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Yang Luo, Qingni Shen, Zhonghai Wu

This paper addresses the role engineering problem for RESTful applications and proposes a role engineering method based on multi-head attention and Retrieval Augmented Generation called MA-RAG. The method first performs fine-grained control flow analysis on the system source code to extract permission information of API handlers. Then, using basic blocks as units, it employs pre-trained code models to convert the source code into semantic vectors, which are stored in the retrieval augmented generation model. On this basis, a call chain structure tree is constructed with permissions as the center, utilizing the multi-head attention mechanism to aggregate semantic information of different code granularities from bottom to top, with each attention head corresponding to a role engineering objective. Finally, the root vectors of each permission tree are subjected to self-supervised clustering to adaptively determine the number of roles and perform division. We evaluated MA-RAG on 284 real-world software systems, and the results show that compared with other methods, MA-RAG can significantly save time overhead, reduce the number of generated roles, lower the role permission overlap rate, and improve the interpretability score.

Anchen Lin, Weikun Wang, Haijun Han, Fanwei Zhu, Qi Ma, Zengwei Zheng, Binbin Zhou

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a prevalent and severe mental disease. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)-based diagnostic methods, which analyze Functional Connectivity (FC) to identify abnormal functional connections, have shown promise as biomarker-based approaches for diagnosing depression. However, the high costs of fMRI data result in small sample sizes, hindering the effective identification of abnormal FC patterns. Moreover, existing methods often overlook the potential benefits of incorporating domain knowledge into their models. In this paper, we propose KnowMDD, a novel knowledge-guided cross contrastive learning framework for MDD diagnosis. By incorporating domain knowledge and employing data augmentation, KnowMDD addresses data sparsity while improving robustness and interpretability. Specifically, multiple atlases are used to construct complementary brain graph representations. The default mode network, closely associated with depression, is introduced into the contrastive learning paradigm for diverse subgraph augmentations, while an attention mechanism captures global semantic relationships between brain regions. Based on them, a cross contrastive learning is designed to learn robust representations for accurate diagnosis. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of KnowMDD, which outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We also develop a demonstration system to show its practical application.

Chaozhuo Li, Tianqi Yang, Litian Zhang, Xi Zhang

The prediction of information popularity propagation is critical for applications such as recommendation systems, targeted advertising, and social media trend analysis. Traditional approaches primarily rely on historical cascade data, often sacrificing timeliness for prediction accuracy. These methods capture aggregate diffusion patterns but fail to account for the complex temporal dynamics of early-stage propagation. In this paper, we introduce Diffusion Guided Propagation Augmentation(DGPA), a novel framework designed to improve early-stage popularity prediction. DGPA models cascade dynamics by leveraging a generative approach, where a temporal conditional interpolator serves as a noising process and forecasting as a denoising process. By iteratively generating cascade representations through a sampling procedure, DGPA effectively incorporates the evolving time steps of diffusion, significantly enhancing prediction timeliness and accuracy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets from Twitter, Weibo, and APS demonstrate that DGPA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in early-stage popularity prediction.

Shuman Zhuang, Zhihao Wu, Yuhong Chen, Zihan Fang, Jiali Yin, Ximeng Liu

Facing the growing diversity of multi-view data, multi-view graph-based models have made encouraging progress in handling multi-view data modeled as graphs. Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) naturally fits multi-view graph data by treating their inherent views as augmentations. However, the development of GCL on multi-view graph data is still in the infant stage. Challenges remain in designing strategies that coordinate preprocessing and contrastive learning, and in developing model architectures that automatically meet the needs of diverse views. To tackle these, we propose a framework named CAMEL, which refines consistency learning by introducing a tailored contrastive paradigm for multi-view graphs. Initially, we theoretically analyze the positive effect of edge-dropping preprocessing on the consistency and quantify the factors that influence it. Paired with a learnable model architecture, the proposed adaptive edge-dropping preprocessing strategy is guided by dynamic topology, making the heterogeneity of views more controllable and better aligned with contrastive learning. Finally, we design a neighborhood consistency multi-view contrastive objective that enhances consistency information interaction by extending positive samples. Extensive experiments on downstream tasks, including node classification and clustering, validate the superiority of our proposed model.

