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Jialong Chen

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5 papers

2 author rows

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

GLNCD: Graph-Level Novel Category Discovery

Bowen Deng
Lele Fu
Sheng Huang
Tianchi Liao
Jialong Chen
Zhang Tao
Chuan Chen

Graph classification has long assumed a closed-world setting, limiting its applicability to real-world scenarios where new categories often emerge. To address this limitation, we introduce Graph-Level Novel Category Discovery (GLNCD), a new task aimed at identifying unseen graph categories without supervision from novel classes. We first adapt classical Novel Category Discovery (NCD) methods for images to the graph domain and evaluate these baseline methods on four diverse graph datasets curated for the GLNCD task. Our analysis reveals that these methods suffer a notable performance degradation compared to their image-based counterparts, due to two key challenges: (1) insufficient utilization of structural information in graph self-supervised learning (SSL), and (2) ineffective pseudo-labeling strategies based on ranking statistics (RS) that neglect graph structure. To alleviate these issues, we propose ProtoFGW-NCD, a framework consisting of two core components: ProtoFGW-CL, a novel graph SSL framework, and FGW-RS, a structure-aware pseudo-labeling method. Both components employ a differentiable Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) distance to effectively compare graphs by incorporating structural information. These components are built upon learnable prototype graphs, which enable efficient, parallel FGW-based graph comparisons and capture representative patterns within graph datasets. Experiments on four GLNCD benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ProtoFGW-NCD.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Graph Neural Ricci Flow: Evolving Feature from a Curvature Perspective

Jialong Chen
Bowen Deng 0002
Zhen Wang 0036
Chuan Chen 0001
Zibin Zheng

Differential equations provide a dynamical perspective for understanding and designing graph neural networks (GNNs). By generalizing the discrete Ricci flow (DRF) to attributed graphs, we can leverage a new paradigm for the evolution of node features with the help of curvature. We show that in the attributed graphs, DRF guarantees a vital property: The curvature of each edge concentrates toward zero over time. This property leads to two interesting consequences: 1) graph Dirichlet energy with bilateral bounds and 2) data-independent curvature decay rate. Based on these theoretical results, we propose the Graph Neural Ricci Flow (GNRF), a novel curvature-aware continuous-depth GNN. Compared to traditional curvature-based graph learning methods, GNRF is not limited to a specific curvature definition. It computes and adjusts time-varying curvature efficiently in linear time. We also empirically illustrate the operating mechanism of GNRF and verify that it performs excellently on diverse datasets.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Self-Assembling Graph Perceptrons

Jialong Chen
Tong Wang
Bowen Deng
Luonan Chen
Zibin Zheng
Chuan Chen

Inspired by the workings of biological brains, humans have designed artificial neural networks (ANNs), sparking profound advancements across various fields. However, the biological brain possesses high plasticity, enabling it to develop simple, efficient, and powerful structures to cope with complex external environments. In contrast, the superior performance of ANNs often relies on meticulously crafted architectures, which can make them vulnerable when handling complex inputs. Moreover, overparameterization often characterizes the most advanced ANNs. This paper explores the path toward building streamlined and plastic ANNs. Firstly, we introduce the Graph Perceptron (GP), which extends the most fundamental ANN, the Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Subsequently, we incorporate a self-assembly mechanism on top of GP called Self-Assembling Graph Perceptron (SAGP). During training, SAGP can autonomously adjust the network's number of neurons and synapses and their connectivity. SAGP achieves comparable or even superior performance with only about 5% of the size of an MLP. We also demonstrate the SAGP's advantages in enhancing model interpretability and feature selection.

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ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Towards Understanding Parametric Generalized Category Discovery on Graphs

Bowen Deng 0002
Lele Fu
Jialong Chen
Sheng Huang
Tianchi Liao
Zhang Tao
Chuan Chen 0001

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to identify both known and novel categories in unlabeled data by leveraging knowledge from old classes. However, existing methods are limited to non-graph data; lack theoretical foundations to answer When and how known classes can help GCD. We introduce the Graph GCD task; provide the first rigorous theoretical analysis of parametric GCD. By quantifying the relationship between old and new classes in the embedding space using the Wasserstein distance W, we derive the first provable GCD loss bound based on W. This analysis highlights two necessary conditions for effective GCD. However, we uncover, through a Pairwise Markov Random Field perspective, that popular graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods inherently violate these conditions. To address this limitation, we propose SWIRL, a novel GCL method for GCD. Experimental results validate our (theoretical) findings and demonstrate SWIRL’s effectiveness.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

A Swiss Army Knife for Heterogeneous Federated Learning: Flexible Coupling via Trace Norm

Tianchi Liao
Lele Fu
Jialong Chen
Zhen Wang
Zibin Zheng
Chuan Chen

The heterogeneity issue in federated learning (FL) has attracted increasing attention, which is attempted to be addressed by most existing methods. Currently, due to systems and objectives heterogeneity, enabling clients to hold models of different architectures and tasks of different demands has become an important direction in FL. Most existing FL methods are based on the homogeneity assumption, namely, different clients have the same architectural models with the same tasks, which are unable to handle complex and multivariate data and tasks. To flexibly address these heterogeneity limitations, we propose a novel federated multi-task learning framework with the help of tensor trace norm, FedSAK. Specifically, it treats each client as a task and splits the local model into a feature extractor and a prediction head. Clients can flexibly choose shared structures based on heterogeneous situations and upload them to the server, which learns correlations among client models by mining model low-rank structures through tensor trace norm. Furthermore, we derive convergence and generalization bounds under non-convex settings. Evaluated on 6 real-world datasets compared to 13 advanced FL models, FedSAK demonstrates superior performance.

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