Zhang Xiong

Zeyu Huang, Yikang Shen, Xiaofeng Zhang et al. · tencent-ai

Large Transformer-based Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) dominate almost all Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Nevertheless, they still make mistakes from time to time. For a model deployed in an industrial environment, fixing these mistakes quickly and robustly is vital to improve user experiences. Previous works formalize such problems as Model Editing (ME) and mostly focus on fixing one mistake. However, the one-mistake-fixing scenario is not an accurate abstraction of the real-world challenge. In the deployment of AI services, there are ever-emerging mistakes, and the same mistake may recur if not corrected in time. Thus a preferable solution is to rectify the mistakes as soon as they appear nonstop. Therefore, we extend the existing ME into Sequential Model Editing (SME) to help develop more practical editing methods. Our study shows that most current ME methods could yield unsatisfying results in this scenario. We then introduce Transformer-Patcher, a novel model editor that can shift the behavior of transformer-based models by simply adding and training a few neurons in the last Feed-Forward Network layer. Experimental results on both classification and generation tasks show that Transformer-Patcher can successively correct up to thousands of errors (Reliability) and generalize to their equivalent inputs (Generality) while retaining the model's accuracy on irrelevant inputs (Locality). Our method outperforms previous fine-tuning and HyperNetwork-based methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance for Sequential Model Editing (SME). The code is available at https://github.com/ZeroYuHuang/Transformer-Patcher.

Keheng Wang, Feiyu Duan, Sirui Wang et al.

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come with incorrect or unfaithful intermediate reasoning steps, especially in the context of answering knowledge-intensive tasks such as KBQA. To alleviate this issue, we propose a framework called Knowledge-Driven Chain-of-Thought (KD-CoT) to verify and modify reasoning traces in CoT via interaction with external knowledge, and thus overcome the hallucinations and error propagation. Concretely, we formulate the CoT rationale process of LLMs into a structured multi-round QA format. In each round, LLMs interact with a QA system that retrieves external knowledge and produce faithful reasoning traces based on retrieved precise answers. The structured CoT reasoning of LLMs is facilitated by our developed KBQA CoT collection, which serves as in-context learning demonstrations and can also be utilized as feedback augmentation to train a robust retriever. Extensive experiments on WebQSP and ComplexWebQuestion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed KD-CoT in task-solving reasoning generation, which outperforms the vanilla CoT ICL with an absolute success rate of 8.0% and 5.1%. Furthermore, our proposed feedback-augmented retriever outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines for retrieving knowledge, achieving significant improvement in Hit and recall performance. Our code and data are released on https://github.com/AdelWang/KD-CoT/tree/main.

Xiaofeng Zhang, Yikang Shen, Zeyu Huang et al. · tencent-ai

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) networks have been proposed as an efficient way to scale up model capacity and implement conditional computing. However, the study of MoE components mostly focused on the feedforward layer in Transformer architecture. This paper proposes the Mixture of Attention Heads (MoA), a new architecture that combines multi-head attention with the MoE mechanism. MoA includes a set of attention heads that each has its own set of parameters. Given an input, a router dynamically selects a subset of $k$ attention heads per token. This conditional computation schema allows MoA to achieve stronger performance than the standard multi-head attention layer. Furthermore, the sparsely gated MoA can easily scale up the number of attention heads and the number of parameters while preserving computational efficiency. In addition to the performance improvements, MoA also automatically differentiates heads' utilities, providing a new perspective to discuss the model's interpretability. We conducted experiments on several important tasks, including Machine Translation and Masked Language Modeling. Experiments have shown promising results on several tasks against strong baselines that involve large and very deep models.

Xi Wang, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng et al.

