the reusability of sampled walks across different queries, SUREL achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of scalability and prediction accuracy. However, SUREL still suffers from high computational overhead caused by node duplication in sampled walks. In this work, we propose a novel framework SUREL+ that upgrades SUREL by using node sets instead of walks to represent subgraphs. This set-based representation eliminates repeated nodes by definition but can also be irregular in size. To address this issue, we design a customized sparse data structure to efficiently store and access node sets and provide a specialized operator to join them in parallel batches. SUREL+ is modularized to support multiple types of set samplers, structural features, and neural encoders to complement the structural information loss after the reduction from walks to sets. Extensive experiments have been performed to validate SUREL+ in the prediction tasks of links, relation types, and higher-order patterns. SUREL+ achieves 3-11times speedups of SUREL while maintaining comparable or even better prediction performance; compared to other SGRL baselines, SUREL+ achieves sim20times speedups and significantly improves the prediction accuracy.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 26, 2023

TheoremGraph: Bridging Formal and Informal Mathematics

Mathematical knowledge is organized around statements and their dependencies, but this structure is exposed unevenly: informal papers cite mostly at the document level, while formal libraries record fine-grained dependencies over a much smaller body of mathematics. We introduce TheoremGraph, a unified statement-level dependency graph spanning both informal and formal mathematics. On the informal side, we parse 11.7M theorem-like environments from mathematics arXiv and recover 18.3M candidate directed dependencies, each labeled by the extractor that proposed it so downstream users can trade coverage for precision. On the formal side, we release LeanGraph, a Lean 4 elaborator-level extractor producing 388,105 declaration nodes and 11.3M typed edges across 25 Lean projects. We bridge the two graphs by embedding generated natural-language slogans into a shared semantic space, linking related statements across papers and across the informal/formal divide; an LLM judge affirms 47,952 such matches above a 0.8 cosine floor, with the judge-acceptance rate rising from 48% across the floor to 87% in the >=0.9 tier. On formal concept retrieval, our name-and-signature representation with graph expansion comes within 0.5pp of LeanSearch v2's reranked Recall@10 (0.775 vs. 0.780) without an LM reranker. We release the dataset, extractors, HTTP API, and MCP interface as infrastructure for mathematical search, attribution, and retrieval-augmented reasoning, available at theoremsearch.com and huggingface.co/datasets/uw-math-ai/theorem-matching.

Plain Transformers Can be Powerful Graph Learners

Transformers have attained outstanding performance across various modalities, owing to their simple but powerful scaled-dot-product (SDP) attention mechanisms. Researchers have attempted to migrate Transformers to graph learning, but most advanced Graph Transformers (GTs) have strayed far from plain Transformers, exhibiting major architectural differences either by integrating message-passing or incorporating sophisticated attention mechanisms. These divergences hinder the easy adoption of training advances for Transformers developed in other domains. Contrary to previous GTs, this work demonstrates that the plain Transformer architecture can be a powerful graph learner. To achieve this, we propose to incorporate three simple, minimal, and easy-to-implement modifications to the plain Transformer architecture to construct our Powerful Plain Graph Transformers (PPGT): (1) simplified L_2 attention for measuring the magnitude closeness among tokens; (2) adaptive root-mean-square normalization to preserve token magnitude information; and (3) a simple MLP-based stem for graph positional encoding. Consistent with its theoretical expressivity, PPGT demonstrates noteworthy realized expressivity on the empirical graph expressivity benchmark, comparing favorably to more complicated alternatives such as subgraph GNNs and higher-order GNNs. Its empirical performance across various graph datasets also justifies the effectiveness of PPGT. This finding underscores the versatility of plain Transformer architectures and highlights their strong potential as a unified backbone for multimodal learning across language, vision, and graph domains.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 16, 2025

Large Language Models on Graphs: A Comprehensive Survey

Large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, are creating significant advancements in natural language processing, due to their strong text encoding/decoding ability and newly found emergent capability (e.g., reasoning). While LLMs are mainly designed to process pure texts, there are many real-world scenarios where text data are associated with rich structure information in the form of graphs (e.g., academic networks, and e-commerce networks) or scenarios where graph data are paired with rich textual information (e.g., molecules with descriptions). Besides, although LLMs have shown their pure text-based reasoning ability, it is underexplored whether such ability can be generalized to graph scenarios (i.e., graph-based reasoning). In this paper, we provide a systematic review of scenarios and techniques related to large language models on graphs. We first summarize potential scenarios of adopting LLMs on graphs into three categories, namely pure graphs, text-rich graphs, and text-paired graphs. We then discuss detailed techniques for utilizing LLMs on graphs, including LLM as Predictor, LLM as Encoder, and LLM as Aligner, and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different schools of models. Furthermore, we mention the real-world applications of such methods and summarize open-source codes and benchmark datasets. Finally, we conclude with potential future research directions in this fast-growing field. The related source can be found at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Awesome-Language-Model-on-Graphs.

