DaRec: A Disentangled Alignment Framework for Large Language Model and Recommender System

Benefiting from the strong reasoning capabilities, Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in recommender systems. Various efforts have been made to distill knowledge from LLMs to enhance collaborative models, employing techniques like contrastive learning for representation alignment. In this work, we prove that directly aligning the representations of LLMs and collaborative models is sub-optimal for enhancing downstream recommendation tasks performance, based on the information theorem. Consequently, the challenge of effectively aligning semantic representations between collaborative models and LLMs remains unresolved. Inspired by this viewpoint, we propose a novel plug-and-play alignment framework for LLMs and collaborative models. Specifically, we first disentangle the latent representations of both LLMs and collaborative models into specific and shared components via projection layers and representation regularization. Subsequently, we perform both global and local structure alignment on the shared representations to facilitate knowledge transfer. Additionally, we theoretically prove that the specific and shared representations contain more pertinent and less irrelevant information, which can enhance the effectiveness of downstream recommendation tasks. Extensive experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method is superior to existing state-of-the-art algorithms.

Dual Test-time Training for Out-of-distribution Recommender System

Deep learning has been widely applied in recommender systems, which has achieved revolutionary progress recently. However, most existing learning-based methods assume that the user and item distributions remain unchanged between the training phase and the test phase. However, the distribution of user and item features can naturally shift in real-world scenarios, potentially resulting in a substantial decrease in recommendation performance. This phenomenon can be formulated as an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) recommendation problem. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Dual Test-Time-Training framework for OOD Recommendation, termed DT3OR. In DT3OR, we incorporate a model adaptation mechanism during the test-time phase to carefully update the recommendation model, allowing the model to specially adapt to the shifting user and item features. To be specific, we propose a self-distillation task and a contrastive task to assist the model learning both the user's invariant interest preferences and the variant user/item characteristics during the test-time phase, thus facilitating a smooth adaptation to the shifting features. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the rationale behind our dual test-time training framework. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to address OOD recommendation via a test-time-training strategy. We conduct experiments on three datasets with various backbones. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of DT3OR compared to other state-of-the-art baselines.

Test-Time Training on Graphs with Large Language Models

Graph Neural Networks have demonstrated great success in various fields of multimedia. However, the distribution shift between the training and test data challenges the effectiveness of GNNs. To mitigate this challenge, Test-Time Training (TTT) has been proposed as a promising approach. Traditional TTT methods require a demanding unsupervised training strategy to capture the information from test to benefit the main task. Inspired by the great annotation ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), we propose to enhance the test-time training on graphs with LLMs as annotators. In this paper, we design a novel Test-Time Training pipeline, LLMTTT, which conducts the test-time adaptation under the annotations by LLMs on a carefully-selected node set. Specifically, LLMTTT introduces a hybrid active node selection strategy that considers not only node diversity and representativeness, but also prediction signals from the pre-trained model. Given annotations from LLMs, a two-stage training strategy is designed to tailor the test-time model with the limited and noisy labels. A theoretical analysis ensures the validity of our method and extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LLMTTT can achieve a significant performance improvement compared to existing Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization methods.

Boosting the Power of Small Multimodal Reasoning Models to Match Larger Models with Self-Consistency Training

Multimodal reasoning is a challenging task that requires models to reason across multiple modalities to answer questions. Existing approaches have made progress by incorporating language and visual modalities into a two-stage reasoning framework, separating rationale generation from answer inference. However, these approaches often fall short due to the inadequate quality of the generated rationales. In this work, we delve into the importance of rationales in model reasoning. We observe that when rationales are completely accurate, the model's accuracy significantly improves, highlighting the need for high-quality rationale generation. Motivated by this, we propose MC-CoT, a self-consistency training strategy that generates multiple rationales and answers, subsequently selecting the most accurate through a voting process. This approach not only enhances the quality of generated rationales but also leads to more accurate and robust answers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves model performance across various benchmarks. Remarkably, we show that even smaller base models, when equipped with our proposed approach, can achieve results comparable to those of larger models, illustrating the potential of our approach in harnessing the power of rationales for improved multimodal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/chengtan9907/mc-cot.

DealMVC: Dual Contrastive Calibration for Multi-view Clustering

Benefiting from the strong view-consistent information mining capacity, multi-view contrastive clustering has attracted plenty of attention in recent years. However, we observe the following drawback, which limits the clustering performance from further improvement. The existing multi-view models mainly focus on the consistency of the same samples in different views while ignoring the circumstance of similar but different samples in cross-view scenarios. To solve this problem, we propose a novel Dual contrastive calibration network for Multi-View Clustering (DealMVC). Specifically, we first design a fusion mechanism to obtain a global cross-view feature. Then, a global contrastive calibration loss is proposed by aligning the view feature similarity graph and the high-confidence pseudo-label graph. Moreover, to utilize the diversity of multi-view information, we propose a local contrastive calibration loss to constrain the consistency of pair-wise view features. The feature structure is regularized by reliable class information, thus guaranteeing similar samples have similar features in different views. During the training procedure, the interacted cross-view feature is jointly optimized at both local and global levels. In comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches, the comprehensive experimental results obtained from eight benchmark datasets provide substantial validation of the effectiveness and superiority of our algorithm. We release the code of DealMVC at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/DealMVC on GitHub.

