Robust Graph Learning Against Adversarial Evasion Attacks via Prior-Free Diffusion-Based Structure Purification

Adversarial evasion attacks pose significant threats to graph learning, with lines of studies that have improved the robustness of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, existing works rely on priors about clean graphs or attacking strategies, which are often heuristic and inconsistent. To achieve robust graph learning over different types of evasion attacks and diverse datasets, we investigate this problem from a prior-free structure purification perspective. Specifically, we propose a novel Diffusion-based Structure Purification framework named DiffSP, which creatively incorporates the graph diffusion model to learn intrinsic distributions of clean graphs and purify the perturbed structures by removing adversaries under the direction of the captured predictive patterns without relying on priors. DiffSP is divided into the forward diffusion process and the reverse denoising process, during which structure purification is achieved. To avoid valuable information loss during the forward process, we propose an LID-driven nonisotropic diffusion mechanism to selectively inject noise anisotropically. To promote semantic alignment between the clean graph and the purified graph generated during the reverse process, we reduce the generation uncertainty by the proposed graph transfer entropy guided denoising mechanism. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior robustness of DiffSP against evasion attacks.

Discrete Curvature Graph Information Bottleneck

Graph neural networks(GNNs) have been demonstrated to depend on whether the node effective information is sufficiently passing. Discrete curvature (Ricci curvature) is used to study graph connectivity and information propagation efficiency with a geometric perspective, and has been raised in recent years to explore the efficient message-passing structure of GNNs. However, most empirical studies are based on directly observed graph structures or heuristic topological assumptions and lack in-depth exploration of underlying optimal information transport structures for downstream tasks. We suggest that graph curvature optimization is more in-depth and essential than directly rewiring or learning for graph structure with richer message-passing characterization and better information transport interpretability. From both graph geometry and information theory perspectives, we propose the novel Discrete Curvature Graph Information Bottleneck (CurvGIB) framework to optimize the information transport structure and learn better node representations simultaneously. CurvGIB advances the Variational Information Bottleneck (VIB) principle for Ricci curvature optimization to learn the optimal information transport pattern for specific downstream tasks. The learned Ricci curvature is used to refine the optimal transport structure of the graph, and the node representation is fully and efficiently learned. Moreover, for the computational complexity of Ricci curvature differentiation, we combine Ricci flow and VIB to deduce a curvature optimization approximation to form a tractable IB objective function. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness and interpretability of CurvGIB.

Bi-Directional Multi-Scale Graph Dataset Condensation via Information Bottleneck

Dataset condensation has significantly improved model training efficiency, but its application on devices with different computing power brings new requirements for different data sizes. Thus, condensing multiple scale graphs simultaneously is the core of achieving efficient training in different on-device scenarios. Existing efficient works for multi-scale graph dataset condensation mainly perform efficient approximate computation in scale order (large-to-small or small-to-large scales). However, for non-Euclidean structures of sparse graph data, these two commonly used paradigms for multi-scale graph dataset condensation have serious scaling down degradation and scaling up collapse problems of a graph. The main bottleneck of the above paradigms is whether the effective information of the original graph is fully preserved when consenting to the primary sub-scale (the first of multiple scales), which determines the condensation effect and consistency of all scales. In this paper, we proposed a novel GNN-centric Bi-directional Multi-Scale Graph Dataset Condensation (BiMSGC) framework, to explore unifying paradigms by operating on both large-to-small and small-to-large for multi-scale graph condensation. Based on the mutual information theory, we estimate an optimal ``meso-scale'' to obtain the minimum necessary dense graph preserving the maximum utility information of the original graph, and then we achieve stable and consistent ``bi-directional'' condensation learning by optimizing graph eigenbasis matching with information bottleneck on other scales. Encouraging empirical results on several datasets demonstrates the significant superiority of the proposed framework in graph condensation at different scales.

Graph Size-imbalanced Learning with Energy-guided Structural Smoothing

Graph is a prevalent data structure employed to represent the relationships between entities, frequently serving as a tool to depict and simulate numerous systems, such as molecules and social networks. However, real-world graphs usually suffer from the size-imbalanced problem in the multi-graph classification, i.e., a long-tailed distribution with respect to the number of nodes. Recent studies find that off-the-shelf Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) would compromise model performance under the long-tailed settings. We investigate this phenomenon and discover that the long-tailed graph distribution greatly exacerbates the discrepancies in structural features. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel energy-based size-imbalanced learning framework named \textbf{SIMBA}, which smooths the features between head and tail graphs and re-weights them based on the energy propagation. Specifically, we construct a higher-level graph abstraction named \textit{Graphs-to-Graph} according to the correlations between graphs to link independent graphs and smooths the structural discrepancies. We further devise an energy-based message-passing belief propagation method for re-weighting lower compatible graphs in the training process and further smooth local feature discrepancies. Extensive experimental results over five public size-imbalanced datasets demonstrate the superior effectiveness of the model for size-imbalanced graph classification tasks.

Prompt-based Unifying Inference Attack on Graph Neural Networks

Graph neural networks (GNNs) provide important prospective insights in applications such as social behavior analysis and financial risk analysis based on their powerful learning capabilities on graph data. Nevertheless, GNNs' predictive performance relies on the quality of task-specific node labels, so it is common practice to improve the model's generalization ability in the downstream execution of decision-making tasks through pre-training. Graph prompting is a prudent choice but risky without taking measures to prevent data leakage. In other words, in high-risk decision scenarios, prompt learning can infer private information by accessing model parameters trained on private data (publishing model parameters in pre-training, i.e., without directly leaking the raw data, is a tacitly accepted trend). However, myriad graph inference attacks necessitate tailored module design and processing to enhance inference capabilities due to variations in supervision signals. In this paper, we propose a novel Prompt-based unifying Inference Attack framework on GNNs, named ProIA. Specifically, ProIA retains the crucial topological information of the graph during pre-training, enhancing the background knowledge of the inference attack model. It then utilizes a unified prompt and introduces additional disentanglement factors in downstream attacks to adapt to task-relevant knowledge. Finally, extensive experiments show that ProIA enhances attack capabilities and demonstrates remarkable adaptability to various inference attacks.

