ReFuGe: Feature Generation for Prediction Tasks on Relational Databases with LLM Agents

Relational databases (RDBs) play a crucial role in many real-world web applications, supporting data management across multiple interconnected tables. Beyond typical retrieval-oriented tasks, prediction tasks on RDBs have recently gained attention. In this work, we address this problem by generating informative relational features that enhance predictive performance. However, generating such features is challenging: it requires reasoning over complex schemas and exploring a combinatorially large feature space, all without explicit supervision. To address these challenges, we propose ReFuGe, an agentic framework that leverages specialized large language model agents: (1) a schema selection agent identifies the tables and columns relevant to the task, (2) a feature generation agent produces diverse candidate features from the selected schema, and (3) a feature filtering agent evaluates and retains promising features through reasoning-based and validation-based filtering. It operates within an iterative feedback loop until performance converges. Experiments on RDB benchmarks demonstrate that ReFuGe substantially improves performance on various RDB prediction tasks. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/K-Kyungho/REFUGE.

Feature-Centric Unsupervised Node Representation Learning Without Homophily Assumption

Unsupervised node representation learning aims to obtain meaningful node embeddings without relying on node labels. To achieve this, graph convolution, which aggregates information from neighboring nodes, is commonly employed to encode node features and graph topology. However, excessive reliance on graph convolution can be suboptimal-especially in non-homophilic graphs-since it may yield unduly similar embeddings for nodes that differ in their features or topological properties. As a result, adjusting the degree of graph convolution usage has been actively explored in supervised learning settings, whereas such approaches remain underexplored in unsupervised scenarios. To tackle this, we propose FUEL, which adaptively learns the adequate degree of graph convolution usage by aiming to enhance intra-class similarity and inter-class separability in the embedding space. Since classes are unknown, FUEL leverages node features to identify node clusters and treats these clusters as proxies for classes. Through extensive experiments using 15 baseline methods and 14 benchmark datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of FUEL in downstream tasks, achieving state-of-the-art performance across graphs with diverse levels of homophily.

ItemRAG: Item-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-Based Recommendation

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been widely used as recommender systems, owing to their strong reasoning capability and their effectiveness in handling cold-start items. To better adapt LLMs for recommendation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been incorporated. Most existing RAG methods are user-based, retrieving purchase patterns of users similar to the target user and providing them to the LLM. In this work, we propose ItemRAG, an item-based RAG method for LLM-based recommendation that retrieves relevant items (rather than users) from item-item co-purchase histories. ItemRAG helps LLMs capture co-purchase patterns among items, which are beneficial for recommendations. Especially, our retrieval strategy incorporates semantically similar items to better handle cold-start items and uses co-purchase frequencies to improve the relevance of the retrieved items. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that ItemRAG consistently (1) improves the zero-shot LLM-based recommender by up to 43% in Hit-Ratio-1 and (2) outperforms user-based RAG baselines under both standard and cold-start item recommendation settings.

A Self-Supervised Mixture-of-Experts Framework for Multi-behavior Recommendation

In e-commerce, where users face a vast array of possible item choices, recommender systems are vital for helping them discover suitable items they might otherwise overlook. While many recommender systems primarily rely on a user's purchase history, recent multi-behavior recommender systems incorporate various auxiliary user behaviors, such as item clicks and cart additions, to enhance recommendations. Despite their overall performance gains, their effectiveness varies considerably between visited items (i.e., those a user has interacted with through auxiliary behaviors) and unvisited items (i.e., those with which the user has had no such interactions). Specifically, our analysis reveals that (1) existing multi-behavior recommender systems exhibit a significant gap in recommendation quality between the two item types (visited and unvisited items) and (2) achieving strong performance on both types with a single model architecture remains challenging. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel multi-behavior recommender system, MEMBER. It employs a mixture-of-experts framework, with experts designed to recommend the two item types, respectively. Each expert is trained using a self-supervised method specialized for its design goal. In our comprehensive experiments, we show the effectiveness of MEMBER across both item types, achieving up to 65.46% performance gain over the best competitor in terms of Hit Ratio@20.

'Hello, World!': Making GNNs Talk with LLMs

While graph neural networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable performance across diverse graph-related tasks, their high-dimensional hidden representations render them black boxes. In this work, we propose Graph Lingual Network (GLN), a GNN built on large language models (LLMs), with hidden representations in the form of human-readable text. Through careful prompt design, GLN incorporates not only the message passing module of GNNs but also advanced GNN techniques, including graph attention and initial residual connection. The comprehensibility of GLN's hidden representations enables an intuitive analysis of how node representations change (1) across layers and (2) under advanced GNN techniques, shedding light on the inner workings of GNNs. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GLN achieves strong zero-shot performance on node classification and link prediction, outperforming existing LLM-based baseline methods.

