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Xiaobao Wang

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25 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

From Subtle to Significant: Prompt-Driven Self-Improving Optimization in Test-Time Graph OOD Detection

Luzhi Wang
Xuanshuo Fu
He Zhang
Chuang Liu
Xiaobao Wang
Hongbo Liu

Graph Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection aims to identify whether a test graph deviates from the distribution of graphs observed during training, which is critical for ensuring the reliability of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) when deployed in open-world scenarios. Recent advances in graph OOD detection have focused on test-time training techniques that facilitate OOD detection without accessing potential supervisory information (e.g., training data). However, most of these methods employ a one-pass inference paradigm, which prevents them from progressively correcting erroneous predictions to amplify OOD signals. To this end, we propose a Self-Improving Graph Out-of-Distribution detector (SIGOOD), which is an unsupervised framework that integrates continuous self-learning with test-time training for effective graph OOD detection. Specifically, SIGOOD generates a prompt to construct a prompt-enhanced graph that amplifies potential OOD signals. To optimize prompts, SIGOOD introduces an Energy Preference Optimization (EPO) loss, which leverages energy variations between the original test graph and the prompt-enhanced graph. By iteratively optimizing the prompt by involving it into the detection model in a self-improving loop, the resulting optimal prompt-enhanced graph is ultimately used for OOD detection. Comprehensive evaluations on 21 real-world datasets confirm the effectiveness and outperformance of our SIGOOD method.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Mitigating Noise and Imbalance in Social Governance Graphs for Multi-Type Risk Assessment

Di Jin
Haotian Zhao
Xiaobao Wang
Fengyu Yan
Dongxiao He

Heterogeneous graphs are widely used to model real-world systems with diverse entity types and relational structures, and existing methods have shown promising performance in various applications. However, most current models assume balanced and semantically aligned features across nodes, which rarely holds in practice. In scenarios such as social risk governance, node types often exhibit severe feature imbalance, making it difficult for standard aggregation mechanisms to extract meaningful signals. This imbalance leads to three key challenges: inaccurate neighbor weighting, noise propagation, and biased representations skewed toward text-rich nodes. To address these issues, we propose HeCoGNN, a collaborative and adaptive aggregation framework that jointly performs neighbor filtering and relation-aware message calibration, enabling robust representation learning under semantic disparity. Experiments on real-world social governance graphs show that HeCoGNN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, particularly in handling underrepresented and noisy node types.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Structure-Enhanced Adapter for Self-Supervised Heterogeneous Graph Learning

Fengyu Yan
Di Jin
Xiaobao Wang
Qianhua Tang
Dongxiao He

Real-world heterogeneous data is commonly modeled as heterogeneous information networks (HINs). Building upon advancements in graph neural networks (GNNs), existing research has significantly progressed in semi-supervised and self-supervised paradigms for heterogeneous GNNs (HGNNs). However, these methods overlook inherent structural deficiencies in raw heterogeneous graphs. We identifies unique structural noise in HINs: missing potential critical edges and multi-relational semantically redundant edges, which force existing HGNNs to learn suboptimal representations on fixed topologies. Crucially, prior limited studies address only partial noise while remaining architecturally entrenched and tightly coupled with specific models. To break this bottleneck, we propose a plug-and-play Heterogeneous graph Structure ADaPter (HSADP) that simultaneously resolves task/model decoupling challenges while accounting for HIN-specific structural properties with with two core components: a dynamic homogeneous subgraph enhancer recovering latent topology across semantic views and a learnable heterogeneous edge discriminator dynamically suppressing redundant edges while collaboratively optimizing semantic graphs. Extensive experiments across multi-domain datasets demonstrate our method’s effectiveness and compatibility. The adapter significantly boosts node classification accuracy for multiple SOTA approaches and surpasses specially designed heterogeneous graph structure learning models.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

A Dynamic Knowledge Update-Driven Model with Large Language Models for Fake News Detection