GraphMoRE: Mitigating Topological Heterogeneity via Mixture of Riemannian Experts

Real-world graphs have inherently complex and diverse topological patterns, known as topological heterogeneity. Most existing works learn graph representation in a single constant curvature space that is insufficient to match the complex geometric shapes, resulting in low-quality embeddings with high distortion. This also constitutes a critical challenge for graph foundation models, which are expected to uniformly handle a wide variety of diverse graph data. Recent studies have indicated that product manifold gains the possibility to address topological heterogeneity. However, the product manifold is still homogeneous, which is inadequate and inflexible for representing the mixed heterogeneous topology. In this paper, we propose a novel Graph Mixture of Riemannian Experts (GraphMoRE) framework to effectively tackle topological heterogeneity by personalized fine-grained topology geometry pattern preservation. Specifically, to minimize the embedding distortion, we propose a topology-aware gating mechanism to select the optimal embedding space for each node. By fusing the outputs of diverse Riemannian experts with learned gating weights, we construct personalized mixed curvature spaces for nodes, effectively embedding the graph into a heterogeneous manifold with varying curvatures at different points. Furthermore, to fairly measure pairwise distances between different embedding spaces, we present a concise and effective alignment strategy. Extensive experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance with lower distortion, highlighting its potential for modeling complex graphs with topological heterogeneity, and providing a novel architectural perspective for graph foundation models.

DG-Mamba: Robust and Efficient Dynamic Graph Structure Learning with Selective State Space Models

Dynamic graphs exhibit intertwined spatio-temporal evolutionary patterns, widely existing in the real world. Nevertheless, the structure incompleteness, noise, and redundancy result in poor robustness for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks (DGNNs). Dynamic Graph Structure Learning (DGSL) offers a promising way to optimize graph structures. However, aside from encountering unacceptable quadratic complexity, it overly relies on heuristic priors, making it hard to discover underlying predictive patterns. How to efficiently refine the dynamic structures, capture intrinsic dependencies, and learn robust representations, remains under-explored. In this work, we propose the novel DG-Mamba, a robust and efficient Dynamic Graph structure learning framework with the Selective State Space Models (Mamba). To accelerate the spatio-temporal structure learning, we propose a kernelized dynamic message-passing operator that reduces the quadratic time complexity to linear. To capture global intrinsic dynamics, we establish the dynamic graph as a self-contained system with State Space Model. By discretizing the system states with the cross-snapshot graph adjacency, we enable the long-distance dependencies capturing with the selective snapshot scan. To endow learned dynamic structures more expressive with informativeness, we propose the self-supervised Principle of Relevant Information for DGSL to regularize the most relevant yet least redundant information, enhancing global robustness. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the robustness and efficiency of our DG-Mamba compared with the state-of-the-art baselines against adversarial attacks.

Scaling Law Hypothesis for Multimodal Model

We propose a scaling law hypothesis for multimodal models processing text, audio, images, and video within a shared token and embedding space. Our framework predicts model performance based on modality-specific compression and tokenization efficiency, extending established scaling laws from text-based decoder models to mixed-modality systems. We explore whether leveraging more training data in multiple modalities can reduce the size of the multimodal model, enabling efficient deployment on resource-constrained devices.

GC-Bench: An Open and Unified Benchmark for Graph Condensation

Graph condensation (GC) has recently garnered considerable attention due to its ability to reduce large-scale graph datasets while preserving their essential properties. The core concept of GC is to create a smaller, more manageable graph that retains the characteristics of the original graph. Despite the proliferation of graph condensation methods developed in recent years, there is no comprehensive evaluation and in-depth analysis, which creates a great obstacle to understanding the progress in this field. To fill this gap, we develop a comprehensive Graph Condensation Benchmark (GC-Bench) to analyze the performance of graph condensation in different scenarios systematically. Specifically, GC-Bench systematically investigates the characteristics of graph condensation in terms of the following dimensions: effectiveness, transferability, and complexity. We comprehensively evaluate 12 state-of-the-art graph condensation algorithms in node-level and graph-level tasks and analyze their performance in 12 diverse graph datasets. Further, we have developed an easy-to-use library for training and evaluating different GC methods to facilitate reproducible research. The GC-Bench library is available at https://github.com/RingBDStack/GC-Bench.

Beyond Human Preferences: Exploring Reinforcement Learning Trajectory Evaluation and Improvement through LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader application of RL within game environments characterized by diverse constraints. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) presents a pioneering framework that capitalizes on human preferences as pivotal reward signals, thereby circumventing the need for meticulous reward engineering. However, obtaining preference data from human experts is costly and inefficient, especially under conditions marked by complex constraints. To tackle this challenge, we propose a LLM-enabled automatic preference generation framework named LLM4PG , which harnesses the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to abstract trajectories, rank preferences, and reconstruct reward functions to optimize conditioned policies. Experiments on tasks with complex language constraints demonstrated the effectiveness of our LLM-enabled reward functions, accelerating RL convergence and overcoming stagnation caused by slow or absent progress under original reward structures. This approach mitigates the reliance on specialized human knowledge and demonstrates the potential of LLMs to enhance RL's effectiveness in complex environments in the wild.