Deep Learning
SGNNBench: A Holistic Evaluation of Spiking Graph Neural Network on Large-scale Graph
Zhang, Huizhe, Li, Jintang, Zhu, Yuchang, Chen, Liang, Kuang, Li
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are exemplary deep models designed for graph data. Message passing mechanism enables GNNs to effectively capture graph topology and push the performance boundaries across various graph tasks. However, the trend of developing such complex machinery for graph representation learning has become unsustainable on large-scale graphs. The computational and time overhead make it imperative to develop more energy-efficient GNNs to cope with the explosive growth of real-world graphs. Spiking Graph Neural Networks (SGNNs), which integrate biologically plausible learning via unique spike-based neurons, have emerged as a promising energy-efficient alternative. Different layers communicate with sparse and binary spikes, which facilitates computation and storage of intermediate graph representations. Despite the proliferation of SGNNs proposed in recent years, there is no systematic benchmark to explore the basic design principles of these brain-inspired networks on the graph data. To bridge this gap, we present SGNNBench to quantify progress in the field of SGNNs. Specifically, SGNNBench conducts an in-depth investigation of SGNNs from multiple perspectives, including effectiveness, energy efficiency, and architectural design. We comprehensively evaluate 9 state-of-the-art SGNNs across 18 datasets. Regarding efficiency, we empirically compare these baselines w.r.t model size, memory usage, and theoretical energy consumption to reveal the often-overlooked energy bottlenecks of SGNNs. Besides, we elaborately investigate the design space of SGNNs to promote the development of a general SGNN paradigm.
From Embeddings to Equations: Genetic-Programming Surrogates for Interpretable Transformer Classification
Khorshidi, Mohammad Sadegh, Yazdanjue, Navid, Gharoun, Hassan, Nikoo, Mohammad Reza, Chen, Fang, Gandomi, Amir H.
We study symbolic surrogate modeling of frozen Transformer embeddings to obtain compact, auditable classifiers with calibrated probabilities. For five benchmarks (SST2G, 20NG, MNIST, CIFAR10, MSC17), embeddings from ModernBERT, DINOv2, and SigLIP are partitioned on the training set into disjoint, information-preserving views via semantic-preserving feature partitioning (SPFP). A cooperative multi-population genetic program (MEGP) then learns additive, closed-form logit programs over these views. Across 30 runs per dataset we report F1, AUC, log-loss, Brier, expected calibration error (ECE), and symbolic complexity; a canonical model is chosen by a one-standard-error rule on validation F1 with a parsimony tie-break. Temperature scaling fitted on validation yields substantial ECE reductions on test. The resulting surrogates achieve strong discrimination (up to F1 around 0.99 on MNIST, CIFAR10, MSC17; around 0.95 on SST2G), while 20NG remains most challenging. We provide reliability diagrams, dimension usage and overlap statistics, contribution-based importances, and global effect profiles (PDP and ALE), demonstrating faithful, cross-modal explanations grounded in explicit programs.
Cycle is All You Need: More Is Different
We propose an information-topological framework in which cycle closure is the fundamental mechanism of memory and consciousness. Memory is not a static store but the ability to re-enter latent cycles in neural state space, with invariant cycles serving as carriers of meaning by filtering order-specific noise and preserving what persists across contexts. The dot-cycle dichotomy captures this: transient dots scaffold exploration, while nontrivial cycles encode low-entropy content invariants that stabilize memory. Biologically, polychronous neural groups realize 1-cycles through delay-locked spiking reinforced by STDP, nested within theta-gamma rhythms that enforce boundary cancellation. These micro-cycles compose hierarchically, extending navigation loops into general memory and cognition. The perception-action cycle introduces high-order invariance: closure holds even across sense-act alternations, generalizing ancestral homing behavior. Sheaf-cosheaf duality formalizes this process: sheaves glue perceptual fragments into global sections, cosheaves decompose global plans into actions and closure aligns top-down predictions with bottom-up cycles. Consciousness then arises as the persistence of high-order invariants that integrate (unity) yet differentiate (richness) across contexts. We conclude that cycle is all you need: persistent invariants enable generalization in non-ergodic environments with long-term coherence at minimal energetic cost.
Cross-Modal Retrieval with Cauchy-Schwarz Divergence
Zhang, Jiahao, Yin, Wenzhe, Yu, Shujian
Effective cross-modal retrieval requires robust alignment of heterogeneous data types. Most existing methods focus on bi-modal retrieval tasks and rely on distributional alignment techniques such as Kullback-Leibler divergence, Maximum Mean Discrepancy, and correlation alignment. However, these methods often suffer from critical limitations, including numerical instability, sensitivity to hyperparameters, and their inability to capture the full structure of the underlying distributions. In this paper, we introduce the Cauchy-Schwarz (CS) divergence, a hyperparameter-free measure that improves both training stability and retrieval performance. We further propose a novel Generalized CS (GCS) divergence inspired by Hรถlder's inequality. This extension enables direct alignment of three or more modalities within a unified mathematical framework through a bidirectional circular comparison scheme, eliminating the need for exhaustive pairwise comparisons. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both bi-modal and tri-modal retrieval tasks. The code of our CS/GCS divergence is publicly available at https://github.com/JiahaoZhang666/CSD.
