In recent years, the rapid increase in academic publications across various fields has posed severe challenges for academic paper analysis: scientists struggle to timely and comprehensively track the latest research findings and methodologies. Key concept extraction has proven to be an effective analytical paradigm, and its automation has been achieved with the widespread application of language models in industrial and scientific domains. However, existing paper databases are mostly limited to similarity matching and basic classification of key concepts, failing to deeply explore the relational networks between concepts. This paper is based on the OpenAlex opensource knowledge graph. By analyzing nearly 8,000 open-source paper data from Novosibirsk State University, we discovered a strong correlation between the distribution patterns of paper key concept paths and both innovation points and rare paths. We propose a prompt engineering-based key concept path analysis method. This method leverages small language models to achieve precise key concept extraction and innovation point identification, and constructs an agent based on a knowledge graph constraint mechanism to enhance analysis accuracy. Through fine-tuning of the Qwen and DeepSeek models, we achieved significant improvements in accuracy, with the models publicly available on the Hugging Face platform.

For autonomous legal agents to operate safely in high-stakes domains, they require a foundation of absolute determinism and auditability-guarantees that standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks cannot provide. When interacting with temporal knowledge graphs that model the complex evolution of legal norms, agents must navigate versioning, causality, and hierarchical structures with precision, a task for which black-box vector search is ill-suited. This paper introduces a new architectural pattern to solve this: a formal Primitive API designed as a secure execution layer for reasoning over such graphs. Instead of a monolithic query engine, our framework provides a library of canonical primitives-atomic, composable, and auditable primitives. This design empowers planner-guided agents to decompose complex legal questions into transparent execution plans, enabling critical tasks with full verifiability, including: (i) precise point-in-time version retrieval, (ii) robust causal lineage tracing, and (iii) context-aware hybrid search. Ultimately, this architecture transforms opaque retrieval into auditable reasoning, turning the agent's internal process from a black box into a verifiable log of deterministic primitives and providing a blueprint for building the next generation of trustworthy legal AI.

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) has become a fundamental technique for representation learning on multi-relational data. Many seminal models, such as TransE, operate in an unbounded Euclidean space, which presents inherent limitations in modeling complex relations and can lead to inefficient training. In this paper, we propose Spherical Knowledge Graph Embedding (SKGE), a model that challenges this paradigm by constraining entity representations to a compact manifold: a hypersphere. SKGE employs a learnable, non-linear Spherization Layer to map entities onto the sphere and interprets relations as a hybrid translate-then-project transformation. Through extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, FB15k-237, CoDEx-S, and CoDEx-M, we demonstrate that SKGE consistently and significantly outperforms its strong Euclidean counterpart, TransE, particularly on large-scale benchmarks such as FB15k-237 and CoDEx-M, demonstrating the efficacy of the spherical geometric prior. We provide an in-depth analysis to reveal the sources of this advantage, showing that this geometric constraint acts as a powerful regularizer, leading to comprehensive performance gains across all relation types. More fundamentally, we prove that the spherical geometry creates an "inherently hard negative sampling" environment, naturally eliminating trivial negatives and forcing the model to learn more robust and semantically coherent representations. Our findings compellingly demonstrate that the choice of manifold is not merely an implementation detail but a fundamental design principle, advocating for geometric priors as a cornerstone for designing the next generation of powerful and stable KGE models.

Abstract--Human smuggling networks are complex and constantly evolving, making them difficult to analyze comprehensively. Legal case documents offer rich factual and procedural insights into these networks but are often long, unstructured, and filled with ambiguous or shifting references, posing significant challenges for automated knowledge graph (KG) construction. Existing methods either overlook coreference resolution or fail to scale beyond short text spans, leading to fragmented graphs and inconsistent entity linking. We propose LINK-KG, a modular framework that integrates a three-stage, LLM-guided coreference resolution pipeline with downstream KG extraction. At the core of our approach is a type-specific Prompt Cache, which consistently tracks and resolves references across document chunks, enabling clean and disambiguated narratives for structured knowledge graph construction from both short and long legal texts. LINK-KG reduces average node duplication by 45.21% and noisy nodes by 32.22% compared to baseline methods, resulting in cleaner and more coherent graph structures. Human smuggling networks represent highly adaptive and organized systems involving a web of actors, routes, vehicles, and intermediaries, often operating under the radar of restrictive immigration policies [1]. These networks exploit legal loopholes, adjust swiftly to enforcement changes, and frequently intersect with transnational criminal organizations. Effectively analyzing their structure and behavior is critical for informing policy, enhancing security, and preventing exploitation. However, much of the actionable insight remains embedded in lengthy, unstructured legal documents, such as court rulings, field reports, and case transcripts, making automated analysis both essential and challenging.

Uncertain knowledge graph embedding (UnKGE) methods learn vector representations that capture both structural and uncertainty information to predict scores of unseen triples. However, existing methods produce only point estimates, without quantifying predictive uncertainty-limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications where understanding confidence in predictions is crucial. To address this limitation, we propose \textsc{UnKGCP}, a framework that generates prediction intervals guaranteed to contain the true score with a user-specified level of confidence. The length of the intervals reflects the model's predictive uncertainty. \textsc{UnKGCP} builds on the conformal prediction framework but introduces a novel nonconformity measure tailored to UnKGE methods and an efficient procedure for interval construction. We provide theoretical guarantees for the intervals and empirically verify these guarantees. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks across diverse UnKGE methods further demonstrate that the intervals are sharp and effectively capture predictive uncertainty.

