OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Bypassing Skip-Gram Negative Sampling: Dimension Regularization as a More Efficient Alternative for Graph Embeddings
Authors: David Liu, Arjun Seshadri, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Johan Ugander
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

A wide range of graph embedding objectives decompose into two components: one that enforces similarity, attracting the embeddings of nodes that are perceived as similar, and another that enforces dissimilarity, repelling the embeddings of nodes that are perceived as dissimilar. Without repulsion, the embeddings would collapse into trivial solutions. Skip-Gram Negative Sampling (SGNS) is a popular and efficient repulsion approach that prevents collapse by repelling each node from a sample of dissimilar nodes. In this work, we show that when repulsion is most needed and the embeddings approach collapse, SGNS node-wise repulsion is, in the aggregate, an approximate re-centering of the node embedding dimensions. Such dimension operations are more scalable than node operations and produce a simpler geometric interpretation of the repulsion. Our theoretical result establishes dimension regularization as an effective and more efficient, compared to skip-gram node contrast, approach to enforcing dissimilarity among embeddings of nodes. We use this result to propose a flexible algorithm augmentation framework that improves the scalability of any existing algorithm using SGNS. The framework prioritizes node attraction and replaces SGNS with dimension regularization. We instantiate this generic framework for LINE and node2vec and show that the augmented algorithms preserve downstream link-prediction performance while reducing GPU memory usage by up to 33.3% and training time by 23.4%. Moreover, we show that completely removing repulsion (a special case of our augmentation framework) in LINE reduces training time by 70.9% on average, while increasing link prediction performance, especially for graphs that are globally sparse but locally dense. Global sparsity slows down dimensional collapse, while local density ensures that node attraction brings the nodes near their neighbors. In general, however, repulsion is needed, and dimension regularization provides an efficient alternative to SGNS.
Saliency-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Visual Explanations
Authors: Yifei Zhang, James Song, Siyi Gu, Tianxu Jiang, Bo Pan, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Explainable AI (XAI) has gained significant attention for providing insights into the decision-making processes of deep learning models, particularly for image classification tasks through saliency-based visual explanations. Despite their success, key challenges persist due to the scarcity of annotated datasets and the absence of standardized evaluation protocols. In this paper, we introduce Saliency-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate visual explanations generated by saliency methods across multiple datasets. We curated, constructed, and annotated eight datasets, each covering diverse tasks such as scene classification, cancer diagnosis, object classification, and action classification, with corresponding ground-truth explanation annotations. The benchmark includes a standardized and unified evaluation pipeline for assessing faithfulness and alignment of the visual explanation, providing a holistic visual explanation performance assessment. We benchmark these eight datasets with widely used saliency methods on different image classifier architectures to evaluate explanation quality. Additionally, we developed an user-friendly toolkit for automating the evaluation pipeline, from data accessing, and data loading, to result evaluation. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/XAIdataset/XAIdataset.github.io.
Efficient End-to-end Language Model Fine-tuning on Graphs
Authors: Rui Xue, Xipeng Shen, Ruozhou Yu, Xiaorui Liu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Learning from Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has attracted significant attention due to its wide range of real-world applications. The rapid evolution of language models (LMs) has revolutionized the way we process textual data, which indicates a strong potential to replace shallow text embedding generally used in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, we find that existing LM approaches that exploit text information in graphs suffer from inferior computation and data efficiency. In this study, we introduce LEADING, a novel and efficient approach for end-to-end fine-tuning of language models on TAGs. To enhance data efficiency, LEADING efficiently transfers rich knowledge from LMs to downstream graph learning tasks with limited labeled data by employing end-to-end training of LMs and GNNs in a semi-supervised learning setting. To address associated computation efficiency issues, it introduces two techniques: neighbor decoupling targeting LMs and implicit graph modeling targeting GNNs, respectively. Our proposed approach demonstrates superior performance, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on the ogbn-arxiv leaderboard, while maintaining computation cost and memory overhead comparable to graph-less fine-tuning of LMs. Through comprehensive experiments, we showcase its superior computation and data efficiency, presenting a promising solution for various LMs and graph learning tasks on TAGs.