Graphlets correct for the topological information missed by random walks

Random walks are widely used for mining networks due to the computational efficiency of computing them. For instance, graph representation learning learns a d-dimensional embedding space, so that the nodes that tend to co-occur on random walks (a proxy of being in the same network neighborhood) are close in the embedding space. Specific local network topology (i.e., structure) influences the co-occurrence of nodes on random walks, so random walks of limited length capture only partial topological information, hence diminishing the performance of downstream methods. We explicitly capture all topological neighborhood information and improve performance by introducing orbit adjacencies that quantify the adjacencies of two nodes as co-occurring on a given pair of graphlet orbits, which are symmetric positions on graphlets (small, connected, non-isomorphic, induced subgraphs of a large network). Importantly, we mathematically prove that random walks on up to k nodes capture only a subset of all the possible orbit adjacencies for up to k-node graphlets. Furthermore, we enable orbit adjacency-based analysis of networks by developing an efficient GRaphlet-orbit ADjacency COunter (GRADCO), which exhaustively computes all 28 orbit adjacency matrices for up to four-node graphlets. Note that four-node graphlets suffice, because real networks are usually small-world. In large networks on around 20,000 nodes, GRADCOcomputesthe28matricesinminutes. Onsixrealnetworksfromvarious domains, we compare the performance of node-label predictors obtained by using the network embeddings based on our orbit adjacencies to those based on random walks. We find that orbit adjacencies, which include those unseen by random walks, outperform random walk-based adjacencies, demonstrating the importance of the inclusion of the topological neighborhood information that is unseen by random walks.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2024

Shortcut Partitions in Minor-Free Graphs: Steiner Point Removal, Distance Oracles, Tree Covers, and More

The notion of shortcut partition, introduced recently by Chang, Conroy, Le, Milenkovi\'c, Solomon, and Than [CCLMST23], is a new type of graph partition into low-diameter clusters. Roughly speaking, the shortcut partition guarantees that for every two vertices u and v in the graph, there exists a path between u and v that intersects only a few clusters. They proved that any planar graph admits a shortcut partition and gave several applications, including a construction of tree cover for arbitrary planar graphs with stretch 1+varepsilon and O(1) many trees for any fixed varepsilon in (0,1). However, the construction heavily exploits planarity in multiple steps, and is thus inherently limited to planar graphs. In this work, we breach the "planarity barrier" to construct a shortcut partition for K_r-minor-free graphs for any r. To this end, we take a completely different approach -- our key contribution is a novel deterministic variant of the cop decomposition in minor-free graphs [And86, AGG14]. Our shortcut partition for K_r-minor-free graphs yields several direct applications. Most notably, we construct the first optimal distance oracle for K_r-minor-free graphs, with 1+varepsilon stretch, linear space, and constant query time for any fixed varepsilon in (0,1). The previous best distance oracle [AG06] uses O(nlog n) space and O(log n) query time, and its construction relies on Robertson-Seymour structural theorem and other sophisticated tools. We also obtain the first tree cover of O(1) size for minor-free graphs with stretch 1+varepsilon, while the previous best (1+varepsilon)-tree cover has size O(log^2 n) [BFN19].

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 31, 2023

Can Large Language Models Analyze Graphs like Professionals? A Benchmark, Datasets and Models

The need to analyze graphs is ubiquitous across various fields, from social networks to biological research and recommendation systems. Therefore, enabling the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process graphs is an important step toward more advanced general intelligence. However, current LLM benchmarks on graph analysis require models to directly reason over the prompts describing graph topology, and are thus limited to small graphs with only a few dozens of nodes. In contrast, human experts typically write programs based on popular libraries for task solving, and can thus handle graphs with different scales. To this end, a question naturally arises: can LLMs analyze graphs like professionals? In this paper, we introduce ProGraph, a manually crafted benchmark containing 3 categories of graph tasks. The benchmark expects solutions based on programming instead of directly reasoning over raw inputs. Our findings reveal that the performance of current LLMs is unsatisfactory, with the best model achieving only 36% accuracy. To bridge this gap, we propose LLM4Graph datasets, which include crawled documents and auto-generated codes based on 6 widely used graph libraries. By augmenting closed-source LLMs with document retrieval and fine-tuning open-source ones on the codes, we show 11-32% absolute improvements in their accuracies. Our results underscore that the capabilities of LLMs in handling structured data are still under-explored, and show the effectiveness of LLM4Graph in enhancing LLMs' proficiency of graph analysis. The benchmark, datasets and enhanced open-source models are available at https://github.com/BUPT-GAMMA/ProGraph.

