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Minglai Shao

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12 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs

Xiaoxu Ma
Dong Li
Minglai Shao
Xintao Wu
Chen Zhao

Text-attributed graphs, where nodes are enriched with textual attributes, have become a powerful tool for modeling real-world networks such as citation, social, and transaction networks. However, existing methods for learning from these graphs often assume that the distributions of training and testing data are consistent. This assumption leads to significant performance degradation when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In this paper, we address the challenge of node-level OOD detection in text-attributed graphs, with the goal of maintaining accurate node classification while simultaneously identifying OOD nodes. We propose a novel approach, LLM-Enhanced Energy Contrastive Learning for Out-of-Distribution Detection in Text-Attributed Graphs (LECT), which integrates large language models (LLMs) and energy-based contrastive learning. The proposed method involves generating high-quality OOD samples by leveraging the semantic understanding and contextual knowledge of LLMs to create dependency-aware pseudo-OOD nodes, and applying contrastive learning based on energy functions to distinguish between in-distribution (IND) and OOD nodes. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated through extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets, where our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving both high classification accuracy and robust OOD detection capabilities.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

LLMTM: Benchmarking and Optimizing LLMs for Temporal Motif Analysis in Dynamic Graphs

Bing Hao
Minglai Shao
Zengyi Wo
Yunlong Chu
Yuhang Liu
Ruijie Wang

The widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) has motivated a growing interest in their capacity for processing dynamic graphs. Temporal motifs, as an elementary unit and important local property of dynamic graphs which can directly reflect anomalies and unique phenomena, are essential for understanding their evolutionary dynamics and structural features. However, leveraging LLMs for temporal motif analysis on dynamic graphs remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we systematically study LLM performance on temporal motif-related tasks. Specifically, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, LLMTM (Large Language Models in Temporal Motifs), which includes six tailored tasks across nine temporal motif types. We then conduct extensive experiments to analyze the impacts of different prompting techniques and LLMs (including nine models: openPangu-7B, the DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen series, Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and o3) on model performance. Informed by our benchmark findings, we develop a tool-augmented LLM agent that leverages precisely engineered prompts to solve these tasks with high accuracy. Nevertheless, the high accuracy of the agent incurs a substantial cost. To address this trade-off, we propose a simple yet effective structure-aware dispatcher that considers both the dynamic graph's structural properties and the LLM's cognitive load to intelligently dispatch queries between the standard LLM prompting and the more powerful agent. Our experiments demonstrate that the structure-aware dispatcher effectively maintains high accuracy while reducing cost.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Out-of-Distribution Detection with Positive and Negative Prompt Supervision Using Large Language Models

Zhixia He
Chen Zhao
Minglai Shao
Xintao Wu
Xujiang Zhao
Dong Li
Qin Tian
Linlin Yu

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is committed to delineating the classification boundaries between in-distribution (ID) and OOD images. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable OOD detection performance by integrating both visual and textual modalities. In this context, negative prompts are introduced to emphasize the dissimilarity between image features and prompt content. However, these prompts often include a broad range of non-ID features, which may result in suboptimal outcomes due to the capture of overlapping or misleading information. To address this issue, we propose Positive and Negative Prompt Supervision, which encourages negative prompts to capture inter-class features and transfers this semantic knowledge to the visual modality to enhance OOD detection performance. Our method begins with class-specific positive and negative prompts initialized by large language models (LLMs). These prompts are subsequently optimized, with positive prompts focusing on features within each class, while negative prompts highlight features around category boundaries. Additionally, a graph-based architecture is employed to aggregate semantic-aware supervision from the optimized prompt representations and propagate it to the visual branch, thereby enhancing the performance of the energy-based OOD detector. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K, across eight OOD datasets and five different LLMs, demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

SkillGen: Learning Domain Skills for In-Context Sequential Decision Making

Ruomeng Ding
Wei Cheng
Minglai Shao
Chen Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to sequential decision-making through in-context learning (ICL), yet their effectiveness is highly sensitive to prompt quality. Effective prompts should meet three principles: focus on decision-critical information, provide step-level granularity, and minimize reliance on expert annotations through label efficiency. However, existing ICL methods often fail to satisfy all three criteria simultaneously. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce SkillGen, a skill-based ICL framework for structured sequential reasoning. It constructs an action-centric, domain-level graph from sampled trajectories, identifies high-utility actions via temporal-difference credit assignment, and retrieves step-wise skills to generate fine-grained, context-aware prompts. We further present a theoretical analysis showing that focusing on high-utility segments supports task identifiability and informs more effective ICL prompt design. Experiments on ALFWorld, BabyAI, and ScienceWorld, using both open-source and proprietary LLMs, show that SkillGen achieves consistent gains, improving progress rate by 5.9%–16.5% on average across models.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FADE: Towards Fairness-aware Data Generation for Domain Generalization via Classifier-Guided Score-based Diffusion Models