Recommender systems usually learn user interests from various user behaviors, including clicks and post-click behaviors (e.g., like and favorite). However, these behaviors inevitably exhibit popularity bias, leading to some unfairness issues: 1) for items with similar quality, more popular ones get more exposure; and 2) even worse the popular items with lower popularity might receive more exposure. Existing work on mitigating popularity bias blindly eliminates the bias and usually ignores the effect of item quality. We argue that the relationships between different user behaviors (e.g., conversion rate) actually reflect the item quality. Therefore, to handle the unfairness issues, we propose to mitigate the popularity bias by considering multiple user behaviors. In this work, we examine causal relationships behind the interaction generation procedure in multi-behavior recommendation. Specifically, we find that: 1) item popularity is a confounder between the exposed items and users' post-click interactions, leading to the first unfairness; and 2) some hidden confounders (e.g., the reputation of item producers) affect both item popularity and quality, resulting in the second unfairness. To alleviate these confounding issues, we propose a causal framework to estimate the causal effect, which leverages backdoor adjustment to block the backdoor paths caused by the confounders. In the inference stage, we remove the negative effect of popularity and utilize the good effect of quality for recommendation. Experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, which enhances fairness without sacrificing recommendation accuracy.

Zhang Xiong, Haoxuan Li, Zhuang Liu et al.

Personalized education, tailored to individual student needs, leverages educational technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital age to enhance learning effectiveness. The integration of AI in educational platforms provides insights into academic performance, learning preferences, and behaviors, optimizing the personal learning process. Driven by data mining techniques, it not only benefits students but also provides educators and institutions with tools to craft customized learning experiences. To offer a comprehensive review of recent advancements in personalized educational data mining, this paper focuses on four primary scenarios: educational recommendation, cognitive diagnosis, knowledge tracing, and learning analysis. This paper presents a structured taxonomy for each area, compiles commonly used datasets, and identifies future research directions, emphasizing the role of data mining in enhancing personalized education and paving the way for future exploration and innovation.

Haoxuan Li, Jifan Yu, Yuanxin Ouyang et al.

Knowledge tracing (KT), aiming to mine students' mastery of knowledge by their exercise records and predict their performance on future test questions, is a critical task in educational assessment. While researchers achieved tremendous success with the rapid development of deep learning techniques, current knowledge tracing tasks fall into the cracks from real-world teaching scenarios. Relying heavily on extensive student data and solely predicting numerical performances differs from the settings where teachers assess students' knowledge state from limited practices and provide explanatory feedback. To fill this gap, we explore a new task formulation: Explainable Few-shot Knowledge Tracing. By leveraging the powerful reasoning and generation abilities of large language models (LLMs), we then propose a cognition-guided framework that can track the student knowledge from a few student records while providing natural language explanations. Experimental results from three widely used datasets show that LLMs can perform comparable or superior to competitive deep knowledge tracing methods. We also discuss potential directions and call for future improvements in relevant topics.

Hao Zhou, Wenge Rong, Jianfei Zhang et al.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) aims to predict students' future performances based on their former exercises and additional information in educational settings. KT has received significant attention since it facilitates personalized experiences in educational situations. Simultaneously, the autoregressive modeling on the sequence of former exercises has been proven effective for this task. One of the primary challenges in autoregressive modeling for Knowledge Tracing is effectively representing the anterior (pre-response) and posterior (post-response) states of learners across exercises. Existing methods often employ complex model architectures to update learner states using question and response records. In this study, we propose a novel perspective on knowledge tracing task by treating it as a generative process, consistent with the principles of autoregressive models. We demonstrate that knowledge states can be directly represented through autoregressive encodings on a question-response alternate sequence, where model generate the most probable representation in hidden state space by analyzing history interactions. This approach underpins our framework, termed Alternate Autoregressive Knowledge Tracing (AAKT). Additionally, we incorporate supplementary educational information, such as question-related skills, into our framework through an auxiliary task, and include extra exercise details, like response time, as additional inputs. Our proposed framework is implemented using advanced autoregressive technologies from Natural Language Generation (NLG) for both training and prediction. Empirical evaluations on four real-world KT datasets indicate that AAKT consistently outperforms all baseline models in terms of AUC, ACC, and RMSE. Furthermore, extensive ablation studies and visualized analysis validate the effectiveness of key components in AAKT.

Zewei Wu, César Teixeira, Wei Ke et al.