Xinning Zhou, Chengyang Ying, Yao Feng, Hang Su, Jun Zhu

Visual reinforcement learning agents typically face serious performance declines in real-world applications caused by visual distractions. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning the policy's representations with hand-crafted augmentations. In this work, we propose Self-Consistent Model-based Adaptation (SCMA), a novel method that fosters robust adaptation without modifying the policy. By transferring cluttered observations to clean ones with a denoising model, SCMA can mitigate distractions for various policies as a plug-and-play enhancement. To optimize the denoising model in an unsupervised manner, we derive an unsupervised distribution matching objective with a theoretical analysis of its optimality. We further present a practical algorithm to optimize the objective by estimating the distribution of clean observations with a pre-trained world model. Extensive experiments on multiple visual generalization benchmarks and real robot data demonstrate that SCMA effectively boosts performance across various distractions and exhibits better sample efficiency.

Xiaoling Zhou, Wei Ye, Zhemg Lee, Shikun Zhang

Spurious correlations pose a significant challenge to the robustness of statistical models, often resulting in unsatisfactory performance when distributional shifts occur between training and testing data. To address this, we propose to transfer knowledge across spuriously correlated categories within the deep feature space. Specifically, samples' deep features are enriched using semantic vectors extracted from both their respective category distributions and those of their spuriously correlated counterparts, enabling the generation of diverse class-specific factual and counterfactual augmented deep features. We then demonstrate the feasibility of optimizing a surrogate robust loss instead of conducting explicit augmentations by considering an infinite number of augmentations. As spurious correlations between samples and classes evolve during training, we develop a reinforcement learning-based training framework called Dynamic Knowledge Transfer (DKT) to facilitate dynamic adjustments in the direction and intensity of knowledge transfer. Within this framework, a target network is trained using the derived robust loss to enhance robustness, while a strategy network generates sample-wise augmentation strategies in a dynamic and automatic way. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the DKT framework in mitigating spurious correlations, achieving state-of-the-art performance across three typical learning scenarios susceptible to such correlations.

Xinhao Zhang, Jinghan Zhang, Fengran Mo, Dongjie Wang, Yanjie Fu, Kunpeng Liu

Humans excel in analogical learning and knowledge transfer and, more importantly, possess a unique understanding of identifying appropriate sources of knowledge. From a model's perspective, this presents a unique challenge. If models could autonomously retrieve knowledge relevant for transfer or decision-making to solve problems, they would transition from passively acquiring to actively accessing and learning from knowledge. However, filling models with knowledge is relatively straightforward—it simply requires more training and accessible knowledge bases. The more complex task is teaching models about which knowledge can be analogized and transferred. Therefore, we design a knowledge augmentation method, LEKA, for knowledge transfer that actively searches for suitable knowledge sources that can enrich the target domain's knowledge. This LEKA method extracts key information from the target domain's textual information, retrieves pertinent data from external data libraries, and harmonizes retrieved data with the target domain data in feature space and marginal probability measures. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments across various domains and demonstrate significant improvements over traditional methods in automating data alignment and optimizing transfer learning outcomes.

Shan Zhang, Liangrui Ren, Jun Wang, Yanyu Xu, Carlotta Domeniconi, Guoxian Yu

Multiple clustering approaches aim to partition complex data in different ways. These methods often exhibit a one-to-many relationship in their results, and relying solely on the data context may be insufficient to capture the patterns relevant to the user. User’s expectation is key for the multiple clustering task. Two main challenges exist: identifying the significant features to represent user interests and aligning those interests with the clustering results. To address this issue, we propose Contrastive Multiple Clusterings (CMClusts), which extends contrastive learning to multiple clustering by elevating traditional instance-level contrast to clustering-level contrast. Furthermore, CMClusts integrates user expectations or interests by extracting desired features through tailored data augmentations, enabling the model to effectively capture user-relevant clustering features. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that CMClusts can generate interpretable and high-quality clusterings, which reflect different user interests.

Chusheng Zeng, Bocheng Wang, Jinghui Yuan, Mulin Chen, Xuelong Li

Recent advances in unsupervised deep graph clustering have been significantly promoted by contrastive learning. Despite the strides, most graph contrastive learning models face challenges: 1) graph augmentation is used to improve learning diversity, but commonly used random augmentation methods may destroy inherent semantics and cause noise; 2) the fixed positive and negative sample selection strategy ignores the difficulty distribution of samples when deal with complex real data, thereby impeding the model’s capability to capture fine-grained patterns and trapping the model in sub-optimal for clustering. To reduce these problems, we propose the Clustering-guided Curriculum Graph contrastive Learning (CurGL) framework. CurGL uses clustering entropy as the guidance of the following graph augmentation and contrastive learning. Specifically, according to the clustering entropy, the intra-class edges and important features are emphasized in augmentation. Then, a multi-task curriculum learning scheme is proposed, which employs the clustering guidance to shift the focus from the discrimination task to the clustering task. In this way, the sample selection strategy of contrastive learning can be adjusted adaptively from early to late stage, which enhances the model's flexibility for complex data structure. Experimental results demonstrate that CurGL has achieved excellent performance compared to state-of-the-art competitors.