HetaRAG: Hybrid Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation across Heterogeneous Data Stores
Yan, Guohang, Zhang, Yue, Cai, Pinlong, Wang, Ding, Mao, Song, Zhang, Hongwei, Zhang, Yaoze, Zhang, Hairong, Cai, Xinyu, Shi, Botian
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a dominant paradigm for mitigating knowledge hallucination and staleness in large language models (LLMs) while preserving data security. By retrieving relevant evidence from private, domain-specific corpora and injecting it into carefully engineered prompts, RAG delivers trustworthy responses without the prohibitive cost of fine-tuning. Traditional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are text-only and often rely on a single storage backend, most commonly a vector database. In practice, this monolithic design suffers from unavoidable trade-offs: vector search captures semantic similarity yet loses global context; knowledge graphs excel at relational precision but struggle with recall; full-text indexes are fast and exact yet semantically blind; and relational engines such as MySQL provide strong transactional guarantees but no semantic understanding. We argue that these heterogeneous retrieval paradigms are complementary, and propose a principled fusion scheme to orchestrate them synergistically, mitigating the weaknesses of any single modality. In this work we introduce HetaRAG, a hybrid, deep-retrieval augmented generation framework that orchestrates cross-modal evidence from heterogeneous data stores. We plan to design a system that unifies vector indices, knowledge graphs, full-text engines, and structured databases into a single retrieval plane, dynamically routing and fusing evidence to maximize recall, precision, and contextual fidelity. To achieve this design goal, we carried out preliminary explorations and constructed an initial RAG pipeline; this technical report provides a brief overview. The partial code is available at https://github.com/KnowledgeXLab/HetaRAG.
From Search to Reasoning: A Five-Level RAG Capability Framework for Enterprise Data
Gill, Gurbinder, Gupta, Ritvik, Lusson, Denis, Chandrashekar, Anand, Nguyen, Donald
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as the standard paradigm for answering questions on enterprise data. Traditionally, RAG has centered on text-based semantic search and re-ranking. However, this approach falls short when dealing with questions beyond data summarization or non-text data. This has led to various attempts to supplement RAG to bridge the gap between RAG, the implementation paradigm, and the question answering problem that enterprise users expect it to solve. Given that contemporary RAG is a collection of techniques rather than a defined implementation, discussion of RAG and related question-answering systems benefits from a problem-oriented understanding. We propose a new classification framework (L1-L5) to categorize systems based on data modalities and task complexity of the underlying question answering problems: L1 (Surface Knowledge of Unstructured Data) through L4 (Reflective and Reasoned Knowledge) and the aspirational L5 (General Intelligence). We also introduce benchmarks aligned with these levels and evaluate four state-of-the-art platforms: LangChain, Azure AI Search, OpenAI, and Corvic AI. Our experiments highlight the value of multi-space retrieval and dynamic orchestration for enabling L1-L4 capabilities. We empirically validate our findings using diverse datasets indicative of enterprise use cases.
Differential-Integral Neural Operator for Long-Term Turbulence Forecasting
Wu, Hao, Gao, Yuan, Xu, Fan, Zhang, Fan, Wen, Qingsong, Wang, Kun, Huang, Xiaomeng, Wu, Xian
Accurately forecasting the long-term evolution of turbulence represents a grand challenge in scientific computing and is crucial for applications ranging from climate modeling to aerospace engineering. Existing deep learning methods, particularly neural operators, often fail in long-term autoregressive predictions, suffering from catastrophic error accumulation and a loss of physical fidelity. This failure stems from their inability to simultaneously capture the distinct mathematical structures that govern turbulent dynamics: local, dissipative effects and global, non-local interactions. In this paper, we propose the {\textbf{\underline{D}}}ifferential-{\textbf{\underline{I}}}ntegral {\textbf{\underline{N}}}eural {\textbf{\underline{O}}}perator (\method{}), a novel framework designed from a first-principles approach of operator decomposition. \method{} explicitly models the turbulent evolution through parallel branches that learn distinct physical operators: a local differential operator, realized by a constrained convolutional network that provably converges to a derivative, and a global integral operator, captured by a Transformer architecture that learns a data-driven global kernel. This physics-based decomposition endows \method{} with exceptional stability and robustness. Through extensive experiments on the challenging 2D Kolmogorov flow benchmark, we demonstrate that \method{} significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in long-term forecasting. It successfully suppresses error accumulation over hundreds of timesteps, maintains high fidelity in both the vorticity fields and energy spectra, and establishes a new benchmark for physically consistent, long-range turbulence forecast.