Di Jin
Jun Yang
Xiaobao Wang
Junwei Zhang
Shuqi Li
Dongxiao He

As the Internet and social media evolve rapidly, distinguishing credible news from a vast amount of complex information poses a significant challenge. Due to the suddenness and instability of news events, the authenticity labels of news can potentially shift as events develop, making it crucial for fake news detection to obtain the latest event updates. Existing methods employ retrieval-augmented generation to fill knowledge gaps, but they suffer from issues such as insufficient credibility of retrieved content and interference from noisy information. We propose a dynamic knowledge update-driven model for fake news detection (DYNAMO), which leverages knowledge graphs to achieve continuous updating of new knowledge and integrates with large language models to fulfill dual functions: news authenticity detection and verification of new knowledge correctness, solving the two key problems of ensuring the authenticity of new knowledge and deeply mining news semantics. Specifically, we first construct a news-domain-specific knowledge graph. Then, we use Monte Carlo Tree Search to decompose complex news and verify them step by step. Finally, we extract and update new knowledge from verified real news texts and reasoning paths. Experimental results demonstrate that DYNAMO achieves the best performance on two real-world datasets.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Active Multimodal Distillation for Few-shot Action Recognition

Weijia Feng
Yichen Zhu
Ruojia Zhang
Chenyang Wang
Fei Ma
Xiaobao Wang
Xiaobai Li

Owing to its rapid progress and broad application prospects, few-shot action recognition has attracted considerable interest. However, current methods are predominantly based on limited single-modal data, which does not fully exploit the potential of multimodal information. This paper presents a novel framework that actively identifies reliable modalities for each sample using task-specific contextual cues, thus significantly improving recognition performance. Our framework integrates an Active Sample Inference (ASI) module, which utilizes active inference to predict reliable modalities based on posterior distributions and subsequently organizes them accordingly. Unlike reinforcement learning, active inference replaces rewards with evidence-based preferences, making more stable predictions. Additionally, we introduce an active mutual distillation module that enhances the representation learning of less reliable modalities by transferring knowledge from more reliable ones. Adaptive multimodal inference is employed during the meta-test to assign higher weights to reliable modalities. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Backdoor Attack on Propagation-based Rumor Detectors

Di Jin
Yujun Zhang
Bingdao Feng
Xiaobao Wang
Dongxiao He
Zhen Wang

Rumor detection is critical as the spread of misinformation on social media threatens social stability. The propagation structure has garnered attention for its ability to capture discriminative information, such as crowd stance, which has led to the development of enhanced detection methods. However, these detectors are vulnerable to attacks that can manipulate results and evade detection, potentially disrupting public order or influencing public opinion. While adversarial attacks on rumor detectors have been studied, the use of backdoor attacks—an evasive and powerful method—remains unexplored due to the challenges in applying them to propagation trees. In this paper, we introduce the first backdoor attack framework against propagation-based rumor detectors, designed to maintain overall detector performance while enabling targeted attacks on specific rumors. We propose an adaptive discrete trigger generator that injects trigger nodes into critical nodes, creating evasive, transferable attacks. Extensive experiments on three real-world rumor datasets demonstrate that our framework effectively undermines the performance of propagation-based rumor detectors and is transferable across different architectures.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Enriching Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Through Textual Emotional Descriptions of Visual-Audio Content

Sheng Wu
Dongxiao He
Xiaobao Wang
Longbiao Wang
Jianwu Dang

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) stands as a critical research frontier, seeking to comprehensively unravel human emotions by amalgamating text, audio, and visual data. Yet, discerning subtle emotional nuances within audio and video expressions poses a formidable challenge, particularly when emotional polarities across various segments appear similar. In this paper, our objective is to spotlight emotion-relevant attributes of audio and visual modalities to facilitate multimodal fusion in the context of nuanced emotional shifts in visual-audio scenarios. To this end, we introduce DEVA, a progressive fusion framework founded on textual sentiment descriptions aimed at accentuating emotional features of visual-audio content. DEVA employs an Emotional Description Generator (EDG) to transmute raw audio and visual data into textualized sentiment descriptions, thereby amplifying their emotional characteristics. These descriptions are then integrated with the source data to yield richer, enhanced features. Furthermore, DEVA incorporates the Text-guided Progressive Fusion Module (TPF), leveraging varying levels of text as a core modality guide. This module progressively fuses visual-audio minor modalities to alleviate disparities between text and visual-audio modalities. Experimental results on widely used sentiment analysis benchmark datasets, including MOSI, MOSEI, and CH-SIMS, underscore significant enhancements compared to state-of-the-art models. Moreover, fine-grained emotion experiments corroborate the robust sensitivity of DEVA to subtle emotional variations.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Exploiting Self-Refining Normal Graph Structures for Robust Defense against Unsupervised Adversarial Attacks