Fan Xu, Wuyang Chen, Wei Gao

Decision trees and forests have achieved successes in various real applications, most working with all testing classes known in training data. In this work, we focus on learning with augmented class via forests, where an augmented class may appear in testing data yet not in training data. We incorporate information of augmented class into trees' splitting, that is, augmented Gini impurity, a new splitting criterion is introduced to exploit some unlabeled data from testing distribution. We then develop the Learning with Augmented Class via Forests (short for LACForest) approach, which constructs shallow forests according to the augmented Gini impurity and then splits forests with pseudo-labeled augmented instances for better performance. We also develop deep neural forests via an optimization objective based on our augmented Gini impurity, which essentially utilizes the representation power of neural networks for forests. Theoretically, we present the convergence analysis for our augmented Gini impurity, and we finally conduct experiments to evaluate our approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/nju-xuf/LACForest.

Ren Wang, Haoliang Sun, Yuxiu Lin, Xinxin Zhang, Yilong Yin

Meta-learning methods typically follow a two-loop framework, where each loop potentially suffers from notorious overfitting, hindering rapid adaptation and generalization to new tasks. Existing methods address this by enhancing the mutual-exclusivity or diversity of training samples, but these data manipulation strategies are data-dependent and insufficiently flexible. This work proposes a data-independent Meta-Gradient Augmentation (MGAug) method from the perspective of gradient regularization. The key idea is first to break the rote memories by network pruning to address memorization overfitting in the inner loop, then use the gradients of pruned sub-networks to augment meta-gradients, alleviating overfitting in the outer loop. Specifically, we explore three pruning strategies, including random width pruning, random parameter pruning, and a newly proposed catfish pruning that measures a Meta-Memorization Carrying Amount (MMCA) score for each parameter and prunes high-score ones to break rote memories. The proposed MGAug is theoretically guaranteed by the generalization bound from the PAC-Bayes framework. Extensive experiments on multiple few-shot learning benchmarks validate MGAug's effectiveness and significant improvement over various meta-baselines.

Qianqian Wang, Bowen Zhao, Zhengming Ding, Xiangdong Zhang, Quanxue Gao

Hypergraph Clustering has gained significant attention due to its capability of capturing high order structural information. Among different approaches, contrastive learning-based methods leverage self-supervised learning and data augmentation, exhibiting impressive performance. However, most of them come with the following limitations: 1) Augmentation strategies like feature dropout can potentially disrupt the intrinsic clustering structure of hypergraphs. 2) High computational demands hinder their real-world application. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective Hypergraph Clustering Network framework (HCN). Specifically, HCN replaces the hypergraph convolution operation with smoothing preprocessing, which avoids high computational complexity. Besides, to retain intrinsic structure, it develops two key modules: the self-diagonal consistency module and the structure alignment mod ule. They respectively align the similarity matrix with the identity matrix and the structural affinity matrix, which ensures intra-cluster compact ness and inter-cluster separability. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets demonstrate HCN’s superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Kaixiang Wang, Xiaojian Ding, Fan Yang

Multi-view multi-label data often suffers from incomplete feature views and label noise. This paper is the first to address both challenges simultaneously, rectifying critical deficiencies in existing methodologies that inadequately extract and fuse high-order structural correlations across views while lacking robust solutions to mitigate label noise. We introduce a dynamic multiple high-order correlations fusion with noise filtering, specifically designed for incomplete multi-view noisy-label learning. By capitalizing on a dynamic multi-hypergraph neural network, inspired by the principles of ensemble learning, we adeptly capture and integrate high-order correlations among samples from different views. The model's capability is further augmented through an innovative hypergraph fusion technique based on random walk theory, which empowers it to seamlessly amalgamate both structural and feature information. Moreover, we propose sophisticated noise-filtering matrices that are tightly embedded within the hypergraph neural network, devised to counteract the detrimental impact of label noise. Recognizing that label noise perturbs the data distribution in the label space, these filtering matrices exploit the distributional disparities between feature and label spaces. The high-order structural information derived from both domains underpins the learning and efficacy of the noise-filtering matrices. Empirical evaluations on benchmark datasets unequivocally demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms contemporary state-of-the-art techniques.