IntSR: An Integrated Generative Framework for Search and Recommendation
Yan, Huimin, Xu, Longfei, Sun, Junjie, Ou, Ni, Luo, Wei, Tan, Xing, Cheng, Ran, Liu, Kaikui, Chu, Xiangxiang
Generative recommendation has emerged as a promising paradigm, demonstrating remarkable results in both academic benchmarks and industrial applications. However, existing systems predominantly focus on unifying retrieval and ranking while neglecting the integration of search and recommendation (S&R) tasks. What makes search and recommendation different is how queries are formed: search uses explicit user requests, while recommendation relies on implicit user interests. As for retrieval versus ranking, the distinction comes down to whether the queries are the target items themselves. Recognizing the query as central element, we propose IntSR, an integrated generative framework for S&R. It also addresses the increased computational complexity associated with integrated S&R behaviors and the erroneous pattern learning introduced by a dynamically changing corpus. IntSR has been successfully deployed across various scenarios in Amap, leading to substantial improvements in digital asset's GMV(+9.34%), Search and recommendation (S&R) services are now commonly provided by online platforms, such as Y ouTube and Amazon. These two tasks operate on shared users and items, creating a natural foundation for the joint modeling and application of S&R. A unified S&R model can better capture user preferences and enhance the effectiveness of both tasks, while also reducing engineering overhead (the left side of Figure 1).
TrustJudge: Inconsistencies of LLM-as-a-Judge and How to Alleviate Them
Wang, Yidong, Song, Yunze, Zhu, Tingyuan, Zhang, Xuanwang, Yu, Zhuohao, Chen, Hao, Song, Chiyu, Wang, Qiufeng, Wang, Cunxiang, Wu, Zhen, Dai, Xinyu, Zhang, Yue, Ye, Wei, Zhang, Shikun
The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge) has revealed critical inconsistencies in current evaluation frameworks. We identify two fundamental types of inconsistencies: (1) Score-Comparison Inconsistency, where lower-rated responses outperform higher-scored ones in pairwise comparisons, and (2) Pairwise Transitivity Inconsistency, manifested through circular preference chains (A>B>C>A) and equivalence contradictions (A=B=C\neq A). We argue that these issues come from information loss in discrete rating systems and ambiguous tie judgments during pairwise evaluation. We propose TrustJudge, a probabilistic framework that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: 1) distribution-sensitive scoring that computes continuous expectations from discrete rating probabilities, preserving information entropy for more precise scoring, and 2) likelihood-aware aggregation that resolves transitivity violations using bidirectional preference probabilities or perplexity. We also formalize the theoretical limitations of current LLM-as-a-judge frameworks and demonstrate how TrustJudge's components overcome them. When evaluated with Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct as judge using our dataset, TrustJudge reduces Score-Comparison inconsistency by 8.43% (from 23.32% to 14.89%) and Pairwise Transitivity inconsistency by 10.82% (from 15.22% to 4.40%), while maintaining higher evaluation accuracy. Our work provides the first systematic analysis of evaluation framework inconsistencies in LLM-as-a-judge paradigms, offering both theoretical insights and practical solutions for reliable automated assessment. The framework demonstrates consistent improvements across various model architectures and scales, enabling more trustworthy LLM evaluation without requiring additional training or human annotations. The codes can be found at https://github.com/TrustJudge/TrustJudge.
FORCE: Transferable Visual Jailbreaking Attacks via Feature Over-Reliance CorrEction
Lin, Runqi, Paren, Alasdair, Yuan, Suqin, Li, Muyang, Torr, Philip, Bibi, Adel, Liu, Tongliang
The integration of new modalities enhances the capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) but also introduces additional vulnerabilities. In particular, simple visual jailbreaking attacks can manipulate open-source MLLMs more readily than sophisticated textual attacks. However, these underdeveloped attacks exhibit extremely limited cross-model transferability, failing to reliably identify vulnerabilities in closed-source MLLMs. In this work, we analyse the loss landscape of these jailbreaking attacks and find that the generated attacks tend to reside in high-sharpness regions, whose effectiveness is highly sensitive to even minor parameter changes during transfer. To further explain the high-sharpness localisations, we analyse their feature representations in both the intermediate layers and the spectral domain, revealing an improper reliance on narrow layer representations and semantically poor frequency components. Building on this, we propose a Feature Over-Reliance CorrEction (FORCE) method, which guides the attack to explore broader feasible regions across layer features and rescales the influence of frequency features according to their semantic content. By eliminating non-generalizable reliance on both layer and spectral features, our method discovers flattened feasible regions for visual jailbreaking attacks, thereby improving cross-model transferability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach effectively facilitates visual red-teaming evaluations against closed-source MLLMs.