Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Shirui Pan

Publications and source records attributed to Shirui Pan.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Graph Navier Stokes Networks

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a cornerstone of deep learning, with most existing methods rooted in graph signal processing and diffusion equations to model message passing. However, these approaches inherently suffer from the oversmoothing problem, where node features become indistinguishable as the network depth increases. Inspired by the Navier Stokes equations, we introduce Graph Navier Stokes Networks (GNSN), a novel architecture that transcends conventional diffusion-based message passing by incorporating convection into graph structures. GNSN defines a dynamic velocity field on the graph to govern convection, enabling more efficient and direct message propagation. By adaptively balancing convection and diffusion, GNSN is able to efficiently handle datasets with varying levels of homophily. Extensive evaluations across twelve real-world datasets demonstrate that GNSN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in classification accuracy. Moreover, experimental results further emphasize its effectiveness in alleviating the oversmoothing problem.

cs.LG↗

AbstainGNN: Teaching Graph Neural Networks to Abstain for Graph Classification

Graph classification is a core task in graph data mining with widespread real-world applications. Recent advances in graph neural networks (GNNs) have led to substantial performance improvements for graph classification. However, existing GNNs are typically forced to make predictions even under high uncertainty or unknown conditions, resulting in unreliable decisions that can severely impact downstream tasks, particularly in safety-critical scenarios. To address this critical limitation, we propose AbstainGNN, a novel and theory-driven framework for graph classification with abstention, which enables GNNs to reject uncertain predictions instead of producing incorrect decisions. Specifically, AbstainGNN explicitly models both the predictive function and the abstention function, allowing for effective utilization of graph structural information. Moreover, unlike existing heuristic abstention methods, we theoretically characterize the trade-off between classification errors and rejection costs from a PAC-Bayesian generalization perspective, and derive a unified learning objective for model optimization. Guided by this theoretical insight, we further develop an efficient two-stage training strategy consisting of predictive function warm-start and abstention function calibration. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets show that AbstainGNN outperforms existing abstention methods, achieving superior classification performance under the same rejection rates.

cs.LG↗

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

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

cs.AI↗

Echoes in Filter Bubble: Diagnosing and Curing Popularity Bias in Generative Recommenders

Recently, Generative Recommenders (GRs), characterized by a unified end-to-end framework, have exhibited astonishing potential in transforming the recommendation paradigm. Despite their effectiveness, we recognize that GRs are still susceptible to the long-standing issue of popularity bias that has pervaded the recommendation community. Although a few studies have attempted to extend traditional debiasing methods to GRs, their effectiveness is marginal, and the fundamental reason why GRs suffer from popularity bias remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, this study focuses on two core aspects in GRs: the optimization of generative framework and the item tokenization based on semantic index. Based on theoretical analyses, we identify that the severe popularity bias emerges from the confluence of a token-level optimization flaw and the undifferentiated property of item tokenization. Accordingly, this study develops a novel generative recommender system, called Ghost, by designing the asymmetric unlikelihood optimization and the skeleton-founded tokenization. Extensive empirical evaluations across three datasets, alongside multiple SOTA baselines, reveal that Ghost substantially alleviates popularity bias and promotes fairer recommendations, while incurring slight degradation to the overall recommendation utility.

cs.IR↗

Rethinking Feature Alignment in Generalist Graph Anomaly Detection: A Relational Fingerprint-based Approach

Generalist graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to detect anomalies on unseen graphs without graph-specific retraining. Nevertheless, existing approaches primarily focus on aligning heterogeneous features across different data domains via PCA-based projection, which harmonizes feature dimensions ignores feature semantics. As a result, GAD models fail to learn transferable semantic knowledge, and even exhibit negative transfer on unseen graphs. To address this issue, we propose a Relational Fingerprint-based generalist GAD approach (ReFi-GAD for short), aligning heterogeneous raw features with a universal and semantics-aware Relational Fingerprint (ReFi) that encodes anomaly-indicative cues from both contextual and structural perspectives. Building on ReFi, we design a fingerprint-grounded generalist GAD model, which combines a transformer-based encoder to capture domain-invariant knowledge with an SNR-guided refinement module for domain-specific adaptation. Extensive experiments on 14 datasets demonstrate that ReFi-GAD significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