Bingdao Feng
Di Jin
Xiaobao Wang
Dongxiao He
Jingyi Cao
Zhen Wang

Defending against adversarial attacks on graphs has become increasingly important. Graph refinement to enhance the quality and robustness of representation learning is a critical area that requires thorough investigation. We observe that representations learned from attacked graphs are often ineffective for refinement due to perturbations that cause the endpoints of perturbed edges to become more similar, complicating the defender's ability to distinguish them. To address this challenge, we propose a robust unsupervised graph learning framework that utilizes cleaner graphs to learn effective representations. Specifically, we introduce an anomaly detection model based on contrastive learning to obtain a rough graph excluding a large number of perturbed structures. Subsequently, we then propose the Graph Pollution Degree (GPD), a mutual information-based measure that leverages the encoder's representation capability on the rough graph to assess the trustworthiness of the predicted graph and refine the learned representations. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms nine state-of-the-art defense models, effectively defending against adversarial attacks and enhancing node classification performance.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

HeterGP: Bridging Heterogeneity in Graph Neural Networks with Multi-View Prompting

Fengyu Yan
Xiaobao Wang
Dongxiao He
Longbiao Wang
Jianwu Dang
Di Jin

The challenges tied to unstructured graph data are manifold, primarily falling into node, edge, and graph-level problem categories. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) serve as effective tools to tackle these issues. However, individual tasks often demand distinct model architectures, and training these models typically requires abundant labeled data, a luxury often unavailable in practical settings. Recently, various "prompt tuning" methodologies have emerged to empower GNNs to adapt to multi-task learning with limited labels. The crux of these methods lies in bridging the gap between pre-training tasks and downstream objectives. Nonetheless, a prevalent oversight in existing studies is the homophily-centric nature of prompt tuning frameworks, disregarding scenarios characterized by high heterogeneity. To remedy this oversight, we introduce a novel prompting strategy named HeterGP tailored for highly heterophilic scenarios. Specifically, we present a dual-view approach to capture both homophilic and heterophilic information, along with a prompt graph design that encompasses token initialization and insertion patterns. Through extensive experiments conducted in a few-shot context encompassing node and graph classification tasks, our method showcases superior performance in highly heterophilic environments compared to state-of-the-art prompt tuning techniques.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Integration of Old and New Knowledge for Generalized Intent Discovery: A Consistency-driven Prototype-Prompting Framework

Xiao Wei
Xiaobao Wang
Ning Zhuang
Chenyang Wang
Longbiao Wang
Jianwu Dang

Intent detection aims to identify user intents from natural language inputs, where supervised methods rely heavily on labeled in-domain (IND) data and struggle with out-of-domain (OOD) intents, limiting their practical applicability. Generalized Intent Discovery (GID) addresses this by leveraging unlabeled OOD data to discover new intents without additional annotation. However, existing methods focus solely on clustering unsupervised data while neglecting domain adaptation. Therefore, we propose a consistency-driven prototype-prompting framework for GID from the perspective of integrating old and new knowledge, which includes a prototype-prompting framework for transferring old knowledge from external sources, and a hierarchical consistency constraint for learning new knowledge from target domains. We conducted extensive experiments and the results show that our method significantly outperforms all baseline methods, achieving state-of-the-art results, which strongly demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization of our methods. Our source code is publicly available at https: //github. com/smileix/cpp.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LoSplit: Loss-Guided Dynamic Split for Training-Time Defense Against Graph Backdoor Attacks

Di Jin
Yuxiang Zhang
Bingdao Feng
Xiaobao Wang
Dongxiao He
Zhen Wang

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing defenses primarily rely on detecting structural anomalies, distributional outliers, or perturbation-induced prediction instability, which struggle to handle the more subtle, feature-based attacks that do not introduce obvious topological changes. Our empirical analysis reveals that both structure-based and feature-based attacks not only cause early loss convergence of target nodes but also induce a class-coherent loss drift, where this early convergence gradually spreads to nearby clean nodes, leading to significant distribution overlap. To address this issue, we propose LoSplit, the first training-time defense framework in graph that leverages this early-stage loss drift to accurately split target nodes. Our method dynamically selects epochs with maximal loss divergence, clusters target nodes via Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), and applies a Decoupling-Forgetting strategy to break the association between target nodes and malicious label. Extensive experiments on multiple real- world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, significantly reducing attack success rates while maintaining high clean accuracy across diverse backdoor attack strategies. Our code is available at: github. com/zyx924768045/LoSplit.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

