Weiqi Wu

Chengyue Jiang, Yong Jiang, Weiqi Wu et al.

Ultra-fine entity typing (UFET) aims to predict a wide range of type phrases that correctly describe the categories of a given entity mention in a sentence. Most recent works infer each entity type independently, ignoring the correlations between types, e.g., when an entity is inferred as a president, it should also be a politician and a leader. To this end, we use an undirected graphical model called pairwise conditional random field (PCRF) to formulate the UFET problem, in which the type variables are not only unarily influenced by the input but also pairwisely relate to all the other type variables. We use various modern backbones for entity typing to compute unary potentials, and derive pairwise potentials from type phrase representations that both capture prior semantic information and facilitate accelerated inference. We use mean-field variational inference for efficient type inference on very large type sets and unfold it as a neural network module to enable end-to-end training. Experiments on UFET show that the Neural-PCRF consistently outperforms its backbones with little cost and results in a competitive performance against cross-encoder based SOTA while being thousands of times faster. We also find Neural- PCRF effective on a widely used fine-grained entity typing dataset with a smaller type set. We pack Neural-PCRF as a network module that can be plugged onto multi-label type classifiers with ease and release it in https://github.com/modelscope/adaseq/tree/master/examples/NPCRF.

Haoyi Wu, Wenyang Hui, Yezeng Chen et al.

Mathematical understanding and reasoning are crucial tasks for assessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI). However, existing benchmarks either require just a few steps of reasoning, or only contain a small amount of data in one specific topic, making it hard to analyse AI's behaviour with reference to different problems within a specific topic in detail. In this work, we propose Conic10K, a challenging math problem dataset on conic sections in Chinese senior high school education. Our dataset contains various problems with different reasoning depths, while only the knowledge from conic sections is required. Since the dataset only involves a narrow range of knowledge, it is easy to separately analyse the knowledge a model possesses and the reasoning ability it has. For each problem, we provide a high-quality formal representation, the reasoning steps, and the final solution. Experiments show that existing large language models, including GPT-4, exhibit weak performance on complex reasoning. We hope that our findings could inspire more advanced techniques for precise natural language understanding and reasoning. Our dataset and codes are available at https://github.com/whyNLP/Conic10K.

Chengyue Jiang, Yong Jiang, Weiqi Wu et al.

Open knowledge graph (KG) consists of (subject, relation, object) triples extracted from millions of raw text. The subject and object noun phrases and the relation in open KG have severe redundancy and ambiguity and need to be canonicalized. Existing datasets for open KG canonicalization only provide gold entity-level canonicalization for noun phrases. In this paper, we present COMBO, a Complete Benchmark for Open KG canonicalization. Compared with existing datasets, we additionally provide gold canonicalization for relation phrases, gold ontology-level canonicalization for noun phrases, as well as source sentences from which triples are extracted. We also propose metrics for evaluating each type of canonicalization. On the COMBO dataset, we empirically compare previously proposed canonicalization methods as well as a few simple baseline methods based on pretrained language models. We find that properly encoding the phrases in a triple using pretrained language models results in better relation canonicalization and ontology-level canonicalization of the noun phrase. We release our dataset, baselines, and evaluation scripts at https://github.com/jeffchy/COMBO/tree/main.

Weiqi Wu, Chengyue Jiang, Yong Jiang et al.

Ontological knowledge, which comprises classes and properties and their relationships, is integral to world knowledge. It is significant to explore whether Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) know and understand such knowledge. However, existing PLM-probing studies focus mainly on factual knowledge, lacking a systematic probing of ontological knowledge. In this paper, we focus on probing whether PLMs store ontological knowledge and have a semantic understanding of the knowledge rather than rote memorization of the surface form. To probe whether PLMs know ontological knowledge, we investigate how well PLMs memorize: (1) types of entities; (2) hierarchical relationships among classes and properties, e.g., Person is a subclass of Animal and Member of Sports Team is a subproperty of Member of ; (3) domain and range constraints of properties, e.g., the subject of Member of Sports Team should be a Person and the object should be a Sports Team. To further probe whether PLMs truly understand ontological knowledge beyond memorization, we comprehensively study whether they can reliably perform logical reasoning with given knowledge according to ontological entailment rules. Our probing results show that PLMs can memorize certain ontological knowledge and utilize implicit knowledge in reasoning. However, both the memorizing and reasoning performances are less than perfect, indicating incomplete knowledge and understanding.