  • 12 authors
·
Sep 29, 2024

Robustness of Graph Self-Supervised Learning to Real-World Noise: A Case Study on Text-Driven Biomedical Graphs

Graph Self-Supervised Learning (GSSL) offers a powerful paradigm for learning graph representations without labeled data. However, existing work assumes clean, manually curated graphs. Recent advances in NLP enable the large-scale automatic extraction of knowledge graphs from text, opening new opportunities for GSSL while introducing substantial real-world noise. This type of noise remains largely unexplored, as prior robustness studies typically rely on synthetic perturbations. To address this gap, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of GSSL methods on text-driven graphs for unsupervised term typing. We introduce Noise-Aware Text-Driven Graph GSSL (NATD-GSSL), a unified framework that combines automatic graph construction, graph refinement, and GSSL. Our evaluation follows a dual-graph protocol that contrasts a noisy graph derived from MedMentions with a clean Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) reference graph, aligned through a shared gold standard. Our results reveal variability in robustness across both pretext tasks and Graph Neural Network (GNN) architectures. Relation reconstruction is highly sensitive to noise and benefits from well-defined schemas, whereas feature reconstruction is considerably more robust, achieving performance comparable to clean-graph settings. Contrastive objectives are generally less affected by noise but depend strongly on alignment with downstream tasks. GNN architecture also plays a critical role: bidirectional relational message-passing designs are better suited to noisy, text-driven graphs, while unidirectional relational ones perform best on clean graphs. Overall, NATD-GSSL provides practical guidance for applying GSSL to real-world, noisy graphs and achieves up to a 7\% improvement over pretrained language model baselines. All code and benchmarks are publicly available at https://github.com/OthmaneKabal/MC2GAE.

  • 5 authors
·
May 5

One-connection rule for structural equation models

Linear structural equation models are multivariate statistical models encoded by mixed graphs. In particular, the set of covariance matrices for distributions belonging to a linear structural equation model for a fixed mixed graph G=(V, D,B) is parameterized by a rational function with parameters for each vertex and edge in G. This rational parametrization naturally allows for the study of these models from an algebraic and combinatorial point of view. Indeed, this point of view has led to a collection of results in the literature, mainly focusing on questions related to identifiability and determining relationships between covariances (i.e., finding polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal). So far, a large proportion of these results has focused on the case when D, the directed part of the mixed graph G, is acyclic. This is due to the fact that in the acyclic case, the parametrization becomes polynomial and there is a description of the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of a finite sum. We move beyond the acyclic case and give a closed form expression for the entries of the covariance matrices in terms of the one-connections in a graph obtained from D through some small operations. This closed form expression then allows us to show that if G is simple, then the parametrization map is generically finite-to-one. Finally, having a closed form expression for the covariance matrices allows for the development of an algorithm for systematically exploring possible polynomials in the Gaussian vanishing ideal.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 1, 2022

On composition and decomposition operations for vector spaces, graphs and matroids

In this paper, we study the ideas of composition and decomposition in the context of vector spaces, graphs and matroids. For vector spaces V_{AB}, treated as collection of row vectors, with specified column set Auplus B, we define V_{SP}lrarv V_{PQ}, Scap Q= emptyset, to be the collection of all vectors (f_S,f_Q) such that (f_S,f_P)in V_{SP}, (f_P,f_Q)in V_{PQ}. An analogous operation G_{SP}lrarg G_{PQ}equivd G_{PQ} can be defined in relation to graphs G_{SP}, G_{PQ}, on edge sets Suplus P, Puplus Q, respectively in terms of an overlapping subgraph G_P which gets deleted in the right side graph (see for instance the notion of k-sum oxley). For matroids we define the `linking' M_{SP}lrarm M_{PQ} equivd (M_{SP}vee M_{PQ})times (Suplus Q), denoting the contraction operation by 'times'. In each case, we examine how to minimize the size of the `overlap' set P, without affecting the right side entity. In the case of vector spaces, there is a polynomial time algorithm for achieving the minimum, which we present. Similar ideas work for graphs and for matroids under appropriate conditions. Next we consider the problem of decomposition. Here, in the case of vector spaces, the problem is to decompose V_{SQ} as V_{SP}lrarv V_{PQ}, with minimum size P. We give a polynomial time algorithm for this purpose. In the case of graphs and matroids we give a solution to this problem under certain restrictions.

  • 1 authors
·
Jul 13, 2023

Distinguishability and linear independence for H-chromatic symmetric functions

We study the H-chromatic symmetric functions X_G^H (introduced in (arXiv:2011.06063) as a generalization of the chromatic symmetric function (CSF) X_G), which track homomorphisms from the graph G to the graph H. We focus first on the case of self-chromatic symmetric functions (self-CSFs) X_G^G, making some progress toward a conjecture from (arXiv:2011.06063) that the self-CSF, like the normal CSF, is always different for different trees. In particular, we show that the self-CSF distinguishes trees from non-trees with just one exception, we check using Sage that it distinguishes all trees on up to 12 vertices, and we show that it determines the number of legs of a spider and the degree sequence of a caterpillar given its spine length. We also show that the self-CSF detects the number of connected components of a forest, again with just one exception. Then we prove some results about the power sum expansions for H-CSFs when H is a complete bipartite graph, in particular proving that the conjecture from (arXiv:2011.06063) about p-monotonicity of ω(X_G^H) for H a star holds as long as H is sufficiently large compared to G. We also show that the self-CSFs of complete multipartite graphs form a basis for the ring Λ of symmetric functions, and we give some construction of bases for the vector space Λ^n of degree n symmetric functions using H-CSFs X_G^H where H is a fixed graph that is not a complete graph, answering a question from (arXiv:2011.06063) about whether such bases exist. However, we show that there generally do not exist such bases with G fixed, even with loops, answering another question from (arXiv:2011.06063). We also define the H-chromatic polynomial as an analogue of the chromatic polynomial, and ask when it is the same for different graphs.