One Prompt Fits All: Universal Graph Adaptation for Pretrained Models

Yongqi Huang
Jitao Zhao
Dongxiao He
Xiaobao Wang
Yawen Li
Yuxiao Huang
Di Jin
Zhiyong Feng

Graph Prompt Learning (GPL) has emerged as a promising paradigm that bridges graph pretraining models and downstream scenarios, mitigating label dependency and the misalignment between upstream pretraining and downstream tasks. Although existing GPL studies explore various prompt strategies, their effectiveness and underlying principles remain unclear. We identify two critical limitations: (1) Lack of consensus on underlying mechanisms: Despite current GPLs have advanced the field, there is no consensus on how prompts interact with pretrained models, as different strategies intervene at varying spaces within the model, i. e. , input-level, layer-wise, and representation-level prompts. (2) Limited scenario adaptability: Most methods fail to generalize across diverse downstream scenarios, especially under data distribution shifts (e. g. , homophilic-to-heterophilic graphs). To address these issues, we theoretically analyze existing GPL approaches and reveal that representation-level prompts essentially function as fine-tuning a simple downstream classifier, proposing that graph prompt learning should focus on unleashing the capability of pretrained models, and the classifier should adapt to downstream scenarios. Based on our findings, we propose UniPrompt, a novel GPL method that adapts any pretrained models, unleashing the capability of pretrained models while preserving the input graph. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively integrate with various pretrained models and achieve strong performance across in-domain and cross-domain scenarios.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Rethinking Contrastive Learning in Graph Anomaly Detection: A Clean-View Perspective

Di Jin
Jingyi Cao
Xiaobao Wang
Bingdao Feng
Dongxiao He
Longbiao Wang
Jianwu Dang

Graph anomaly detection aims to identify unusual patterns in graph-based data, with wide applications in fields such as web security and financial fraud detection. Existing methods typically rely on contrastive learning, assuming that a lower similarity between a node and its local subgraph indicates abnormality. However, these approaches overlook a crucial limitation: the presence of interfering edges invalidates this assumption, since it introduces disruptive noise that compromises the contrastive learning process. Consequently, this limitation impairs the ability to effectively learn meaningful representations of normal patterns, leading to suboptimal detection performance. To address this issue, we propose a Clean-View Enhanced Graph Anomaly Detection framework (CVGAD), which includes a multi-scale anomaly awareness module to identify key sources of interference in the contrastive learning process. Moreover, to mitigate bias from the one-step edge removal process, we introduce a novel progressive purification module. This module incrementally refines the graph by iteratively identifying and removing interfering edges, thereby enhancing model performance. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Single-Node Trigger Backdoor Attacks in Graph-Based Recommendation Systems

Runze Li
Di Jin
Xiaobao Wang
Dongxiao He
Bingdao Feng
Zhen Wang

Graph recommendation systems have been widely studied due to their ability to effectively capture the complex interactions between users and items. However, these systems also exhibit certain vulnerabilities when faced with attacks. The prevailing shilling attack methods typically manipulate recommendation results by injecting a large number of fake nodes and edges. However, such attack strategies face two primary challenges: low stealth and high destructiveness. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel graph backdoor attack method that aims to enhance the exposure of target items to the target user in a covert manner, without affecting other unrelated nodes. Specifically, we design a single-node trigger generator, which can effectively expose multiple target items to the target user by inserting only one fake user node. Additionally, we introduce constraint conditions between the target nodes and irrelevant nodes to mitigate the impact of fake nodes on the recommendation system's performance. Experimental results show that the exposure of the target items reaches no less than 50% in 99% of the target users, while the impact on the recommendation system's performance is controlled within approximately 5%.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Stealthy Yet Effective: Distribution-Preserving Backdoor Attacks on Graph Classification