Qiuchen Wang, Ruixue Ding, Zehui Chen et al.

Understanding information from visually rich documents remains a significant challenge for traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) methods. Existing benchmarks predominantly focus on image-based question answering (QA), overlooking the fundamental challenges of efficient retrieval, comprehension, and reasoning within dense visual documents. To bridge this gap, we introduce ViDoSeek, a novel dataset designed to evaluate RAG performance on visually rich documents requiring complex reasoning. Based on it, we identify key limitations in current RAG approaches: (i) purely visual retrieval methods struggle to effectively integrate both textual and visual features, and (ii) previous approaches often allocate insufficient reasoning tokens, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we propose ViDoRAG, a novel multi-agent RAG framework tailored for complex reasoning across visual documents. ViDoRAG employs a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based hybrid strategy to effectively handle multi-modal retrieval. To further elicit the model's reasoning capabilities, we introduce an iterative agent workflow incorporating exploration, summarization, and reflection, providing a framework for investigating test-time scaling in RAG domains. Extensive experiments on ViDoSeek validate the effectiveness and generalization of our approach. Notably, ViDoRAG outperforms existing methods by over 10% on the competitive ViDoSeek benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/ViDoRAG.

Weiqi Wu, Hongqiu Wu, Hai Zhao

The Turing test examines whether AIs exhibit human-like behaviour in natural language conversations. The traditional setting limits each participant to one message at a time and requires constant human participation. This fails to reflect a natural conversational style and hinders the evaluation of dialogue agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex and prolonged interactions. This paper proposes \textbf{\textsc{X-Turing}}, which enhances the original test with a \textit{burst dialogue} pattern, allowing more dynamic exchanges using consecutive messages. It further reduces human workload by iteratively generating dialogues that simulate the long-term interaction between the agent and a human to compose the majority of the test process. With the \textit{pseudo-dialogue} history, the agent then engages in a shorter dialogue with a real human, which is paired with a human-human conversation on the same topic to be judged using questionnaires. We introduce the \textit{X-Turn Pass-Rate} metric to assess the human likeness of LLMs across varying durations. While LLMs like GPT-4 initially perform well, achieving pass rates of 51.9\% and 38.9\% during 3 turns and 10 turns of dialogues respectively, their performance drops as the dialogue progresses, which underscores the difficulty in maintaining consistency in the long term.

Hongwei Zheng, Weiqi Wu, Zhengjia Wang et al.

Conversational agents, such as ChatGPT and Doubao, have become essential daily assistants for billions of users. To further enhance engagement, these systems are evolving from passive responders to proactive companions. However, existing efforts focus on activation within ongoing dialogues, while overlooking a key real-world bottleneck. In the conversation initiation stage, users may have a vague need but no explicit query intent, creating a first-message barrier where the conversation holds before it begins. To overcome this, we introduce Conversation Starter Generation: generating personalized starters to guide users into conversation. However, unlike in-conversation stages where immediate context guides the response, initiation must operate in a cold-start moment without explicit user intent. To pioneer in this direction, we present IceBreaker that frames human ice-breaking as a two-step handshake: (i) evoke resonance via Resonance-Aware Interest Distillation from session summaries to capture trigger interests, and (ii) stimulate interaction via Interaction-Oriented Starter Generation, optimized with personalized preference alignment and a self-reinforced loop to maximize engagement. Online A/B tests on one of the world's largest conversational agent products show that IceBreaker improves user active days by +0.184% and click-through rate by +9.425%, and has been deployed in production.

Hongqiu Wu, Zekai Xu, Tianyang Xu et al.

