Oral Session
Oral 5F Graph & Federated Learning
AUDITORIUM
FlatLand: Personalized Graph Federated Learning via Tailored Lorentz Space
Jiahong Liu ⋅ Ram Samarth B B ⋅ Xinyu Fu ⋅ Menglin Yang ⋅ Weixi Zhang ⋅ ZHITAO YING ⋅ Irwin King
Personalization has become a pivotal field of study in contemporary intelligent systems. Federated learning enables privacy-preserving collaborative training, but highly heterogeneous client data remain challenging, especially in graph federated learning where clients possess structurally diverse graphs. Existing personalized federated learning (PFL) methods ignore the intrinsic geometric properties of diverse graph structures. We propose FlatLand, a novel personalized Federated learning method that embeds different clients' data in tailored Lorentz space of hyperbolic geometry. Our key insight is that hyperbolic geometry naturally accommodates the intrinsic negative curvature prevalent in real-world graphs, while the time-like dimension in Lorentz space provides a principled way to encode client-specific heterogeneity. We develop a parameter decoupling strategy that separates heterogeneous information (captured in time-like parameters) from common knowledge (preserved in space-like parameters), enabling direct aggregation without requiring client similarity estimation and extra calculation modules. Empirical results on diverse federated graph learning tasks demonstrate that FlatLand achieves superior performance, particularly in low-dimensional settings. Code is available in our GitHub repository.
MV-FGAD: Towards Efficient and Effective Federated Graph Anomaly Detection via Multi-view Learning
Junyi Yan ⋅ KE LIANG ⋅ Hao Yu ⋅ Meng Liu ⋅ Hao Tan ⋅ Tianrui Liu ⋅ Jun-Jie Huang ⋅ Xinwang Liu
Federated graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify abnormal nodes in distributed subgraphs through federated learning. However, existing methods suffer from two limitations. 1) Their reliance on neighborhood aggregation assumes that anomalous information can be sufficiently captured, which often fails in federated learning with partitioned client subgraphs. 2) They overlook the detection bottleneck caused by weak attribute or structural anomalies. To tackle these challenges, we revisit federated GAD and reveal that weak anomalies exhibit harder-to-detect signals compared to strong anomalies. Specifically, we propose MV-FGAD, an efficient and effective federated GAD framework for mining anomalies of varying strengths. MV-FGAD introduces a federated knowledge learning module to aggregate and broadcast shared knowledge, which is further exploited to optimize local topological structures. Moreover, it designs a multi-view learning mechanism to capture diverse anomaly patterns, and adopts Mahalanobis distance–based scoring strategy to quantify node abnormality across views. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets of varying types and scales demonstrate MV-FGAD's efficiency and effectiveness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Junyi-Yan/MV-FGAD.
PhenoBrain: Phenotype-Conditioned Long-Range Communication for Multi-Modal Brain Network Analysis
Lingyuan Meng ⋅ KE LIANG ⋅ Hao Li ⋅ Meng Liu ⋅ Weijia Shi ⋅ Miaomiao Li ⋅ Yang Gao ⋅ Xinwang Liu
Multi-modal brain network analysis aims to predict neuropsychiatric status from functional connectomes with heterogeneous phenotypes. However, most existing methods treat phenotypes as auxiliary features and perform late fusion, implicitly assuming that the connectome representation should be learned in the same way regardless of phenotype. However, in clinical neuroscience the same functional connectivity pattern may support different conclusions under different phenotype contexts. To bridge this gap, we propose PhenoBrain, a novel framework for multi-modal brain network analysis that injects phenotype information at the mechanism level rather than only at the classifier level. Specifically, we propose a phenotype-conditioned long-range routing mechanism, which learns a subject-specific multi-hop communication kernel to model long-range connectome interactions. Furthermore, we propose a phenotypic-guided attention mechanism regulation method, which uses phenotypic information as a conditional prior to regulate the learning process of attention in brain networks. To verify the effectiveness of our method, we constructed two multi-modal brain network analysis datasets based on open-source image data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PhenoBrain achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Towards Hierarchy–Uniformity Equilibrium: Recovering Semantic Depth in Hypergraph Contrastive Learning
Ruiting Zhao ⋅ Ming Li ⋅ Lixin Cui ⋅ Lu Bai ⋅ Feilong Cao ⋅ Ke Lv ⋅ Pietro Lió
Hypergraph contrastive learning is an effective paradigm for representation learning on higher-order relational data, yet existing methods largely ignore that hyperedges link nodes with multi-level semantics. Standard contrastive objectives emphasize instance discrimination via hyperspherical uniformity and tend to push embeddings apart in an indiscriminate manner. We show that this leads to a Hierarchy–Uniformity Conflict, whose geometric manifestation is Semantic Flattening, where the semantic depth of hyperedges collapses into a nearly flat cloud of instances. To address this issue, we introduce HyperDepth, a hypergraph contrastive learning framework that moves representations towards a hierarchy–uniformity equilibrium by jointly coordinating spectral and geometric signals. HyperDepth employs a decoupled spectral encoding scheme with adaptive gating so that high-frequency components focus on local instance discrimination while low-frequency components capture global hierarchical structure. On top of this, an energy-based hierarchical alignment module attaches a learnable prototype tree to the representation space and minimizes an interpretable energy functional to recover the semantic depth of hyperedges. Theoretically, under a mild frequency-separation assumption, we show that the local contrastive and global hierarchical objectives operate on orthogonal spectral components and admit equilibrium embeddings that preserve semantic depth while still retaining instance-level discrimination. Experiments on 15 hypergraph datasets and 17 supervised and self-supervised baselines, spanning homophilic and heterophilic regimes, show that HyperDepth attains strong performance with the best average rank.