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Sheng Zhou

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24 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

History-Aware Reasoning for GUI Agents

Ziwei Wang
Leyang Yang
Xiaoxuan Tang
Sheng Zhou
Dajun Chen
Wei Jiang
Yong Li

Advances in Multimodal Large Language Models have significantly enhanced Graphical User Interface (GUI) automation. Equipping GUI agents with reliable episodic reasoning capabilities is essential for bridging the gap between users’ concise task descriptions and the complexities of real-world execution. Current methods integrate Reinforcement Learning (RL) with System-2 Chain-of-Thought, yielding notable gains in reasoning enhancement. For long-horizon GUI tasks, historical interactions connect each screen to the goal-oriented episode chain, and effectively leveraging these clues is crucial for the current decision. However, existing native GUI agents exhibit weak short-term memory in their explicit reasoning, interpreting the chained interactions as discrete screen understanding, i.e., unawareness of the historical interactions within the episode. This history-agnostic reasoning challenges their performance in GUI automation. To alleviate this weakness, we propose a History-Aware Reasoning (HAR) framework, which encourages an agent to reflect on its own errors and acquire episodic reasoning knowledge from them via tailored strategies that enhance short-term memory in long-horizon interaction. The framework mainly comprises constructing a reflective learning scenario, synthesizing tailored correction guidelines, and designing a hybrid RL reward function. Using the HAR framework, we develop a native end-to-end model, HAR-GUI-3B, which alters the inherent reasoning mode from history-agnostic to history-aware, equipping the GUI agent with stable short-term memory and reliable perception of screen details. Comprehensive evaluations across a range of GUI-related benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our method.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

ProBench: Benchmarking GUI Agents with Accurate Process Information

Leyang Yang
Ziwei Wang
Xiaoxuan Tang
Sheng Zhou
Dajun Chen
Wei Jiang
Yong Li

With the deep integration of artificial intelligence and interactive technology, Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agent, as the carrier connecting goal-oriented natural language and real-world devices, has received widespread attention from the community. Contemporary benchmarks aim to evaluate the comprehensive capabilities of GUI agents in GUI operation tasks, generally determining task completion solely by inspecting the final screen state. However, GUI operation tasks consist of multiple chained steps while not all critical information is presented in the final few pages. Although a few research has begun to incorporate intermediate steps into evaluation, accurately and automatically capturing this process information still remains an open challenge. To address this weakness, we introduce ProBench, a comprehensive mobile benchmark with over 200 challenging GUI tasks covering widely-used scenarios. Remaining the traditional State-related Task evaluation, we extend our dataset to include Process-related Task and design a specialized evaluation method. A newly introduced Process Provider automatically supplies accurate process information, enabling presice assessment of agent's performance. Our evaluation of advanced GUI agents reveals significant limitations for real-world GUI scenarios. These shortcomings are prevalent across diverse models, including both large-scale generalist models and smaller, GUI-specific models. A detailed error analysis further exposes several universal problems, outlining concrete directions for future improvements.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Towards Scalable Web Accessibility Audit with MLLMs as Copilots

Ming Gu
Ziwei Wang
Sicen Lai
Zirui Gao
Sheng Zhou
Jiajun Bu

Ensuring web accessibility is crucial for advancing social welfare, justice, and equality in digital spaces, yet the vast majority of website user interfaces remain non-compliant, due in part to the resource-intensive and unscalable nature of current auditing practices. While WCAG-EM offers a structured methodology for site-wise conformance evaluation, it involves great human efforts and lacks practical support for execution at scale. In this work, we present an auditing framework, AAA, which operationalizes WCAG-EM through a human-AI partnership model. AAA is anchored by two key innovations: GRASP, a graph-based multimodal sampling method that ensures representative page coverage via learned embeddings of visual, textual, and relational cues; and MaC, a multimodal large language model-based copilot strategy that supports auditors through cross-modal reasoning and intelligent assistance in high-effort tasks. Together, these components enable scalable, end-to-end web accessibility auditing, empowering human auditors with AI-enhanced assistance for real-world impact. We further contribute four novel datasets designed for benchmarking core stages of the audit pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, providing insights that small-scale language models can serve as capable experts when fine-tuned.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