Yujie Lin
Dong Li
Minglai Shao
Guihong Wan
Chen Zhao

Fairness-aware domain generalization (FairDG) has emerged as a critical challenge for deploying trustworthy AI systems, particularly in scenarios involving distribution shifts. Traditional methods for addressing fairness have failed in domain generalization due to their lack of consideration for distribution shifts. Although disentanglement has been used to tackle FairDG, it is limited by its strong assumptions. To overcome these limitations, we propose Fairness-aware Classifier-Guided Score-based Diffusion Models (FADE) as a novel approach to effectively address the FairDG issue. Specifically, we first pre-train a score-based diffusion model (SDM) and two classifiers to equip the model with strong generalization capabilities across different domains. Then, we guide the SDM using these pre-trained classifiers to effectively eliminate sensitive information from the generated data. Finally, the generated fair data is used to train downstream classifiers, ensuring robust performance under new data distributions. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that FADE not only enhances fairness but also improves accuracy in the presence of distribution shifts. Additionally, FADE outperforms existing methods in achieving the best accuracy-fairness trade-offs.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

HPDM: A Hierarchical Popularity-aware Debiased Modeling Approach for Personalized News Recommender

Xiangfu He
Qiyao Peng
Minglai Shao
Hongtao Liu

News recommender systems face inherent challenges from popularity bias, where user interactions concentrate heavily on a small subset of popular news. While existing debiasing methods have made progress in recommendation, they often overlook two critical aspects: the different granularity of news popularity (across titles, categories, etc. ) and how hierarchical popularity levels distinctly influence user interest modeling. Hence, in this paper, we propose a hierarchical causal debiasing framework that effectively captures genuine user interests while mitigating popularity bias at different granularity levels. Our framework incorporates two key components during training: (1) a hierarchical popularity-aware user modeling module to capture user interests by distinguishing popular and unpopular interactions at different granularity news content; and (2) a dual-view structure combining counterfactual reasoning for popular-view news with inverse propensity weighting for unpopular-view news to model user genuine interests. During inference, our framework removes popularity-induced effects to predict relatedness between user and candidate news. Extensive experiments on two widely-used datasets, MIND and Adressa, demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing baseline approaches in addressing both the long-tail distribution challenge. Our code is available at \url{https: //github. com/hexiangfu123/HPDM}.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Leveraging Personalized PageRank and Higher-Order Topological Structures for Heterophily Mitigation in Graph Neural Networks

Yumeng Wang
Zengyi Wo
Wenjun Wang
Xingcheng Fu
Minglai Shao

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in node classification tasks but often assume homophily, where connected nodes share similar labels. This assumption does not hold in many real-world heterophilic graphs. Existing models for heterophilic graphs primarily rely on pairwise relationships, overlooking multi-scale information from higher-order structures. This leads to suboptimal performance, particularly under noise from conflicting class information across nodes. To address these challenges, we propose HPGNN, a novel model integrating Higher-order Personalized PageRank with Graph Neural Networks. HPGNN introduces an efficient high-order approximation of Personalized PageRank (PPR) to capture long-range and multiscale node interactions. This approach reduces computational complexity and mitigates noise from surrounding information. By embedding higher-order structural information into convolutional networks, HPGNN effectively models key interactions across diverse graph dimensions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate HPGNN’s effectiveness. The model achieves better performance than five out of seven state-of-the-art methods on heterophilic graphs in downstream tasks while maintaining competitive performance on homophilic graphs. HPGNN’s ability to balance multi-scale information and robustness to noise makes it a versatile solution for real-world graph learning challenges. Codes are available at https: //github. com/streetcorner/HPGNN.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Mitigating Message Imbalance in Fraud Detection with Dual-View Graph Representation Learning

Yudan Song
Yuecen Wei
Yuhang Lu
Qingyun Sun
Minglai Shao
Li-e Wang
Chunming Hu
Xianxian Li

Graph representation learning has become a mainstream method for fraud detection due to its strong expressive power, which focuses on enhancing node representations through improved neighborhood knowledge capture. However, the focus on local interactions leads to imbalanced transmission of global topological information and increased risk of node-specific information being overwhelmed during aggregation due to the imbalance between fraud and benign nodes. In this paper, we first summarize the impact of topology and class imbalance on downstream tasks in GNN-based fraud detection, as the problem of imbalanced supervisory messages is caused by fraudsters' topological behavior obfuscation and identity feature concealment. Based on statistical validation, we propose a novel dual-view graph representation learning method to mitigate Message imbalance in Fraud Detection (MimbFD). Specifically, we design a topological message reachability module for high-quality node representation learning to penetrate fraudsters' camouflage and alleviate insufficient propagation. Then, we introduce a local confounding debiasing module to adjust node representations, enhancing the stable association between node representations and labels to balance the influence of different classes. Finally, we conducted experiments on three public fraud datasets, and the results demonstrate that MimbFD exhibits outstanding performance in fraud detection.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Graph Bayesian Optimization for Multiplex Influence Maximization