CONVERT:Contrastive Graph Clustering with Reliable Augmentation

Contrastive graph node clustering via learnable data augmentation is a hot research spot in the field of unsupervised graph learning. The existing methods learn the sampling distribution of a pre-defined augmentation to generate data-driven augmentations automatically. Although promising clustering performance has been achieved, we observe that these strategies still rely on pre-defined augmentations, the semantics of the augmented graph can easily drift. The reliability of the augmented view semantics for contrastive learning can not be guaranteed, thus limiting the model performance. To address these problems, we propose a novel CONtrastiVe Graph ClustEring network with Reliable AugmenTation (COVERT). Specifically, in our method, the data augmentations are processed by the proposed reversible perturb-recover network. It distills reliable semantic information by recovering the perturbed latent embeddings. Moreover, to further guarantee the reliability of semantics, a novel semantic loss is presented to constrain the network via quantifying the perturbation and recovery. Lastly, a label-matching mechanism is designed to guide the model by clustering information through aligning the semantic labels and the selected high-confidence clustering pseudo labels. Extensive experimental results on seven datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. We release the code and appendix of CONVERT at https://github.com/xihongyang1999/CONVERT on GitHub.

Asymmetric double-winged multi-view clustering network for exploring Diverse and Consistent Information

In unsupervised scenarios, deep contrastive multi-view clustering (DCMVC) is becoming a hot research spot, which aims to mine the potential relationships between different views. Most existing DCMVC algorithms focus on exploring the consistency information for the deep semantic features, while ignoring the diverse information on shallow features. To fill this gap, we propose a novel multi-view clustering network termed CodingNet to explore the diverse and consistent information simultaneously in this paper. Specifically, instead of utilizing the conventional auto-encoder, we design an asymmetric structure network to extract shallow and deep features separately. Then, by aligning the similarity matrix on the shallow feature to the zero matrix, we ensure the diversity for the shallow features, thus offering a better description of multi-view data. Moreover, we propose a dual contrastive mechanism that maintains consistency for deep features at both view-feature and pseudo-label levels. Our framework's efficacy is validated through extensive experiments on six widely used benchmark datasets, outperforming most state-of-the-art multi-view clustering algorithms.

Efficient Multi-View Graph Clustering with Local and Global Structure Preservation

Anchor-based multi-view graph clustering (AMVGC) has received abundant attention owing to its high efficiency and the capability to capture complementary structural information across multiple views. Intuitively, a high-quality anchor graph plays an essential role in the success of AMVGC. However, the existing AMVGC methods only consider single-structure information, i.e., local or global structure, which provides insufficient information for the learning task. To be specific, the over-scattered global structure leads to learned anchors failing to depict the cluster partition well. In contrast, the local structure with an improper similarity measure results in potentially inaccurate anchor assignment, ultimately leading to sub-optimal clustering performance. To tackle the issue, we propose a novel anchor-based multi-view graph clustering framework termed Efficient Multi-View Graph Clustering with Local and Global Structure Preservation (EMVGC-LG). Specifically, a unified framework with a theoretical guarantee is designed to capture local and global information. Besides, EMVGC-LG jointly optimizes anchor construction and graph learning to enhance the clustering quality. In addition, EMVGC-LG inherits the linear complexity of existing AMVGC methods respecting the sample number, which is time-economical and scales well with the data size. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.

Reinforcement Graph Clustering with Unknown Cluster Number

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group nodes into disjoint clusters by neural networks in an unsupervised manner, has attracted great attention in recent years. Although the performance has been largely improved, the excellent performance of the existing methods heavily relies on an accurately predefined cluster number, which is not always available in the real-world scenario. To enable the deep graph clustering algorithms to work without the guidance of the predefined cluster number, we propose a new deep graph clustering method termed Reinforcement Graph Clustering (RGC). In our proposed method, cluster number determination and unsupervised representation learning are unified into a uniform framework by the reinforcement learning mechanism. Concretely, the discriminative node representations are first learned with the contrastive pretext task. Then, to capture the clustering state accurately with both local and global information in the graph, both node and cluster states are considered. Subsequently, at each state, the qualities of different cluster numbers are evaluated by the quality network, and the greedy action is executed to determine the cluster number. In order to conduct feedback actions, the clustering-oriented reward function is proposed to enhance the cohesion of the same clusters and separate the different clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method. The source code of RGC is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/RGC and a collection (papers, codes and, datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering on Github.

Dink-Net: Neural Clustering on Large Graphs

Deep graph clustering, which aims to group the nodes of a graph into disjoint clusters with deep neural networks, has achieved promising progress in recent years. However, the existing methods fail to scale to the large graph with million nodes. To solve this problem, a scalable deep graph clustering method (Dink-Net) is proposed with the idea of dilation and shrink. Firstly, by discriminating nodes, whether being corrupted by augmentations, representations are learned in a self-supervised manner. Meanwhile, the cluster centres are initialized as learnable neural parameters. Subsequently, the clustering distribution is optimized by minimizing the proposed cluster dilation loss and cluster shrink loss in an adversarial manner. By these settings, we unify the two-step clustering, i.e., representation learning and clustering optimization, into an end-to-end framework, guiding the network to learn clustering-friendly features. Besides, Dink-Net scales well to large graphs since the designed loss functions adopt the mini-batch data to optimize the clustering distribution even without performance drops. Both experimental results and theoretical analyses demonstrate the superiority of our method. Compared to the runner-up, Dink-Net achieves 9.62% NMI improvement on the ogbn-papers100M dataset with 111 million nodes and 1.6 billion edges. The source code is released at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Dink-Net. Besides, a collection (papers, codes, and datasets) of deep graph clustering is shared at https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Deep-Graph-Clustering.