Arrow Research search

Author name cluster

Xiang Wang 0010

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

19 papers
1 author row

Possible papers

19

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AlphaDPO: Adaptive Reward Margin for Direct Preference Optimization

  • Junkang Wu
  • Xue Wang 0010
  • Zhengyi Yang 0007
  • Jiancan Wu
  • Jinyang Gao
  • Bolin Ding
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Xiangnan He 0001

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences requires balancing policy optimization with computational stability. While recent offline methods like DPO and SimPO bypass reinforcement learning’s complexity, they face critical limitations: DPO relies on static reference models that degrade with policy updates, and SimPO assumes a uniform target reward margin that ignores instance-wise preference strength. We propose AlphaDPO, an adaptive preference optimization framework that dynamically reparameterizes the reference distribution to address these issues. Our key innovation lies in an implicit reference model $\hat{\pi}_{\text{ref}} \propto U(y|x)(\pi_\theta/\pi_{\text{ref}})^\alpha$, which interpolates between policy-driven specialization and uniform exploration while enabling instance-adaptive reward margins. Theoretically, we prove AlphaDPO implicitly controls sequential KL divergence between iterative policy updates, ensuring stability even with poorly calibrated reference models. Empirically, AlphaDPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on AlpacaEval 2 (58. 7% LC win rate) and Arena-Hard (35. 7% win rate) across Mistral2-7B, Llama3-8B, and Gemma2-9B, demonstrating robust alignment without multi-stage training. Our work establishes adaptive reference reparameterization as a principled mechanism for preference optimization.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AlphaEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Language Models

  • Junfeng Fang
  • Houcheng Jiang
  • Kun Wang 0056
  • Yunshan Ma 0002
  • Jie Shi 0005
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Xiangnan He 0001
  • Tat-Seng Chua

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit hallucinations, producing incorrect or outdated knowledge. Hence, model editing methods have emerged to enable targeted knowledge updates. To achieve this, a prevailing paradigm is the locating-then-editing approach, which first locates influential parameters and then edits them by introducing a perturbation. While effective, current studies have demonstrated that this perturbation inevitably disrupt the originally preserved knowledge within LLMs, especially in sequential editing scenarios. To address this, we introduce AlphaEdit, a novel solution that projects perturbation onto the null space of the preserved knowledge before applying it to the parameters. We theoretically prove that this projection ensures the output of post-edited LLMs remains unchanged when queried about the preserved knowledge, thereby mitigating the issue of disruption. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including LLaMA3, GPT2-XL, and GPT-J, show that AlphaEdit boosts the performance of most locating-then-editing methods by an average of 36.7% with a single line of additional code for projection solely.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

AnyEdit: Edit Any Knowledge Encoded in Language Models

  • Houcheng Jiang
  • Junfeng Fang
  • Ningyu Zhang 0001
  • Mingyang Wan
  • Guojun Ma
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Xiangnan He 0001
  • Tat-Seng Chua

Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated information, necessitating efficient and precise knowledge updates. Current model editing methods, however, struggle with long-form knowledge in diverse formats, such as poetry, code snippets, and mathematical derivations. These limitations arise from their reliance on editing a single token’s hidden state, a limitation we term as “efficacy barrier”. To solve this, we propose AnyEdit, a new autoregressive editing paradigm. It decomposes long-form knowledge into sequential chunks and iteratively edits the key token in each chunk, ensuring consistent and accurate outputs. Theoretically, we ground AnyEdit in the Chain Rule of Mutual Information, showing its ability to update any knowledge within LLMs. Empirically, it outperforms strong baselines by 21. 5% on benchmarks including UnKEBench, AKEW, and our new EditEverything dataset for long-form diverse-formatted knowledge. Additionally, AnyEdit serves as a plug-and-play framework, enabling current editing methods to update knowledge with arbitrary length and format, significantly advancing the scope and practicality of LLM knowledge editing. Our code is available at: https: //github. com/jianghoucheng/AnyEdit.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DAMA: Data- and Model-aware Alignment of Multi-modal LLMs

