Recommender system is one of the most important information services on today’s Internet. Recently, graph neural networks have become the new state-of-the-art approach to recommender systems. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review of the literature on graph neural network-based recommender systems. We first introduce the background and the history of the development of both recommender systems and graph neural networks. For recommender systems, in general, there are four aspects for categorizing existing works: stage, scenario, objective, and application. For graph neural networks, the existing methods consist of two categories: spectral models and spatial ones. We then discuss the motivation of applying graph neural networks into recommender systems, mainly consisting of the high-order connectivity, the structural property of data and the enhanced supervision signal. We then systematically analyze the challenges in graph construction, embedding propagation/aggregation, model optimization, and computation efficiency. Afterward and primarily, we provide a comprehensive overview of a multitude of existing works of graph neural network-based recommender systems, following the taxonomy above. Finally, we raise discussions on the open problems and promising future directions in this area. We summarize the representative papers along with their code repositories in https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/GNN-Recommender-Systems .

Traffic prediction is the cornerstone of intelligent transportation system. Accurate traffic forecasting is essential for the applications of smart cities, i.e., intelligent traffic management and urban planning. Although various methods are proposed for spatio-temporal modeling, they ignore the dynamic characteristics of correlations among locations on road network. Meanwhile, most Recurrent Neural Network based works are not efficient enough due to their recurrent operations. Additionally, there is a severe lack of fair comparison among different methods on the same datasets. To address the above challenges, in this article, we propose a novel traffic prediction framework, named Dynamic Graph Convolutional Recurrent Network (DGCRN). In DGCRN, hyper-networks are designed to leverage and extract dynamic characteristics from node attributes, while the parameters of dynamic filters are generated at each time step. We filter the node embeddings and then use them to generate dynamic graph, which is integrated with pre-defined static graph. As far as we know, we are first to employ a generation method to model fine topology of dynamic graph at each time step. Furthermore, to enhance efficiency and performance, we employ a training strategy for DGCRN by restricting the iteration number of decoder during forward and backward propagation. Finally, a reproducible standardized benchmark and a brand new representative traffic dataset are opened for fair comparison and further research. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms 15 baselines consistently. Source codes are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/Traffic-Benchmark .

Urban spatio-temporal prediction is crucial for informed decision-making, such as traffic management, resource optimization, and emergence response. Despite remarkable breakthroughs in pretrained natural language models that enable one model to handle diverse tasks, a universal solution for spatio-temporal prediction remains challenging. Existing prediction approaches are typically tailored for specific spatio-temporal scenarios, requiring task-specific model designs and extensive domain-specific training data. In this study, we introduce UniST, a universal model designed for general urban spatio-temporal prediction across a wide range of scenarios. Inspired by large language models, UniST achieves success through: (i) utilizing diverse spatio-temporal data, (ii) effective pre-training to capture complex spatio-temporal relationships, (iii) spatio-temporal knowledge-guided prompts to enhance generalization capabilities. These designs together unlock the potential of building a universal model for various scenarios. Extensive experiments on more than 20 spatio-temporal scenarios demonstrate UniST's efficacy in advancing state-of-the-art performance, especially in few-shot and zero-shot prediction. The datasets and code implementation are released on https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/UniST.

Most existing recommender systems leverage user behavior data of one type only, such as the purchase behavior in E-commerce that is directly related to the business KPI (Key Performance Indicator) of conversion rate. Besides the key behavioral data, we argue that other forms of user behaviors also provide valuable signal, such as views, clicks, adding a product to shopping carts and so on. They should be taken into account properly to provide quality recommendation for users. In this work, we contribute a new solution named NMTR (short for Neural Multi-Task Recommendation) for learning recommender systems from user multi-behavior data. We develop a neural network model to capture the complicated and multi-type interactions between users and items. In particular, our model accounts for the cascading relationship among different types of behaviors (e.g., a user must click on a product before purchasing it). To fully exploit the signal in the data of multiple types of behaviors, we perform a joint optimization based on the multi-task learning framework, where the optimization on a behavior is treated as a task. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that NMTR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art recommender systems that are designed to learn from both single-behavior data and multi-behavior data. Further analysis shows that modeling multiple behaviors is particularly useful for providing recommendation for sparse users that have very few interactions.

With the rapid development of mobile applications, mobile edge computing (MEC), which provides various cloud resources (e.g., computation and storage resources) closer to mobile and IoT devices for computation offloading, has been broadly studied in both academia and industry. To adapt the diverse demands, in this paper, we propose a novel mobile edge mechanism with a vehicle-mounted edge (V-edge) deployed. Aiming at maximizing completed tasks of the V-edge with sensitive deadline, the problem of joint path planning and resource allocation is formulated into a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP). By utilizing the piecewise linear approxi- mation and linear relaxation, we transform the MINLP into a mixed integer linear program (MILP). To obtain the near-optimal solution, we further develop a gap-adjusted branch & bound algorithm, also called GA-B&B algorithm. Moreover, we propose a low-complexity L-step lookahead branch scheme (referred to as L-step scheme) for efficient scheduling in large-scale scenarios. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheme compared with the traditional static edge mechanism. Furthermore, the proposed L-step scheme achieves close performance to the near-optimal solution, and significantly improves the task completion ratio of state-of-the-art schemes by over 10%.