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Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Jun Wang, Fuyuan CAO, ZhixinXue, Xingwang Zhao, Jiye Liang

Existing early and late fusion frameworks in multimodal learning are confronted with the fundamental challenge of modality imbalance, wherein disparities in representational capacities induce inter-modal competition during training. Current research methodologies primarily rely on modality-level contribution assessments to measure gaps in representational capabilities and enhance poorly learned modalities, overlooking the dynamic variations of modality contributions across individual samples. To address this, we propose a Causal-aware Modality valuation approach for Balanced multimodal learning (CMoB). We define a benefit function based on Shannon's theory of informational uncertainty to evaluate the changes in the importance of samples across different stages of multimodal training. Inspired by human cognitive science, we propose a causal-aware modality contribution quantification method from a causal perspective to capture fine-grained changes in modality contribution degrees within samples. In the iterative training of multimodal learning, we develop targeted modal enhancement strategies that dynamically select and optimize modalities based on real-time evaluation of their contribution variations across training samples. Our method enhances the discriminative ability of key modalities and the learning capacity of weak modalities while achieving fine-grained balance in multimodal learning. Extensive experiments on benchmark multimodal datasets and multimodal frameworks demonstrate the superiority of our CMoB approach for balanced multimodal learning.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Lingzhi Shen, Xiaohao Cai, Yunfei Long, Imran Razzak, Guanming Chen, Shoaib Jameel

Cultural awareness in language models is the capacity to understand and adapt to diverse cultural contexts. However, most existing approaches treat culture as static background knowledge, overlooking its dynamic and evolving nature. This limitation reduces their reliability in downstream tasks that demand genuine cultural sensitivity. In this work, we introduce CALM, a novel framework designed to endow language models with cultural self-awareness. CALM disentangles task semantics from explicit cultural concepts and latent cultural signals, shaping them into structured cultural clusters through contrastive learning. These clusters are then aligned via cross-attention to establish fine-grained interactions among related cultural features and are adaptively integrated through a Mixture-of-Experts mechanism along culture-specific dimensions. The resulting unified representation is fused with the model's original knowledge to construct a culturally grounded internal identity state, which is further enhanced through self-prompted reflective learning, enabling continual adaptation and self-correction. Experiments on the benchmark datasets demonstrate that CALM outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Computer Vision · Classification and Understanding

Shuqiao Liang, Jian Liu, Chen Renzhang, Quanlong Guan

The increasing realism of synthetic images generated by advanced models such as VAEs, GANs, and LDMs poses significant challenges for synthetic image detection. To address this issue, we explore two artifact types introduced during the generation process: (1) latent distribution deviations and (2) decoding-induced smoothing effects, which manifest as inconsistencies in local textures, edges, and color transitions. Leveraging local pixel dependencies (LPD) properties rooted in Markov Random Fields, we reconstruct synthetic images using neighboring pixel information to expose disruptions in texture continuity and edge coherence. Building upon LPD, we propose FerretNet, a lightweight neural network with only 1.1M parameters that delivers efficient and robust synthetic image detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FerretNet—trained exclusively on the 4-class ProGAN dataset—achieves an average accuracy of 97.1% on an open-world benchmark comprising 22 generative models. Our code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/xigua7105/FerretNet.

Computer Vision · Segmentation

Haijing Liu, Zhiyuan Song, Hefeng Wu, Tao Pu, Keze Wang, Liang Lin

Egocentric Referring Video Object Segmentation (Ego-RVOS) aims to segment the specific object actively involved in a human action, as described by a language query, within first-person videos. This task is critical for understanding egocentric human behavior. However, achieving such segmentation robustly is challenging due to ambiguities inherent in egocentric videos and biases present in training data. Consequently, existing methods often struggle, learning spurious correlations from skewed object-action pairings in datasets and fundamental visual confounding factors of the egocentric perspective, such as rapid motion and frequent occlusions. To address these limitations, we introduce Causal Ego-REferring Segmentation (CERES), a plug-in causal framework that adapts strong, pre-trained RVOS backbones to the egocentric domain. CERES implements dual-modal causal intervention: applying backdoor adjustment principles to counteract language representation biases learned from dataset statistics, and leveraging front-door adjustment concepts to address visual confounding by intelligently integrating semantic visual features with geometric depth information guided by causal principles, creating representations more robust to egocentric distortions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CERES achieves state-of-the-art performance on Ego-RVOS benchmarks, highlighting the potential of applying causal reasoning to build more reliable models for broader egocentric video understanding.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Yuxiang Bao, Huijie Liu, xun gao, Huan Fu, Guoliang Kang