  • Jinda Lu
  • Junkang Wu
  • Jinghan Li
  • Xiaojun Jia
  • Shuo Wang 0008
  • Yifan Zhang 0004
  • Junfeng Fang
  • Xiang Wang 0010

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has shown effectiveness in aligning multi-modal large language models (MLLM) with human preferences. However, existing methods exhibit an imbalanced responsiveness to the data of varying hardness, tending to overfit on the easy-to-distinguish data while underfitting on the hard-to-distinguish data. In this paper, we propose Data- and Model-aware DPO (DAMA) to dynamically adjust the optimization process from two key aspects: (1) a data-aware strategy that incorporates data hardness, and (2) a model-aware strategy that integrates real-time model responses. By combining the two strategies, DAMA enables the model to effectively adapt to data with varying levels of hardness. Extensive experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that DAMA not only significantly enhances the trustworthiness, but also improves the effectiveness over general tasks. For instance, on the Object HalBench, our DAMA-7B reduces response-level and mentioned-level hallucination by 90. 0% and 95. 3%, respectively, surpassing the performance of GPT-4V.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

DiffGAD: A Diffusion-based Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detector

  • Jinghan Li
  • Yuan Gao
  • Jinda Lu
  • Junfeng Fang
  • Congcong Wen
  • Hui Lin
  • Xiang Wang 0010

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) is crucial for identifying abnormal entities within networks, garnering significant attention across various fields. Traditional unsupervised methods, which decode encoded latent representations of unlabeled data with a reconstruction focus, often fail to capture critical discriminative content, leading to suboptimal anomaly detection. To address these challenges, we present a Diffusion-based Graph Anomaly Detector (DiffGAD). At the heart of DiffGAD is a novel latent space learning paradigm, meticulously designed to enhance the model's proficiency by guiding it with discriminative content. This innovative approach leverages diffusion sampling to infuse the latent space with discriminative content and introduces a content-preservation mechanism that retains valuable information across different scales, significantly improving the model’s adeptness at identifying anomalies with limited time and space complexity. Our comprehensive evaluation of DiffGAD, conducted on six real-world and large-scale datasets with various metrics, demonstrated its exceptional performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/fortunato-all/DiffGAD

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Language Representations Can be What Recommenders Need: Findings and Potentials

  • Leheng Sheng
  • An Zhang 0003
  • Yi Zhang 0001
  • Yuxin Chen
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Tat-Seng Chua

Recent studies empirically indicate that language models (LMs) encode rich world knowledge beyond mere semantics, attracting significant attention across various fields. However, in the recommendation domain, it remains uncertain whether LMs implicitly encode user preference information. Contrary to prevailing understanding that LMs and traditional recommenders learn two distinct representation spaces due to the huge gap in language and behavior modeling objectives, this work re-examines such understanding and explores extracting a recommendation space directly from the language representation space. Surprisingly, our findings demonstrate that item representations, when linearly mapped from advanced LM representations, yield superior recommendation performance. This outcome suggests the possible homomorphism between the advanced language representation space and an effective item representation space for recommendation, implying that collaborative signals may be implicitly encoded within LMs. Motivated by the finding of homomorphism, we explore the possibility of designing advanced collaborative filtering (CF) models purely based on language representations without ID-based embeddings. To be specific, we incorporate several crucial components (i.e., a multilayer perceptron (MLP), graph convolution, and contrastive learning (CL) loss function) to build a simple yet effective model, with the language representations of item textual metadata (i.e., title) as the input. Empirical results show that such a simple model can outperform leading ID-based CF models on multiple datasets, which sheds light on using language representations for better recommendation. Moreover, we systematically analyze this simple model and find several key features for using advanced language representations: a good initialization for item representations, superior zero-shot recommendation abilities in new datasets, and being aware of user intention. Our findings highlight the connection between language modeling and behavior modeling, which can inspire both natural language processing and recommender system communities.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Larger or Smaller Reward Margins to Select Preferences for LLM Alignment?