KGMEL: Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Multimodal Entity Linking

Entity linking (EL) aligns textual mentions with their corresponding entities in a knowledge base, facilitating various applications such as semantic search and question answering. Recent advances in multimodal entity linking (MEL) have shown that combining text and images can reduce ambiguity and improve alignment accuracy. However, most existing MEL methods overlook the rich structural information available in the form of knowledge-graph (KG) triples. In this paper, we propose KGMEL, a novel framework that leverages KG triples to enhance MEL. Specifically, it operates in three stages: (1) Generation: Produces high-quality triples for each mention by employing vision-language models based on its text and images. (2) Retrieval: Learns joint mention-entity representations, via contrastive learning, that integrate text, images, and (generated or KG) triples to retrieve candidate entities for each mention. (3) Reranking: Refines the KG triples of the candidate entities and employs large language models to identify the best-matching entity for the mention. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that KGMEL outperforms existing methods. Our code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/juyeonnn/KGMEL.

Emergence of psychopathological computations in large language models

Can large language models (LLMs) implement computations of psychopathology? An effective approach to the question hinges on addressing two factors. First, for conceptual validity, we require a general and computational account of psychopathology that is applicable to computational entities without biological embodiment or subjective experience. Second, mechanisms underlying LLM behaviors need to be studied for better methodological validity. Thus, we establish a computational-theoretical framework to provide an account of psychopathology applicable to LLMs. To ground the theory for empirical analysis, we also propose a novel mechanistic interpretability method alongside a tailored empirical analytic framework. Based on the frameworks, we conduct experiments demonstrating three key claims: first, that distinct dysfunctional and problematic representational states are implemented in LLMs; second, that their activations can spread and self-sustain to trap LLMs; and third, that dynamic, cyclic structural causal models encoded in the LLMs underpin these patterns. In concert, the empirical results corroborate our hypothesis that network-theoretic computations of psychopathology have already emerged in LLMs. This suggests that certain LLM behaviors mirroring psychopathology may not be a superficial mimicry but a feature of their internal processing. Thus, our work alludes to the possibility of AI systems with psychopathological behaviors in the near future.

Simple yet Effective Node Property Prediction on Edge Streams under Distribution Shifts

The problem of predicting node properties (e.g., node classes) in graphs has received significant attention due to its broad range of applications. Graphs from real-world datasets often evolve over time, with newly emerging edges and dynamically changing node properties, posing a significant challenge for this problem. In response, temporal graph neural networks (TGNNs) have been developed to predict dynamic node properties from a stream of emerging edges. However, our analysis reveals that most TGNN-based methods are (a) far less effective without proper node features and, due to their complex model architectures, (b) vulnerable to distribution shifts. In this paper, we propose SPLASH, a simple yet powerful method for predicting node properties on edge streams under distribution shifts. Our key contributions are as follows: (1) we propose feature augmentation methods and an automatic feature selection method for edge streams, which improve the effectiveness of TGNNs, (2) we propose a lightweight MLP-based TGNN architecture that is highly efficient and robust under distribution shifts, and (3) we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the accuracy, efficiency, generalization, and qualitative performance of the proposed method and its competitors on dynamic node classification, dynamic anomaly detection, and node affinity prediction tasks across seven real-world datasets.

MARIOH: Multiplicity-Aware Hypergraph Reconstruction

Hypergraphs offer a powerful framework for modeling higher-order interactions that traditional pairwise graphs cannot fully capture. However, practical constraints often lead to their simplification into projected graphs, resulting in substantial information loss and ambiguity in representing higher-order relationships. In this work, we propose MARIOH, a supervised approach for reconstructing the original hypergraph from its projected graph by leveraging edge multiplicity. To overcome the difficulties posed by the large search space, MARIOH integrates several key ideas: (a) identifying provable size-2 hyperedges, which reduces the candidate search space, (b) predicting the likelihood of candidates being hyperedges by utilizing both structural and multiplicity-related features, and (c) not only targeting promising hyperedge candidates but also examining less confident ones to explore alternative possibilities. Together, these ideas enable MARIOH to efficiently and effectively explore the search space. In our experiments using 10 real-world datasets, MARIOH achieves up to 74.51% higher reconstruction accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods.

TiGer: Self-Supervised Purification for Time-evolving Graphs

Time-evolving graphs, such as social and citation networks, often contain noise that distorts structural and temporal patterns, adversely affecting downstream tasks, such as node classification. Existing purification methods focus on static graphs, limiting their ability to account for critical temporal dependencies in dynamic graphs. In this work, we propose TiGer (Time-evolving Graph purifier), a self-supervised method explicitly designed for time-evolving graphs. TiGer assigns two different sub-scores to edges using (1) self-attention for capturing long-term contextual patterns shaped by both adjacent and distant past events of varying significance and (2) statistical distance measures for detecting inconsistency over a short-term period. These sub-scores are used to identify and filter out suspicious (i.e., noise-like) edges through an ensemble strategy, ensuring robustness without requiring noise labels. Our experiments on five real-world datasets show TiGer filters out noise with up to 10.2% higher accuracy and improves node classification performance by up to 5.3%, compared to state-of-the-art methods.