Naive DDIM inversion process usually suffers from a trajectory deviation issue, i.e., the latent trajectory during reconstruction deviates from the one during inversion. To alleviate this issue, previous methods either learn to mitigate the deviation or design cumbersome compensation strategy to reduce the mismatch error, exhibiting substantial time and computation cost. In this work, we present a nearly free-lunch method (named FreeInv) to address the issue more effectively and efficiently. In FreeInv, we randomly transform the latent representation and keep the transformation the same between the corresponding inversion and reconstruction time-step. It is motivated from a statistical perspective that an ensemble of DDIM inversion processes for multiple trajectories yields a smaller trajectory mismatch error on expectation. Moreover, through theoretical analysis and empirical study, we show that FreeInv performs an efficient ensemble of multiple trajectories. FreeInv can be freely integrated into existing inversion-based image and video editing techniques. Especially for inverting video sequences, it brings more significant fidelity and efficiency improvements. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation on PIE benchmark and DAVIS dataset shows that FreeInv remarkably outperforms conventional DDIM inversion, and is competitive among previous state-of-the-art inversion methods, with superior computation efficiency.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Zhenyu Yang, Kairui Zhang, Yuhang Hu, Bing Wang, Shengsheng Qian, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Weiming Dong, Changsheng Xu

Despite significant progress in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) for offline video understanding, existing online Video-LLMs typically struggle to simultaneously process continuous frame-by-frame inputs and determine optimal response timing, often compromising real-time responsiveness and narrative coherence. To address these limitations, we introduce LiveStar, a pioneering live streaming assistant that achieves always-on proactive responses through adaptive streaming decoding. Specifically, LiveStar incorporates: (1) a training strategy enabling incremental video-language alignment for variable-length video streams, preserving temporal consistency across dynamically evolving frame sequences; (2) a response-silence decoding framework that determines optimal proactive response timing via a single forward pass verification; (3) memory-aware acceleration via peak-end memory compression for online inference on 10+ minute videos, combined with streaming key-value cache to achieve 1.53× faster inference. We also construct an OmniStar dataset, a comprehensive dataset for training and benchmarking that encompasses 15 diverse real-world scenarios and 5 evaluation tasks for online video understanding. Extensive experiments across three benchmarks demonstrate LiveStar's state-of-the-art performance, achieving an average 19.5\% improvement in semantic correctness with 18.1\% reduced timing difference compared to existing online Video-LLMs, while improving FPS by 12.0\% across all five OmniStar tasks. Our model and dataset can be accessed at https://github.com/yzy-bupt/LiveStar.

Applications · Time Series

Zenan Ying, Zhi Zheng, huijun hou, Tong Xu, Qi Liu, Jinke Wang, Wei Chen

Multivariate time series (MTS) classification has attracted increasing attention across various domains. Existing methods either decompose MTS into separate univariate series, ignoring inter-variable dependencies, or jointly model all variables, which may lead to over-smoothing and loss of semantic structure. These limitations become particularly pronounced when dealing with complex and heterogeneous variable types. To address these challenges, we propose SwinGroupNet (SGN), which explores a novel perspective for constructing variable interaction and temporal dependency. Specifically, SGN processes multi-scale time series using (1) Variable Group Embedding (VGE), which partitions variables into groups and performs independent group-wise embedding; (2) Multi-Scale Group Window Mixing (MGWM), which reconstructs variable interactions by modeling both intra-group and inter-group dependencies while extracting multi-scale temporal features; and (3) Periodic Window Shifting and Merging (PWSM), which exploits inherent periodic patterns to enable hierarchical temporal interaction and feature aggregation. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmark datasets from multiple domains demonstrate that SGN consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, with an average improvement of 4.2% over existing methods. We release the source code at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SGN.