  • 2 authors
·
Nov 11, 2025

UniGraph: Learning a Unified Cross-Domain Foundation Model for Text-Attributed Graphs

Foundation models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have revolutionized artificial intelligence, exhibiting remarkable abilities to generalize across a wide array of tasks and applications beyond their initial training objectives. However, graph learning has predominantly focused on single-graph models, tailored to specific tasks or datasets, lacking the ability to transfer learned knowledge to different domains. This limitation stems from the inherent complexity and diversity of graph structures, along with the different feature and label spaces specific to graph data. In this paper, we recognize text as an effective unifying medium and employ Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) to leverage this potential. We present our UniGraph framework, designed to learn a foundation model for TAGs, which is capable of generalizing to unseen graphs and tasks across diverse domains. Unlike single-graph models that use pre-computed node features of varying dimensions as input, our approach leverages textual features for unifying node representations, even for graphs such as molecular graphs that do not naturally have textual features. We propose a novel cascaded architecture of Language Models (LMs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as backbone networks. Additionally, we propose the first pre-training algorithm specifically designed for large-scale self-supervised learning on TAGs, based on Masked Graph Modeling. We introduce graph instruction tuning using Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable zero-shot prediction ability. Our comprehensive experiments across various graph learning tasks and domains demonstrate the model's effectiveness in self-supervised representation learning on unseen graphs, few-shot in-context transfer, and zero-shot transfer, even surpassing or matching the performance of GNNs that have undergone supervised training on target datasets.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 21, 2024

CayleyPy Growth: Efficient growth computations and hundreds of new conjectures on Cayley graphs (Brief version)

This is the third paper of the CayleyPy project applying artificial intelligence to problems in group theory. We announce the first public release of CayleyPy, an open source Python library for computations with Cayley and Schreier graphs. Compared with systems such as GAP and Sage, CayleyPy handles much larger graphs and performs several orders of magnitude faster. Using CayleyPy we obtained about 200 new conjectures on Cayley and Schreier graphs, focused on diameters and growth. For many Cayley graphs of symmetric groups Sn we observe quasi polynomial diameter formulas: a small set of quadratic or linear polynomials indexed by n mod s. We conjecture that this is a general phenomenon, giving efficient diameter computation despite the problem being NP hard. We propose a refinement of the Babai type conjecture on diameters of Sn: n^2/2 + 4n upper bounds in the undirected case, compared to previous O(n^2) bounds. We also provide explicit generator families, related to involutions in a square with whiskers pattern, conjectured to maximize the diameter; search confirms this for all n up to 15. We further conjecture an answer to a question posed by V M Glushkov in 1968 on directed Cayley graphs generated by a cyclic shift and a transposition. For nilpotent groups we conjecture an improvement of J S Ellenberg's results on upper unitriangular matrices over Z/pZ, showing linear dependence of diameter on p. Moreover. Some conjectures are LLM friendly, naturally stated as sorting problems verifiable by algorithms or Python code. To benchmark path finding we created more than 10 Kaggle datasets. CayleyPy works with arbitrary permutation or matrix groups and includes over 100 predefined generators. Our growth computation code outperforms GAP and Sage up to 1000 times in speed and size.

  • 49 authors
·
Sep 23, 2025

On the Power of the Weisfeiler-Leman Test for Graph Motif Parameters

Seminal research in the field of graph neural networks (GNNs) has revealed a direct correspondence between the expressive capabilities of GNNs and the k-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman (kWL) test, a widely-recognized method for verifying graph isomorphism. This connection has reignited interest in comprehending the specific graph properties effectively distinguishable by the kWL test. A central focus of research in this field revolves around determining the least dimensionality k, for which kWL can discern graphs with different number of occurrences of a pattern graph P. We refer to such a least k as the WL-dimension of this pattern counting problem. This inquiry traditionally delves into two distinct counting problems related to patterns: subgraph counting and induced subgraph counting. Intriguingly, despite their initial appearance as separate challenges with seemingly divergent approaches, both of these problems are interconnected components of a more comprehensive problem: "graph motif parameters". In this paper, we provide a precise characterization of the WL-dimension of labeled graph motif parameters. As specific instances of this result, we obtain characterizations of the WL-dimension of the subgraph counting and induced subgraph counting problem for every labeled pattern P. We additionally demonstrate that in cases where the kWL test distinguishes between graphs with varying occurrences of a pattern P, the exact number of occurrences of P can be computed uniformly using only local information of the last layer of a corresponding GNN. We finally delve into the challenge of recognizing the WL-dimension of various graph parameters. We give a polynomial time algorithm for determining the WL-dimension of the subgraph counting problem for given pattern P, answering an open question from previous work.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 29, 2023

