Yixin Peng, Diego Collarana, Er Jin +1cs.LG cs.CL stat.ML
Temporal heterogeneous graphs offer a natural abstraction for dynamic relational systems in which diverse node and relation types co-exist and evolve over time. Learning on such graphs requires jointly modeling cross-type structural heterogeneity and the temporal dynamics of interactions, yet existing methods still struggle to reconcile parameter-efficient cross-type transfer with relation-aware specialization, and typically inject time only as additive features outside the attention kernel. We propose \textbf{THGFM}, a web-scale temporal heterogeneous graph fusion model that addresses both limitations within a unified dual-path architecture. THGFM couples a \textit{Shared-Space Temporal Attention} branch for parameter-efficient cross-type transfer with a \textit{Relational Type-Partitioned Temporal Attention} branch for relation-aware specialization, and integrates them through \textit{Dual-Path Relational--Shared Fusion}, instantiated with \textit{Type-Conditioned Non-Competitive Gated Sum Fusion}: a adaptive mechanism that assigns independent, type-conditioned feature-wise gates to the shared and specialized branches, allowing both to be amplified or suppressed without zero-sum competition. To directly incorporate relative time into the attention score, THGFM further introduces \textit{Rotary Temporal Attention}, which rotates queries and keys by half-phases of relative time before matching. THGFM consistently outperforms baseline graph transformer models on academic graphs benchmarks, delivering a $+3.25\%$ six-task mean gain, with peak relative gains of $+12.37\%$ on OAG-CS PV, $+4.87\%$ on PF-$L_2$, and $+1.18\%$ on PF-$L_1$, and $+4.24\%$, $+3.73\%$, and $+4.61\%$ on OGBN-MAG, HTAG-ArXiv, and HTAG-DBLP, respectively.
This work proposes an adaptation of the attention mechanism for triangle meshes. The core observation is that endowing the attention mechanism with critical properties for learning over meshes -- intrinsicality and triangulation-agnosticism -- enables it to attain state-of-the-art results over several learning-based tasks in geometry-processing. The above is achieved by modifying the attention mechanism from the bottom up based on simple principles from geometry-processing. Namely, the quantities used within attention -- queries, keys and values -- are created by an intrinsic, triangulation-agnostic network, and treated as discretizations of continuous functions. From that, we devise an appropriate attention mechanism that operates over triangle meshes through standard FEM discretization of the resulting integrals of the above functions. Surprisingly, as far as we know, this straightforward approach has not been utilized for learning over meshes. Experiments show our method exceeds current state of the art, including both mesh-based architectures as well as point cloud transformers. Namely, we show significant improvements on several common benchmarks and tasks -- predicting canonical high-frequency signals; predicting deformations; computing dense correspondences, both between full shapes and partial ones; and predicting feature descriptors.
High task performance does not show whether a model retains prediction-relevant structural information in its internal representation. Temporal graph models, for example, can achieve high future-link AUC while basic graph statistics remain difficult to recover from the same representation. We identify one source of this gap in the weighted averaging used by standard attention: when an evidence pattern is repeated, the numerator and denominator grow at the same rate, so inputs with different amounts of accumulated evidence can produce the same aggregate. We propose Mass-Aware Attention (MAA), which generalizes standard L1 normalization to an Lp family. Under repetition, MAA makes the numerator and denominator scale at different rates, retaining the effective number of contributing inputs in the representation magnitude. It adds no supervision, parameters, hidden dimensions, or explicit count features, and recovers standard attention at p=1. Across four continuous-time dynamic graph models and three datasets, MAA improves future-link AUC in 11 of 12 model-dataset cells. Linear recovery from the same hidden representation increases by 4.49% on average, and preferential-attachment recovery improves in all 12 cells after family-wise correction. We also observe consistent evidence in marked temporal point processes, temporal knowledge graphs, retrieval-augmented generation, and spatio-temporal point processes. Information accessibility and task utility remain distinct: NLL improves in MTPP, ranking is largely preserved in TKG, additional information in RAG does not improve the diagnostic head, and downstream LayerNorm can erase the signal in STPP. These results position MAA as a general normalization principle for improving predictor-facing representation informativeness by controlling repetition invariance in standard attention.