Visual pedestrian tracking represents a promising research field, with extensive applications in intelligent surveillance, behavior analysis, and human-computer interaction. However, real-world applications face significant occlusion challenges. When multiple pedestrians interact or overlap, the loss of target features severely compromises the tracker's ability to maintain stable trajectories. Traditional tracking methods, which typically rely on full-body bounding box features extracted from {Re-ID} models and linear constant-velocity motion assumptions, often struggle in severe occlusion scenarios. To address these limitations, this work proposes an enhanced tracking framework that leverages richer feature representations and a more robust motion model. Specifically, the proposed method incorporates detection features from both the regression and classification branches of an object detector, embedding spatial and positional information directly into the feature representations. To further mitigate occlusion challenges, a head keypoint detection model is introduced, as the head is less prone to occlusion compared to the full body. In terms of motion modeling, we propose an iterative Kalman filtering approach designed to align with modern detector assumptions, integrating 3D priors to better complete motion trajectories in complex scenes. By combining these advancements in appearance and motion modeling, the proposed method offers a more robust solution for multi-object tracking in crowded environments where occlusions are prevalent.

Zewei Wu, Longhao Wang, Cui Wang et al.

Tracking specific targets, such as pedestrians and vehicles, has been the focus of recent vision-based multitarget tracking studies. However, in some real-world scenarios, unseen categories often challenge existing methods due to low-confidence detections, weak motion and appearance constraints, and long-term occlusions. To address these issues, this article proposes a tracklet-enhanced tracker called Multi-Tracklet Tracking (MTT) that integrates flexible tracklet generation into a multi-tracklet association framework. This framework first adaptively clusters the detection results according to their short-term spatio-temporal correlation into robust tracklets and then estimates the best tracklet partitions using multiple clues, such as location and appearance over time to mitigate error propagation in long-term association. Finally, extensive experiments on the benchmark for generic multiple object tracking demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed framework.

Jiongchao Jin, Huanqiang Xu, Pengliang Ji et al.

We propose the Part-based Recurrent Multi-view Aggregation network(PREMA) to eliminate the detrimental effects of the practical view defects, such as insufficient view numbers, occlusions or background clutters, and also enhance the discriminative ability of shape representations. Inspired by the fact that human recognize an object mainly by its discriminant parts, we define the multi-view coherent part(MCP), a discriminant part reoccurring in different views. Our PREMA can reliably locate and effectively utilize MCPs to build robust shape representations. Comprehensively, we design a novel Regional Attention Unit(RAU) in PREMA to compute the confidence map for each view, and extract MCPs by applying those maps to view features. PREMA accentuates MCPs via correlating features of different views, and aggregates the part-aware features for shape representation.

Zhuang Liu, Yunpu Ma, Yuanxin Ouyang et al.

Recommender systems, which analyze users' preference patterns to suggest potential targets, are indispensable in today's society. Collaborative Filtering (CF) is the most popular recommendation model. Specifically, Graph Neural Network (GNN) has become a new state-of-the-art for CF. In the GNN-based recommender system, message dropout is usually used to alleviate the selection bias in the user-item bipartite graph. However, message dropout might deteriorate the recommender system's performance due to the randomness of dropping out the outgoing messages based on the user-item bipartite graph. To solve this problem, we propose a graph contrastive learning module for a general recommender system that learns the embeddings in a self-supervised manner and reduces the randomness of message dropout. Besides, many recommender systems optimize models with pairwise ranking objectives, such as the Bayesian Pairwise Ranking (BPR) based on a negative sampling strategy. However, BPR has the following problems: suboptimal sampling and sample bias. We introduce a new debiased contrastive loss to solve these problems, which provides sufficient negative samples and applies a bias correction probability to alleviate the sample bias. We integrate the proposed framework, including graph contrastive module and debiased contrastive module with several Matrix Factorization(MF) and GNN-based recommendation models. Experimental results on three public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.

Jiongchao Jin, Akshay Gadi Patil, Zhang Xiong et al.