AION: Next-Generation Tasks and Practical Harness for Time Series

Time series research is moving beyond fixed forecasting benchmarks toward realistic tasks that combine prediction, contextual reasoning, tool use, and structured decision support. Most benchmarks are built around clean data and short evaluation loops; agents alone may miss temporal constraints, evidence checks, or review before finalizing outputs. We first formalize next-generation time series tasks as three-component tuples consisting of a task file, a workspace, and a validation interface. We then present AION, a time series harness built from six component groups: agents, skills, rules, memory, evaluation, and protocols. In this harness, we use three design principles: temporal grounding, temporal knowledge-grounded reasoning, and reliability mechanisms such as post-experiment analysis and layered review. A Kaggle Store Sales case study shows that the harness produces more detailed process traces, more artifacts, and more review steps than the same base agent operating in OpenCode direct build mode. Taken together, these results argue for a paradigm shift from fixed tasks to realistic ones under real-world constraints.

cs.AI↗

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

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

cs.LG↗

LineageFlow: Flow Matching for High-Fidelity Family-Aware Protein Sequence Generation

Protein sequence generation for engineering requires samples that are biophysically plausible and, when targeting a family/domain, remain recognizable members while exploring within-family diversity. Current discrete generative models typically start from uniform or masked-token noise, which discards strong position-specific constraints induced by evolution and forces the model to reconstruct conserved residues from scratch, leading to weak family control and low plausibility. We propose \emph{LineageFlow}, a Dirichlet flow-matching model that initializes generation from lineage priors derived from ancestral sequence reconstruction, turning generation into structured mutation from an evolved scaffold. Across diverse protein families, LineageFlow achieves family validity close to held-out natural sequences and improves predicted structural confidence over uniform-/mask-initialized baselines while maintaining substantial novelty and diversity. Finally, we introduce \emph{rerouting}, a single intermediate-time mutate--select--amplify intervention that enables objective-guided sampling without per-step predictor guidance and yields further gains in plausibility, including a zero-shot enzyme generation case study. Code is available at https://github.com/Jinx-byebye/LineageFlow.

cs.CE↗

ST-TGExplainer: Disentangling Stability and Transition Patterns for Temporal GNN Interpretability

Temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) have gained significant traction for solving real-world temporal graph tasks. However, their interpretability remains limited, as most TGNNs fail to identify which historical interactions most influence a given prediction. Despite promising progress on interpretable TGNNs, existing methods predominantly focus on previously seen historical interactions, which we term stability patterns, while overlooking newly emerging first-time interactions, which we term transition patterns. Both types of patterns are essential for faithful temporal explanations. To address this limitation, we propose ST-TGExplainer, a self-explainable TGNN that disentangles Stability and Transition patterns in temporal graphs for a more faithful Temporal GNN Explainer. Guided by a disentangled information bottleneck objective, ST-TGExplainer learns a compact explanatory subgraph that remains predictive of the event label while explicitly suppressing label-conditioned redundancy between stability and transition patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-TGExplainer achieves strong predictive performance and yields more faithful explanations. Code is available at https://github.com/hjchen-hdu/ST-TGExplainer.

cs.LG↗

CAMERA: Adapting to Semantic Camouflage in Unsupervised Text-Attributed Graph Fraud Detection

Text-attributed graph fraud detection (TAGFD) plays a critical role in preventing fraudulent activities on online social and e-commerce platforms. However, to evade detection, fraudsters continuously evolve their camouflaging strategies by deliberately mimicking textual responses of benign users, thereby concealing their malicious purposes. This phenomenon, referred to as semantic camouflage, fundamentally undermines commonly relied assumptions on how structural and attribute cues can be exploited to identify fraudsters, and makes it difficult to spot fraudsters with unsupervised TAGFD. To bridge the gaps, we propose a Case-Adaptive Multi-cue Expert fRAmework (CAMERA) for unsupervised TAGFD. CAMERA employs an ego-decoupled mixture-of-experts architecture, where each expert specializes in modeling a distinct type of fraud-indicative cue. A context-informed gating model is introduced to jointly consider the ego node representation and its local neighborhood context for adaptive integration of cues learned by different experts. Furthermore, CAMERA leverages the inherent rarity of fraudsters to support unsupervised one-class learning with expert-level objectives that encourage modeling dominant benign patterns, thereby enabling reliable unsupervised detection of camouflaged fraudsters. Experiments on 4 challenging datasets show that CAMERA consistently outperforms competitors, showing its effectiveness against semantically camouflaged fraudsters. Code available at https://github.com/CampanulaBells/CAMERA