Game roles can be reflections of personas from a parallel world. In this paper, we propose a new style of game-play to bridge self-expression and role-playing: \emph{open role-playing games (ORPGs)}, where players are allowed to craft and embody their unique characters in the game world. Our vision is that, in the real world, we are individually similar when we are born, but we grow into unique ones as a result of the strongly different choices we make afterward. Therefore, in an ORPG, we empower players with freedom to decide their own growing curves through natural language inputs, ultimately becoming unique characters. To technically do this, we propose a special engine called Delta-Engine. This engine is not a traditional game engine used for game development, but serves as an in-game module to provide new game-play experiences. A delta-engine consists of two components, a base engine and a neural proxy. The base engine programs the prototype of the character as well as the foundational settings of the game; the neural proxy is an LLM, which realizes the character growth by generating new code snippets on the base engine incrementally. In this paper, we self-develop a specific ORPG based on delta-engines. It is adapted from the popular animated series ``Pokémon''. We present our efforts in generating out-of-domain and interesting role data in the development process as well as accessing the performance of a delta-engine. While the empirical results in this work are specific, we aim for them to provide general insights for future games.

Tianyang Xu, Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu et al.

LLM-based Interactive Drama introduces a novel dialogue scenario in which the player immerses into a character and engages in a dramatic story by interacting with LLM agents. Despite the fact that this emerging area holds significant promise, it remains largely underexplored due to the lack of a well-designed playground to develop a complete drama. This makes a significant barrier for researchers to replicate, extend, and study such systems. Hence, we present Open-Theatre, the first open-source toolkit for experiencing and customizing LLM-based interactive drama. It refines prior work with an efficient multi-agent architecture and a hierarchical retrieval-based memory system, designed to enhance narrative coherence and realistic long-term behavior in complex interactions. In addition, we provide a highly configurable pipeline, making it easy for researchers to develop and optimize new approaches.

Weiqi Wu, Hongqiu Wu, Lai Jiang et al.

Drama is a form of storytelling inspired by human creativity, proceeding with a predefined storyline, carrying emotions and thoughts. This paper introduces \emph{LLM-based interactive drama}, which endows traditional drama with an unprecedented immersion, where a person is allowed to walk into it and interact with the characters and scenes. We define this new artistic genre by 6 essential elements-plot, character, thought, diction, spectacle and interaction-and study the entire pipeline to forge a backbone \emph{drama LLM} to drive the playing process, which is challenged by limited drama resources, uncontrollable narrative development, and complicated instruction following. We propose \emph{Narrative Chain} to offer finer control over the narrative progression during interaction with players; \emph{Auto-Drama} to synthesize drama scripts given arbitrary stories; \emph{Sparse Instruction Tuning} to allow the model to follow sophisticated instructions. We manually craft 3 scripts, \emph{Detective Conan}, \emph{Harry Potter}, \emph{Romeo and Juliet}, and design a 5-dimension principle to evaluate the drama LLM comprehensively.

Weiqi Wu, Shen Huang, Yong Jiang et al.

In the fast-changing realm of information, the capacity to construct coherent timelines from extensive event-related content has become increasingly significant and challenging. The complexity arises in aggregating related documents to build a meaningful event graph around a central topic. This paper proposes CHRONOS - Causal Headline Retrieval for Open-domain News Timeline SummarizatiOn via Iterative Self-Questioning, which offers a fresh perspective on the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle the task of Timeline Summarization (TLS). By iteratively reflecting on how events are linked and posing new questions regarding a specific news topic to gather information online or from an offline knowledge base, LLMs produce and refresh chronological summaries based on documents retrieved in each round. Furthermore, we curate Open-TLS, a novel dataset of timelines on recent news topics authored by professional journalists to evaluate open-domain TLS where information overload makes it impossible to find comprehensive relevant documents from the web. Our experiments indicate that CHRONOS is not only adept at open-domain timeline summarization, but it also rivals the performance of existing state-of-the-art systems designed for closed-domain applications, where a related news corpus is provided for summarization.

Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu, Tianyang Xu et al.

LLM-based Interactive Drama is a novel AI-based dialogue scenario, where the user (i.e. the player) plays the role of a character in the story, has conversations with characters played by LLM agents, and experiences an unfolding story. This paper begins with understanding interactive drama from two aspects: Immersion, the player's feeling of being present in the story, and Agency, the player's ability to influence the story world. Both are crucial to creating an enjoyable interactive experience, while they have been underexplored in previous work. To enhance these two aspects, we first propose Playwriting-guided Generation, a novel method that helps LLMs craft dramatic stories with substantially improved structures and narrative quality. Additionally, we introduce Plot-based Reflection for LLM agents to refine their reactions to align with the player's intentions. Our evaluation relies on human judgment to assess the gains of our methods in terms of immersion and agency.