Yuming Qiao, Yuechen Wang, Dan Meng, Haonan Lu, Zhenyu Yang, Xudong Zhang

Language-Visual Large Models (LVLMs) have made significant strides in enhancing visual understanding capabilities. However, these models often struggle with knowledge-based visual tasks due to constrains in their pre-training data scope and timeliness. Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods can effectively solve the problem but primarily rely on user queries, limiting their applicability in scenarios without explicit language input. To overcome these challenges, we introduce MsRAG, a knowledge-augmented captioning framework designed to effectively retrieve and utilize external real-world knowledge, particularly in the absence of user queries, and perform dense captioning for subjects. MsRAG comprises three key components: (1) Parallel Visual Search Module. It retrieves fine-grained object-level knowledge using both online visual search engines and offline domain-knowledge databases, enhancing the robustness and richness of retrieved information. (2) Prompt Templates Pool. The prompt pool dynamically assigns appropriate prompts based on retrieved information, optimizing LVLMs' ability to leverage relevant data under complex RAG conditions. (3) Visual-RAG Alignment Module, which employs a novel visual prompting method to bridge the modality gap between textual RAG content and corresponding visual objects, enabling precise alignment of visual elements with their text-format RAG content. To validate the effectiveness of MsRAG, we conducted a series of qualitative and quantitative experiments. The evaluation results demonstrate the superiority of MsRAG over other methods.

Zhuang Qi, Sijin Zhou, Lei Meng, Han Hu, Han Yu, Xiangxu Meng

Attribute bias in federated learning (FL) typically leads local models to optimize inconsistently due to the learning of non-causal associations, resulting degraded performance. Existing methods either use data augmentation for increasing sample diversity or knowledge distillation for learning invariant representations to address this problem. However, they lack a comprehensive analysis of the inference paths, and the interference from confounding factors limits their performance. To address these limitations, we propose the Federated Deconfounding and Debiasing Learning (FedDDL) method. It constructs a structured causal graph to analyze the model inference process, and performs backdoor adjustment to eliminate confounding paths. Specifically, we design an intra-client deconfounding learning module for computer vision tasks to decouple background and objects, generating counterfactual samples that establish a connection between the background and any label, which stops the model from using the background to infer the label. Moreover, we design an inter-client debiasing learning module to construct causal prototypes to reduce the proportion of the background in prototype components. Notably, it bridges the gap between heterogeneous representations via causal prototypical regularization. Extensive experiments on 2 benchmarking datasets demonstrate that FedDDL significantly enhances the model capability to focus on main objects in unseen data, leading to 4.5% higher Top-1 Accuracy on average over 9 state-of-the-art existing methods.

Zhiqiang Li, Jie Wang, Jianqing Liang, Junbiao Cui, Xingwang Zhao, Jiye Liang

The success of current graph contrastive learning methods largely relies on the choice of data augmentation and contrastive objectives. However, most existing methods tend to optimize these two components independently, neglecting their potential interplay, which leads to suboptimal quality of the learned embeddings. To address this issue, we propose Uncertainty-guided Graph Contrastive Learning (UGCL) from a unified perspective. The core of our method is the introduction of sample uncertainty, a critical metric that quantifies the degree of class ambiguity within individual samples. On this basis, we design a novel multi-scale data augmentation strategy and a weighted graph contrastive loss function, both of which significantly enhance the quality of embeddings. Theoretically, we demonstrate that UGCL can coordinate overall optimization objectives through uncertainty, and through experiments, we show that it improves the performance of tasks such as node classification, node clustering, and link prediction, thereby verifying the effectiveness of our method.