UniMM-V2X: MoE-Enhanced Multi-Level Fusion for End-to-End Cooperative Autonomous Driving

Ziyi Song
Chen Xia
Chenbing Wang
Haibao Yu
Sheng Zhou
Zhisheng Niu

Autonomous driving holds transformative potential but remains fundamentally constrained by the limited perception and isolated decision-making with standalone intelligence. While recent multi-agent approaches introduce cooperation, they often focus merely on perception-level tasks, overlooking the alignment with downstream planning and control, or fall short in leveraging the full capacity of the recent emerging end-to-end autonomous driving. In this paper, we present UniMM-V2X, a novel end-to-end multi-agent framework that enables hierarchical cooperation across perception, prediction, and planning. At the core of our framework is a multi-level fusion strategy that unifies perception and prediction cooperation, allowing agents to share queries and reason cooperatively for consistent and safe decision-making. To adapt to diverse downstream tasks and further enhance the quality of multi-level fusion, we incorporate a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to dynamically enhance the BEV representations. We further extend MoE into the decoder to better capture diverse motion patterns. Extensive experiments on the DAIR-V2X dataset demonstrate our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance with a 39.7% improvement in perception accuracy, a 7.2% reduction in prediction error, and a 33.2% improvement in planning performance compared with UniV2X, showcasing the strength of our MoE-enhanced multi-level cooperative paradigm.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Advancing Loss Functions in Recommender Systems: A Comparative Study with a Rényi Divergence-Based Solution

Shengjia Zhang
Jiawei Chen
Changdong Li
Sheng Zhou
Qihao Shi
Yan Feng
Chun Chen
Can Wang

Loss functions play a pivotal role in optimizing recommendation models. Among various loss functions, Softmax Loss (SL) and Cosine Contrastive Loss (CCL) are particularly effective. Their theoretical connections and differences warrant in-depth exploration. This work conducts comprehensive analyses of these losses, yielding significant insights: 1) Common strengths --- both can be viewed as augmentations of traditional losses with Distributional Robust Optimization (DRO), enhancing robustness to distributional shifts; 2) Respective limitations --- stemming from their use of different distribution distance metrics in DRO optimization, SL exhibits high sensitivity to false negative instances, whereas CCL suffers from low data utilization. To address these limitations, this work proposes a new loss function, DrRL, which generalizes SL and CCL by leveraging Rényi-divergence in DRO optimization. DrRL incorporates the advantageous structures of both SL and CCL, and can be demonstrated to effectively mitigate their limitations. Extensive experiments have been conducted to validate the superiority of DrRL on both recommendation accuracy and robustness.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Divide and Conquer: Coordinating Multiplex Mixture of Graph Learners to Handle Multi-Omics Analysis

Zhihao Wu
Jielong Lu
Jiajun Yu
Sheng Zhou
Yueyang Pi
Haishuai Wang

Graph learning has shown significant advantages in organizing and leveraging complex data, making it promising for numerous real-world applications with heterogeneous information, particularly multi-omics data analysis. Despite its potential in such scenarios, existing methods are still in their infancy, lacking architectural potential and struggling to handle such complex data. In this paper, we propose the Multiplex Mixture of Graph Learners (MMoG) framework. MMoG first conducts fine-grained processing of consensus and unique information, constructing consistent features and multiplex graph structures. Then, a macroscopically shared group of sub-GNNs with diverse orders and architectures synergistically learn representations, providing a foundation for strong interaction between different views. Inspired by the mixture of experts (MoE), each sample in different omics adaptively determines the neighborhood ranges and architectures for information aggregation, while blocking unsuitable sub-GNNs. MMoG treats the complex multi-omics analysis as a multi-view learning problem, and essentially decomposes it into multiple sub-problems, allowing each omics/view to solve intersecting yet unique sub-problem groups. Additionally, we introduce mutual information-driven orthogonal loss and balancing loss to avoid view collapse. Extensive experiments on multi-omics data across multiple cancer types highlight MMoG's superiority.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

M4Bench: A Benchmark of Multi-domain Multi-granularity Multi-image Understanding for Multi-modal Large Language Models