Your Graph Recommenders are Provably Doing Graph Contrastive Learning
Authors: Wenjie Yang, Shengzhong Zhang, Jiaxing Guo, Zengfeng Huang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Graph recommender (GR) is a type of graph neural network (GNN) encoder that is customized for extracting information from the user-item interaction graph. Due to its strong performance on the recommendation task, GR has gained significant attention recently. Graph contrastive learning (GCL) is also a popular research direction that aims to learn, often unsupervised, GNNs with certain contrastive objectives. As general graph representation learning methods, GCLs have been widely adopted with supervised recommendation loss for joint training of GRs. Despite the intersection of GR and GCL research, theoretical understanding of the relationship between the two fields is surprisingly sparse. This vacancy inevitably leads to inefficient scientific research. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between the fields of GR and GCL from the perspective of encoders and loss functions. We theoretically show an interesting fact that graph recommenders are equivalent to a commonly used single-view graph contrastive model. Specifically, we find that (1) the classic encoder in GR is essentially a linear graph convolutional network with one-hot inputs, and (2) the loss function in GR is well bounded by a single-view GCL loss with certain hyperparameters. The first observation enables us to explain crucial designs of GR models, e.g., the removal of self-loop and nonlinearity. The second finding leads to a remarkable result that the recommendation loss and the GCL loss can be used interchangeably. The fact that we can train GR models solely with the GCL loss is particularly insightful, since before this work, GCLs are typically viewed as unsupervised methods that need fine-tuning. For the completeness of our work, we further generalize our theory to accommodate other GCL losses, particularly a multi-view GCL method that explicitly utilizes structural information. We believe our theory holds significant potential to inspire novel cross-field research directions in the future.
A Scalable Pretraining Framework for Link Prediction with Efficient Adaptation
Authors: Yu Song, Zhigang Hua, Harry Shomer, Yan Xie, Jingzhe Liu, Bo Long, Hui Liu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Link Prediction (LP) is a critical task in graph machine learning. While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have significantly advanced LP performance recently, existing methods face key challenges including limited supervision from sparse connectivity, sensitivity to initialization, and poor generalization under distribution shifts. We explore pretraining as a solution to address these challenges. Unlike node classification, LP is inherently a pairwise task, which requires the integration of both node- and edge-level information. In this work, we present the first systematic study on the transferability of these distinct modules and propose a late fusion strategy to effectively combine their outputs for improved performance. To handle the diversity of pretraining data and avoid negative transfer, we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that captures distinct patterns in separate experts, facilitating seamless application of the pretrained model on diverse downstream datasets. For fast adaptation, we develop a parameter-efficient tuning strategy that allows the pretrained model to adapt to unseen datasets with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on 16 datasets across two domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving state-of-the-art performance on low-resource link prediction while obtaining competitive results compared to end-to-end trained methods, with over 10,000x lower computational overhead.
FAT: Frequency-Aware Pretraining for Enhanced Time-Series Representation Learning
Authors: Rui Cheng, Xiangfei Jia, Qing Li, Rong Xing, Jiwen Huang, Yu Zheng, Zhilong Xie
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Recent advancements in time-series forecasting have highlighted the importance of frequency-domain modeling. However, deep learning models primarily operate in the time domain, limiting their ability to capture frequency-based patterns. Existing approaches normally introduce novel neural network architectures tailored to task-specific frequency properties, yet they often lack generalization and require extensive domain-specific adaptations. In this paper, we propose FAT, a novel pretraining framework that learns generalizable Frequency-Aware Time-series representations through self-supervised learning. The key idea of FAT is to pretrain any backbone model to directly extract generalizable frequency patterns from time-domain signals and encode them into robust representations-eliminating the need for architectural modifications or additional modules during inference. This is achieved via a frequency reformer that amplifies critical frequency components learned through self-supervision and enforces similarity between the original and frequency-reformed time-series representations produced by the encoder. In addition, recognizing that semantically equivalent time-series can exhibit different frequency expressions-analogous to how the same phrase is pronounced differently by different speakers-FAT introduces a Knowledge-Guided Frequency Reformer that unifies the expression of frequency patterns with the same underlying semantics and extends similarity constraints to frequency-invariant augmented samples to enhance robustness of learned representation. Experiments on 14 benchmark datasets across regression and classification tasks show that FAT consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining robustness across diverse backbone models, significantly outperforming existing pretraining methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiaXiangfei/FAT.
Improving Open-world Continual Learning under the Constraints of Scarce Labeled Data
Authors: Yujie Li, Xiangkun Wang, Xin Yang, Marcello M. Bonsangue, Junbo Zhang, Tianrui Li
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Open-world continual learning (OWCL) adapts to sequential tasks with open samples, learning knowledge incrementally while preventing forgetting. However, existing OWCL still requires a large amount of labeled data for training, which is often impractical in real-world applications. Given that new categories/entities typically come with limited annotations and are in small quantities, a more realistic situation is OWCL with scarce labeled data, i.e., few-shot training samples. Hence, this paper investigates the problem of open-world few-shot continual learning (OFCL), challenging in (i) learning unbounded tasks without forgetting previous knowledge and avoiding overfitting(ii) constructing compact decision boundaries for open detection with limited labeled data, and (iii) transferring knowledge about knowns and unknowns and even update the unknowns to knowns once the labels of open samples are learned. In response, we propose a novel OFCL framework that integrates three key components: (1) an instance-wise token augmentation (ITA) that represents and enriches sample representations with additional knowledge(2) a margin-based open boundary (MOB) that supports open detection with new tasks emerge over time, and (3) an adaptive knowledge space (AKS) that endows unknowns with knowledge for the updating from unknowns to knowns. Finally, extensive experiments show that the proposed OFCL framework outperforms all baselines remarkably with practical importance and reproducibility. The source code is released at https://github.com/liyj1201/OFCL.
