Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict the user's next action based on short and dynamic sessions. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in utilizing various elaborately designed graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture the pair-wise relationships among items, seemingly suggesting the design of more complicated models is the panacea for improving the empirical performance. However, these models achieve relatively marginal improvements with exponential growth in model complexity. In this paper, we dissect the classical GNN-based SBR models and empirically find that some sophisticated GNN propagations are redundant, given the readout module plays a significant role in GNN-based models. Based on this observation, we intuitively propose to remove the GNN propagation part, while the readout module will take on more responsibility in the model reasoning process. To this end, we propose the Multi-Level Attention Mixture Network (Atten-Mixer), which leverages both concept-view and instance-view readouts to achieve multi-level reasoning over item transitions. As simply enumerating all possible high-level concepts is infeasible for large real-world recommender systems, we further incorporate SBR-related inductive biases, i.e., local invariance and inherent priority to prune the search space. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposal. We also have already launched the proposed techniques to a large-scale e-commercial online service since April 2021, with significant improvements of top-tier business metrics demonstrated in the online experiments on live traffic.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as promising solutions for collaborative filtering (CF) through the modeling of user-item interaction graphs. The nucleus of existing GNN-based recommender systems involves recursive message passing along user-item interaction edges to refine encoded embeddings. Despite their demonstrated effectiveness, current GNN-based methods encounter challenges of limited receptive fields and the presence of noisy "interest-irrelevant" connections. In contrast, Transformer-based methods excel in aggregating information adaptively and globally. Nevertheless, their application to large-scale interaction graphs is hindered by inherent complexities and challenges in capturing intricate, entangled structural information. In this paper, we propose TransGNN, a novel model that integrates Transformer and GNN layers in an alternating fashion to mutually enhance their capabilities. Specifically, TransGNN leverages Transformer layers to broaden the receptive field and disentangle information aggregation from edges, which aggregates information from more relevant nodes, thereby enhancing the message passing of GNNs. Additionally, to capture graph structure information effectively, positional encoding is meticulously designed and integrated into GNN layers to encode such structural knowledge into node attributes, thus enhancing the Transformer's performance on graphs. Efficiency considerations are also alleviated by proposing the sampling of the most relevant nodes for the Transformer, along with two efficient sample update strategies to reduce complexity. Furthermore, theoretical analysis demonstrates that TransGNN offers increased expressiveness compared to GNNs, with only a marginal increase in linear complexity. Extensive experiments on five public datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of TransGNN. Our code is available at https://github.com/Peiyance/TransGNN-torch.

Many real-world graph learning tasks require handling dynamic graphs where new nodes and edges emerge. Dynamic graph learning methods commonly suffer from the catastrophic forgetting problem, where knowledge learned for previous graphs is overwritten by updates for new graphs. To alleviate the problem, continual graph learning methods are proposed. However, existing continual graph learning methods aim to learn new patterns and maintain old ones with the same set of parameters of fixed size, and thus face a fundamental tradeoff between both goals. In this paper, we propose Parameter Isolation GNN (PI-GNN) for continual learning on dynamic graphs that circumvents the tradeoff via parameter isolation and expansion. Our motivation lies in that different parameters contribute to learning different graph patterns. Based on the idea, we expand model parameters to continually learn emerging graph patterns. Meanwhile, to effectively preserve knowledge for unaffected patterns, we find parameters that correspond to them via optimization and freeze them to prevent them from being rewritten. Experiments on eight real-world datasets corroborate the effectiveness of PI-GNN compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

The "Graph pre-training and fine-tuning" paradigm has significantly improved Graph Neural Networks(GNNs) by capturing general knowledge without manual annotations for downstream tasks. However, due to the immense gap of data and tasks between the pre-training and fine-tuning stages, the model performance is still limited. Inspired by prompt fine-tuning in Natural Language Processing(NLP), many endeavors have been made to bridge the gap in graph domain. But existing methods simply reformulate the form of fine-tuning tasks to the pre-training ones. With the premise that the pre-training graphs are compatible with the fine-tuning ones, these methods typically operate in transductive setting. In order to generalize graph pre-training to inductive scenario where the fine-tuning graphs might significantly differ from pre-training ones, we propose a novel graph prompt based method called Inductive Graph Alignment Prompt(IGAP). Firstly, we unify the mainstream graph pre-training frameworks and analyze the essence of graph pre-training from graph spectral theory. Then we identify the two sources of the data gap in inductive setting: (i) graph signal gap and (ii) graph structure gap. Based on the insight of graph pre-training, we propose to bridge the graph signal gap and the graph structure gap with learnable prompts in the spectral space. A theoretical analysis ensures the effectiveness of our method. At last, we conduct extensive experiments among nodes classification and graph classification tasks under the transductive, semi-inductive and inductive settings. The results demonstrate that our proposed method can successfully bridge the data gap under different settings.