Uncertain knowledge graphs (UKGs) associate each triple with a confidence score to provide more precise knowledge representations. Recently, since real-world UKGs suffer from the incompleteness, uncertain knowledge graph (UKG) completion attracts more attention, aiming to complete missing triples and confidences. Current studies attempt to learn UKG embeddings to solve this problem, but they neglect the extremely imbalanced distributions of triple confidences. This causes that the learnt embeddings are insufficient to high-quality UKG completion. Thus, in this paper, to address the above issue, we propose a new semi-supervised Confidence Distribution Learning (ssCDL) method for UKG completion, where each triple confidence is transformed into a confidence distribution to introduce more supervision information of different confidences to reinforce the embedding learning process. ssCDL iteratively learns UKG embedding by relational learning on labeled data (i.e., existing triples with confidences) and unlabeled data with pseudo labels (i.e., unseen triples with the generated confidences), which are predicted by meta-learning to augment the training data and rebalance the distribution of triple confidences. Experiments on two UKG datasets demonstrate that ssCDL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in different evaluation metrics.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for learning from graph-structured data but often produce biased predictions with respect to sensitive attributes. Fairness-aware GNNs have been actively studied for mitigating biased predictions. However, no prior studies have evaluated fairness-aware GNNs on knowledge graphs, which are one of the most important graphs in many applications, such as recommender systems. Therefore, we introduce a benchmarking study on knowledge graphs. We generate new graphs from three knowledge graphs, YAGO, DBpedia, and Wikidata, that are significantly larger than the existing graph datasets used in fairness studies. We benchmark inprocessing and preprocessing methods in different GNN backbones and early stopping conditions. We find several key insights: (i) knowledge graphs show different trends from existing datasets; clearer trade-offs between prediction accuracy and fairness metrics than other graphs in fairness-aware GNNs, (ii) the performance is largely affected by not only fairness-aware GNN methods but also GNN backbones and early stopping conditions, and (iii) preprocessing methods often improve fairness metrics, while inprocessing methods improve prediction accuracy.

Heterogeneous graph neural networks have seen rapid progress in web applications such as social networks, knowledge graphs, and recommendation systems, driven by the inherent heterogeneity of web data. However, existing methods typically assume static graphs, while real-world graphs are continuously evolving. This dynamic nature requires models to adapt to new data while preserving existing knowledge. To this end, this work introduces HERO (HEterogeneous continual gRaph learning via meta-knOwledge distillation), a unified framework for continual learning on heterogeneous graphs. HERO employs meta-adaptation, a gradient-based meta-learning strategy that provides directional guidance for rapid adaptation to new tasks with limited samples. To enable efficient and effective knowledge reuse, we propose DiSCo (Diversity Sampling with semantic Consistency), a heterogeneity-aware sampling method that maximizes target node diversity and expands subgraphs along metapaths, retaining critical semantic and structural information with minimal overhead. Furthermore, HERO incorporates heterogeneity-aware knowledge distillation, which aligns knowledge at both the node and semantic levels to balance adaptation and retention across tasks. Extensive experiments on four web-related heterogeneous graph benchmarks demonstrate that HERO substantially mitigates catastrophic forgetting while achieving efficient and consistent knowledge reuse in dynamic web environments.

Current Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems primarily operate on unimodal textual data, limiting their effectiveness on unstructured multimodal documents. Such documents often combine text, images, tables, equations, and graphs, each contributing unique information. In this work, we present a Modality-Aware Hybrid retrieval Architecture (MAHA), designed specifically for multimodal question answering with reasoning through a modality-aware knowledge graph. MAHA integrates dense vector retrieval with structured graph traversal, where the knowledge graph encodes cross-modal semantics and relationships. This design enables both semantically rich and context-aware retrieval across diverse modalities. Evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that MAHA substantially outperforms baseline methods, achieving a ROUGE-L score of 0.486, providing complete modality coverage. These results highlight MAHA's ability to combine embeddings with explicit document structure, enabling effective multimodal retrieval. Our work establishes a scalable and interpretable retrieval framework that advances RAG systems by enabling modality-aware reasoning over unstructured multimodal data.

Knowledge graphs represent information as structured triples and serve as the backbone for a wide range of applications, including question answering, link prediction, and recommendation systems. A prominent line of research for exploring knowledge graphs involves graph embedding methods, where entities and relations are represented in low-dimensional vector spaces that capture underlying semantics and structure. However, most existing methods rely on assumptions such as the Closed World Assumption or Local Closed World Assumption, treating missing triples as false. This contrasts with the Open World Assumption underlying many real-world knowledge graphs. Furthermore, while explicitly stated negative statements can help distinguish between false and unknown triples, they are rarely included in knowledge graphs and are often overlooked during embedding training. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that integrates explicitly declared negative statements into the knowledge embedding learning process. Our approach employs a dual-model architecture, where two embedding models are trained in parallel, one on positive statements and the other on negative statements. During training, each model generates negative samples by corrupting positive samples and selecting the most likely candidates as scored by the other model. The proposed approach is evaluated on both general-purpose and domain-specific knowledge graphs, with a focus on link prediction and triple classification tasks. The extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach improves predictive performance over state-of-the-art embedding models, demonstrating the value of integrating meaningful negative knowledge into embedding learning.