Hang Ni

The integration of machine learning techniques has become a cornerstone in the development of intelligent urban services, significantly contributing to the enhancement of urban efficiency, sustainability, and overall livability. Recent advancements in foundational models, such as ChatGPT, have introduced a paradigm shift within the fields of machine learning and AI. These models, with their exceptional capacity for contextual comprehension, problem-solving, and task adaptability, present a transformative opportunity to reshape the future of smart cities and drive progress toward Urban General Intelligence (UGI). Despite increasing attention to Urban Foundation Models (UFMs), this rapidly evolving field faces critical challenges, including the lack of clear definitions, systematic reviews, and universalizable solutions. To address these issues, this article first introduces the definition and concept of UFMs and highlights the distinctive challenges involved in their development. Furthermore, we present a data-centric taxonomy that classifies existing research on UFMs according to the various urban data modalities and types. In addition, we propose a prospective framework designed to facilitate the realization of versatile UFMs, aimed at overcoming the identified challenges and driving further progress in this field. Finally, this article systematically summarizes and discusses existing benchmarks and datasets related to UFMs, and explores the wide-ranging applications of UFMs within urban contexts, illustrating their potential to significantly impact and transform urban systems. A comprehensive collection of relevant research papers and open source resources has been collated and is continuously updated at: https://github.com/usail-hkust/Awesome-Urban-Foundation-Models .

Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) plays a vital role in various data mining applications such as e-commerce fraud prevention and malicious user detection. Recently, Graph Neural Network (GNN) -based approach has demonstrated great effectiveness in GAD by first encoding graph data into low-dimensional representations and then identifying anomalies under the guidance of supervised or unsupervised signals. However, existing GNN-based approaches implicitly follow the homophily principle (i.e., the “like attracts like” phenomenon) and fail to learn discriminative embedding for anomalies that connect vast normal nodes. Moreover, such approaches identify anomalies in a unified global perspective but overlook diversified abnormal patterns conditioned on local graph context, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, in this article, we propose a Multi-hypersphere Heterophilic Graph Learning (MHetGL) framework for unsupervised GAD. Specifically, we first devise a Heterophilic Graph Encoding (HGE) module to learn distinguishable representations for potential anomalies by purifying and augmenting their neighborhood in a fully unsupervised manner. Then, we propose a Multi-Hypersphere Learning module to enhance the detection capability for context-dependent anomalies by jointly incorporating critical patterns from both global and local perspectives. Extensive experiments on 11 real-world datasets show that MHetGL outperforms 26 baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/KennyNH/MHetGL .

Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the development of Foundation Models (FMs) for weather forecasting, yet their ability to predict extreme weather events remains limited. Existing approaches either focus on general weather conditions or specialize in specific-type extremes, neglecting the real-world atmospheric patterns of diversified extreme events. In this work, we identify two key characteristics of extreme events: (1) the spectral disparity against normal weather regimes, and (2) the hierarchical drivers and geographic blending of diverse extremes. Along this line, we propose UniExtreme, a uni versal extreme weather forecasting foundation model that integrates (1) an Adaptive Frequency Modulation (AFM) module that captures region-wise spectral differences between normal and extreme weather, through learnable Beta-distribution filters and multi-granularity spectral aggregation, and (2) an Event Prior Augmentation (EPA) module which incorporates region-specific extreme event priors to resolve hierarchical extreme diversity and composite extreme schema, via a dual-level memory fusion network. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniExtreme outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both extreme and general weather forecasting, showcasing superior adaptability across diverse extreme scenarios.

Machine learning techniques are now integral to the advancement of intelligent urban services, playing a crucial role in elevating the efficiency, sustainability, and livability of urban environments. The recent emergence of foundation models such as ChatGPT marks a revolutionary shift in the fields of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Their unparalleled capabilities in contextual understanding, problem solving, and adaptability across a wide range of tasks suggest that integrating these models into urban domains could have a transformative impact on the development of smart cities. Despite growing interest in Urban Foundation Models (UFMs), this burgeoning field faces challenges such as a lack of clear definitions and systematic reviews. To this end, this paper first introduces the concept of UFMs and discusses the unique challenges involved in building them. We then propose a data-centric taxonomy that categorizes and clarifies current UFM-related works, based on urban data modalities and types. Furthermore, we explore the application landscape of UFMs, detailing their potential impact in various urban contexts. Relevant papers and open-source resources have been collated and are continuously updated at: https://github.com/usail-hkust/Awesome-Urban-Foundation-Models.

The recommender system is one of the most fundamental information services. A significant effort has been devoted to improving prediction accuracy, inevitably leading to the potential degradation of recommendation diversity. Moreover, individuals have different needs for diversity. To address these problems, diversity-enhanced approaches are proposed to modify the recommender models. However, these methods fail to break free from the relevance-oriented paradigm and are mostly haunted by sharply-declined accuracy and high computational costs. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Dual-Process Graph Neural Network (DPGNN), an efficient diversity-enhanced recommender system, resonating with the dual-process model of human cognition and the arousal theory of human interest. The first stage reduces the risk of suboptimal output during the training procedure, which helps to find a solution outside the relevance-oriented paradigm. Moreover, the second stage utilizes user-specific rating adjustments, boosting the recommendation diversity and accommodating users' distinctive needs with minimum computational costs. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our method in improving diversity, while maintaining accuracy with low computational costs.