Fat Polygonal Partitions with Applications to Visualization and Embeddings

Let T be a rooted and weighted tree, where the weight of any node is equal to the sum of the weights of its children. The popular Treemap algorithm visualizes such a tree as a hierarchical partition of a square into rectangles, where the area of the rectangle corresponding to any node in T is equal to the weight of that node. The aspect ratio of the rectangles in such a rectangular partition necessarily depends on the weights and can become arbitrarily high. We introduce a new hierarchical partition scheme, called a polygonal partition, which uses convex polygons rather than just rectangles. We present two methods for constructing polygonal partitions, both having guarantees on the worst-case aspect ratio of the constructed polygons; in particular, both methods guarantee a bound on the aspect ratio that is independent of the weights of the nodes. We also consider rectangular partitions with slack, where the areas of the rectangles may differ slightly from the weights of the corresponding nodes. We show that this makes it possible to obtain partitions with constant aspect ratio. This result generalizes to hyper-rectangular partitions in R^d. We use these partitions with slack for embedding ultrametrics into d-dimensional Euclidean space: we give a rm polylog(Delta)-approximation algorithm for embedding n-point ultrametrics into R^d with minimum distortion, where Delta denotes the spread of the metric, i.e., the ratio between the largest and the smallest distance between two points. The previously best-known approximation ratio for this problem was polynomial in n. This is the first algorithm for embedding a non-trivial family of weighted-graph metrics into a space of constant dimension that achieves polylogarithmic approximation ratio.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 9, 2010

Pard: Permutation-Invariant Autoregressive Diffusion for Graph Generation

Graph generation has been dominated by autoregressive models due to their simplicity and effectiveness, despite their sensitivity to ordering. Yet diffusion models have garnered increasing attention, as they offer comparable performance while being permutation-invariant. Current graph diffusion models generate graphs in a one-shot fashion, but they require extra features and thousands of denoising steps to achieve optimal performance. We introduce PARD, a Permutation-invariant Auto Regressive Diffusion model that integrates diffusion models with autoregressive methods. PARD harnesses the effectiveness and efficiency of the autoregressive model while maintaining permutation invariance without ordering sensitivity. Specifically, we show that contrary to sets, elements in a graph are not entirely unordered and there is a unique partial order for nodes and edges. With this partial order, PARD generates a graph in a block-by-block, autoregressive fashion, where each block's probability is conditionally modeled by a shared diffusion model with an equivariant network. To ensure efficiency while being expressive, we further propose a higher-order graph transformer, which integrates transformer with PPGN. Like GPT, we extend the higher-order graph transformer to support parallel training of all blocks. Without any extra features, PARD achieves state-of-the-art performance on molecular and non-molecular datasets, and scales to large datasets like MOSES containing 1.9M molecules.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 5, 2024

H4G: Unlocking Faithful Inference for Zero-Shot Graph Learning in Hyperbolic Space

Text-attributed graphs are widely used across domains, offering rich opportunities for zero-shot learning via graph-text alignment. However, existing methods struggle with tasks requiring fine-grained pattern recognition, particularly on heterophilic graphs. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify an over-abstraction problem: current approaches operate at excessively large hyperbolic radii, compressing multi-scale structural information into uniform high-level abstractions. This abstraction-induced information loss obscures critical local patterns essential for accurate predictions. By analyzing embeddings in hyperbolic space, we demonstrate that optimal graph learning requires faithful preservation of fine-grained structural details, better retained by representations positioned closer to the origin. To address this, we propose H4G, a framework that systematically reduces embedding radii using learnable block-diagonal scaling matrices and M\"obius matrix multiplication. This approach restores access to fine-grained patterns while maintaining global receptive ability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments show H4G achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with 12.8\% improvement on heterophilic graphs and 8.4\% on homophilic graphs, confirming that radius reduction enables faithful multi-scale representation for advancing zero-shot graph learning.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 13, 2025

Can LLMs Convert Graphs to Text-Attributed Graphs?

Graphs are ubiquitous structures found in numerous real-world applications, such as drug discovery, recommender systems, and social network analysis. To model graph-structured data, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become a popular tool. However, existing GNN architectures encounter challenges in cross-graph learning where multiple graphs have different feature spaces. To address this, recent approaches introduce text-attributed graphs (TAGs), where each node is associated with a textual description, which can be projected into a unified feature space using textual encoders. While promising, this method relies heavily on the availability of text-attributed graph data, which is difficult to obtain in practice. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel method named Topology-Aware Node description Synthesis (TANS), leveraging large language models (LLMs) to convert existing graphs into text-attributed graphs. The key idea is to integrate topological information into LLMs to explain how graph topology influences node semantics. We evaluate our TANS on text-rich, text-limited, and text-free graphs, demonstrating its applicability. Notably, on text-free graphs, our method significantly outperforms existing approaches that manually design node features, showcasing the potential of LLMs for preprocessing graph-structured data in the absence of textual information. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/TANS.