cs.LG↗

UniER: A Unified Benchmark for Item-level and Path-level Exercise Recommendation

Personalized exercise recommendation dynamically aligns pedagogical resources with individual knowledge mastery, which is crucial for satisfying students' dynamic learning needs in modern education. The field is currently driven by two dominant paradigms: Item-Level Exercise Recommendation (ILER) optimizes for immediate single-step state transitions, while Path-Level Exercise Recommendation (PLER) constructs coherent learning paths to maximize cumulative gains. Despite sharing the same ultimate objective, disparate evaluation setups have kept these two lines of research isolated, hindering unified benchmarking and fair comparison. To fill the gap, in this paper, we present a Unified Benchmark for Exercise Recommendation (UniER), a comprehensive evaluation framework that unifies ILER and PLER. Specifically, we introduce Weighted Cognitive Gain (WCG) as a unified metric to measure cross-paradigm algorithmic performance. Our benchmark encompasses 9 datasets spanning four generation methods, facilitating the comparison of 18 representative ILER/PLER methods. Through multi-dimensional analyses covering effectiveness, generalizability, robustness, and efficiency, our results reveal the systematic dominance of PLER and expose the pedagogical failure of ILER's fragmented recommendations under extreme sparsity and noise. Furthermore, we provide an open-source codebase of UniER to foster reproducible research and outline potential directions for future investigations.

cs.IR↗

ReCoG: Relational and Compact Context Graph Learning for Few-shot Molecular Property Prediction

Few-shot molecular property prediction (FSMPP) is essential in drug discovery and materials design, where high-quality labeled data are often scarce and expensive to obtain. Despite the promising performance of existing methods, especially context-aware methods, they still face two-fold severe challenges with \textit{insufficient structural context modeling} \& \textit{redundant auxiliary context learning}, leading to inadequate context graph exploration and ineffective information utilization for effective molecule representation learning. To address these, in this paper, we propose a novel framework by learning on \textbf{\underline{Re}}lational and \textbf{\underline{C}}ompact c\textbf{\underline{o}}ntext \textbf{\underline{G}}raph, named \textbf{\method}, to comprehensively exploit the context graph for expressive molecular property prediction. Specifically, the proposed \method contains two core modules: a \textbf{(1) cross-property relational learning module} to better model the structural and relational context information, and a \textbf{(2) context graph information bottleneck module} to adaptively suppress irrelevant auxiliary signals for compact context information utilization, followed by a detailed theoretical demonstration regarding the importance of joint relational and compact knowledge extraction in context graphs.

cs.CE↗

LeapTS: Rethinking Time Series Forecasting as Adaptive Multi-Horizon Scheduling

Time series forecasting serves as an essential tool for many real-world applications, supporting tasks such as resource optimization and decision-making. Despite significant architectural advancements, most modern models still treat forecasting task as a fixed mapping from history to target horizons. This induces temporal decoupling across future time points and limits the model's ability to adapt to the evolving context as forecasting progresses. In this work, we present LeapTS, a novel framework that reformulates time series forecasting as a dynamic scheduling process over the prediction horizon. Specifically, LeapTS organizes the forecasting process into multi-level decisions using: (1) the hierarchical controller to dynamically select the optimal prediction scale and advancement length at each step, and (2) continuous-time state evolution driven by neural controlled differential equations. Within this process, the controlled update mechanism explicitly couples the irregular temporal dynamics with discrete scheduling feedback. Extensive evaluations on both real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that LeapTS improves overall forecasting performance by at least 7.4% while achieving a 2.6$\times$ to 5.3$\times$ inference speedup over representative Transformer-based models. Furthermore, by explicitly tracing the scheduling trajectories, we reveal how the model autonomously adapts its forecasting behavior to capture non-stationary dynamics.

cs.LG↗

EventTSF: Event-Aware Non-Stationary Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting is vital in diverse sectors such as energy and transportation, where non-stationary dynamics are deeply intertwined with external events in other modalities such as texts. However, incorporating natural language-based external events to improve non-stationary forecasting remains largely unexplored, as most approaches still rely on a single modality, resulting in limited contextual knowledge and model underperformance. Enabling fine-grained multimodal interactions between temporal and textual data is challenged by two fundamental issues: (1) the gap in modeling interactions among discrete external events and continuous time series in a unified framework; (2) classical uniform diffusion timestep ignores event-induced non-stationary variability, leading to imbalanced denoising difficulty across diffusion stages. In this work, we propose event-aware non-stationary time series forecasting (EventTSF), an autoregressive diffusion framework that integrates historical time series and textual events via step-wise diffusion. To mitigate the imbalanced denoising difficulty of uniform timestep sampling, EventTSF uses an event-aware flow-matching timestep conditioned on event semantics. Extensive experiments on 7 synthetic and real-world datasets show that EventTSF outperforms 12 non-stationary time series forecasting baselines, achieving average gains of 41.3% in probabilistic forecasting and 27.5% in deterministic forecasting across all evaluation metrics.

cs.LG↗

FedCIGAR: A Personalized Reconstruction Approach for Federated Graph-level Anomaly Detection

Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) is crucial for ensuring the reliability of graph-driven applications by identifying abnormal graphs that deviate from the majority. Considering the privacy concerns in distributed scenarios, federated graph-level anomaly detection (FedGLAD) has emerged as a promising solution to enable collaborative detection without sharing raw data. However, existing methods suffer from poor generalization due to the reliance on unrealistic synthetic anomalies and insufficient personalization capabilities under data heterogeneity. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Federated graph-level anomaly detection approach with Cluster-adaptIve GAted Reconstruction (FedCIGAR). Specifically, we design a reconstruction-based paradigm trained on normal graphs to avoid synthetic data. Furthermore, we introduce a client-side node contribution gating mechanism and a server-side sliding window-based clustering strategy to tackle data heterogeneity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FedCIGAR achieves superior performance and robustness in contrast to state-of-the-art methods.

cs.LG↗

G-reasoner: Foundation Models for Unified Reasoning over Graph-structured Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but remain limited by static and incomplete parametric knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this by incorporating external knowledge, yet existing RAGs struggle with knowledge-intensive tasks due to fragmented information and weak modeling of knowledge structure. Graphs offer a natural way to model relationships within knowledge, but LLMs are inherently unstructured and cannot effectively reason over graph-structured data. Recent graph-enhanced RAG (GraphRAG) attempts to bridge this gap by constructing tailored graphs and enabling LLMs to reason on them. However, these methods often depend on ad-hoc graph designs, heuristic search, or costly agent pipelines, which hinder scalability and generalization. To address these challenges, we present G-reasoner, a unified framework that integrates graph and language foundation models for scalable reasoning over diverse graph-structured knowledge. Central to our approach is QuadGraph, a standardized four-layer abstraction that unifies heterogeneous knowledge sources into a common graph representation. Building on this, we introduce a 34M-parameter graph foundation model (GFM) that jointly captures graph topology and textual semantics, and is integrated with LLMs to enhance reasoning in downstream applications. To ensure scalability and efficiency, mixed-precision training and distributed message-passing are implemented to scale GFM with more GPUs. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks show that G-reasoner consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, significantly enhances LLM reasoning, and achieves strong efficiency and cross-graph generalization.

cs.AI↗

Personalized Multi-Interest Modeling for Cross-Domain Recommendation to Cold-Start Users

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) has demonstrated to be an effective solution for alleviating the user cold-start issue. By leveraging rich user-item interactions available in a richly informative source domain, CDR could improve the recommendation performance for cold-start users in the target domain. Previous CDR approaches mostly adhere the Embedding and Mapping (EMCDR) paradigm, which learns a user-shared mapping function to transfer users' preference from the source domain to the target domain, neglecting users' personalized preference. Recent CDR approaches further leverage the meta-learning paradigm, considering the CDR task for each user independently and learning user-specific mapping functions for each user. However, they mostly learn representations for each user individually, which ignores the common preference between different users, neglecting valuable information for CDR. In addition, all these approaches usually summarize the user's preference into an overall representation, which can hardly capture the user's multi-interest preference. To this end, we propose a personalized multi-interest modeling framework for CDR to cold-start users, termed as NF-NPCDR. Specifically, we propose a personalized preference encoder that enhances the neural process (NP) with the normalizing flow (NF) to convert the Gaussian (unimodal) distribution to a multimodal distribution, providing a novel way to capture the user's personalized multi-interest preference. Then, we propose a common preference encoder with a preference pool to capture the common preference between different users. Furthermore, we introduce a stochastic adaptive decoder to incorporate both the personalized and common preference for cold-start users, adaptively modulating both preference for better recommendation.

cs.IR↗

BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks

The security of LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) is critically threatened by propagation vulnerability, where malicious agents can distort collective decision-making through inter-agent message interactions. While existing supervised defense methods demonstrate promising performance, they may be impractical in real-world scenarios due to their heavy reliance on labeled malicious agents to train a supervised malicious detection model. To enable practical and generalizable MAS defenses, in this paper, we propose BlindGuard, an unsupervised defense method that learns without requiring any attack-specific labels or prior knowledge of malicious behaviors. To this end, we establish a hierarchical agent encoder to capture individual, neighborhood, and global interaction patterns of each agent, providing a comprehensive understanding for malicious agent detection. Meanwhile, we design a corruption-guided detector that consists of directional noise injection and contrastive learning, allowing effective detection model training solely on normal agent behaviors. Extensive experiments show that BlindGuard effectively detects diverse attack types (i.e., prompt injection, memory poisoning, and tool attack) across MAS with various communication patterns while maintaining superior generalizability compared to supervised baselines. The code is available at: https://github.com/MR9812/BlindGuard.

cs.AI↗