  • Kexin Huang
  • Junkang Wu
  • Ziqian Chen
  • Xue Wang 0010
  • Jinyang Gao
  • Bolin Ding
  • Jiancan Wu
  • Xiangnan He 0001

Preference learning is critical for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, with the quality of preference datasets playing a crucial role in this process. While existing metrics primarily assess data quality based on either explicit or implicit reward margins, their single-margin focus often leads to contradictory evaluations for the same data. To address this issue, we propose a new metric of alignment potential, $M_{AP}$, which integrates both margins to quantify the gap from the model’s current implicit reward margin to the target explicit reward margin, thereby estimating the model’s potential to align on the preference data. Empirical results demonstrate that training on the data selected by $M_{AP}$ consistently enhances alignment performance, surpassing existing metrics across different base models and optimization objectives. Furthermore, our method can be extended to self-play data generation frameworks, where we use this metric to identify high-quality data within the self-generated content by LLMs. Under this data generation scenario, our method surpasses current state-of-the-art methods across various training settings and demonstrates continuous improvements with increasing dataset size and training iterations.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Learning Bayesian Nash Equilibrium in Auction Games via Approximate Best Response

  • Kexin Huang
  • Ziqian Chen
  • Xue Wang 0010
  • Chongming Gao
  • Jinyang Gao
  • Bolin Ding
  • Xiang Wang 0010

Auction plays a crucial role in many modern trading environments, including online advertising and public resource allocation. As the number of competing bidders increases, learning Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (BNE) in auctions faces significant scalability challenges. Existing methods often experience slow convergence in large-scale auctions. For example, in a classic symmetric auction setting, the convergence rate depends on the number of bidders quadratically. To address this issue, we propose the Approximate Best Response Gradient method, a new approach for learning BNE efficiently in auction games. We leverage an analytic solution for gradient estimation to enable efficient gradient computation during optimization. Moreover, we introduce the Best Response Distance objective, which serves as an upper bound of approximation quality to BNE. By optimizing the new objective, our method is proven to achieve a local convergence rate independent of bidder numbers and circumvent the traditional quadratic complexity in the classic symmetric setting. Extensive experiments across various auction formats demonstrate that our approach accelerates convergence and enhances learning efficiency in complex auction settings.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Multi-agent Architecture Search via Agentic Supernet

  • Guibin Zhang
  • Luyang Niu
  • Junfeng Fang
  • Kun Wang 0056
  • Lei Bai 0001
  • Xiang Wang 0010

Large Language Model (LLM)-empowered multi-agent systems extend the cognitive boundaries of individual agents through disciplined collaboration and interaction, while constructing these systems often requires labor-intensive manual designs. Despite the availability of methods to automate the design of agentic workflows, they typically seek to identify a static, complex, one-size-fits-all system, which, however, fails to dynamically allocate inference resources based on the difficulty and domain of each query. To address this challenge, we shift away from the pursuit of a monolithic agentic system, instead optimizing the agentic supernet, a probabilistic and continuous distribution of agentic architectures. We introduce MaAS, an automated framework that samples query-dependent agentic systems from the supernet, delivering high-quality solutions and tailored resource allocation ( e. g. , LLM calls, tool calls, token cost). Comprehensive evaluation across six benchmarks demonstrates that MaAS (I) requires only $6\\sim45\%$ of the inference costs of existing handcrafted or automated multi-agent systems, \textbf{(II)} surpasses them by $0. 54\%\sim11. 82\%$, and \textbf{(III)} enjoys superior cross-dataset and cross-LLM-backbone transferability.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

NExT-Mol: 3D Diffusion Meets 1D Language Modeling for 3D Molecule Generation

  • Zhiyuan Liu 0001
  • Yanchen Luo
  • Han Huang
  • Enzhi Zhang
  • Sihang Li 0002
  • Junfeng Fang
  • Yaorui Shi
  • Xiang Wang 0010