  • 6 authors
·
Dec 13, 2024

Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer

We propose a recipe on how to build a general, powerful, scalable (GPS) graph Transformer with linear complexity and state-of-the-art results on a diverse set of benchmarks. Graph Transformers (GTs) have gained popularity in the field of graph representation learning with a variety of recent publications but they lack a common foundation about what constitutes a good positional or structural encoding, and what differentiates them. In this paper, we summarize the different types of encodings with a clearer definition and categorize them as being local, global or relative. The prior GTs are constrained to small graphs with a few hundred nodes, here we propose the first architecture with a complexity linear in the number of nodes and edges O(N+E) by decoupling the local real-edge aggregation from the fully-connected Transformer. We argue that this decoupling does not negatively affect the expressivity, with our architecture being a universal function approximator on graphs. Our GPS recipe consists of choosing 3 main ingredients: (i) positional/structural encoding, (ii) local message-passing mechanism, and (iii) global attention mechanism. We provide a modular framework GraphGPS that supports multiple types of encodings and that provides efficiency and scalability both in small and large graphs. We test our architecture on 16 benchmarks and show highly competitive results in all of them, show-casing the empirical benefits gained by the modularity and the combination of different strategies.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2022

SimMatchV2: Semi-Supervised Learning with Graph Consistency

Semi-Supervised image classification is one of the most fundamental problem in computer vision, which significantly reduces the need for human labor. In this paper, we introduce a new semi-supervised learning algorithm - SimMatchV2, which formulates various consistency regularizations between labeled and unlabeled data from the graph perspective. In SimMatchV2, we regard the augmented view of a sample as a node, which consists of a label and its corresponding representation. Different nodes are connected with the edges, which are measured by the similarity of the node representations. Inspired by the message passing and node classification in graph theory, we propose four types of consistencies, namely 1) node-node consistency, 2) node-edge consistency, 3) edge-edge consistency, and 4) edge-node consistency. We also uncover that a simple feature normalization can reduce the gaps of the feature norm between different augmented views, significantly improving the performance of SimMatchV2. Our SimMatchV2 has been validated on multiple semi-supervised learning benchmarks. Notably, with ResNet-50 as our backbone and 300 epochs of training, SimMatchV2 achieves 71.9\% and 76.2\% Top-1 Accuracy with 1\% and 10\% labeled examples on ImageNet, which significantly outperforms the previous methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/SimMatchV2{https://github.com/mingkai-zheng/SimMatchV2}.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 13, 2023

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

Graph Density-Aware Losses for Novel Compositions in Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation (SGG) aims to predict graph-structured descriptions of input images, in the form of objects and relationships between them. This task is becoming increasingly useful for progress at the interface of vision and language. Here, it is important - yet challenging - to perform well on novel (zero-shot) or rare (few-shot) compositions of objects and relationships. In this paper, we identify two key issues that limit such generalization. Firstly, we show that the standard loss used in this task is unintentionally a function of scene graph density. This leads to the neglect of individual edges in large sparse graphs during training, even though these contain diverse few-shot examples that are important for generalization. Secondly, the frequency of relationships can create a strong bias in this task, such that a blind model predicting the most frequent relationship achieves good performance. Consequently, some state-of-the-art models exploit this bias to improve results. We show that such models can suffer the most in their ability to generalize to rare compositions, evaluating two different models on the Visual Genome dataset and its more recent, improved version, GQA. To address these issues, we introduce a density-normalized edge loss, which provides more than a two-fold improvement in certain generalization metrics. Compared to other works in this direction, our enhancements require only a few lines of code and no added computational cost. We also highlight the difficulty of accurately evaluating models using existing metrics, especially on zero/few shots, and introduce a novel weighted metric.

  • 6 authors
·
May 17, 2020

Stochastic Function Certification with Correlations

We study the Stochastic Boolean Function Certification (SBFC) problem, where we are given n Bernoulli random variables {X_e: e in U} on a ground set U of n elements with joint distribution p, a Boolean function f: 2^U to {0, 1}, and an (unknown) scenario S = {e in U: X_e = 1} of active elements sampled from p. We seek to probe the elements one-at-a-time to reveal if they are active until we can certify f(S) = 1, while minimizing the expected number of probes. Unlike most previous results that assume independence, we study correlated distributions p and give approximation algorithms for several classes of functions f. When f(S) is the indicator function for whether S is the spanning set of a given matroid, our problem reduces to finding a basis of active elements of a matroid by probing elements. We give a non-adaptive O(log n)-approximation algorithm for arbitrary distributions p, and show that this is tight up to constants unless P = NP, even for partition matroids. For uniform matroids, we give constant factor 4.642-approximation ([BBFT20]) that can be further improved to a 2-approximation if additionally the random variables are negatively correlated for the case of 1-uniform matroid. We also give an adaptive O(log k)-approximation algorithm for SBFC for k-uniform matroids for the Graph Probing problem, where we seek to probe the edges of a graph one-at-a-time until we find k active edges. The underlying distribution on edges arises from (hidden) independent vertex random variables, with an edge being active if at least one of its endpoints is active. This significantly improves over the information-theoretic lower bound on Ω(poly(n)) ([JGM19]) for adaptive algorithms for k-uniform matroids with arbitrary distributions.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 2