Applications · Health

Suhas BN, Andrew Sherrill, Rosa I. Arriaga, Christopher Wiese, Saeed Abdullah

The advancement of AI systems for mental health support is hindered by limited access to therapeutic conversation data, particularly for trauma treatment. We present Thousand Voices of Trauma, a synthetic benchmark dataset of 3,000 therapy conversations based on Prolonged Exposure therapy protocols for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The dataset comprises 500 unique cases, each explored through six conversational perspectives that mirror the progression of therapy from initial anxiety to peak distress to emotional processing. We incorporated diverse demographic profiles (ages 18-80, M=49.3, 49.4\% male, 44.4\% female, 6.2\% non-binary), 20 trauma types, and 10 trauma-related behaviors using deterministic and probabilistic generation methods. Analysis reveals realistic distributions of trauma types (witnessing violence 10.6\%, bullying 10.2\%) and symptoms (nightmares 23.4\%, substance abuse 20.8\%). Clinical experts validated the dataset's therapeutic fidelity, highlighting its emotional depth while suggesting refinements for greater authenticity. We also developed an emotional trajectory benchmark with standardized metrics for evaluating model responses. This privacy-preserving dataset addresses critical gaps in trauma-focused mental health data, offering a valuable resource for advancing both patient-facing applications and clinician training tools.

Computer Vision · Classification and Understanding

Menghao Zhang, Huazheng Wang, Pengfei Ren, Kangheng Lin, Qi Qi, Haifeng Sun, Zirui Zhuang, Lei Zhang, Jianxin Liao, Jingyu Wang

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) pretrained on large-scale multimodal data have shown promising capabilities in Video Anomaly Detection (VAD). However, their ability to reason about abnormal events based on scene semantics remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate LVLMs’ behavior in VAD from a visual-textual co-occurrence perspective, focusing on whether their decisions are driven by statistical shortcuts between visual instances and textual phrases. By analyzing visual-textual co-occurrence in pretraining data and conducting experiments under different data settings, we reveal a hallucination phenomenon: LVLMs tend to rely on co-occurrence patterns between visual instances and textual phrases associated with either normality or abnormality, leading to incorrect predictions when these high-frequency objects appear in semantically mismatched contexts. To address this issue, we propose VAD-DPO, a direct preference optimization method supervised with counter-example pairs. By constructing visually similar but semantically contrasting video clips, VAD-DPO encourages the model to align its predictions with the semantics of scene rather than relying on co-occurrence patterns. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VAD-DPO in enhancing both anomaly detection and reasoning performance, particularly in scene-dependent scenarios.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Jing Wang, Ao Ma, Ke Cao, Jun Zheng, Jiasong Feng, Zhanjie Zhang, Wanyuan Pang, Xiaodan Liang

Recent advances in text-to-video (T2V) generation, exemplified by models such as Sora and Kling, have demonstrated strong potential for constructing world simulators. However, existing T2V models still struggle to understand abstract physical principles and to generate videos that faithfully obey physical laws. This limitation stems primarily from the lack of explicit physical guidance, caused by a significant gap between high-level physical concepts and the generative capabilities of current models. To address this challenge, we propose the **W**orld **S**imulator **A**ssistant (**WISA**), a novel framework designed to systematically decompose and integrate physical principles into T2V models. Specifically, WISA decomposes physical knowledge into three hierarchical levels: textual physical descriptions, qualitative physical categories, and quantitative physical properties. It then incorporates several carefully designed modules—such as Mixture-of-Physical-Experts Attention (MoPA) and a Physical Classifier—to effectively encode these attributes and enhance the model’s adherence to physical laws during generation. In addition, most existing video datasets feature only weak or implicit representations of physical phenomena, limiting their utility for learning explicit physical principles. To bridge this gap, we present **WISA-80K**, a new dataset comprising 80,000 human-curated videos that depict 17 fundamental physical laws across three core domains of physics: dynamics, thermodynamics, and optics. Experimental results show that WISA substantially improves the alignment of T2V models (such as CogVideoX and Wan2.1) with real-world physical laws, achieving notable gains on the VideoPhy benchmark. Our data, code, and models are available in the [Project Page](https://wisav1.github.io/WISA/).

