Ronghua Li
Publications
Toward Effective Multimodal Graph Foundation Model: A Divide-and-Conquer Based Approach
Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) have achieved remarkable success in generalizing across diverse domains. However, they mainly focus on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs), leaving Multimodal-Attributed Graphs (MAGs) largely untapped. Developing Multimodal Graph Foundation Models (MGFMs) allows for leveraging the rich multimodal information in MAGs, and extends applicability to broader types of downstream tasks. While recent MGFMs integrate diverse modality information, our empirical investigation reveals two fundamental limitations of existing MGFMs: (1)they fail to explicitly model modality interaction, essential for capturing intricate cross-modal semantics beyond simple aggregation, and (2)they exhibit sub-optimal modality alignment, which is critical for bridging the significant semantic disparity between distinct modal spaces. To address these challenges, we propose PLANET (graPh topoLogy-aware modAlity iNteraction and alignmEnT), a novel framework employing a Divide-and-Conquer strategy to decouple modality interaction and alignment across distinct granularities. At the embedding granularity, (1)Embedding-wise Domain Gating (EDG) performs local semantic enrichment by adaptively infusing topology-aware cross-modal context, achieving modality interaction. At the node granularity, (2)Node-wise Discretization Retrieval (NDR) ensures global modality alignment by constructing a Discretized Semantic Representation Space (DSRS) to bridge modality gaps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PLANET significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse graph-centric and multimodal generative tasks.
DOGMA: Weaving Structural Information into Data-centric Single-cell Transcriptomics Analysis
Recently, data-centric AI methodology has been a dominant paradigm in single-cell transcriptomics analysis, which treats data representation rather than model complexity as the fundamental bottleneck. In the review of current studies, earlier sequence methods treat cells as independent entities and adapt prevalent ML models to analyze their directly inherited sequence data. Despite their simplicity and intuition, these methods overlook the latent intercellular relationships driven by the functional mechanisms of biological systems and the inherent quality issues of the raw sequence data. Therefore, a series of structured methods has emerged. Although they employ various heuristic rules to capture intricate intercellular relationships and enhance the raw sequencing data, these methods often neglect biological prior knowledge. This omission incurs substantial overhead and yields suboptimal graph representations, thereby hindering the utility of ML models. To address them, we propose DOGMA, a holistic data-centric framework designed for the structural reshaping and semantic enhancement of raw data through multi-level biological prior knowledge. Transcending reliance on stochastic heuristics, DOGMA redefines graph construction by integrating Statistical Anchors with Cell Ontology and Phylogenetic Trees to enable deterministic structure discovery and robust cross-species alignment. Furthermore, Gene Ontology is utilized to bridge the feature-level semantic gap by incorporating functional priors. In complex multi-species and multi-organ benchmarks, DOGMA achieves SOTA performance, exhibiting superior zero-shot robustness and sample efficiency while operating with significantly lower computational cost.
LION: A Clifford Neural Paradigm for Multimodal-Attributed Graph Learning
Recently, the rapid advancement of multimodal domains has driven a data-centric paradigm shift in graph ML, transitioning from text-attributed to multimodal-attributed graphs. This advancement significantly enhances data representation and expands the scope of graph downstream tasks, such as modality-oriented tasks, thereby improving the practical utility of graph ML. Despite its promise, limitations exist in the current neural paradigms: (1) Neglect Context in Modality Alignment: Most existing methods adopt topology-constrained or modality-specific operators as tokenizers. These aligners inevitably neglect graph context and inhibit modality interaction, resulting in suboptimal alignment. (2) Lack of Adaptation in Modality Fusion: Most existing methods are simple adaptations for 2-modality graphs and fail to adequately exploit aligned tokens equipped with topology priors during fusion, leading to poor generalizability and performance degradation. To address the above issues, we propose LION (c\underline{LI}ff\underline{O}rd \underline{N}eural paradigm) based on the Clifford algebra and decoupled graph neural paradigm (i.e., propagation-then-aggregation) to implement alignment-then-fusion in multimodal-attributed graphs. Specifically, we first construct a modality-aware geometric manifold grounded in Clifford algebra. This geometric-induced high-order graph propagation efficiently achieves modality interaction, facilitating modality alignment. Then, based on the geometric grade properties of aligned tokens, we propose adaptive holographic aggregation. This module integrates the energy and scale of geometric grades with learnable parameters to improve modality fusion. Extensive experiments on 9 datasets demonstrate that LION significantly outperforms SOTA baselines across 3 graph and 3 modality downstream tasks.
AlgBench: To What Extent Do Large Reasoning Models Understand Algorithms?
Reasoning ability has become a central focus in the advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). Although notable progress has been achieved on several reasoning benchmarks such as MATH500 and LiveCodeBench, existing benchmarks for algorithmic reasoning remain limited, failing to answer a critical question: Do LRMs truly master algorithmic reasoning? To answer this question, we propose AlgBench, an expert-curated benchmark that evaluates LRMs under an algorithm-centric paradigm. AlgBench consists of over 3,000 original problems spanning 27 algorithms, constructed by ACM algorithmic experts and organized under a comprehensive taxonomy, including Euclidean-structured, non-Euclidean-structured, non-optimized, local-optimized, global-optimized, and heuristic-optimized categories. Empirical evaluations on leading LRMs (e.g., Gemini-3-Pro, DeepSeek-v3.2-Speciale and GPT-o3) reveal substantial performance heterogeneity: while models perform well on non-optimized tasks (up to 92%), accuracy drops sharply to around 49% on globally optimized algorithms such as dynamic programming. Further analysis uncovers \textbf{strategic over-shifts}, wherein models prematurely abandon correct algorithmic designs due to necessary low-entropy tokens. These findings expose fundamental limitations of problem-centric reinforcement learning and highlight the necessity of an algorithm-centric training paradigm for robust algorithmic reasoning.