Faster Minimum k-Cut I: Simple and Sparse Weighted Graphs

The minimum k-cut problem asks for the fewest edges whose removal leaves an input graph with at least k connected components. Previously, the best algorithm for simple graphs ran in O_k(n^{(1-varepsilon)k+O(1)}) time~HL22, showing that the \(n^k\) barrier can be broken up to a polynomial overhead. We give the first widetilde O_k(n^{ck})-time algorithm for Minimum k-Cut on simple graphs for an absolute constant c<1. More precisely, the running times are widetilde O(n^2) for k=3, widetilde O(n^{55/19}) for k=4, and widetilde O(n^{4.112007}) for k=5; for every kge6, the running time is \[ k^{O(k^2)}n^{1+(6k-6)k-1.749614{7k-10}}(\log n)^{O(k^2)}, \] whose exponent is frac67k-0.132ldots+O(1/k). The algorithm combines three ingredients. First, for weighted Minimum k-Cut we give a randomized \[ k^{O(k^2)}n^{k-2}(m+n)\log^3(n) \] -time algorithm: it perturbs the edge weights so that any minimum k-cut has a side with boundary strictly smaller than average. These then cut few edges of some tree in a logarithmic-size sample from a tree packing with high probability. After we enumerate them, we recursively compute (k-1)-cuts to complete them to the k-cuts of which they were a part. A variant of the perturbation and processing the entire packing support give a deterministic k^{O(k^2)}n^{k+O(1)}-time variant. Second, for cut size s, we give an improved FPT algorithm using a near-linear-time construction of an (O(slog^2 nloglog n),s) edge-unbreakable tree decomposition with O(slog^2 nloglog n) adhesion; this also gives a near-linear-time approximation algorithm for Minimum k-Cut. Third, we refine the border/island framework of~HL22, using rectangular matrix multiplication to recover singleton islands and balancing it against the improved FPT algorithm.

  • 2 authors
·
Aug 16

Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for a variety of tasks with implicit graphical structures, such as planning in robotics, multi-hop question answering or knowledge probing, structured commonsense reasoning, and more. While LLMs have advanced the state-of-the-art on these tasks with structure implications, whether LLMs could explicitly process textual descriptions of graphs and structures, map them to grounded conceptual spaces, and perform structured operations remains underexplored. To this end, we propose NLGraph (Natural Language Graph), a comprehensive benchmark of graph-based problem solving designed in natural language. NLGraph contains 29,370 problems, covering eight graph reasoning tasks with varying complexity from simple tasks such as connectivity and shortest path up to complex problems such as maximum flow and simulating graph neural networks. We evaluate LLMs (GPT-3/4) with various prompting approaches on the NLGraph benchmark and find that 1) language models do demonstrate preliminary graph reasoning abilities, 2) the benefit of advanced prompting and in-context learning diminishes on more complex graph problems, while 3) LLMs are also (un)surprisingly brittle in the face of spurious correlations in graph and problem settings. We then propose Build-a-Graph Prompting and Algorithmic Prompting, two instruction-based approaches to enhance LLMs in solving natural language graph problems. Build-a-Graph and Algorithmic prompting improve the performance of LLMs on NLGraph by 3.07% to 16.85% across multiple tasks and settings, while how to solve the most complicated graph reasoning tasks in our setup with language models remains an open research question. The NLGraph benchmark and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Arthur-Heng/NLGraph.

  • 6 authors
·
May 17, 2023

Detecting Arbitrary Planted Subgraphs in Random Graphs

The problems of detecting and recovering planted structures/subgraphs in Erdős-Rényi random graphs, have received significant attention over the past three decades, leading to many exciting results and mathematical techniques. However, prior work has largely focused on specific ad hoc planted structures and inferential settings, while a general theory has remained elusive. In this paper, we bridge this gap by investigating the detection of an arbitrary planted subgraph Γ= Γ_n in an Erdős-Rényi random graph G(n, q_n), where the edge probability within Γ is p_n. We examine both the statistical and computational aspects of this problem and establish the following results. In the dense regime, where the edge probabilities p_n and q_n are fixed, we tightly characterize the information-theoretic and computational thresholds for detecting Γ, and provide conditions under which a computational-statistical gap arises. Most notably, these thresholds depend on Γ only through its number of edges, maximum degree, and maximum subgraph density. Our lower and upper bounds are general and apply to any value of p_n and q_n as functions of n. Accordingly, we also analyze the sparse regime where q_n = Θ(n^{-α}) and p_n-q_n =Θ(q_n), with αin[0,2], as well as the critical regime where p_n=1-o(1) and q_n = Θ(n^{-α}), both of which have been widely studied, for specific choices of Γ. For these regimes, we show that our bounds are tight for all planted subgraphs investigated in the literature thus farand many more. Finally, we identify conditions under which detection undergoes sharp phase transition, where the boundaries at which algorithms succeed or fail shift abruptly as a function of q_n.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

Standard Quadratic Formulations of Many NP Problems: A Simplex-Based Compilation Framework for Combinatorial Optimization