We introduce a differential visual similarity metric to train deep neural networks for 3D reconstruction, aimed at improving reconstruction quality. The metric compares two 3D shapes by measuring distances between multi-view images differentiably rendered from the shapes. Importantly, the image-space distance is also differentiable and measures visual similarity, rather than pixel-wise distortion. Specifically, the similarity is defined by mean-squared errors over HardNet features computed from probabilistic keypoint maps of the compared images. Our differential visual shape similarity metric can be easily plugged into various 3D reconstruction networks, replacing their distortion-based losses, such as Chamfer or Earth Mover distances, so as to optimize the network weights to produce reconstructions with better structural fidelity and visual quality. We demonstrate this both objectively, using well-known shape metrics for retrieval and classification tasks that are independent from our new metric, and subjectively through a perceptual study.

Jingyuan Wang, Yang Zhang, Ke Tang et al.

Recent years have witnessed the successful marriage of finance innovations and AI techniques in various finance applications including quantitative trading (QT). Despite great research efforts devoted to leveraging deep learning (DL) methods for building better QT strategies, existing studies still face serious challenges especially from the side of finance, such as the balance of risk and return, the resistance to extreme loss, and the interpretability of strategies, which limit the application of DL-based strategies in real-life financial markets. In this work, we propose AlphaStock, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) based investment strategy enhanced by interpretable deep attention networks, to address the above challenges. Our main contributions are summarized as follows: i) We integrate deep attention networks with a Sharpe ratio-oriented reinforcement learning framework to achieve a risk-return balanced investment strategy; ii) We suggest modeling interrelationships among assets to avoid selection bias and develop a cross-asset attention mechanism; iii) To our best knowledge, this work is among the first to offer an interpretable investment strategy using deep reinforcement learning models. The experiments on long-periodic U.S. and Chinese markets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of AlphaStock over diverse market states. It turns out that AlphaStock tends to select the stocks as winners with high long-term growth, low volatility, high intrinsic value, and being undervalued recently.

Jingyuan Wang, Junjie Wu, Ze Wang et al.

Recent years have witnessed the world-wide emergence of mega-metropolises with incredibly huge populations. Understanding residents mobility patterns, or urban dynamics, thus becomes crucial for building modern smart cities. In this paper, we propose a Neighbor-Regularized and context-aware Non-negative Tensor Factorization model (NR-cNTF) to discover interpretable urban dynamics from urban heterogeneous data. Different from many existing studies concerned with prediction tasks via tensor completion, NR-cNTF focuses on gaining urban managerial insights from spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal patterns. This is enabled by high-quality Tucker factorizations regularized by both POI-based urban contexts and geographically neighboring relations. NR-cNTF is also capable of unveiling long-term evolutions of urban dynamics via a pipeline initialization approach. We apply NR-cNTF to a real-life data set containing rich taxi GPS trajectories and POI records of Beijing. The results indicate: 1) NR-cNTF accurately captures four kinds of city rhythms and seventeen spatial communities; 2) the rapid development of Beijing, epitomized by the CBD area, indeed intensifies the job-housing imbalance; 3) the southern areas with recent government investments have shown more healthy development tendency. Finally, NR-cNTF is compared with some baselines on traffic prediction, which further justifies the importance of urban contexts awareness and neighboring regulations.

Yikang Shen, Wenge Rong, Nan Jiang et al.

With the development of community based question answering (Q&A) services, a large scale of Q&A archives have been accumulated and are an important information and knowledge resource on the web. Question and answer matching has been attached much importance to for its ability to reuse knowledge stored in these systems: it can be useful in enhancing user experience with recurrent questions. In this paper, we try to improve the matching accuracy by overcoming the lexical gap between question and answer pairs. A Word Embedding based Correlation (WEC) model is proposed by integrating advantages of both the translation model and word embedding, given a random pair of words, WEC can score their co-occurrence probability in Q&A pairs and it can also leverage the continuity and smoothness of continuous space word representation to deal with new pairs of words that are rare in the training parallel text. An experimental study on Yahoo! Answers dataset and Baidu Zhidao dataset shows this new method's promising potential.