papers

Publications (62)

cs.IR2025

SimAug: Enhancing Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models for Dense and Balanced Data Augmentation

Yuying Zhao, Xiaodong Yang, Huiyuan Chen +4

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are extensively used in collaborative filtering due to their impressive effectiveness. These systems depend on interaction data to learn user and item e…

cs.LG2026

A Survey of Mamba

Haohao Qu, Liangbo Ning, Rui An +5

As one of the most representative DL techniques, Transformer architecture has empowered numerous advanced models, especially the large language models (LLMs) that comprise billions…

cs.LG2022

Improving Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Mitigating Sensitive Attribute Leakage

Yu Wang, Yuying Zhao, Yushun Dong +3

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great power in learning node representations on graphs. However, they may inherit historical prejudices from training data, leading to discr…

cs.CV2026

Inverse-LLaVA: Rethinking Multimodal Alignment via Text-to-Vision Mapping

Xuhui Zhan, Tyler Derr

The paper introduces Inverse-LLaVA, a multimodal model that projects text embeddings into continuous visual representation space and fuses them within transformer layers, reducing…

#multimodal alignment#text-to-vision mapping#transformer fusion#learning efficiency
cs.SI2019

Deep Adversarial Network Alignment

Tyler Derr, Hamid Karimi, Xiaorui Liu +2

Network alignment, in general, seeks to discover the hidden underlying correspondence between nodes across two (or more) networks when given their network structure. However, most…

cs.LG2024

WelQrate: Defining the Gold Standard in Small Molecule Drug Discovery Benchmarking

Yunchao Liu, Ha Dong, Xin Wang +8

While deep learning has revolutionized computer-aided drug discovery, the AI community has predominantly focused on model innovation and placed less emphasis on establishing best b…

cs.CL2026

ReAD: Reinforcement-Guided Capability Distillation for Large Language Models

Xueqi Cheng, Xugui Zhou, Tyler Derr +1

Capability distillation applies knowledge distillation to selected model capabilities, aiming to compress a large language model (LLM) into a smaller one while preserving the abili…

cs.CR2025

Ensemble Privacy Defense for Knowledge-Intensive LLMs against Membership Inference Attacks

Haowei Fu, Bo Ni, Han Xu +3

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Supervised Finetuning (SFT) have become the predominant paradigms for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge for di…

cs.IR2025

Towards Bridging Review Sparsity in Recommendation with Textual Edge Graph Representation

Leyao Wang, Xutao Mao, Xuhui Zhan +5

Textual reviews enrich recommender systems with fine-grained preference signals and enhanced explainability. However, in real-world scenarios, users rarely leave reviews, resulting…

cs.CV2023

Interpretable Visual Understanding with Cognitive Attention Network

Xuejiao Tang, Wenbin Zhang, Yi Yu +4

While image understanding on recognition-level has achieved remarkable advancements, reliable visual scene understanding requires comprehensive image understanding on recognition-l…

cs.IR2019

Deep Adversarial Social Recommendation

Wenqi Fan, Tyler Derr, Yao Ma +3

Recent years have witnessed rapid developments on social recommendation techniques for improving the performance of recommender systems due to the growing influence of social netwo…

cs.LG2022

ChemicalX: A Deep Learning Library for Drug Pair Scoring

Benedek Rozemberczki, Charles Tapley Hoyt, Anna Gogleva +9

In this paper, we introduce ChemicalX, a PyTorch-based deep learning library designed for providing a range of state of the art models to solve the drug pair scoring task. The prim…

cs.CR2026

Quantifying the Generalization Gap: A New Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Graph-Based Android Malware Classification

Ngoc N. Tran, Anwar Said, Waseem Abbas +2

While graph-based Android malware classifiers achieve over 94% accuracy on standard benchmarks, they exhibit a significant generalization gap under distribution shift, suffering up…

cs.CL2019

Say What I Want: Towards the Dark Side of Neural Dialogue Models

Haochen Liu, Tyler Derr, Zitao Liu +1

Neural dialogue models have been widely adopted in various chatbot applications because of their good performance in simulating and generalizing human conversations. However, there…

cs.CL2025

Personalization of Large Language Models: A Survey

Zhehao Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Branislav Kveton +18

Personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has recently become increasingly important with a wide range of applications. Despite the importance and recent progress, most exist…

cs.AI2026

SaVe-TAG: LLM-based Interpolation for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs

Leyao Wang, Yu Wang, Bo Ni +4

Real-world graph data often follows long-tailed distributions, making it difficult for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generalize well across both head and tail classes. Recent adv…

cs.LG2022

Fairness and Explainability: Bridging the Gap Towards Fair Model Explanations

Yuying Zhao, Yu Wang, Tyler Derr

While machine learning models have achieved unprecedented success in real-world applications, they might make biased/unfair decisions for specific demographic groups and hence resu…

cs.LG2023

A Survey on Privacy in Graph Neural Networks: Attacks, Preservation, and Applications

Yi Zhang, Yuying Zhao, Zhaoqing Li +5

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have gained significant attention owing to their ability to handle graph-structured data and the improvement in practical applications. However, many o…

cs.SI2023

Enhanced Graph Neural Networks with Ego-Centric Spectral Subgraph Embeddings Augmentation

Anwar Said, Mudassir Shabbir, Tyler Derr +2

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown remarkable merit in performing various learning-based tasks in complex networks. The superior performance of GNNs often correlates with the…

cs.SI2018

Signed Graph Convolutional Network

Tyler Derr, Yao Ma, Jiliang Tang

Due to the fact much of today's data can be represented as graphs, there has been a demand for generalizing neural network models for graph data. One recent direction that has show…

cs.AI2024

Towards Trustworthy Knowledge Graph Reasoning: An Uncertainty Aware Perspective

Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Lu Cheng +2

Recently, Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have been successfully coupled with Large Language Models (LLMs) to mitigate their hallucinations and enhance their reasoning capability, such as i…

cs.SI2025

Amplifying Your Social Media Presence: Personalized Influential Content Generation with LLMs

Yuying Zhao, Yu Wang, Xueqi Cheng +5

The remarkable advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the content generation process in social media, offering significant convenience in writing tasks. H…

cs.SI2018

Signed Network Modeling Based on Structural Balance Theory

Tyler Derr, Charu Aggarwal, Jiliang Tang

The modeling of networks, specifically generative models, have been shown to provide a plethora of information about the underlying network structures, as well as many other benefi…

cs.CL2026

SOMA: Efficient Multi-turn LLM Serving via Small Language Model

Xueqi Cheng, Qiong Wu, Zhengyi Zhou +3

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in multi-turn dialogue settings where preserving conversational context across turns is essential. A standard serving practic…

cs.IR2024

Can One Embedding Fit All? A Multi-Interest Learning Paradigm Towards Improving User Interest Diversity Fairness

Yuying Zhao, Minghua Xu, Huiyuan Chen +5

Recommender systems (RSs) have gained widespread applications across various domains owing to the superior ability to capture users' interests. However, the complexity and nuanced…

cs.LG2021

Graph Feature Gating Networks

Wei Jin, Xiaorui Liu, Yao Ma +3

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have received tremendous attention due to their power in learning effective representations for graphs. Most GNNs follow a message-passing scheme where…

cs.CL2025

Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey

Bo Ni, Zheyuan Liu, Leyao Wang +17

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an advanced technique designed to address the challenges of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC). By integrating context retriev…

cs.CV2026

Graph2Video: Leveraging Video Models to Model Dynamic Graph Evolution

Hua Liu, Yanbin Wei, Fei Xing +3

Dynamic graphs are common in real-world systems such as social media, recommender systems, and traffic networks. Existing dynamic graph models for link prediction often fall short…

cs.LG2021

Node Similarity Preserving Graph Convolutional Networks

Wei Jin, Tyler Derr, Yiqi Wang +3

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved tremendous success in various real-world applications due to their strong ability in graph representation learning. GNNs explore the grap…

cs.AI2026

Sparse Personalized Text Generation with Multi-Trajectory Reasoning

Bo Ni, Haowei Fu, Qinwen Ge +10

As Large Language Models (LLMs) advance, personalization has become a key mechanism for tailoring outputs to individual user needs. However, most existing methods rely heavily on d…

cs.SI2025

BTS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tie Strength Prediction

Xueqi Cheng, Catherine Yang, Yuying Zhao +3

The rapid rise of online social networks underscores the need to understand the heterogeneous strengths of online relationships. Yet, efforts to assess tie strength (TS) are hinder…

cs.LG2019

Attacking Graph Convolutional Networks via Rewiring

Yao Ma, Suhang Wang, Tyler Derr +2

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have boosted the performance of many graph related tasks such as node classification and graph classification. Recent researches show that graph neural…

cs.LG2021

Distance-wise Prototypical Graph Neural Network in Node Imbalance Classification

Yu Wang, Charu Aggarwal, Tyler Derr

Recent years have witnessed the significant success of applying graph neural networks (GNNs) in learning effective node representations for classification. However, current GNNs ar…

cs.CL2026

Assessing Capabilities of Large Language Models in Social Media Analytics: A Multi-task Quest