Xiaojun Ye
Guanbao Liang
Chun Wang
Liangcheng Li
Pengfei Ke
Rui Wang
Bingxin Jia
Gang Huang

The increasing demands in analyzing complex associated scenes pose necessities to researching multi-image understanding abilities. Compared with understanding individual images, both the alignments and differences between images are essential aspects of understanding the intricate relationships for multi-image inference tasks. However, existing benchmarks face difficulties in addressing both of these aspects simultaneously, resulting in obstacles to modeling relationships under various granularities and domains of images. In this paper, we introduce M4Bench to enhance the capability of aligning and distinguishing multi-images with multi-domain multi-granularity comparison. We carefully design five comparison tasks related to coarse and fine-grained granularities in single and multiple domains of images and evaluate them on 13 state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models with various sizes. Besides, we analyze the evaluation results and provide several observations and viewpoints for the multi-image understanding research. The data and evaluation code are available at https: //github. com/eaglelab-zju/M4Bench.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Making Classic GNNs Strong Baselines Across Varying Homophily: A Smoothness–Generalization Perspective

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}.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Understanding and Enhancing Message Passing on Heterophilic Graphs via Compatibility Matrix

Zhuonan Zheng
Yuanchen Bei
Zhiyao Zhou
Sheng Zhou
Yao Ma
Ming Gu
HONGJIA XU
Jiawei Chen

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel in graph mining tasks thanks to their message-passing mechanism, which aligns with the homophily assumption. However, connected nodes can also exhibit inconsistent behaviors, termed heterophilic patterns, sparking interest in heterophilic GNNs (HTGNNs). Although the message-passing mechanism seems unsuitable for heterophilic graphs owing to the propagation of dissimilar messages, it is still popular in HTGNNs and consistently achieves notable success. Some efforts have investigated such an interesting phenomenon, but are limited in the data perspective. The model-perspective understanding remains largely unexplored, which is conducive to guiding the designs of HTGNNs. To fill this gap, we build the connection between node discriminability and the compatibility matrix (CM). We reveal that the effectiveness of the message passing in HTGNNs may be credited to increasing the proposed Compatibility Matrix Discriminability (CMD). However, the issues of sparsity and noise pose great challenges to leveraging CM. Thus, we propose CMGNN, a novel approach to alleviate these issues while enhancing the CM and node embeddings explicitly. A thorough evaluation involving 13 datasets and comparison against 20 well-established baselines highlights the superiority of CMGNN.

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IROS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

WHALES: A Multi-Agent Scheduling Dataset for Enhanced Cooperation in Autonomous Driving

Yinsong Richard Wang
Siwei Chen
Ziyi Song
Sheng Zhou

Cooperative perception research is hindered by the limited availability of datasets that capture the complexity of real-world Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) interactions, particularly under dynamic communication constraints. To address this gap, we introduce WHALES (Wireless enHanced Autonomous vehicles with Large number of Engaged agentS), the first large-scale V2X dataset explicitly designed to benchmark communication-aware agent scheduling and scalable cooperative perception. WHALES introduces a new benchmark that enables state-of-the-art (SOTA) research in communication-aware cooperative perception, featuring an average of 8. 4 cooperative agents per scene and 2. 01 million annotated 3D objects across diverse traffic scenarios. It incorporates detailed communication metadata to emulate real-world communication bottlenecks, enabling rigorous evaluation of scheduling strategies. To further advance the field, we propose the Coverage-Aware Historical Scheduler (CAHS), a novel scheduling baseline that selects agents based on historical viewpoint coverage, improving perception performance over existing SOTA methods. WHALES bridges the gap between simulated and real-world V2X challenges, providing a robust framework for exploring perception-scheduling co-design, cross-data generalization, and scalability limits. The WHALES dataset and code are available at https://github.com/chensiweiTHU/WHALES.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Exploiting Symmetric Temporally Sparse BPTT for Efficient RNN Training

Xi Chen
Chang Gao
Zuowen Wang
Longbiao Cheng
Sheng Zhou
Shih-Chii Liu
Tobi Delbruck