Xiaobao Wang
Ruoxiao Sun
Yujun Zhang
Bingdao Feng
Dongxiao He
Luzhi Wang
Di Jin

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated strong performance across tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification, but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks that implant imperceptible triggers during training to control predictions. While node-level attacks exploit local message passing, graph-level attacks face the harder challenge of manipulating global representations while maintaining stealth. We identify two main sources of anomaly in existing graph classification backdoor methods: structural deviation from rare subgraph triggers and semantic deviation caused by label flipping, both of which make poisoned graphs easily detectable by anomaly detection models. To address this, we propose DPSBA, a clean-label backdoor framework that learns in-distribution triggers via adversarial training guided by anomaly-aware discriminators. DPSBA effectively suppresses both structural and semantic anomalies, achieving high attack success while significantly improving stealth. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate that DPSBA achieves a superior balance between effectiveness and detectability compared to state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https: //github. com/TheCoderOfs/DPSBA.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Word-Level Emotional Expression Control in Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis

Tianrui Wang
Haoyu Wang
Meng Ge
Cheng Gong
Chunyu Qiang
Ziyang Ma
Zikang Huang
Guanrou Yang

While emotional text-to-speech (TTS) has made significant progress, most existing research remains limited to utterance-level emotional expression and fails to support word-level control. Achieving word-level expressive control poses fundamental challenges, primarily due to the complexity of modeling multi-emotion transitions and the scarcity of annotated datasets that capture intra-sentence emotional and prosodic variation. In this paper, we propose WeSCon, the first self-training framework that enables word-level control of both emotion and speaking rate in a pretrained zero-shot TTS model, without relying on datasets containing intra-sentence emotion or speed transitions. Our method introduces a transition-smoothing strategy and a dynamic speed control mechanism to guide the pretrained TTS model in performing word-level expressive synthesis through a multi-round inference process. To further simplify the inference, we incorporate a dynamic emotional attention bias mechanism and fine-tune the model via self-training, thereby activating its ability for word-level expressive control in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results show that WeSCon effectively overcomes data scarcity, achieving state-of-the-art performance in word-level emotional expression control while preserving the strong zero-shot synthesis capabilities of the original TTS model.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Multi-Modal Sarcasm Detection Based on Dual Generative Processes

Huiying Ma
Dongxiao He
Xiaobao Wang
Di Jin
Meng Ge
Longbiao Wang

With the advancement of the internet, sarcastic sentiment expression on social media has grown increasingly diverse. Consequently, multimodal sarcasm detection has emerged as a valuable tool for users to comprehend and interpret sarcastic expressions. Previous research suggests that effectively integrating three modalities (namely image, text, and their inconsistencies) enhances sarcasm detection. However, in some instances, sarcasm detection can be achieved using a single modality, while others necessitate multiple modalities for accurate recognition. This variability suggests that each modality contributes differently to sarcasm detection, and employing a traditional fusion method may introduce bias in the information, unable to explicitly demonstrate the prediction ability of each modality. Therefore, we propose a multimodal sarcasm detection method based on dual generative processes. The dual generative processes map features into the same semantic space to deeply explore emotional inconsistencies between modalities. Concurrently, by incorporating the concept of strong and weak modalities, we explicitly model the modalities' contributions based on prediction performance and autonomously adjust the weight distribution. Experimental results on publicly available multi-modal sarcasm detection datasets validate the superiority of our proposed model.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Unveiling Implicit Deceptive Patterns in Multi-Modal Fake News via Neuro-Symbolic Reasoning

Yiqi Dong
Dongxiao He
Xiaobao Wang
Youzhu Jin
Meng Ge
Carl Yang
Di Jin

In the current Internet landscape, the rampant spread of fake news, particularly in the form of multi-modal content, poses a great social threat. While automatic multi-modal fake news detection methods have shown promising results, the lack of explainability remains a significant challenge. Existing approaches provide superficial explainability by displaying learned important components or views from well-trained networks, but they often fail to uncover the implicit deceptive patterns that reveal how fake news is fabricated. To address this limitation, we begin by predefining three typical deceptive patterns, namely image manipulation, cross-modal inconsistency, and image repurposing, which shed light on the mechanisms underlying fake news fabrication. Then, we propose a novel Neuro-Symbolic Latent Model called NSLM, that not only derives accurate judgments on the veracity of news but also uncovers the implicit deceptive patterns as explanations. Specifically, the existence of each deceptive pattern is expressed as a two-valued learnable latent variable, which is acquired through amortized variational inference and weak supervision based on symbolic logic rules. Additionally, we devise pseudo-siamese networks to capture distinct deceptive patterns effectively. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that our NSLM achieves the best performance in fake news detection while providing insightful explanations of deceptive patterns.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Generalized Deep Markov Random Fields Framework for Fake News Detection

