Lost in Sequence: Do Large Language Models Understand Sequential Recommendation?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as promising tools for recommendation thanks to their advanced textual understanding ability and context-awareness. Despite the current practice of training and evaluating LLM-based recommendation (LLM4Rec) models under a sequential recommendation scenario, we found that whether these models understand the sequential information inherent in users' item interaction sequences has been largely overlooked. In this paper, we first demonstrate through a series of experiments that existing LLM4Rec models do not fully capture sequential information both during training and inference. Then, we propose a simple yet effective LLM-based sequential recommender, called LLM-SRec, a method that enhances the integration of sequential information into LLMs by distilling the user representations extracted from a pre-trained CF-SRec model into LLMs. Our extensive experiments show that LLM-SRec enhances LLMs' ability to understand users' item interaction sequences, ultimately leading to improved recommendation performance. Furthermore, unlike existing LLM4Rec models that require fine-tuning of LLMs, LLM-SRec achieves state-of-the-art performance by training only a few lightweight MLPs, highlighting its practicality in real-world applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sein-Kim/LLM-SRec.

RA-SGG: Retrieval-Augmented Scene Graph Generation Framework via Multi-Prototype Learning

Scene Graph Generation (SGG) research has suffered from two fundamental challenges: the long-tailed predicate distribution and semantic ambiguity between predicates. These challenges lead to a bias towards head predicates in SGG models, favoring dominant general predicates while overlooking fine-grained predicates. In this paper, we address the challenges of SGG by framing it as multi-label classification problem with partial annotation, where relevant labels of fine-grained predicates are missing. Under the new frame, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Scene Graph Generation (RA-SGG), which identifies potential instances to be multi-labeled and enriches the single-label with multi-labels that are semantically similar to the original label by retrieving relevant samples from our established memory bank. Based on augmented relations (i.e., discovered multi-labels), we apply multi-prototype learning to train our SGG model. Several comprehensive experiments have demonstrated that RA-SGG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 3.6% on VG and 5.9% on GQA, particularly in terms of F@K, showing that RA-SGG effectively alleviates the issue of biased prediction caused by the long-tailed distribution and semantic ambiguity of predicates.

Debiased Graph Poisoning Attack via Contrastive Surrogate Objective

Graph neural networks (GNN) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which aim to degrade the performance of GNNs through imperceptible changes on the graph. However, we find that in fact the prevalent meta-gradient-based attacks, which utilizes the gradient of the loss w.r.t the adjacency matrix, are biased towards training nodes. That is, their meta-gradient is determined by a training procedure of the surrogate model, which is solely trained on the training nodes. This bias manifests as an uneven perturbation, connecting two nodes when at least one of them is a labeled node, i.e., training node, while it is unlikely to connect two unlabeled nodes. However, these biased attack approaches are sub-optimal as they do not consider flipping edges between two unlabeled nodes at all. This means that they miss the potential attacked edges between unlabeled nodes that significantly alter the representation of a node. In this paper, we investigate the meta-gradients to uncover the root cause of the uneven perturbations of existing attacks. Based on our analysis, we propose a Meta-gradient-based attack method using contrastive surrogate objective (Metacon), which alleviates the bias in meta-gradient using a new surrogate loss. We conduct extensive experiments to show that Metacon outperforms existing meta gradient-based attack methods through benchmark datasets, while showing that alleviating the bias towards training nodes is effective in attacking the graph structure.

Semantic Diversity-aware Prototype-based Learning for Unbiased Scene Graph Generation

The scene graph generation (SGG) task involves detecting objects within an image and predicting predicates that represent the relationships between the objects. However, in SGG benchmark datasets, each subject-object pair is annotated with a single predicate even though a single predicate may exhibit diverse semantics (i.e., semantic diversity), existing SGG models are trained to predict the one and only predicate for each pair. This in turn results in the SGG models to overlook the semantic diversity that may exist in a predicate, thus leading to biased predictions. In this paper, we propose a novel model-agnostic Semantic Diversity-aware Prototype-based Learning (DPL) framework that enables unbiased predictions based on the understanding of the semantic diversity of predicates. Specifically, DPL learns the regions in the semantic space covered by each predicate to distinguish among the various different semantics that a single predicate can represent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model-agnostic DPL framework brings significant performance improvement on existing SGG models, and also effectively understands the semantic diversity of predicates.

Self-Guided Robust Graph Structure Refinement

Recent studies have revealed that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. To defend against such attacks, robust graph structure refinement (GSR) methods aim at minimizing the effect of adversarial edges based on node features, graph structure, or external information. However, we have discovered that existing GSR methods are limited by narrowassumptions, such as assuming clean node features, moderate structural attacks, and the availability of external clean graphs, resulting in the restricted applicability in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a self-guided GSR framework (SG-GSR), which utilizes a clean sub-graph found within the given attacked graph itself. Furthermore, we propose a novel graph augmentation and a group-training strategy to handle the two technical challenges in the clean sub-graph extraction: 1) loss of structural information, and 2) imbalanced node degree distribution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SG-GSR under various scenarios including non-targeted attacks, targeted attacks, feature attacks, e-commerce fraud, and noisy node labels. Our code is available at https://github.com/yeonjun-in/torch-SG-GSR.

