Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in a wide range of tasks, yet their application to specialized domains remains challenging due to the need for deep expertise. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to customize LLMs for professional fields by seamlessly integrating external knowledge bases, enabling real-time access to domain-specific expertise during inference. Despite its potential, traditional RAG systems, based on flat text retrieval, face three critical challenges: (i) complex query understanding in professional contexts, (ii) difficulties in knowledge integration across distributed sources, and (iii) system efficiency bottlenecks at scale. This survey presents a systematic analysis of Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG), a new paradigm that revolutionizes domain-specific LLM applications. GraphRAG addresses traditional RAG limitations through three key innovations: (i) graph-structured knowledge representation that explicitly captures entity relationships and domain hierarchies, (ii) efficient graph-based retrieval techniques that enable context-preserving knowledge retrieval with multihop reasoning ability, and (iii) structure-aware knowledge integration algorithms that leverage retrieved knowledge for accurate and logical coherent generation of LLMs. In this survey, we systematically analyze the technical foundations of GraphRAG and examine current implementations across various professional domains, identifying key technical challenges and promising research directions. All the related resources of GraphRAG, including research papers, open-source data, and projects, are collected for the community in \textcolor{blue}{\url{https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/Awesome-GraphRAG}}.

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized AI applications but poses significant challenges in safeguarding user privacy. Ensuring compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA while addressing nuanced privacy risks requires robust and scalable frameworks. This paper presents a detailed study of OneShield Privacy Guard, a framework designed to mitigate privacy risks in user inputs and LLM outputs across enterprise and open-source settings. We analyze two real-world deployments:(1) a multilingual privacy-preserving system integrated with Data and Model Factory, focusing on enterprise-scale data governance; and (2) PR Insights, an open-source repository emphasizing automated triaging and community-driven refinements. In Deployment 1, OneShield achieved a 0.95 F1 score in detecting sensitive entities like dates, names, and phone numbers across 26 languages, outperforming state-of-the-art tool such as StarPII and Presidio by up to 12\%. Deployment 2, with an average F1 score of 0.86, reduced manual effort by over 300 hours in three months, accurately flagging 8.25\% of 1,256 pull requests for privacy risks with enhanced context sensitivity. These results demonstrate OneShield's adaptability and efficacy in diverse environments, offering actionable insights for context-aware entity recognition, automated compliance, and ethical AI adoption. This work advances privacy-preserving frameworks, supporting user trust and compliance across operational contexts.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have rapidly advanced, enabling the generation of high-quality images from text prompts across various domains. However, these models present notable safety concerns, including the risk of generating harmful, biased, or private content. Current research on assessing T2I safety remains in its early stages. While some efforts have been made to evaluate models on specific safety dimensions, many critical risks remain unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce T2ISafety, a safety benchmark that evaluates T2I models across three key domains: toxicity, fairness, and bias. We build a detailed hierarchy of 12 tasks and 44 categories based on these three domains, and meticulously collect 70K corresponding prompts. Based on this taxonomy and prompt set, we build a large-scale T2I dataset with 68K manually annotated images and train an evaluator capable of detecting critical risks that previous work has failed to identify, including risks that even ultra-large proprietary models like GPTs cannot correctly detect. We evaluate 12 prominent diffusion models on T2ISafety and reveal several concerns including persistent issues with racial fairness, a tendency to generate toxic content, and significant variation in privacy protection across the models, even with defense methods like concept erasing. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/adwardlee/t2i_safety.

Collaborative learning (CL) enables multiple participants to jointly train machine learning (ML) models on decentralized data sources without raw data sharing. While the primary goal of CL is to maximize the expected accuracy gain for each participant, it is also important to ensure that the gains are fairly distributed. Specifically, no client should be negatively impacted by the collaboration, and the individual gains must ideally be commensurate with the contributions. Most existing CL algorithms require central coordination and focus on the gain maximization objective while ignoring collaborative fairness. In this work, we first show that the existing measure of collaborative fairness based on the correlation between accuracy values without and with collaboration has drawbacks because it does not account for negative collaboration gain. We argue that maximizing mean collaboration gain (MCG) while simultaneously minimizing the collaboration gain spread (CGS) is a fairer alternative. Next, we propose the CYCle protocol that enables individual participants in a private decentralized learning (PDL) framework to achieve this objective through a novel reputation scoring method based on gradient alignment between the local cross-entropy and distillation losses. Experiments on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Fed-ISIC2019 datasets empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of the CYCle protocol to ensure positive and fair collaboration gain for all participants, even in cases where the data distributions of participants are highly skewed. For the simple mean estimation problem with two participants, we also theoretically show that CYCle performs better than standard FedAvg, especially when there is large statistical heterogeneity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) faces growing challenges from evolving data protection laws and enforcement practices worldwide. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA impose strict compliance requirements on Machine Learning (ML) models, especially concerning personal data use. These laws grant individuals rights such as data correction and deletion, complicating the training and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) that rely on extensive datasets. Public data availability does not guarantee its lawful use for ML, amplifying these challenges. This paper introduces an adaptive system for mitigating risk of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) in LLMs. It dynamically aligns with diverse regulatory frameworks and integrates seamlessly into Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) systems. The system uses advanced NLP techniques, context-aware analysis, and policy-driven masking to ensure regulatory compliance. Benchmarks highlight the system's effectiveness, with an F1 score of 0.95 for Passport Numbers, outperforming tools like Microsoft Presidio (0.33) and Amazon Comprehend (0.54). In human evaluations, the system achieved an average user trust score of 4.6/5, with participants acknowledging its accuracy and transparency. Observations demonstrate stricter anonymization under GDPR compared to CCPA, which permits pseudonymization and user opt-outs. These results validate the system as a scalable and robust solution for enterprise privacy compliance.