Retrieval Augmented Cross-Domain LifeLong Behavior Modeling for Enhancing Click-through Rate Prediction
Authors: Xing Tang, Chaohua Yang, Yuwen Fu, Dongyang Ao, Shiwei Li, Fuyuan Lyu, Dugang Liu, Xiuqiang He
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Lifelong behavior modeling for single-domain has been widely investigated in industry click-through (CTR) prediction. However, some domains do not always have rich historical behaviors in online platforms, so cross-domain lifelong behavior modeling is overlooked. This paper proposes a novel retrieval augmented lifelong cross-domain net (RAL-CDNet) to address the challenges in cross-domain lifelong behavior modeling. There are three components in RAL-CDNet, i.e., cross-domain retrieval unit, cross-domain alignment unit, and cross-net. As the general search unit in the previous study, a cross-domain retrieval unit features a retrieval augmented paradigm that utilizes a pre-trained language model to learn the intrinsic textual information of user behaviors and generates the sequential behaviors from the source domain based on sequential behaviors in the target domain. The retrieval augmented behaviors can achieve consistency and capture accurate hidden interest for target domain CTR prediction. Furthermore, we propose the cross-domain alignment unit to align the embeddings across domains by adding a semantic-guided contrastive loss and auxiliary task loss in the source domain. This allows the embeddings to be consistent across domains and have enough source information to capture the cross-domain relation. Finally, the cross-net utilizes two-level attention techniques to enhance the final prediction in the target domain. We conduct extensive experiments on both a public dataset and an industrial dataset from the WeChat advertising platform to demonstrate the effectiveness of RAL-CDNet in terms of offline and online metrics.
SKnow-LLM Workshop: Structured Knowledge for Large Language Models
Authors: Qi Zhu, Xiusi Chen, Yu Zhang, Soji Adeshina, Costas Mavromatis, Zhen Han, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Leman Akoglu, Danai Koutra, Huzefa Rangwala
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Frontier large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various knowledge-intensive enterprise tasks. However, these models are primarily trained on unstructured, general knowledge, which limits their effectiveness in domain-specific applications-particularly when tasks involve structured data sources or sensitive enterprise information. We propose the first Structured Knowledge for Large Language Models Workshop - SKnow-LLM, which aims to bridge this gap by promoting research on innovative methodologies and practical applications in this area. Through keynote talks, panel discussions and paper presentations, the workshop will foster in-depth discussions on recent advances, identify existing challenges, and explore promising directions for integrating structured knowledge into LLMs.
FreRA: A Frequency-Refined Augmentation for Contrastive Learning on Time Series Classification
Authors: Tian Tian, Chunyan Miao, Hangwei Qian
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Contrastive learning has emerged as a competent approach for unsupervised representation learning. However, the design of an optimal augmentation strategy, although crucial for contrastive learning, is less explored for time series classification tasks. Existing predefined time-domain augmentation methods are primarily adopted from vision and are not specific to time series data. Consequently, this cross-modality incompatibility may distort the semantically relevant information of time series by introducing mismatched patterns into the data. To address this limitation, we present a novel perspective from the frequency domain and identify three advantages for downstream classification: 1) the frequency component naturally encodes global features, 2) the orthogonal nature of the Fourier basis allows easier isolation and independent modifications of critical and unimportant information, and 3) a compact set of frequency components can preserve semantic integrity. To fully utilize the three properties, we propose the lightweight yet effective Frequency-Refined Augmentation (FreRA) tailored for time series contrastive learning on classification tasks, which can be seamlessly integrated with contrastive learning frameworks in a plug-and-play manner. Specifically, FreRA automatically separates critical and unimportant frequency components. Accordingly, we propose semantic-aware Identity Modification and semantic-agnostic Self-adaptive Modification to protect semantically relevant information in the critical frequency components and infuse variance into the unimportant ones respectively. Theoretically, we prove that FreRA generates semantic-preserving views. Empirically, we conduct extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, including UCR and UEA archives, as well as five large-scale datasets on diverse applications. FreRA consistently outperforms ten leading baselines on time series classification, anomaly detection, and transfer learning tasks, demonstrating superior capabilities in contrastive representation learning and generalization in transfer learning scenarios across diverse datasets. The code is available at https://github.com/Tian0426/FreRA.