Applications · Chemistry and Drug Discovery

Baoyi He, Luotian Yuan, Ying Wei, Fei Wu

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has opened new opportunities for AI-driven chemical problem solving. However, existing chemical LLMs are typically tailored to specific task formats or narrow domains, limiting their capacity to integrate knowledge and generalize across tasks. Model merging offers a promising route for efficiently combining specialized LLMs into a unified model without access to original training data, which is urgently needed in the chemical domain where in-house data and privacy preservation are critical. However, effective model merging in the chemical domain poses unique challenges: (1) significant disparities among chemical LLMs due to task-specific specialization, and (2) a highly imbalanced distribution of chemical LLMs in targeted downstream tasks, where some are over-benchmarked while others remain underexplored. These challenges intensify model inconsistencies such as parameter interference and accumulated fine-tuning noise, which collectively hinder effective model merging. To this end, we propose Curriculum Model Merging (CMM), a curriculum-based framework that progressively merges expert chemical LLMs in a moderate and continual manner. CMM aims to harmonize their inconsistencies while meantime preserve their domain-specific expertise. Comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that CMM effectively consolidates task-specific expertise and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 29.03\% in terms of overall average performance. Moreover, CMM facilitates chemical knowledge generalization across prediction and generative tasks without sacrificing robustness, exhibiting promising merging performance under both expert-abundant and expert-sparse scenarios.

Applications · Time Series

Jinyu Cai, Yuan Xie, Glynnis Lim, Yifang Yin, Roger Zimmermann, See-Kiong Ng

Detecting anomalies in multivariate time-series data is an essential task across various domains, yet there are unresolved challenges such as (1) severe class imbalance between normal and anomalous data due to rare anomaly availability in the real world; (2) limited adaptability of the static graph-based methods to dynamically changing inter-variable correlations; and (3) neglect of subtle anomalies due to overfitting to normal patterns in reconstruction-based methods. To tackle these issues, we propose Self-Perturbed Anomaly-Aware Graph Dynamics (SPAGD), a framework for time-series anomaly detection. SPAGD employs a self-perturbation module that generates self-perturbed time series from the reconstruction process of normal ones, which provide auxiliary signals to alleviate class imbalance during training. Concurrently, an anomaly-aware graph construction module is proposed to dynamically adjust the graph structure by leveraging the reconstruction residuals of self-perturbed time series, thereby emphasizing the inter-variable disruptions induced by anomalous candidates. A unified spatio-temporal anomaly detection module then integrates both spatial and temporal convolutions to train a classifier that distinguishes normal time series from the auxiliary self-perturbed samples. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SPAGD compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Computer Vision · Image and Video Generation

Zengxi Zhang, Junchen Ge, Zhiying Jiang, Miao Zhang, Jinyuan Liu

Deep learning-based image stitching methods have achieved promising performance on conventional stitching datasets. However, real-world scenarios may introduce challenges such as complex weather conditions, illumination variations, and dynamic scene motion, which severely degrade image quality and lead to significant misalignment in stitching results. To solve this problem, we propose an adverse condition-tolerant image stitching network, dubbed ACDIS. We first introduce a bidirectional consistency learning framework, which ensures reliable alignment through an iterative optimization paradigm that integrates differentiable image restoration and Gaussian-distribute encoded homography estimation. Subsequently, we incorporate motion constraints into the seamless composition network to produce robust stitching results without interference from moving scenes. We further propose the first adverse scene image stitching dataset, which covers diverse parallax and scenes under low-light, haze, and underwater environments. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method can generate visually pleasing stitched images under adverse conditions, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

Social Aspects · Trustworthy Machine Learning

Hao Cheng, Erjia Xiao, Jing Shao, Yichi Wang, Le Yang, Chao Shen, Philip Torr, Jindong Gu, Renjing Xu