Hongchang Ke, Yan Ding, Lin Pan, Yang Chen, Jia Zhao

Dynamic edge networks revolutionize mobile edge computing by enabling real-time applications in intelligent transportation, augmented reality, and industrial Internet of Things (IoT). Efficient workload offloading in dynamic edge networks is crucial for addressing the increasing demands of time-varying workloads while contending with limited computational and communication resources. Existing deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based offloading decision-making schemes are inadequate for managing scenarios involving multiple workloads and edge servers, particularly when faced with time-varying workload arrivals and fluctuating channel states. To this end, we propose a flexible module weighted fusion DRL framework (DRL-MWF) for scalable and robust multi-workload offloading in edge environments. Unlike traditional monolithic networks, DRL-MWF employs a weighted fusion modular architecture that adapts flexibly to diverse workload distributions. Specifically, DRL-MWF introduces a state representation and normalization strategy to model state and workload characteristics, enabling precise and adaptive decision-making. Furthermore, we design two key mechanisms: a weighted policy correction method to stabilize learning and a prioritized experience replay with weighted importance sampling to accelerate convergence by emphasizing critical transitions. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that DRL-MWF consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. These results reveal DRL-MWF's potential to transform workload offloading in next-generation edge computing systems, ensuring high performance in dynamic scenarios.

Peiyan Hu, Haodong Feng, Yue Wang, Zhiming Ma

Neural operators have demonstrated promise in modeling and controlling systems governed by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Beyond PDEs, Stochastic Partial Differential Equations (SPDEs) play a critical role in modeling systems influenced by randomness, with applications in finance, physics, and beyond. However, controlling SPDE-governed systems remains a significant challenge. On the one hand, the regularity of the system's state (which can be intuitively understood as smoothness) deteriorates, making modeling and generalization more challenging. On the other hand, this stochasticity also renders control more unstable and thus less accurate. To address this gap, we propose the Model-Based Closed-Loop Control Algorithm (MB-CC), the first model-based closed-loop control method for SPDEs. MB-CC introduces two key innovations to enhance control robustness and efficiency: a Regularity Feature (RF) block and a closed-loop strategy with an operator-encoded policy network. The RF block, inspired by the regularity structure theory of SPDEs, addresses noise-induced irregularities by transforming the network's input—including the system state and noise-perturbed external forces—into a refined feature space for improved forward prediction. Compared to previous works using regularity features, we introduce a new parameterization, data augmentation, and extend the RF block as a plug-and-play component. Additionally, to achieve closed-loop control, we introduce an operator-encoded policy network to map the current state to optimal control, which integrates physical priors and swiftly makes decisions based on states returned by the environment. We conduct a systematic evaluation of MB-CC on two notable SPDEs, showcasing its effectiveness and efficiency. The ablation studies show its ability to handle stochasticity more effectively.

Zihan Fang, Zhiling Cai, Yuxuan Zheng, Shide Du, Yanchao Tan, Shiping Wang

Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) are vital for modeling entity relationships across various domains. Graph Neural Networks have become cornerstone for processing graph structures, while the integration of text attributes remains a prominent research. The development of Large Language Models (LLMs) provides new opportunities for advancing textual encoding in TAGs. However, LLMs face challenges in specialized domains due to their limited task-specific knowledge, and fine-tuning them for specific tasks demands significant resources. To cope with the above challenges, we propose HiTuner, a novel framework that leverages fine-tuned Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) with domain expertise as tuner to enhance the hierarchical LLM contextualized representations for modeling TAGs. Specifically, we first strategically select hierarchical hidden states of LLM to form a set of diverse and complementary descriptions as input for the sparse projection operator. Concurrently, a hybrid representation learning is developed to amalgamate the broad linguistic comprehension of LLMs with task-specific insights of the fine-tuned PLMs. Finally, HiTuner employs a confidence network to adaptively fuse the semantically-augmented representations. Empirical results across benchmark datasets spanning various domains validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/ZihanFang11/HiTuner

Zi-Jian Cheng, Zi-Yi Jia, Kun-Yang Yu, Zhi Zhou, Lan-Zhe Guo

Tabular data is widely adopted in various machine learning tasks. Current tabular data learning mainly focuses on closed environments, while in real-world applications, open environments are often encountered, where distribution shifts and feature decrements occur, leading to severe performance degradation. Previous studies have primarily focused on addressing distribution shifts, while feature decrements, a unique challenge in tabular data learning, have received relatively little attention. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study on the problem of Fully Test-Time Adaptation for Feature Decrement in Tabular Data. Through empirical analysis, we identify the suboptimality of existing missing-feature imputation methods and the limited applicability of missing-feature adaptation approaches. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method, LLM-IMPUTE, which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to impute missing features without relying on training data. Furthermore, we introduce Augmented-Training LLM (ATLLM), a method designed to enhance the robustness of feature decrements by simulating feature-decrement scenarios during the training phase to address tasks that can not be imputed by LLM-IMPUTE. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our proposal significantly improves both performance and robustness in missing feature imputation and adaptation scenarios.