Yiqi Dong
Dongxiao He
Xiaobao Wang
Yawen Li
Xiaowen Su
Di Jin

Recently, the wanton dissemination of fake news on social media has adversely affected our lives, rendering automatic fake news detection a pressing issue. Current methods are often fully supervised and typically employ deep neural networks (DNN) to learn implicit relevance from labeled data, ignoring explicitly shared properties (e. g. , inflammatory expressions) across fake news. To address this limitation, we propose a graph-theoretic framework, called Generalized Deep Markov Random Fields Framework (GDMRFF), that inherits the capability of deep learning while at the same time exploiting the correlations among the news articles (including labeled and unlabeled data). Specifically, we first leverage a DNN-based module to learn implicit relations, which we then reveal as the unary function of MRF. Pairwise functions with refining effects to encapsulate human insights are designed to capture the explicit association among all samples. Meanwhile, an event removal module is introduced to remove event impact on pairwise functions. Note that we train GDMRFF with the semi-supervised setting, which decreases the reliance on labeled data while maximizing the potential of unlabeled data. We further develop an Ambiguity Learning Guided MRF (ALGM) model as a concretization of GDMRFF. Experiments show that ALGM outperforms the compared methods significantly on two datasets, especially when labeled data is limited.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Augmenting Affective Dependency Graph via Iterative Incongruity Graph Learning for Sarcasm Detection

Xiaobao Wang
Yiqi Dong
Di Jin
Yawen Li
Longbiao Wang
Jianwu Dang

Recently, progress has been made towards improving automatic sarcasm detection in computer science. Among existing models, manually constructing static graphs for texts and then using graph neural networks (GNNs) is one of the most effective approaches for drawing long-range incongruity patterns. However, the manually constructed graph structure might be prone to errors (e.g., noisy or incomplete) and not optimal for the sarcasm detection task. Errors produced during the graph construction step cannot be remedied and may accrue to the following stages, resulting in poor performance. To surmount the above limitations, we explore a novel Iterative Augmenting Affective Graph and Dependency Graph (IAAD) framework to jointly and iteratively learn the incongruity graph structure. IAAD can alternatively update the incongruity graph structure and node representation until the learning graph structure is optimal for the metrics of sarcasm detection. More concretely, we begin with deriving an affective and a dependency graph for each instance, then an iterative incongruity graph learning module is employed to augment affective and dependency graphs for obtaining the optimal inconsistent semantic graph with the goal of optimizing the graph for the sarcasm detection task. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines for sarcasm detection with significant margins.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Commonsense Knowledge Enhanced Sentiment Dependency Graph for Sarcasm Detection

Zhe Yu
Di Jin
Xiaobao Wang
Yawen Li
Longbiao Wang
Jianwu Dang

Sarcasm is widely utilized on social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit. Sarcasm detection is required for analyzing people's true feelings since sarcasm is commonly used to portray a reversed emotion opposing the literal meaning. The syntactic structure is the key to make better use of commonsense when detecting sarcasm. However, it is extremely challenging to effectively and explicitly explore the information implied in syntactic structure and commonsense simultaneously. In this paper, we apply the pre-trained COMET model to generate relevant commonsense knowledge, and explore a novel scenario of constructing a commonsense-augmented sentiment graph and a commonsense-replaced dependency graph for each text. Based on this, a Commonsense Sentiment Dependency Graph Convolutional Network (CSDGCN) framework is proposed to explicitly depict the role of external commonsense and inconsistent expressions over the context for sarcasm detection by interactively modeling the sentiment and dependency information. Experimental results on several benchmark datasets reveal that our proposed method beats the state-of-the-art methods in sarcasm detection, and has a stronger interpretability.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Local-Global Defense against Unsupervised Adversarial Attacks on Graphs