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive zero-shot performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Integrating various modality encoders further expands their capabilities, giving rise to Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) that process not only text but also visual and auditory modality inputs. However, these advanced capabilities may also pose significant safety problems, as models can be exploited to generate harmful or inappropriate content through jailbreak attack. While prior work has extensively explored how manipulating textual or visual modality inputs can circumvent safeguards in LLMs and MLLMs, the vulnerability of audio-specific Jailbreak on Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) remains largely underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{Jailbreak-AudioBench}, which consists of the Toolbox, curated Dataset, and comprehensive Benchmark. The Toolbox supports not only text-to-audio conversion but also various editing techniques for injecting audio hidden semantics. The curated Dataset provides diverse explicit and implicit jailbreak audio examples in both original and edited forms. Utilizing this dataset, we evaluate multiple state-of-the-art LALMs and establish the most comprehensive Jailbreak benchmark to date for audio modality. Finally, Jailbreak-AudioBench establishes a foundation for advancing future research on LALMs safety alignment by enabling the in-depth exposure of more powerful jailbreak threats, such as query-based audio editing, and by facilitating the development of effective defense mechanisms.

General Machine Learning · Everything Else

Hanyang Li, Yuheng Jia, Hui LIU, Junhui Hou

Recent deep clustering models have produced impressive clustering performance. However, a common issue with existing methods is the disparity between global and local feature structures. While local structures typically show strong consistency and compactness within class samples, global features often present intertwined boundaries and poorly separated clusters. Motivated by this observation, we propose **DCBoost, a parameter-free plug-in** designed to enhance the global feature structures of current deep clustering models. By harnessing reliable local structural cues, our method aims to elevate clustering performance effectively. Specifically, we first identify high-confidence samples through adaptive $k$-nearest neighbors-based consistency filtering, aiming to select a sufficient number of samples with high label reliability to serve as trustworthy anchors for self-supervision. Subsequently, these samples are utilized to compute a discriminative loss, which promotes both intra-class compactness and inter-class separability, to guide network optimization. Extensive experiments across various benchmark datasets showcase that our DCBoost significantly improves the clustering performance of diverse existing deep clustering models. Notably, our method improves the performance of current state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., ProPos) by more than 3\% and amplifies the silhouette coefficient by over $7\times$. **Code is available at [https://github.com/l-h-y168/DCBoost](https://github.com/l-h-y168/DCBoost).**

General Machine Learning · Transfer, Multitask and Meta-learning

Yuyang Huang, Yabo Chen, Junyu Zhou, Wenrui Dai, XIAOPENG ZHANG, Junni Zou, Hongkai Xiong, Qi Tian

Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) is a challenging task that tackles domain shifts using only a pre-trained source model and unlabeled target data. Existing SFDA methods are restricted by the fundamental limitation of source-target domain discrepancy. Non-generation SFDA methods suffer from unreliable pseudo-labels in challenging scenarios with large domain discrepancies, while generation-based SFDA methods are evidently degraded due to enlarged domain discrepancies in creating pseudo-source data. To address this limitation, we propose a novel generation-based framework named Diffusion-Driven Progressive Target Manipulation (DPTM) that leverages unlabeled target data as references to reliably generate and progressively refine a pseudo-target domain for SFDA. Specifically, we divide the target samples into a trust set and a non-trust set based on the reliability of pseudo-labels to sufficiently and reliably exploit their information. For samples from the non-trust set, we develop a manipulation strategy to semantically transform them into the newly assigned categories, while simultaneously maintaining them in the target distribution via a latent diffusion model. Furthermore, we design a progressive refinement mechanism that progressively reduces the domain discrepancy between the pseudo-target domain and the real target domain via iterative refinement. Experimental results demonstrate that DPTM outperforms existing methods by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four prevailing SFDA benchmark datasets with different scales. Remarkably, DPTM can significantly enhance the performance by up to 18.6\% in scenarios with large source-target gaps.

Probabilistic Methods · Bayesian Models and Methods

Mélodie Monod, Alessandro Micheli, Samir Bhatt

We introduce *NeuralSurv*, the first deep survival model to incorporate Bayesian uncertainty quantification. Our non‑parametric, architecture‑agnostic framework flexibly captures time‑varying covariate–risk relationships in continuous time via a novel two‑stage data‑augmentation scheme, for which we establish theoretical guarantees. For efficient posterior inference, we introduce a mean‑field variational algorithm with coordinate‑ascent updates that scale linearly in model size. By locally linearizing the Bayesian neural network, we obtain full conjugacy and derive all coordinate updates in closed form. In experiments, *NeuralSurv* delivers superior calibration compared to state-of-the-art deep survival models, while matching or exceeding their discriminative performance across both synthetic benchmarks and real-world datasets. Our results demonstrate the value of Bayesian principles in data‑scarce regimes by enhancing model calibration and providing robust, well‑calibrated uncertainty estimates for the survival function.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Xinyang Liu, Junming Hou, Chenxu Wu, Xiaofeng Cong, zihao chen, Shangqi Deng, Junling Li, Liang-Jian Deng, Bo Liu