The standard quadratic program (StQP) minimizes a quadratic form over nonnegative variables that sum to one. We compose classical graph reductions with regularized Motzkin--Straus clique formulations to express discrete optimization problems in this continuous domain. The graph matrix has diagonal entries τ, zeros on edges, and ones on nonedges. For 0<τ<1, its minimum is τ/ω(G), where ω(G) is the clique number. Its strict local minimizers are precisely the uniform distributions on maximal cliques, and its global minimizers encode maximum cliques. At τ=1/2, integer scaling gives coefficients in {0,1,2} and minimum 1/ω(G), yielding an NP-complete StQP threshold problem with a restricted coefficient alphabet. We give explicit formulations for satisfiability, coloring, Hamiltonian cycles, independent set, vertex cover, set packing, three-dimensional matching, and graph isomorphism. A regularized weighted clique formulation combined with local-state compatibility graphs gives an exact compiler for finite-domain factor models specified by complete local tables, including QUBO, with at most four simplex coordinates per binary pair factor. The catalog covers Karp's 21 problems: twelve use direct graph formulations, and nine use factor-state formulations, including six obtained through binary-linear feasibility. For each route we record dimensions, coefficient structure, and recovery rules. We analyze interaction count, coefficient range, objective separation, perturbation tolerance, support recovery, and decoding overhead. The separation bounds quantify the effects of clique size, factor weights, and offsets. In the complete factor-state construction, every assignment, including each suboptimal assignment, is a strict local minimum.

  • 3 authors
·
Sep 30

Towards Data-centric Machine Learning on Directed Graphs: a Survey

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have made significant advances in processing structured data. However, most of them primarily adopted a model-centric approach, which simplifies graphs by converting them into undirected formats and emphasizes model designs. This approach is inherently limited in real-world applications due to the unavoidable information loss in simple undirected graphs and the model optimization challenges that arise when exceeding the upper bounds of this sub-optimal data representational capacity. As a result, there has been a shift toward data-centric methods that prioritize improving graph quality and representation. Specifically, various types of graphs can be derived from naturally structured data, including heterogeneous graphs, hypergraphs, and directed graphs. Among these, directed graphs offer distinct advantages in topological systems by modeling causal relationships, and directed GNNs have been extensively studied in recent years. However, a comprehensive survey of this emerging topic is still lacking. Therefore, we aim to provide a comprehensive review of directed graph learning, with a particular focus on a data-centric perspective. Specifically, we first introduce a novel taxonomy for existing studies. Subsequently, we re-examine these methods from the data-centric perspective, with an emphasis on understanding and improving data representation. It demonstrates that a deep understanding of directed graphs and their quality plays a crucial role in model performance. Additionally, we explore the diverse applications of directed GNNs across 10+ domains, highlighting their broad applicability. Finally, we identify key opportunities and challenges within the field, offering insights that can guide future research and development in directed graph learning.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 28, 2024

Revisiting Graph Neural Networks on Graph-level Tasks: Comprehensive Experiments, Analysis, and Improvements

Graphs are essential data structures for modeling complex interactions in domains such as social networks, molecular structures, and biological systems. Graph-level tasks, which predict properties or classes for the entire graph, are critical for applications, such as molecular property prediction and subgraph counting. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in these tasks, but their evaluations are often limited to narrow datasets, tasks, and inconsistent experimental setups, restricting their generalizability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified evaluation framework for graph-level GNNs. This framework provides a standardized setting to evaluate GNNs across diverse datasets, various graph tasks (e.g., graph classification and regression), and challenging scenarios, including noisy, imbalanced, and few-shot graphs. Additionally, we propose a novel GNN model with enhanced expressivity and generalization capabilities. Specifically, we enhance the expressivity of GNNs through a k-path rooted subgraph approach, enabling the model to effectively count subgraphs (e.g., paths and cycles). Moreover, we introduce a unified graph contrastive learning algorithm for graphs across diverse domains, which adaptively removes unimportant edges to augment graphs, thereby significantly improving generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance against fourteen effective baselines across twenty-seven graph datasets, establishing it as a robust and generalizable model for graph-level tasks.

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 1, 2025

OptimusKG: Unifying biomedical knowledge in a modern multimodal graph

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) are widely used in the life sciences, yet many are derived from unstructured documents and therefore lack schema-level constrains, whereas graphs assembled from structured resources are difficult to harmonize into a unified representation. We present OptimusKG, a multimodal biomedical labeled property graph (LPG) built from structured and semi-structured resources to preserve factual, type-specific metadata across molecular, anatomical, clinical, and environmental domains. OptimusKG contains 190,531 nodes across 10 entity types, 21,813,816 edges across 26 relation types, and 67,249,863 property instances encoding 110,276,843 values across 150 distinct property keys, derived from 18 ontologies and controlled vocabularies. The graph enforces a top-level schema for nodes and edges and retains granular, type-specific properties, cross-references, and provenance across molecular, anatomical, clinical, and environmental domains. We assessed the validity of OptimusKG by evaluating whether graph relationships are supported by evidence from the scientific literature using a multimodal agent, PaperQA3. PaperQA3 identified supporting evidence for 70.0% of sampled edges, whereas 83.4% of sampled false edges received no supporting evidence. Edges without literature support were concentrated in associations derived from experimental and functional genomics resources, suggesting that OptimusKG captures biomedical knowledge that may precede synthesis in the scientific literature. OptimusKG is distributed as Apache Parquet files, providing a standardized resource for graph-based machine learning, knowledge-grounded retrieval with large language models, and biomedical discovery use cases such as hypothesis generation.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 28