3D molecule generation is crucial for drug discovery and material design. While prior efforts focus on 3D diffusion models for their benefits in modeling continuous 3D conformers, they overlook the advantages of 1D SELFIES-based Language Models (LMs), which can generate 100\% valid molecules and leverage the billion-scale 1D molecule datasets. To combine these advantages for 3D molecule generation, we propose a foundation model -- NExT-Mol: 3D Diffusion Meets 1D Language Modeling for 3D Molecule Generation. NExT-Mol uses an extensively pretrained molecule LM for 1D molecule generation, and subsequently predicts the generated molecule's 3D conformers with a 3D diffusion model. We enhance NExT-Mol's performance by scaling up the LM's model size, refining the diffusion neural architecture, and applying 1D to 3D transfer learning. Notably, our 1D molecule LM significantly outperforms baselines in distributional similarity while ensuring validity, and our 3D diffusion model achieves leading performances in conformer prediction. Given these improvements in 1D and 3D modeling, NExT-Mol achieves a 26\% relative improvement in 3D FCD for de novo 3D generation on GEOM-DRUGS, and a 13\% average relative gain for conditional 3D generation on QM9-2014. Our codes and pretrained checkpoints are available at https://github.com/acharkq/NExT-Mol.

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Reinforced Lifelong Editing for Language Models

  • Zherui Li 0001
  • Houcheng Jiang
  • Hao Chen
  • Baolong Bi
  • Zhenhong Zhou
  • Fei Sun 0001
  • Junfeng Fang
  • Xiang Wang 0010

Large language models (LLMs) acquire information from pre-training corpora, but their stored knowledge can become inaccurate or outdated over time. Model editing addresses this challenge by modifying model parameters without retraining, and prevalent approaches leverage hypernetworks to generate these parameter updates. However, they face significant challenges in lifelong editing due to their incompatibility with LLM parameters that dynamically change during the editing process. To address this, we observed that hypernetwork-based lifelong editing aligns with reinforcement learning modeling and proposed RLEdit, an RL-based editing method. By treating editing losses as rewards and optimizing hypernetwork parameters at the full knowledge sequence level, we enable it to precisely capture LLM changes and generate appropriate parameter updates. Our extensive empirical evaluation across several LLMs demonstrates that RLEdit outperforms existing methods in lifelong editing with superior effectiveness and efficiency, achieving a 59. 24% improvement while requiring only 2. 11% of the time compared to most approaches.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SciLitLLM: How to Adapt LLMs for Scientific Literature Understanding

  • Sihang Li 0002
  • Jin Huang 0001
  • Jiaxi Zhuang
  • Yaorui Shi
  • Xiaochen Cai
  • Mingjun Xu
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Linfeng Zhang 0002

Scientific literature understanding is crucial for extracting targeted information and garnering insights, thereby significantly advancing scientific discovery. Despite the remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs), they face challenges in scientific literature understanding, primarily due to (1) a lack of scientific knowledge and (2) unfamiliarity with specialized scientific tasks. To develop an LLM specialized in scientific literature understanding, we propose a hybrid strategy that integrates continual pre-training (CPT) and supervised fine-tuning (SFT), to simultaneously infuse scientific domain knowledge and enhance instruction-following capabilities for domain-specific tasks. In this process, we identify two key challenges: (1) constructing high-quality CPT corpora, and (2) generating diverse SFT instructions. We address these challenges through a meticulous pipeline, including PDF text extraction, parsing content error correction, quality filtering, and synthetic instruction creation. Applying this strategy, we present a suite of LLMs: SciLitLLM, specialized in scientific literature understanding. These models demonstrate promising performance on scientific literature understanding benchmarks. (1) We present an effective framework that integrates CPT and SFT to adapt LLMs to scientific literature understanding, which can also be easily adapted to other domains. (2) We propose an LLM-based synthesis method to generate diverse and high-quality scientific instructions, resulting in a new instruction set -- SciLitIns -- for less-represented scientific domains. (3) SciLitLLM achieves promising performance in scientific literature understanding benchmarks.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Towards Robust Alignment of Language Models: Distributionally Robustifying Direct Preference Optimization

  • Junkang Wu
  • Yuexiang Xie
  • Zhengyi Yang 0007
  • Jiancan Wu
  • Jiawei Chen 0007
  • Jinyang Gao
  • Bolin Ding
  • Xiang Wang 0010