Ramtin Davoudi, Kartik Thakkar, Nazanin Donyapour +2

In this study, we present the first comprehensive evaluation of modern LLMs - including GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5-Turbo, Gemini 1.5 Pro, DeepSeek-V3, Llama 3.2, and BERT - across thre…

cs.IR2024

Leveraging Opposite Gender Interaction Ratio as a Path towards Fairness in Online Dating Recommendations Based on User Sexual Orientation

Yuying Zhao, Yu Wang, Yi Zhang +3

Online dating platforms have gained widespread popularity as a means for individuals to seek potential romantic relationships. While recommender systems have been designed to impro…

cs.CL2020

Chat as Expected: Learning to Manipulate Black-box Neural Dialogue Models

Haochen Liu, Zhiwei Wang, Tyler Derr +1

Recently, neural network based dialogue systems have become ubiquitous in our increasingly digitalized society. However, due to their inherent opaqueness, some recently raised conc…

cs.LG2024

Large Generative Graph Models

Yu Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Namyong Park +6

Large Generative Models (LGMs) such as GPT, Stable Diffusion, Sora, and Suno are trained on a huge amount of language corpus, images, videos, and audio that are extremely diverse f…

cs.CL2026

A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation

Bo Ni, Leyao Wang, Yu Wang +27

User simulation has long played a vital role in computer science due to its potential to support a wide range of applications. Language, as the primary medium of human communicatio…

cs.LG2025

Defining and Benchmarking a Data-Centric Design Space for Brain Graph Construction

Qinwen Ge, Roza G. Bayrak, Anwar Said +3

The construction of brain graphs from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data plays a crucial role in enabling graph machine learning for neuroimaging. However, current p…

cs.IR2024

Knowledge Graph-based Session Recommendation with Adaptive Propagation

Yu Wang, Amin Javari, Janani Balaji +3

Session-based recommender systems (SBRSs) predict users' next interacted items based on their historical activities. While most SBRSs capture purchasing intentions locally within e…

cs.LG2024

Robust Graph Neural Networks via Unbiased Aggregation

Zhichao Hou, Ruiqi Feng, Tyler Derr +1

The adversarial robustness of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been questioned due to the false sense of security uncovered by strong adaptive attacks despite the existence of nume…

cs.LG2026

Scaffold-Aware Generative Augmentation and Reranking for Enhanced Virtual Screening

Xin Wang, Yu Wang, Yunchao Liu +2

Ligand-based virtual screening (VS) is an essential step in drug discovery that evaluates large chemical libraries to identify compounds that potentially bind to a therapeutic targ…

cs.LG2022

On Structural Explanation of Bias in Graph Neural Networks

Yushun Dong, Song Wang, Yu Wang +2

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown satisfying performance in various graph analytical problems. Hence, they have become the \emph{de facto} solution in a variety of decision-m…

cs.IR2022

Attacking Black-box Recommendations via Copying Cross-domain User Profiles

Wenqi Fan, Tyler Derr, Xiangyu Zhao +5

Recently, recommender systems that aim to suggest personalized lists of items for users to interact with online have drawn a lot of attention. In fact, many of these state-of-the-a…

cs.LG2025

A Survey of Graph Unlearning

Anwar Said, Ngoc N. Tran, Yuying Zhao +4

Graph unlearning emerges as a crucial advancement in the pursuit of responsible AI, providing the means to remove sensitive data traces from trained models, thereby upholding the \…

cs.SI2019

Balance in Signed Bipartite Networks

Tyler Derr, Cassidy Johnson, Yi Chang +1

A large portion of today's big data can be represented as networks. However, not all networks are the same, and in fact, for many that have additional complexities to their structu…

cs.LG2024

Edge Classification on Graphs: New Directions in Topological Imbalance

Xueqi Cheng, Yu Wang, Yunchao Liu +3

Recent years have witnessed the remarkable success of applying Graph machine learning (GML) to node/graph classification and link prediction. However, edge classification task that…

cs.CL2026

Reasoning-Based Personalized Generation for Users with Sparse Data

Bo Ni, Branislav Kveton, Samyadeep Basu +14

Large Language Model (LLM) personalization holds great promise for tailoring responses by leveraging personal context and history. However, real-world users usually possess sparse…

cs.LG2024

FT-AED: Benchmark Dataset for Early Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection

Austin Coursey, Junyi Ji, Marcos Quinones-Grueiro +5

Early and accurate detection of anomalous events on the freeway, such as accidents, can improve emergency response and clearance. However, existing delays and errors in event ident…

cs.SI2026

Adverse Online Social Interactions: A Multi-Level Evolutionary Analysis of Local Patterns, Diffusion, and Community Disruption

Xueqi Cheng, Qinwen Ge, Hamid Karimi +2

Adverse social interactions (ASIs) can shape how online communities evolve over the time. However, structural-based ASIs and content-based ASIs are often studied separately and at…

cs.LG2023

A Topological Perspective on Demystifying GNN-Based Link Prediction Performance

Yu Wang, Tong Zhao, Yuying Zhao +4

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown great promise in learning node embeddings for link prediction (LP). While numerous studies aim to improve the overall LP performance of GNNs…

cs.LG2022

Imbalanced Graph Classification via Graph-of-Graph Neural Networks

Yu Wang, Yuying Zhao, Neil Shah +1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved unprecedented success in identifying categorical labels of graphs. However, most existing graph classification problems with GNNs follow…

cs.LG2020

Self-supervised Learning on Graphs: Deep Insights and New Direction

Wei Jin, Tyler Derr, Haochen Liu +4

The success of deep learning notoriously requires larger amounts of costly annotated data. This has led to the development of self-supervised learning (SSL) that aims to alleviate…

cs.CL2023

Knowledge Graph Prompting for Multi-Document Question Answering

Yu Wang, Nedim Lipka, Ryan A. Rossi +3

The `pre-train, prompt, predict' paradigm of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success in open-domain question answering (OD-QA). However, few works explore this…

cs.SI2020

Road to the White House: Analyzing the Relations Between Mainstream and Social Media During the U.S. Presidential Primaries

Aaron Brookhouse, Tyler Derr, Hamid Karimi +2

Information is crucial to the function of a democratic society where well-informed citizens can make rational political decisions. While in the past political entities were primari…

cs.IR2024

Fairness and Diversity in Recommender Systems: A Survey

Yuying Zhao, Yu Wang, Yunchao Liu +3

Recommender systems are effective tools for mitigating information overload and have seen extensive applications across various domains. However, the single focus on utility goals…

cs.LG2024

NeuroGraph: Benchmarks for Graph Machine Learning in Brain Connectomics

Anwar Said, Roza G. Bayrak, Tyler Derr +4

Machine learning provides a valuable tool for analyzing high-dimensional functional neuroimaging data, and is proving effective in predicting various neurological conditions, psych…

cs.LG2020

Characterizing the Decision Boundary of Deep Neural Networks

Hamid Karimi, Tyler Derr, Jiliang Tang

Deep neural networks and in particular, deep neural classifiers have become an integral part of many modern applications. Despite their practical success, we still have limited kno…

cs.IR2024

Augmenting Textual Generation via Topology Aware Retrieval

Yu Wang, Nedim Lipka, Ruiyi Zhang +6

Despite the impressive advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating text, they are often limited by the knowledge contained in the input and prone to producing inaccu…

cs.LG2021

Tree Decomposed Graph Neural Network

Yu Wang, Tyler Derr

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved significant success in learning better representations by performing feature propagation and transformation iteratively to leverage neigh…

cs.SI2017

Signed Node Relevance Measurements

Tyler Derr, Chenxing Wang, Suhang Wang +1

In this paper, we perform the initial and comprehensive study on the problem of measuring node relevance on signed social networks. We design numerous relevance measurements for si…

cs.IR2023

Collaboration-Aware Graph Convolutional Network for Recommender Systems

Yu Wang, Yuying Zhao, Yi Zhang +1

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been successfully adopted in recommender systems by virtue of the message-passing that implicitly captures collaborative effect. Nevertheless, mos…