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are useful in temporal sequence tasks. However, training RNNs involves dense matrix multiplications which require hardware that can support a large number of arithmetic operations and memory accesses. Implementing online training of RNNs on the edge calls for optimized algorithms for an efficient deployment on hardware. Inspired by the spiking neuron model, the Delta RNN exploits temporal sparsity during inference by skipping over the update of hidden states from those inactivated neurons whose change of activation across two timesteps is below a defined threshold. This work describes a training algorithm for Delta RNNs that exploits temporal sparsity in the backward propagation phase to reduce computational requirements for training on the edge. Due to the symmetric computation graphs of forward and backward propagation during training, the gradient computation of inactivated neurons can be skipped. Results show a reduction of ∼80% in matrix operations for training a 56k parameter Delta LSTM on the Fluent Speech Commands dataset with negligible accuracy loss. Logic simulations of a hardware accelerator designed for the training algorithm show 2-10X speedup in matrix computations for an activation sparsity range of 50%-90%. Additionally, we show that the proposed Delta RNN training will be useful for online incremental learning on edge devices with limited computing resources.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

GC-Bench: An Open and Unified Benchmark for Graph Condensation

Qingyun Sun
Ziying Chen
Beining Yang
Cheng Ji
Xingcheng Fu
Sheng Zhou
Hao Peng
Jianxin Li

Graph condensation (GC) has recently garnered considerable attention due to its ability to reduce large-scale graph datasets while preserving their essential properties. The core concept of GC is to create a smaller, more manageable graph that retains the characteristics of the original graph. Despite the proliferation of graph condensation methods developed in recent years, there is no comprehensive evaluation and in-depth analysis, which creates a great obstacle to understanding the progress in this field. To fill this gap, we develop a comprehensive Graph Condensation Benchmark (GC-Bench) to analyze the performance of graph condensation in different scenarios systematically. Specifically, GC-Bench systematically investigates the characteristics of graph condensation in terms of the following dimensions: effectiveness, transferability, and complexity. We comprehensively evaluate 12 state-of-the-art graph condensation algorithms in node-level and graph-level tasks and analyze their performance in 12 diverse graph datasets. Further, we have developed an easy-to-use library for training and evaluating different GC methods to facilitate reproducible research. The GC-Bench library is available at https: //github. com/RingBDStack/GC-Bench.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

NoisyGL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Neural Networks under Label Noise

Zhonghao Wang
Danyu Sun
Sheng Zhou
Haobo Wang
Jiapei Fan
Longtao Huang
Jiajun Bu

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) exhibit strong potential in node classification task through a message-passing mechanism. However, their performance often hinges on high-quality node labels, which are challenging to obtain in real-world scenarios due to unreliable sources or adversarial attacks. Consequently, label noise is common in real-world graph data, negatively impacting GNNs by propagating incorrect information during training. To address this issue, the study of Graph Neural Networks under Label Noise (GLN) has recently gained traction. However, due to variations in dataset selection, data splitting, and preprocessing techniques, the community currently lacks a comprehensive benchmark, which impedes deeper understanding and further development of GLN. To fill this gap, we introduce NoisyGL in this paper, the first comprehensive benchmark for graph neural networks under label noise. NoisyGL enables fair comparisons and detailed analyses of GLN methods on noisy labeled graph data across various datasets, with unified experimental settings and interface. Our benchmark has uncovered several important insights that were missed in previous research, and we believe these findings will be highly beneficial for future studies. We hope our open-source benchmark library will foster further advancements in this field. The code of the benchmark can be found in https: //github. com/eaglelab-zju/NoisyGL.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

PSL: Rethinking and Improving Softmax Loss from Pairwise Perspective for Recommendation

