Ling Zhong

Lei Liang, Mengshu Sun, Zhengke Gui et al.

The recently developed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology has enabled the efficient construction of domain-specific applications. However, it also has limitations, including the gap between vector similarity and the relevance of knowledge reasoning, as well as insensitivity to knowledge logic, such as numerical values, temporal relations, expert rules, and others, which hinder the effectiveness of professional knowledge services. In this work, we introduce a professional domain knowledge service framework called Knowledge Augmented Generation (KAG). KAG is designed to address the aforementioned challenges with the motivation of making full use of the advantages of knowledge graph(KG) and vector retrieval, and to improve generation and reasoning performance by bidirectionally enhancing large language models (LLMs) and KGs through five key aspects: (1) LLM-friendly knowledge representation, (2) mutual-indexing between knowledge graphs and original chunks, (3) logical-form-guided hybrid reasoning engine, (4) knowledge alignment with semantic reasoning, and (5) model capability enhancement for KAG. We compared KAG with existing RAG methods in multihop question answering and found that it significantly outperforms state-of-theart methods, achieving a relative improvement of 19.6% on 2wiki and 33.5% on hotpotQA in terms of F1 score. We have successfully applied KAG to two professional knowledge Q&A tasks of Ant Group, including E-Government Q&A and E-Health Q&A, achieving significant improvement in professionalism compared to RAG methods.

Jun Xu, Xinkai Du, Yu Ao et al.

Efficient retrieval of external knowledge bases and web pages is crucial for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Previous works on training LLMs to leverage external retrievers for solving complex problems have predominantly employed end-to-end reinforcement learning. However, these approaches neglect supervision over the reasoning process, making it difficult to guarantee logical coherence and rigor. To address these limitations, we propose Thinker, a hierarchical thinking model for deep search through multi-turn interaction, making the reasoning process supervisable and verifiable. It decomposes complex problems into independently solvable sub-problems, each dually represented in both natural language and an equivalent logical function to support knowledge base and web searches. Concurrently, dependencies between sub-problems are passed as parameters via these logical functions, enhancing the logical coherence of the problem-solving process. To avoid unnecessary external searches, we perform knowledge boundary determination to check if a sub-problem is within the LLM's intrinsic knowledge, allowing it to answer directly. Experimental results indicate that with as few as several hundred training samples, the performance of Thinker is competitive with established baselines. Furthermore, when scaled to the full training set, Thinker significantly outperforms these methods across various datasets and model sizes. The source code is available at https://github.com/OpenSPG/KAG-Thinker.

Yushan Zhu, Wen Zhang, Long Jin et al.

Structured data question answering (QA), including table QA, Knowledge Graph (KG) QA, and temporal KG QA, is a pivotal research area. Advances in large language models (LLMs) have driven significant progress in unified structural QA frameworks like TrustUQA. However, these frameworks face challenges when applied to small-scale LLMs since small-scale LLMs are prone to errors in generating structured queries. To improve the structured data QA ability of small-scale LLMs, we propose a self-correction distillation (SCD) method. In SCD, an error prompt mechanism (EPM) is designed to detect errors and provide customized error messages during inference, and a two-stage distillation strategy is designed to transfer large-scale LLMs' query-generation and error-correction capabilities to small-scale LLM. Experiments across 5 benchmarks with 3 structured data types demonstrate that our SCD achieves the best performance and superior generalization on small-scale LLM (8B) compared to other distillation methods, and closely approaches the performance of GPT4 on some datasets. Furthermore, large-scale LLMs equipped with EPM surpass the state-of-the-art results on most datasets.

Weiming Li, Yan Shao, Jing Yang et al.

Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding is a fundamental task for building GUI agents. However, general vision-language models (VLMs) struggle with this task due to a lack of specific optimization. We identify a key gap in this paper: while VLMs exhibit significant latent grounding potential, as demonstrated by their performance measured by Pointing Game, they underperform when tasked with outputting explicit coordinates. To address this discrepancy, and bypass the high data and annotation costs of current fine-tuning approaches, we propose three zero-shot auxiliary reasoning methods. By providing explicit spatial cues such as axes, grids and labeled intersections as part of the input image, these methods enable VLMs to articulate their implicit spatial understanding capabilities. We evaluate these methods on four GUI grounding benchmarks across seven open-source and proprietary VLMs. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed methods substantially improve the performance of GUI grounding.

Ling Team, Ang Li, Ben Liu et al.