Lidia Losavio, Francesco Sovrano, Dario Fenoglio +2cs.LG cs.AI
Money laundering threatens financial stability and exposes institutions to penalties, motivating automated detection. Because laundering schemes often emerge through relational patterns, graph neural networks (GNNs) are increasingly used for anti-money laundering (AML). Yet AML GNNs are typically evaluated with aggregate metrics such as overall F1 score, which hide an operational issue: high-activity recipient accounts concentrate many incoming transactions, making suspicious signals harder to isolate and costlier to investigate. We introduce a recipient-degree stratified evaluation that reports standard AML metrics across recipient-context density. Across three datasets (HI-Small, HI-Medium, and AMLSim-32k-5%), it reveals consistent degradation in dense recipient contexts, which we trace to three GNN characteristics: two known limitations that AML amplifies, i.e., (1) multiset non-discriminability and (2) cardinality blindness, and (3) an attention-specific effect: in dense neighborhoods, normalized attention attenuates weak but pattern-relevant multi-hop signals. Guided by this diagnosis, we propose SALT-GNN, a lightweight statistics-aware architecture that fuses degree-aware statistical aggregation with attention at each message-passing layer, so distributional and cardinality information shapes the node states used by subsequent attention steps. Ablations support fusion placement as a key factor in dense-context performance. On HI-Small and HI-Medium, SALT-GNN uses up to 77% fewer parameters than task-specific graph-transformer baselines while improving dense-context F1 score by 3-6 points; on AMLSim-32k-5%, it improves highest-degree F1 score by 16-20 points. The gains hold for both Transformer- and GAT-style attention, indicating that the benefit comes from where statistical and attentional evidence is fused rather than from a specific attention operator.
We place the attention token on the group: a token is an element $g_i$ of a matrix Lie group $G$ -- a bare transformation, with no feature payload and no external action $ρ(g)$ carrying it. To our knowledge this is the first attention construction whose tokens are bare matrix Lie group elements: their score is the closed-form algebra norm of the relative pose rather than a learned kernel, and it reaches the affine full-frame groups that every irrep- or surjective-exp-based method must exclude. We call it Lie-Algebra Attention. Once tokens are group elements, the rest follows with none of the usual representation-theoretic machinery. The relative geometry of a pair is canonical, $g_i^{-1} g_j$, so the pairwise invariant $w_{ij} = \log(g_i^{-1} g_j)$ is intrinsic rather than designed; equivariance under the diagonal $G$-action is tautological, and the cocycle condition holds automatically. The attention score is the negative squared algebra norm, $s_{ij} = -\|\log(g_i^{-1} g_j)\|_λ^2/τ$: the canonical proximity kernel under a block-weighted Frobenius inner product, with no irreducible representations, spherical harmonics, Clebsch-Gordan products, or learned kernel. The construction applies to any matrix Lie group on a chosen logarithm chart containing the relative poses, including the non-compact non-abelian affine groups with scale and shear that no vector-token attention method reaches: neither the irrep tradition nor surjective-exp methods. Three sequence-completion experiments, on SE(2), SO(3), and Aff(2), bear this out: the closed-form score matches a learned MLP kernel on the same invariant and outperforms it on SE(2), using 50 to 80x fewer score parameters, while a vector-token baseline breaks invariance by five to twelve orders of magnitude.
Cheng Zhang, Minnan Luo, Zesheng Yang +3cs.LG cs.AI cs.NE
Transformer architectures have dramatically advanced representation learning and inference in deep models through self-attention mechanisms. In parallel,associative memory (AM) frameworks map representations onto energy landscapes, offering interpretable retrieval mechanisms. However, their continuous-time inference dynamics lack the biological plausibility of classical Continuous Attractor Neural Networks (CANNs). To bridge this gap, we propose Controlled Dynamics Attractor Transformer (CDAT), which couples a mixture von Mises-Fisher (Mo-vMF) attention energy with a Hopfield refinement energy, while augmenting energy descent with a CANN-inspired excitation-inhibition modulation. CDAT instantiates a topology-constrained dynamical system whose couplings encode relational structure among tokens, thereby linking attractor-style dynamics to modern energy-based attention. We further provide a constructive dissipation analysis to formally establish their controlled inference dynamics. Benefiting from these robust and structured dynamics, CDAT achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks in graph anomaly detection and graph classification.