Di Jin
Bingdao Feng
Siqi Guo
Xiaobao Wang
Jianguo Wei
Zhen Wang

Unsupervised pre-training algorithms for graph representation learning are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, such as first-order perturbations on graphs, which will have an impact on particular downstream applications. Designing an effective representation learning strategy against white-box attacks remains a crucial open topic. Prior research attempts to improve representation robustness by maximizing mutual information between the representation and the perturbed graph, which is sub-optimal because it does not adapt its defense techniques to the severity of the attack. To address this issue, we propose an unsupervised defense method that combines local and global defense to improve the robustness of representation. Note that we put forward the Perturbed Edges Harmfulness (PEH) metric to determine the riskiness of the attack. Thus, when the edges are attacked, the model can automatically identify the risk of attack. We present a method of attention-based protection against high-risk attacks that penalizes attention coefficients of perturbed edges to encoders. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our strategies can enhance the robustness of representation against various adversarial attacks on three benchmark graphs.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Topic Enhanced Sentiment Spreading Model in Social Networks Considering User Interest

Xiaobao Wang
Di Jin
Katarzyna Musial
Jianwu Dang

Emotion is a complex emotional state, which can affect our physiology and psychology and lead to behavior changes. The spreading process of emotions in the text-based social networks is referred to as sentiment spreading. In this paper, we study an interesting problem of sentiment spreading in social networks. In particular, by employing a text-based social network (Twitter), we try to unveil the correlation between users’ sentimental statuses and topic distributions embedded in the tweets, then to automatically learn the inﬂuence strength between linked users. Furthermore, we introduce user interest to reﬁne the inﬂuence strength. We develop a uniﬁed probabilistic framework to formalize the problem into a topic-enhanced sentiment spreading model. The model can predict users’ sentimental statuses based on their historical emotional status, topic distributions in tweets and social structures. Experiments on the Twitter dataset show that the proposed model signiﬁcantly outperforms several alternative methods in predicting users’ sentimental status. We also discover an intriguing phenomenon that positive and negative sentiment is more relevant to user interest than neutral ones. Our method offers a new opportunity to understand the underlying mechanism of sentimental spreading in online social networks.

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AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Robust Detection of Link Communities in Large Social Networks by Exploiting Link Semantics

Di Jin
Xiaobao Wang
Ruifang He
Dongxiao He
Jianwu Dang
Weixiong Zhang

Community detection has been extensively studied for various applications, focusing primarily on network topologies. Recent research has started to explore node contents to identify semantically meaningful communities and interpret their structures using selected words. However, links in real networks typically have semantic descriptions, e.g., comments and emails in social media, supporting the notion of communities of links. Indeed, communities of links can better describe multiple roles that nodes may play and provide a richer characterization of community behaviors than communities of nodes. The second issue in community finding is that most existing methods assume network topologies and descriptive contents to be consistent and to carry the compatible information of node group membership, which is generally violated in real networks. These methods are also restricted to interpret one community with one topic. The third problem is that the existing methods have used top ranked words or phrases to label topics when interpreting communities. However, it is often difficult to comprehend the derived topics using words or phrases, which may be irrelevant. To address these issues altogether, we propose a new unified probabilistic model that can be learned by a dual nested expectation-maximization algorithm. Our new method explores the intrinsic correlation between communities and topics to discover link communities robustly and extract adequate community summaries in sentences instead of words for topic labeling at the same time. It is able to derive more than one topical summary per community to provide rich explanations. We present experimental results to show the effectiveness of our new approach, and evaluate the quality of the results by a case study.

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AAAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Joint Identification of Network Communities and Semantics via Integrative Modeling of Network Topologies and Node Contents

Dongxiao He
Zhiyong Feng
Di Jin
Xiaobao Wang
Weixiong Zhang

The objective of discovering network communities, an essential step in complex systems analysis, is two-fold: identification of functional modules and their semantics at the same time. However, most existing community-finding methods have focused on finding communities using network topologies, and the problem of extracting module semantics has not been well studied and node contents, which often contain semantic information of nodes and networks, have not been fully utilized. We considered the problem of identifying network communities and module semantics at the same time. We introduced a novel generative model with two closely correlated parts, one for communities and the other for semantics. We developed a co-learning strategy to jointly train the two parts of the model by combining a nested EM algorithm and belief propagation. By extracting the latent correlation between the two parts, our new method is not only robust for finding communities and semantics, but also able to provide more than one semantic explanation to a community. We evaluated the new method on artificial benchmarks and analyzed the semantic interpretability by a case study. We compared the new method with eight state-of-the-art methods on ten real-world networks, showing its superior performance over the existing methods.

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