We introduce Ling 2.0, a series reasoning-oriented language foundation built upon the principle that every activation boosts reasoning capability. Designed to scale from tens of billions to one trillion parameters under a unified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, Ling 2.0 emphasizes high sparsity, cross-scale consistency, and efficiency guided by empirical scaling laws. The series includes three non-thinking (instruct) models - Ling-mini-2.0, Ling-flash-2.0, and Ling-1T - ranging from 16B to 1T total parameters and achieving up to 7-fold active-compute efficiency compared with dense counterparts. Ling 2.0 integrates coordinated innovations across model architecture, pre-training, post-training, and infrastructure: a high-sparsity MoE with MTP for efficient reasoning, reasoning-oriented data and mid-training CoT activation, reinforcement-based fine-tuning (DFT, Evo-CoT), and full-scale FP8 training with fine-grained heterogeneous pipelines. At the trillion scale, Ling-1T establishes a new Pareto frontier of reasoning accuracy versus computational efficiency, demonstrating that sparse activation, when properly aligned with reasoning objectives, enables scalable and efficient intelligence. Collectively, Ling 2.0 provides a coherent, open, and efficient foundation for advancing future reasoning and thinking models, including the Ring series built upon the same base.

Dalong Zhang, Jun Xu, Jun Zhou et al.

In this paper, we introduce KAG-Thinker, which upgrade KAG to a multi-turn interactive thinking and deep reasoning framework powered by a dedicated parameter-light large language model (LLM). Our approach constructs a structured thinking process for solving complex problems, enhancing the the logical coherence and contextual consistency of the reasoning process in question-answering (Q&A) tasks on domain-specific knowledge bases (KBs) within LLMs. Following the \textbf{Logical Form} guided retrieval and reasoning technology route of KAG, this framework first decomposes complex questions into independently solvable sub-problems (which are also referred to as logical forms) through \textbf{breadth decomposition}. Each such logical form is represented in two equivalent forms-natural language and logical function-and subsequently classified as either a Knowledge Retrieval or Reasoning Analysis task. Dependencies and parameter passing between these tasks are explicitly modeled via logical function interfaces. In the solving process, the Retrieval function performs retrieval tasks. It retrieves one-hop structured and unstructured information of specified knowledge unit. While the Math and Deduce functions are used to perform reasoning analysis tasks. Secondly, it is worth noting that, in the Knowledge Retrieval sub-problem tasks, LLMs and external knowledge sources are regarded as equivalent KBs. We use the \textbf{knowledge boundary} module to determine the optimal source using self-regulatory mechanisms such as confidence calibration and reflective reasoning, and use the \textbf{depth solving} module to enhance the comprehensiveness of knowledge acquisition...

Yujing Lu, Ling Zhong, Jing Yang et al.

Chart Question Answering (CQA) evaluates Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on visual understanding and reasoning over chart data. However, existing benchmarks mostly test surface-level parsing, such as reading labels and legends, while overlooking deeper scientific reasoning. We propose DomainCQA, a framework for constructing domain-specific CQA benchmarks that emphasize both visual comprehension and knowledge-intensive reasoning. It integrates complexity-aware chart selection, multitier QA generation, and expert validation. Applied to astronomy, DomainCQA yields AstroChart, a benchmark of 1,690 QA pairs over 482 charts, exposing persistent weaknesses in fine-grained perception, numerical reasoning, and domain knowledge integration across 21 MLLMs. Fine-tuning on AstroChart improves performance across fundamental and advanced tasks. Pilot QA sets in biochemistry, economics, medicine, and social science further demonstrate DomainCQA's generality. Together, our results establish DomainCQA as a unified pipeline for constructing and augmenting domain-specific chart reasoning benchmarks.

Zhouyu Jiang, Ling Zhong, Mengshu Sun et al.

To tackle the problem of domain-specific knowledge scarcity within large language models (LLMs), knowledge graph-retrievalaugmented method has been proven to be an effective and efficient technique for knowledge infusion. However, existing approaches face two primary challenges: knowledge mismatch between public available knowledge graphs and the specific domain of the task at hand, and poor information compliance of LLMs with knowledge graphs. In this paper, we leverage a small set of labeled samples and a large-scale corpus to efficiently construct domain-specific knowledge graphs by an LLM, addressing the issue of knowledge mismatch. Additionally, we propose a three-stage KG-LLM alignment strategyto enhance the LLM's capability to utilize information from knowledge graphs. We conduct experiments with a limited-sample setting on two biomedical question-answering datasets, and the results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing baselines.

Ling Zhong, Jason T. L. Wang

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are non-coding RNAs with approximately 22 nucleotides (nt) that are derived from precursor molecules. These precursor molecules or pre-miRNAs often fold into stem-loop hairpin structures. However, a large number of sequences with pre-miRNA-like hairpins can be found in genomes. It is a challenge to distinguish the real pre-miRNAs from other hairpin sequences with similar stem-loops (referred to as pseudo pre-miRNAs). Several computational methods have been developed to tackle this challenge. In this paper we propose a new method, called MirID, for identifying and classifying microRNA precursors. We collect 74 features from the sequences and secondary structures of pre-miRNAs; some of these features are taken from our previous studies on non-coding RNA prediction while others were suggested in the literature. We develop a combinatorial feature mining algorithm to identify suitable feature sets. These feature sets are then used to train support vector machines to obtain classification models, based on which classifier ensemble is constructed. Finally we use an AdaBoost algorithm to further enhance the accuracy of the classifier ensemble. Experimental results on a variety of species demonstrate the good performance of the proposed method, and its superiority over existing tools.