Zirui Yuan
Minglai Shao
Zhiqian Chen

Influence maximization (IM) is the problem of identifying a limited number of initial influential users within a social network to maximize the number of influenced users. However, previous research has mostly focused on individual information propagation, neglecting the simultaneous and interactive dissemination of multiple information items. In reality, when users encounter a piece of information, such as a smartphone product, they often associate it with related products in their minds, such as earphones or computers from the same brand. Additionally, information platforms frequently recommend related content to users, amplifying this cascading effect and leading to multiplex influence diffusion. This paper first formulates the Multiplex Influence Maximization (Multi-IM) problem using multiplex diffusion models with an information association mechanism. In this problem, the seed set is a combination of influential users and information. To effectively manage the combinatorial complexity, we propose Graph Bayesian Optimization for Multi-IM (GBIM). The multiplex diffusion process is thoroughly investigated using a highly effective global kernelized attention message-passing module. This module, in conjunction with Bayesian linear regression (BLR), produces a scalable surrogate model. A data acquisition module incorporating the exploration-exploitation trade-off is developed to optimize the seed set further. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets have proven our proposed framework effective. The code is available at https://github.com/zirui-yuan/GBIM.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Graph Collaborative Expert Finding with Contrastive Learning

Qiyao Peng
Wenjun Wang
Hongtao Liu
Cuiying Huo
Minglai Shao

In Community Question Answering (CQA) websites, most current expert finding methods often model expert embeddings from textual features and optimize them with expert-question first-order interactions, i. e. , this expert has answered this question. In this paper, we try to address the limitation of current models that typically neglect the intrinsic high-order connectivity within expert-question interactions, which is pivotal for collaborative effects. We introduce an innovative and simple approach: by conceptualizing expert-question interactions as a bipartite graph, and then we propose a novel graph-based expert finding method based on contrastive learning to effectively capture both first-order and intricate high-order connectivity, named CGEF. Specifically, we employ a question encoder to model questions from titles and employ the graph attention network to recursively propagate embeddings. Besides, to alleviate the problem of sparse interactions, we devise two auxiliary tasks to enhance expert modeling. First, we generate multiple views of one expert, including: 1) behavior-level augmentation drops interaction edges randomly in the graph; 2) interest-level augmentation randomly replaces question titles with tags in the graph. Then we maximize the agreement between one expert and the corresponding augmented expert on a specific view. In this way, the model can effectively inject collaborative signals into expert modeling. Extensive experiments on six CQA datasets demonstrate significant improvements compared with recent methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Supervised Algorithmic Fairness in Distribution Shifts: A Survey

Minglai Shao
Dong Li
Chen Zhao
Xintao Wu
Yujie Lin
Qin Tian

Supervised fairness-aware machine learning under distribution shifts is an emerging field that addresses the challenge of maintaining equitable and unbiased predictions when faced with changes in data distributions from source to target domains. In real-world applications, machine learning models are often trained on a specific dataset but deployed in environments where the data distribution may shift over time due to various factors. This shift can lead to unfair predictions, disproportionately affecting certain groups characterized by sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. In this survey, we provide a summary of various types of distribution shifts and comprehensively investigate existing methods based on these shifts, highlighting six commonly used approaches in the literature. Additionally, this survey lists publicly available datasets and evaluation metrics for empirical studies. We further explore the interconnection with related research fields, discuss the significant challenges, and identify potential directions for future studies.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Towards Counterfactual Fairness-aware Domain Generalization in Changing Environments

Yujie Lin
Chen Zhao
Minglai Shao
Baoluo Meng
Xujiang Zhao
Haifeng Chen

Recognizing domain generalization as a commonplace challenge in machine learning, data distribution might progressively evolve across a continuum of sequential domains in practical scenarios. While current methodologies primarily concentrate on bolstering model effectiveness within these new domains, they tend to neglect issues of fairness throughout the learning process. In response, we propose an innovative framework known as Disentanglement for Counterfactual Fairness-aware Domain Generalization (DCFDG). This approach adeptly removes domain-specific information and sensitive information from the embedded representation of classification features. To scrutinize the intricate interplay between semantic information, domain-specific information, and sensitive attributes, we systematically partition the exogenous factors into four latent variables. By incorporating fairness regularization, we utilize semantic information exclusively for classification purposes. Empirical validation on synthetic and authentic datasets substantiates the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating elevated accuracy levels while ensuring the preservation of fairness amidst the evolving landscape of continuous domains.

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