Towards Context-Aware Traffic Classification via Time-Wavelet Fusion Network
Authors: Ziming Zhao, Zhuoxue Song, Xiaofei Xie, Zhaoxuan Li, Jiongchi Yu, Fan Zhang, Tingting Li
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Encrypted traffic classification occupies a significant role in cybersecurity and network management. The existing encrypted traffic classification technology mostly relies on intra-flow semantics for extracting features. However, considering that some attack behaviors inherently have similar patterns to legitimate behaviors, and powerful adversaries could simulate benign users to conceal their attack intentions, intra-flow features may be similar between different categories. In this paper, we propose TrafficScope, a time-wavelet fusion network based on Transformer to enhance the performance of encrypted traffic classification. Specifically, in addition to using intra-flow semantics, TrafficScope also extracts contextual information to construct more comprehensive representations. Moreover, to cope with the non-stationary and dynamic contextual traffic, we employ wavelet transform to extract invariant features. For feature fusion, the cross-attention mechanism is adopted to inline combine temporal and wavelet-domain features. We extensively evaluate TrafficScope compared with 7 state-of-the-art baselines based on four groups of real-world traffic datasets, the results show that TrafficScope outperforms existing methods. We conduct a series of experiments in terms of similar intra-flow feature evaluation, data pollution, flow manipulations, and dynamic context to demonstrate the robustness and stability of the proposed method. Furthermore, we produce additional experiments to present the potential of TrafficScope in cross-dataset scenarios.
Incremental Label Distribution Learning
Authors: Chao Xu, Xijia Tang, Hong Tao, Chenping Hou
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

Label distribution learning (LDL) has large practical application potentials due to its superiority in dealing with ambiguous label information. Most existing LDL methods are designed in a closed environment, wherein all the elements, e.g., feature and label space, are fixed. Nevertheless, in reality, data are dynamically acquired in the open environment, wherein the feature space can accumulate over time and the label space can be further enriched and refined accordingly with the accumulated feature space. Conducting LDL for such simultaneous augmentation of feature and label is crucial but rarely studied, particularly when the labeled samples with full observations are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel Incremental Label Distribution Learning (ILDL) method to tackle this brand new LDL problem by continuously transiting discriminative information from the previous model to the current one. Concretely, a prior compensation regularization is designed for such discriminative information transitivity. In this manner, the current model has the capacity to reuse the previous model to guide its own training. Furthermore, we present the theoretical analyses about the generalization bound, which provides guarantees for model inheritance. Comprehensive experimental studies validate the effectiveness of our proposal.
SciSoc LLM Workshop: Large Language Models for Scientific and Societal Advances
Authors: Wei Jin, Lu Cheng, Wenpeng Yin, Xianfeng Tang, Qingsong Wen, Danai Koutra, B. Aditya Prakash, Yan Liu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

The proposed ''SciSoc LLM Workshop: Large Language Models for Scientific and Societal Advances'' aims to explore the profound implications and potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in driving forward scientific inquiry and addressing critical societal challenges. As LLMs such as GPT-4 continue to redefine boundaries in both complexity and capability, their integration into the scientific and societal domains is not just beneficial but essential. In particular, LLMs have demonstrated substantial value in improving our understanding of complex datasets and generating insights across various fields such as healthcare, environmental science, education, and public policy. By bringing together experts and enthusiasts from diverse fields, the workshop aims to foster a comprehensive understanding of how LLMs can redefine traditional research methodologies. Participants will explore innovative ways to harness the power of LLMs for greater efficiency and innovation in their respective fields, potentially catalyzing a new era of scientific and societal advancement.
Unsupervised Time Series Anomaly Prediction with Importance-based Generative Contrastive Learning
Authors: Kai Zhao, Zhihao Zhuang, Chenjuan Guo, Hao Miao, Christian S. Jensen, Yunyao Cheng, Bin Yang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2025

We study the problem of time series anomaly prediction, which is relevant to a range of real-world applications. Existing anomaly prediction methods rely on labeled training data for achieving acceptable accuracy. However, such data may be difficult to obtain; and in real-time deployments, anomalies can occur that were not seen in labeled data, thus making them difficult to predict. We provide a theoretical analysis and propose an Importance-based Generative Contrastive Learning method (IGCL) for unsupervised anomaly prediction. IGCL employs a controlled diffusion module to produce anomaly precursor patterns. Next, ICGL learns contextual representations to extract temporal dependencies from pairs of normal time series and anomaly precursors. IGCL is then able to predict anomalies by identifying anomaly precursors that will evolve into future anomalies. To address challenges caused by potentially complex precursor combinations involving multiple variables, we propose a memory bank with importance scores that stores representative samples adaptively and generates more complex anomaly precursors. Extensive experiments on nine benchmark datasets offer evidence that the proposed method is able to outperform state-of-the-art baselines.