Over the past decades, pansharpening has contributed greatly to numerous remote sensing applications, with methods evolving from theoretically grounded models to deep learning approaches and their hybrids. Though promising, existing methods rarely address pansharpening through the lens of underlying physical imaging processes. In this work, we revisit the spectral imaging mechanism and propose a novel physics‐informed neural operator framework for pansharpening, termed PINO, which faithfully models the end‐to‐end electro‐optical sensor process. Specifically, PINO operates as: (1) First, a spatial-spectral encoder pair is introduced to aggregate multi-granularity high-resolution panchromatic (PAN) and low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) features. (2) Subsequently, an iterative neural integral process utilizes these fused spatial-spectral characteristics to learn a continuous radiance field $L_i(x, y, \lambda)$ over spatial coordinates and wavelength, effectively emulating band-wise spectral integration. (3) Finally, the learned radiance field is modulated by the sensor’s spectral responsivity $R_b(\lambda)$ to produce physically consistent spatial–spectral fusion products. This physics-grounded fusion paradigm offers a principled solution for reconstructing high-resolution multispectral and hyperspectral images in accordance with sensor imaging physics, effectively harnessing the unique advantages of spectral data to better uncover real-world characteristics. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art fusion algorithms, achieving reduced spectral aberrations and finer spatial textures. Furthermore, extension to hyperspectral (HS) data demonstrates its generalizability and universality. The code will be available upon potential acceptance.

Computer Vision · Vision Models & Multimodal

Jingjing Jiang, Chongjie Si, Jun Luo, Hanwang Zhang, Chao Ma

This paper presents a pioneering exploration of reinforcement learning (RL) via group relative policy optimization for unified multimodal large language models (ULMs), aimed at simultaneously reinforcing generation and understanding capabilities. Through systematic pilot studies, we uncover the significant potential of ULMs to enable the synergistic co-evolution of dual capabilities within a shared policy optimization framework. Building on this insight, we introduce \textbf{CoRL}, a \textbf{Co}-\textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning framework comprising a unified RL stage for joint optimization and a refined RL stage for task-specific enhancement. With the proposed CoRL, our resulting model, \textbf{ULM-R1}, achieves average improvements of 7\% on three text-to-image generation datasets and 23\% on nine multimodal understanding benchmarks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of CoRL and highlight the substantial benefits of reinforcement learning in facilitating cross-task synergy and optimization for ULMs. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/mm-vl/ULM-R1}.

Deep Learning · Graph Neural Networks

Ming Gu, Zhuonan Zheng, Sheng Zhou, Meihan Liu, Jiawei Chen, Qiaoyu Tan, Liangcheng Li, Jiajun Bu

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved great success but are often considered to be challenged by varying levels of homophily in graphs. Recent empirical studies have surprisingly shown that homophilic GNNs can perform well across datasets of different homophily levels with proper hyperparameter tuning, but the underlying theory and effective architectures remain unclear. To advance GNN universality across varying homophily, we theoretically revisit GNN message passing and uncover a novel \textit{smoothness-generalization dilemma}, where increasing hops inevitably enhances smoothness at the cost of generalization. This dilemma hinders learning in high-order homophilic neighborhoods and all heterophilic ones, where generalization is critical due to complex neighborhood class distributions that are sensitive to shifts induced by noise or sparsity. To address this, we introduce the Inceptive Graph Neural Network (IGNN) built on three simple yet effective design principles, which alleviate the dilemma by enabling distinct hop-wise generalization alongside improved overall generalization with adaptive smoothness. Benchmarking against 30 baselines demonstrates IGNN's superiority and reveals notable universality in certain homophilic GNN variants. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/galogm/IGNN}{https://github.com/galogm/IGNN}.