This study addresses the challenge of noise in training datasets for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a method for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. We categorize noise into pointwise noise, which includes low-quality data points, and pairwise noise, which encompasses erroneous data pair associations that affect preference rankings. Utilizing Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO), we enhance DPO's resilience to these types of noise. Our theoretical insights reveal that DPO inherently embeds DRO principles, conferring robustness to pointwise noise, with the regularization coefficient $\beta$ playing a critical role in its noise resistance. Extending this framework, we introduce Distributionally Robustifying DPO (Dr. DPO), which integrates pairwise robustness by optimizing against worst-case pairwise scenarios. The novel hyperparameter $\beta'$ in Dr. DPO allows for fine-tuned control over data pair reliability, providing a strategic balance between exploration and exploitation in noisy training environments. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Dr. DPO substantially improves the quality of generated text and response accuracy in preference datasets, showcasing enhanced performance in both noisy and noise-free settings.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Unified Parameter-Efficient Unlearning for LLMs

  • Chenlu Ding
  • Jiancan Wu
  • Yancheng Yuan
  • Jinda Lu
  • Kai Zhang 0038
  • Alex Su
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Xiangnan He 0001

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing, enabling advanced understanding and reasoning capabilities across a variety of tasks. Fine-tuning these models for specific domains, particularly through Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies like LoRA, has become a prevalent practice due to its efficiency. However, this raises significant privacy and security concerns, as models may inadvertently retain and disseminate sensitive or undesirable information. To address these issues, we introduce a novel instance-wise unlearning framework, LLMEraser, which systematically categorizes unlearning tasks and applies precise parameter adjustments using influence functions. Unlike traditional unlearning techniques that are often limited in scope and require extensive retraining, LLMEraser is designed to handle a broad spectrum of unlearning tasks without compromising model performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that LLMEraser excels in efficiently managing various unlearning scenarios while maintaining the overall integrity and efficacy of the models.

ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Auctionformer: A Unified Deep Learning Algorithm for Solving Equilibrium Strategies in Auction Games

  • Kexin Huang
  • Ziqian Chen
  • Xue Wang 0010
  • Chongming Gao
  • Jinyang Gao
  • Bolin Ding
  • Xiang Wang 0010

Auction games have been widely used in plenty of trading environments such as online advertising and real estate. The complexity of real-world scenarios, characterized by diverse auction mechanisms and bidder asymmetries, poses significant challenges in efficiently solving for equilibria. Traditional learning approaches often face limitations due to their specificity to certain settings and high resource demands. Addressing this, we introduce Auctionformer, an efficient transformer-based method to solve equilibria of diverse auctions in a unified framework. Leveraging the flexible tokenization schemes, Auctionformer translates varying auction games into a standard token series, making use of renowned Transformer architectures. Moreover, we employ Nash error as the loss term, sidestepping the need for underlying equilibrium solutions and enabling efficient training and inference. Furthermore, a few-shot framework supports adaptability to new mechanisms, reinforced by a self-supervised fine-tuning approach. Extensive experimental results affirm the superior performance of Auctionformer over contemporary methods, heralding its potential for broad real-world applications.

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Towards 3D Molecule-Text Interpretation in Language Models

  • Sihang Li 0002
  • Zhiyuan Liu 0001
  • Yanchen Luo
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Xiangnan He 0001
  • Kenji Kawaguchi
  • Tat-Seng Chua
  • Qi Tian 0001

Language Models (LMs) have greatly influenced diverse domains. However, their inherent limitation in comprehending 3D molecular structures has considerably constrained their potential in the biomolecular domain. To bridge this gap, we focus on 3D molecule-text interpretation, and propose 3D-MoLM: 3D-Molecular Language Modeling. Specifically, 3D-MoLM enables an LM to interpret and analyze 3D molecules by equipping the LM with a 3D molecular encoder. This integration is achieved by a 3D molecule-text projector, bridging the 3D molecular encoder’s representation space and the LM’s input space. Moreover, to enhance 3D MoLM’s ability of cross-modal molecular understanding and instruction following, we meticulously curated a 3D molecule-centric instruction tuning dataset – 3D-MoIT. Through 3D molecule-text alignment and 3D molecule-centric instruction tuning, 3D-MoLM establishes an integration of 3D molecular encoder and LM. It significantly surpasses existing baselines on downstream tasks, including molecule text retrieval, molecule captioning, and more challenging open-text molecular QA tasks, especially focusing on 3D-dependent properties. We will release our codes and datasets at https://github.com/lsh0520/3D-MoLM.