Weiqin Yang
Jiawei Chen
Xin Xin
Sheng Zhou
Binbin Hu
Yan Feng
Chun Chen
Can Wang

Softmax Loss (SL) is widely applied in recommender systems (RS) and has demonstrated effectiveness. This work analyzes SL from a pairwise perspective, revealing two significant limitations: 1) the relationship between SL and conventional ranking metrics like DCG is not sufficiently tight; 2) SL is highly sensitive to false negative instances. Our analysis indicates that these limitations are primarily due to the use of the exponential function. To address these issues, this work extends SL to a new family of loss functions, termed Pairwise Softmax Loss (PSL), which replaces the exponential function in SL with other appropriate activation functions. While the revision is minimal, we highlight three merits of PSL: 1) it serves as a tighter surrogate for DCG with suitable activation functions; 2) it better balances data contributions; and 3) it acts as a specific BPR loss enhanced by Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO). We further validate the effectiveness and robustness of PSL through empirical experiments. The code is available at https: //github. com/Tiny-Snow/IR-Benchmark.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Rethinking Propagation for Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation

Meihan Liu
Zeyu Fang
Zhen Zhang
Ming Gu
Sheng Zhou
Xin Wang
Jiajun Bu

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labelled source graph to an unlabelled target graph in order to address the distribution shifts between graph domains. Previous works have primarily focused on aligning data from the source and target graph in the representation space learned by graph neural networks (GNNs). However, the inherent generalization capability of GNNs has been largely overlooked. Motivated by our empirical analysis, we reevaluate the role of GNNs in graph domain adaptation and uncover the pivotal role of the propagation process in GNNs for adapting to different graph domains. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of UGDA and derive a generalization bound for multi-layer GNNs. By formulating GNN Lipschitz for k-layer GNNs, we show that the target risk bound can be tighter by removing propagation layers in source graph and stacking multiple propagation layers in target graph. Based on the empirical and theoretical analysis mentioned above, we propose a simple yet effective approach called A2GNN for graph domain adaptation. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed A2GNN framework.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Revisiting, Benchmarking and Understanding Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation

Meihan Liu
Zhen Zhang
Jiachen Tang
Jiajun Bu
Bingsheng He
Sheng Zhou

Unsupervised Graph Domain Adaptation (UGDA) involves the transfer of knowledge from a label-rich source graph to an unlabeled target graph under domain discrepancies. Despite the proliferation of methods designed for this emerging task, the lack of standard experimental settings and fair performance comparisons makes it challenging to understand which and when models perform well across different scenarios. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive benchmark for unsupervised graph domain adaptation named GDABench, which encompasses 16 algorithms across diverse adaptation tasks. Through extensive experiments, we observe that the performance of current UGDA models varies significantly across different datasets and adaptation scenarios. Specifically, we recognize that when the source and target graphs face significant distribution shifts, it is imperative to formulate strategies to effectively address and mitigate graph structural shifts. We also find that with appropriate neighbourhood aggregation mechanisms, simple GNN variants can even surpass state-of-the-art UGDA baselines. To facilitate reproducibility, we have developed an easy-to-use library PyGDA for training and evaluating existing UGDA methods, providing a standardized platform in this community. Our source codes and datasets can be found at https: //github. com/pygda-team/pygda.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

OpenGSL: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Graph Structure Learning

Zhiyao Zhou
Sheng Zhou
Bochao Mao
Xuanyi Zhou
Jiawei Chen
Qiaoyu Tan
Daochen Zha
Yan Feng

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as the de facto standard for representation learning on graphs, owing to their ability to effectively integrate graph topology and node attributes. However, the inherent suboptimal nature of node connections, resulting from the complex and contingent formation process of graphs, presents significant challenges in modeling them effectively. To tackle this issue, Graph Structure Learning (GSL), a family of data-centric learning approaches, has garnered substantial attention in recent years. The core concept behind GSL is to jointly optimize the graph structure and the corresponding GNN models. Despite the proposal of numerous GSL methods, the progress in this field remains unclear due to inconsistent experimental protocols, including variations in datasets, data processing techniques, and splitting strategies. In this paper, we introduce OpenGSL, the first comprehensive benchmark for GSL, aimed at addressing this gap. OpenGSL enables a fair comparison among state-of-the-art GSL methods by evaluating them across various popular datasets using uniform data processing and splitting strategies. Through extensive experiments, we observe that existing GSL methods do not consistently outperform vanilla GNN counterparts. We also find that there is no significant correlation between the homophily of the learned structure and task performance, challenging the common belief. Moreover, we observe that the learned graph structure demonstrates a strong generalization ability across different GNN models, despite the high computational and space consumption. We hope that our open-sourced library will facilitate rapid and equitable evaluation and inspire further innovative research in this field. The code of the benchmark can be found in https: //github. com/OpenGSL/OpenGSL.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Robust Sequence Networked Submodular Maximization