The increased screen time and isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a significant surge in cases of online grooming, which is the use of strategies by predators to lure children into sexual exploitation. Previous efforts to detect grooming in industry and academia have involved accessing and monitoring private conversations through centrally-trained models or sending private conversations to a global server. In this work, we implement a privacy-preserving pipeline for the early detection of sexual predators. We leverage federated learning and differential privacy in order to create safer online spaces for children while respecting their privacy. We investigate various privacy-preserving implementations and discuss their benefits and shortcomings. Our extensive evaluation using real-world data proves that privacy and utility can coexist with only a slight reduction in utility.

Inferring the true demand for a product or a service from aggregate data is often challenging due to the limited available supply, thus resulting in observations that are censored and correspond to the realized demand, thereby not accounting for the unsatisfied demand. Censored regression models are able to account for the effect of censoring due to the limited supply, but they don't consider the effect of substitutions, which may cause the demand for similar alternative products or services to increase. This paper proposes Diffusion-aware Censored Demand Models, which combine a Tobit likelihood with a graph diffusion process in order to model the latent process of transfer of unsatisfied demand between similar products or services. We instantiate this new class of models under the framework of GPs and, based on both simulated and real-world data for modeling sales, bike-sharing demand, and EV charging demand, demonstrate its ability to better recover the true demand and produce more accurate out-of-sample predictions.

Blockchain technology, with implications in the financial domain, offers data in the form of large-scale transaction networks. Analyzing transaction networks facilitates fraud detection, market analysis, and supports government regulation. Despite many graph representation learning methods for transaction network analysis, we pinpoint two salient limitations that merit more investigation. Existing methods predominantly focus on the snapshots of transaction networks, sidelining the evolving nature of blockchain transaction networks. Existing methodologies may not sufficiently emphasize efficient, incremental learning capabilities, which are essential for addressing the scalability challenges in ever-expanding large-scale transaction networks. To address these challenges, we employed an incremental approach for random walk-based node representation learning in transaction networks. Further, we proposed a Metropolis-Hastings-based random walk mechanism for improved efficiency. The empirical evaluation conducted on blockchain transaction datasets reveals comparable performance in node classification tasks while reducing computational overhead. Potential applications include transaction network monitoring, the efficient classification of blockchain addresses for fraud detection or the identification of specialized address types within the network.

It treats an incredibly important and foundational problem (fairness), proposes a creative but simple new definition, gives techniques for achieving the definition, proves theorems with regards to optimality, and even provides empirical results. As learning algorithms are used more and more broadly in situations where their decisions affect people's lives, fairness of these algorithms becomes a critical technical, social, and legal problem. While there is certainly no single "right" definition and paradigm when it comes to fairness, this definition seems to clearly be *a* right definition. It's so clean and simple that in retrospect, it seems obvious--a sign of an excellent idea. One of the many things I love about this definition and this work is how it shifts the structure of power and incentives--once a learner is constrained to be fair, under either of the definitions proposed, she is immediately incentivised to gather more data or make other efforts to do a better job of understanding protected populations.

Current definitions of Information Science are inadequate to comprehensively describe the nature of its field of study and for addressing the problems that are arising from intelligent technologies. The ubiquitous rise of artificial intelligence applications and their impact on society demands the field of Information Science acknowledge the socio-technical nature of these technologies. Previous definitions of Information Science over the last six decades have inadequately addressed the environmental, human, and social aspects of these technologies. This perspective piece advocates for an expanded definition of Information Science that fully includes the socio-technical impacts information has on the conduct of research in this field. Proposing an expanded definition of Information Science that includes the socio-technical aspects of this field should stimulate both conversation and widen the interdisciplinary lens necessary to address how intelligent technologies may be incorporated into society and our lives more fairly.