ICLR Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Boosting Causal Discovery via Adaptive Sample Reweighting

  • An Zhang 0003
  • Fangfu Liu
  • Wenchang Ma
  • Zhibo Cai
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • Tat-Seng Chua

Under stringent model type and variable distribution assumptions, score-based causal discovery methods learn the directed acyclic graph (DAG) from observational data by evaluating candidate graphs over an averaged score function. Despite the great success in low-dimensional linear systems, it has been observed that these approaches overly exploits easier-to-fit samples, thus inevitably learning spurious edges. Worse still, the common homogeneity assumption of most causal discovery methods can be easily violated due to the widespread existence of heterogeneous data in the real world, resulting in performance vulnerability when noise distributions vary. We propose a simple yet effective model-agnostic framework to boost causal discovery performance by dynamically learning the adaptive weights for the Reweighted Score function, ReScore for short, where the learned weights tailors quantitatively to the important degree of each samples. Intuitively, we leverage the bilevel optimization scheme to alternatively train a standard DAG learner first, then upweight the samples that the DAG learner fails to fit well and downweight the samples that the DAG learner easily extracts the causation information from. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets are carried out to validate the effectiveness of ReScore. We observe consistent and significant boosts in structure learning performance. We further visualize that ReScore concurrently mitigates the influence of spurious edges and generalizes to heterogeneous data. Finally, we perform theoretical analysis to guarantee the structure identifiability and the weight adaptive properties of ReScore. Our codes are available at https://github.com/anzhang314/ReScore.

ICLR Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Discovering Invariant Rationales for Graph Neural Networks

  • Yingxin Wu 0002
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • An Zhang 0003
  • Xiangnan He 0001
  • Tat-Seng Chua

Intrinsic interpretability of graph neural networks (GNNs) is to find a small subset of the input graph's features --- rationale --- which guides the model prediction. Unfortunately, the leading rationalization models often rely on data biases, especially shortcut features, to compose rationales and make predictions without probing the critical and causal patterns. Moreover, such data biases easily change outside the training distribution. As a result, these models suffer from a huge drop in interpretability and predictive performance on out-of-distribution data. In this work, we propose a new strategy of discovering invariant rationale (DIR) to construct intrinsically interpretable GNNs. It conducts interventions on the training distribution to create multiple interventional distributions. Then it approaches the causal rationales that are invariant across different distributions while filtering out the spurious patterns that are unstable. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superiority of our DIR in terms of interpretability and generalization ability on graph classification over the leading baselines. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Wuyxin/DIR-GNN.

ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Let Invariant Rationale Discovery Inspire Graph Contrastive Learning

  • Sihang Li 0002
  • Xiang Wang 0010
  • An Zhang 0003
  • Yingxin Wu 0002
  • Xiangnan He 0001
  • Tat-Seng Chua

Leading graph contrastive learning (GCL) methods perform graph augmentations in two fashions: (1) randomly corrupting the anchor graph, which could cause the loss of semantic information, or (2) using domain knowledge to maintain salient features, which undermines the generalization to other domains. Taking an invariance look at GCL, we argue that a high-performing augmentation should preserve the salient semantics of anchor graphs regarding instance-discrimination. To this end, we relate GCL with invariant rationale discovery, and propose a new framework, Rationale-aware Graph Contrastive Learning (RGCL). Specifically, without supervision signals, RGCL uses a rationale generator to reveal salient features about graph instance-discrimination as the rationale, and then creates rationale-aware views for contrastive learning. This rationale-aware pre-training scheme endows the backbone model with the powerful representation ability, further facilitating the fine-tuning on downstream tasks. On MNIST-Superpixel and MUTAG datasets, visual inspections on the discovered rationales showcase that the rationale generator successfully captures the salient features (\ie distinguishing semantic nodes in graphs). On biochemical molecule and social network benchmark datasets, the state-of-the-art performance of RGCL demonstrates the effectiveness of rationale-aware views for contrastive learning. Our codes are available at https: //github. com/lsh0520/RGCL.

v2026.09.13