Qihao Shi
Bingyang Fu
Can Wang
Jiawei Chen
Sheng Zhou
Yan Feng
Chun Chen

In this paper, we study the Robust optimization for sequence Networked submodular maximization (RoseNets) problem. We interweave the robust optimization with the sequence networked submodular maximization. The elements are connected by a directed acyclic graph and the objective function is not submodular on the elements but on the edges in the graph. Under such networked submodular scenario, the impact of removing an element from a sequence depends both on its position in the sequence and in the network. This makes the existing robust algorithms inapplicable and calls for new robust algorithms. In this paper, we take the first step to study the RoseNets problem. We design a robust greedy algorithms, which is robust against the removal of an arbitrary subset of the selected elements. The approximation ratio of the algorithm depends both on the number of the removed elements and the network topology. We further conduct experiments on real applications of recommendation and link prediction. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Hilbert Distillation for Cross-Dimensionality Networks

Dian Qin
Haishuai Wang
Zhe Liu
HONGJIA XU
Sheng Zhou
Jiajun Bu

3D convolutional neural networks have revealed superior performance in processing volumetric data such as video and medical imaging. However, the competitive performance by leveraging 3D networks results in huge computational costs, which are far beyond that of 2D networks. In this paper, we propose a novel Hilbert curve-based cross-dimensionality distillation approach that facilitates the knowledge of 3D networks to improve the performance of 2D networks. The proposed Hilbert Distillation (HD) method preserves the structural information via the Hilbert curve, which maps high-dimensional (>=2) representations to one-dimensional continuous space-filling curves. Since the distilled 2D networks are supervised by the curves converted from dimensionally heterogeneous 3D features, the 2D networks are given an informative view in terms of learning structural information embedded in well-trained high-dimensional representations. We further propose a Variable-length Hilbert Distillation (VHD) method to dynamically shorten the walking stride of the Hilbert curve in activation feature areas and lengthen the stride in context feature areas, forcing the 2D networks to pay more attention to learning from activation features. The proposed algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art distillation techniques adapted to cross-dimensionality distillation on two classification tasks. Moreover, the distilled 2D networks by the proposed method achieve competitive performance with the original 3D networks, indicating the lightweight distilled 2D networks could potentially be the substitution of cumbersome 3D networks in the real-world scenario.

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IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

RMGN: A Regional Mask Guided Network for Parser-free Virtual Try-on

Chao Lin
Zhao Li
Sheng Zhou
Shichang Hu
Jialun Zhang
Linhao Luo
Jiarun Zhang
Longtao Huang

Virtual try-on (VTON) aims at fitting target clothes to reference person images, which is widely adopted in e-commerce. Existing VTON approaches can be narrowly categorized into Parser-Based (PB) and Parser-Free (PF) by whether relying on the parser information to mask the persons’clothes and synthesize try-on images. Although abandoning parser information has improved the applicability of PF methods, the ability of detail synthesizing has also been sacrificed. As a result, the distraction from original cloth may persist in synthesized images, especially in complicated postures and high resolution applications. To address the aforementioned issue, we propose a novel PF method named Regional Mask Guided Network (RMGN). More specifically, a regional mask is proposed to explicitly fuse the features of target clothes and reference persons so that the persisted distraction can be eliminated. A posture awareness loss and a multi-level feature extractor are further proposed to handle the complicated postures and synthesize high resolution images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed RMGN outperforms both state-of-the-art PB and PF methods. Ablation studies further verify the effectiveness of modules in RMGN. Code is available at https: //github. com/jokerlc/RMGN-VITON.