Adaptive Self-training Framework for Fine-grained Scene Graph Generation

Scene graph generation (SGG) models have suffered from inherent problems regarding the benchmark datasets such as the long-tailed predicate distribution and missing annotation problems. In this work, we aim to alleviate the long-tailed problem of SGG by utilizing unannotated triplets. To this end, we introduce a Self-Training framework for SGG (ST-SGG) that assigns pseudo-labels for unannotated triplets based on which the SGG models are trained. While there has been significant progress in self-training for image recognition, designing a self-training framework for the SGG task is more challenging due to its inherent nature such as the semantic ambiguity and the long-tailed distribution of predicate classes. Hence, we propose a novel pseudo-labeling technique for SGG, called Class-specific Adaptive Thresholding with Momentum (CATM), which is a model-agnostic framework that can be applied to any existing SGG models. Furthermore, we devise a graph structure learner (GSL) that is beneficial when adopting our proposed self-training framework to the state-of-the-art message-passing neural network (MPNN)-based SGG models. Our extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of ST-SGG on various SGG models, particularly in enhancing the performance on fine-grained predicate classes.

LLM4SGG: Large Language Model for Weakly Supervised Scene Graph Generation

Weakly-Supervised Scene Graph Generation (WSSGG) research has recently emerged as an alternative to the fully-supervised approach that heavily relies on costly annotations. In this regard, studies on WSSGG have utilized image captions to obtain unlocalized triplets while primarily focusing on grounding the unlocalized triplets over image regions. However, they have overlooked the two issues involved in the triplet formation process from the captions: 1) Semantic over-simplification issue arises when extracting triplets from captions, where fine-grained predicates in captions are undesirably converted into coarse-grained predicates, resulting in a long-tailed predicate distribution, and 2) Low-density scene graph issue arises when aligning the triplets in the caption with entity/predicate classes of interest, where many triplets are discarded and not used in training, leading to insufficient supervision. To tackle the two issues, we propose a new approach, i.e., Large Language Model for weakly-supervised SGG (LLM4SGG), where we mitigate the two issues by leveraging the LLM's in-depth understanding of language and reasoning ability during the extraction of triplets from captions and alignment of entity/predicate classes with target data. To further engage the LLM in these processes, we adopt the idea of Chain-of-Thought and the in-context few-shot learning strategy. To validate the effectiveness of LLM4SGG, we conduct extensive experiments on Visual Genome and GQA datasets, showing significant improvements in both Recall@K and mean Recall@K compared to the state-of-the-art WSSGG methods. A further appeal is that LLM4SGG is data-efficient, enabling effective model training with a small amount of training images.

MELT: Mutual Enhancement of Long-Tailed User and Item for Sequential Recommendation

The long-tailed problem is a long-standing challenge in Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) in which the problem exists in terms of both users and items. While many existing studies address the long-tailed problem in SRS, they only focus on either the user or item perspective. However, we discover that the long-tailed user and item problems exist at the same time, and considering only either one of them leads to sub-optimal performance of the other one. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for SRS, called Mutual Enhancement of Long-Tailed user and item (MELT), that jointly alleviates the long-tailed problem in the perspectives of both users and items. MELT consists of bilateral branches each of which is responsible for long-tailed users and items, respectively, and the branches are trained to mutually enhance each other, which is trained effectively by a curriculum learning-based training. MELT is model-agnostic in that it can be seamlessly integrated with existing SRS models. Extensive experiments on eight datasets demonstrate the benefit of alleviating the long-tailed problems in terms of both users and items even without sacrificing the performance of head users and items, which has not been achieved by existing methods. To the best of our knowledge, MELT is the first work that jointly alleviates the long-tailed user and item problems in SRS.

Unbiased Heterogeneous Scene Graph Generation with Relation-aware Message Passing Neural Network

Recent scene graph generation (SGG) frameworks have focused on learning complex relationships among multiple objects in an image. Thanks to the nature of the message passing neural network (MPNN) that models high-order interactions between objects and their neighboring objects, they are dominant representation learning modules for SGG. However, existing MPNN-based frameworks assume the scene graph as a homogeneous graph, which restricts the context-awareness of visual relations between objects. That is, they overlook the fact that the relations tend to be highly dependent on the objects with which the relations are associated. In this paper, we propose an unbiased heterogeneous scene graph generation (HetSGG) framework that captures relation-aware context using message passing neural networks. We devise a novel message passing layer, called relation-aware message passing neural network (RMP), that aggregates the contextual information of an image considering the predicate type between objects. Our extensive evaluations demonstrate that HetSGG outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially outperforming on tail predicate classes.

LTE4G: Long-Tail Experts for Graph Neural Networks

Existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) usually assume a balanced situation where both the class distribution and the node degree distribution are balanced. However, in real-world situations, we often encounter cases where a few classes (i.e., head class) dominate other classes (i.e., tail class) as well as in the node degree perspective, and thus naively applying existing GNNs eventually fall short of generalizing to the tail cases. Although recent studies proposed methods to handle long-tail situations on graphs, they only focus on either the class long-tailedness or the degree long-tailedness. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for training GNNs, called Long-Tail Experts for Graphs (LTE4G), which jointly considers the class long-tailedness, and the degree long-tailedness for node classification. The core idea is to assign an expert GNN model to each subset of nodes that are split in a balanced manner considering both the class and degree long-tailedness. After having trained an expert for each balanced subset, we adopt knowledge distillation to obtain two class-wise students, i.e., Head class student and Tail class student, each of which is responsible for classifying nodes in the head classes and tail classes, respectively. We demonstrate that LTE4G outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art methods in node classification evaluated on both manual and natural imbalanced graphs. The source code of LTE4G can be found at https://github.com/SukwonYun/LTE4G.