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TCS Journal 2021 Journal Article

Profit maximization for competitive social advertising

Qihao Shi
Can Wang
Deshi Ye
Jiawei Chen
Sheng Zhou
Yan Feng
Chun Chen
Yanhao Huang

In social advertising, the social platform host may run marketing campaigns for multiple competing clients simultaneously. In this case, each client comes up with a budget and an influence spread requirement. The host runs campaigns by allocating a set of seed nodes for each client. If the influence spread triggered by a seed set meets the requirement, the host can earn the budget from the corresponding client. In this paper, we study the problem of Profit Maximization, considering that different seeds incur different costs. Given all the clients' requirements met, we aim to find the optimal seed allocation with minimum cost. Under the competitive K-LT propagation model, we show the Profit Maximization problem is NP-hard and NP-hard to approximate with any factor. To find a feasible solution, we propose an effective algorithm that iteratively selects a candidate set and obtains an approximate allocation. The experimental results over a real-world dataset validate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

DGE: Deep Generative Network Embedding Based on Commonality and Individuality

Sheng Zhou
Xin Wang
Jiajun Bu
Martin Ester
Pinggang Yu
Jiawei Chen
Qihao Shi
Can Wang

Network embedding plays a crucial role in network analysis to provide effective representations for a variety of learning tasks. Existing attributed network embedding methods mainly focus on preserving the observed node attributes and network topology in the latent embedding space, with the assumption that nodes connected through edges will share similar attributes. However, our empirical analysis of real-world datasets shows that there exist both commonality and individuality between node attributes and network topology. On the one hand, similar nodes are expected to share similar attributes and have edges connecting them (commonality). On the other hand, each information source may maintain individual differences as well (individuality). Simultaneously capturing commonality and individuality is very challenging due to their exclusive nature and existing work fail to do so. In this paper, we propose a deep generative embedding (DGE) framework which simultaneously captures commonality and individuality between network topology and node attributes in a generative process. Stochastic gradient variational Bayesian (SGVB) optimization is employed to infer model parameters as well as the node embeddings. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets show the superiority of our proposed DGE framework in various tasks including node classiﬁcation and link prediction.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Fast Adaptively Weighted Matrix Factorization for Recommendation with Implicit Feedback

Jiawei Chen
Can Wang
Sheng Zhou
Qihao Shi
Jingbang Chen
Yan Feng
Chun Chen

Recommendation from implicit feedback is a highly challenging task due to the lack of the reliable observed negative data. A popular and effective approach for implicit recommendation is to treat unobserved data as negative but downweight their conﬁdence. Naturally, how to assign conﬁdence weights and how to handle the large number of the unobserved data are two key problems for implicit recommendation models. However, existing methods either pursuit fast learning by manually assigning simple conﬁdence weights, which lacks ﬂexibility and may create empirical bias in evaluating user’s preference; or adaptively infer personalized con- ﬁdence weights but suffer from low efﬁciency. To achieve both adaptive weights assignment and efﬁcient model learning, we propose a fast adaptively weighted matrix factorization (FAWMF) based on variational auto-encoder. The personalized data conﬁdence weights are adaptively assigned with a parameterized neural network (function) and the network can be inferred from the data. Further, to support fast and stable learning of FAWMF, a new speciﬁc batchbased learning algorithm fBGD has been developed, which trains on all feedback data but its complexity is linear to the number of observed data. Extensive experiments on realworld datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed FAWMF and its learning algorithm fBGD.

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IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

ANRL: Attributed Network Representation Learning via Deep Neural Networks

Zhen Zhang
Hongxia Yang
Jiajun Bu
Sheng Zhou
Pinggang Yu
Jianwei Zhang
Martin Ester
Can Wang

Network representation learning (RL) aims to transform the nodes in a network into low-dimensional vector spaces while preserving the inherent properties of the network. Though network RL has been intensively studied, most existing works focus on either network structure or node attribute information. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, named ANRL, to incorporate both the network structure and node attribute information in a principled way. Specifically, we propose a neighbor enhancement autoencoder to model the node attribute information, which reconstructs its target neighbors instead of itself. To capture the network structure, attribute-aware skip-gram model is designed based on the attribute encoder to formulate the correlations between each node and its direct or indirect neighbors. We conduct extensive experiments on six real-world networks, including two social networks, two citation networks and two user behavior networks. The results empirically show that ANRL can achieve relatively significant gains in node classification and link prediction tasks.

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