Zhongxiang Sun

CL
Semantic Scholar Profile
h-index40
23papers
654citations
Novelty50%
AI Score58

23 Papers

CLMar 16, 2023
A Short Survey of Viewing Large Language Models in Legal Aspect

Zhongxiang Sun

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed many fields, including natural language processing, computer vision, and reinforcement learning. These models have also made a significant impact in the field of law, where they are being increasingly utilized to automate various legal tasks, such as legal judgement prediction, legal document analysis, and legal document writing. However, the integration of LLMs into the legal field has also raised several legal problems, including privacy concerns, bias, and explainability. In this survey, we explore the integration of LLMs into the field of law. We discuss the various applications of LLMs in legal tasks, examine the legal challenges that arise from their use, and explore the data resources that can be used to specialize LLMs in the legal domain. Finally, we discuss several promising directions and conclude this paper. By doing so, we hope to provide an overview of the current state of LLMs in law and highlight the potential benefits and challenges of their integration.

IRJul 23, 2024
TWIN V2: Scaling Ultra-Long User Behavior Sequence Modeling for Enhanced CTR Prediction at Kuaishou

Zihua Si, Lin Guan, ZhongXiang Sun et al.

The significance of modeling long-term user interests for CTR prediction tasks in large-scale recommendation systems is progressively gaining attention among researchers and practitioners. Existing work, such as SIM and TWIN, typically employs a two-stage approach to model long-term user behavior sequences for efficiency concerns. The first stage rapidly retrieves a subset of sequences related to the target item from a long sequence using a search-based mechanism namely the General Search Unit (GSU), while the second stage calculates the interest scores using the Exact Search Unit (ESU) on the retrieved results. Given the extensive length of user behavior sequences spanning the entire life cycle, potentially reaching up to 10^6 in scale, there is currently no effective solution for fully modeling such expansive user interests. To overcome this issue, we introduced TWIN-V2, an enhancement of TWIN, where a divide-and-conquer approach is applied to compress life-cycle behaviors and uncover more accurate and diverse user interests. Specifically, a hierarchical clustering method groups items with similar characteristics in life-cycle behaviors into a single cluster during the offline phase. By limiting the size of clusters, we can compress behavior sequences well beyond the magnitude of 10^5 to a length manageable for online inference in GSU retrieval. Cluster-aware target attention extracts comprehensive and multi-faceted long-term interests of users, thereby making the final recommendation results more accurate and diverse. Extensive offline experiments on a multi-billion-scale industrial dataset and online A/B tests have demonstrated the effectiveness of TWIN-V2. Under an efficient deployment framework, TWIN-V2 has been successfully deployed to the primary traffic that serves hundreds of millions of daily active users at Kuaishou.

CLJan 16
When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs

Zhongxiang Sun, Yi Zhan, Chenglei Shen et al.

Personalized large language models (LLMs) adapt model behavior to individual users to enhance user satisfaction, yet personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning. We show that when personalized LLMs face factual queries, there exists a phenomenon where the model generates answers aligned with a user's prior history rather than the objective truth, resulting in personalization-induced hallucinations that degrade factual reliability and may propagate incorrect beliefs, due to representational entanglement between personalization and factual representations. To address this issue, we propose Factuality-Preserving Personalized Steering (FPPS), a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. We further introduce PFQABench, the first benchmark designed to jointly evaluate factual and personalized question answering under personalization. Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS substantially improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance.

81.0CVMar 12
HomeSafe-Bench: Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Unsafe Action Detection for Embodied Agents in Household Scenarios

Jiayue Pu, Zhongxiang Sun, Zilu Zhang et al.

The rapid evolution of embodied agents has accelerated the deployment of household robots in real-world environments. However, unlike structured industrial settings, household spaces introduce unpredictable safety risks, where system limitations such as perception latency and lack of common sense knowledge can lead to dangerous errors. Current safety evaluations, often restricted to static images, text, or general hazards, fail to adequately benchmark dynamic unsafe action detection in these specific contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce \textbf{HomeSafe-Bench}, a challenging benchmark designed to evaluate Vision-Language Models (VLMs) on unsafe action detection in household scenarios. HomeSafe-Bench is contrusted via a hybrid pipeline combining physical simulation with advanced video generation and features 438 diverse cases across six functional areas with fine-grained multidimensional annotations. Beyond benchmarking, we propose \textbf{Hierarchical Dual-Brain Guard for Household Safety (HD-Guard)}, a hierarchical streaming architecture for real-time safety monitoring. HD-Guard coordinates a lightweight FastBrain for continuous high-frequency screening with an asynchronous large-scale SlowBrain for deep multimodal reasoning, effectively balancing inference efficiency with detection accuracy. Evaluations demonstrate that HD-Guard achieves a superior trade-off between latency and performance, while our analysis identifies critical bottlenecks in current VLM-based safety detection.

CLJan 30
Deep Search with Hierarchical Meta-Cognitive Monitoring Inspired by Cognitive Neuroscience

Zhongxiang Sun, Qipeng Wang, Weijie Yu et al.

Deep search agents powered by large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in multi-step retrieval, reasoning, and long-horizon task execution. However, their practical failures often stem from the lack of mechanisms to monitor and regulate reasoning and retrieval states as tasks evolve under uncertainty. Insights from cognitive neuroscience suggest that human metacognition is hierarchically organized, integrating fast anomaly detection with selectively triggered, experience-driven reflection. In this work, we propose Deep Search with Meta-Cognitive Monitoring (DS-MCM), a deep search framework augmented with an explicit hierarchical metacognitive monitoring mechanism. DS-MCM integrates a Fast Consistency Monitor, which performs lightweight checks on the alignment between external evidence and internal reasoning confidence, and a Slow Experience-Driven Monitor, which is selectively activated to guide corrective intervention based on experience memory from historical agent trajectories. By embedding monitoring directly into the reasoning-retrieval loop, DS-MCM determines both when intervention is warranted and how corrective actions should be informed by prior experience. Experiments across multiple deep search benchmarks and backbone models demonstrate that DS-MCM consistently improves performance and robustness.

LGNov 30, 2025
Beyond High-Entropy Exploration: Correctness-Aware Low-Entropy Segment-Based Advantage Shaping for Reasoning LLMs

Xinzhu Chen, Xuesheng Li, Zhongxiang Sun et al.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a central approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. Recent work studies RLVR through token entropy, arguing that high-entropy tokens drive exploration and should receive stronger updates. However, they overlook the fact that most of a reasoning trajectory consists of low-entropy segments that encode stable and reusable structural patterns. Through qualitative and quantitative analyses, we find that the overlap of low-entropy segments across correct responses strongly correlates with model accuracy, while overlaps involving incorrect responses exhibit stable but unproductive patterns. Motivated by these findings, we propose LESS, a correctness-aware reinforcement framework that performs fine-grained advantage modulation over low-entropy segments. LESS amplifies segments unique to correct responses, suppresses those unique to incorrect ones, and neutralizes segments shared by both, while preserving high-entropy exploration in the underlying RL algorithm. Instantiated on top of the popular GRPO, LESS consistently improves accuracy over strong RL baselines across three backbones and six math benchmarks, achieves stronger robustness of the performance floor.

93.8CLApr 25
Hidden States Know Where Reasoning Diverges: Credit Assignment via Span-Level Wasserstein Distance

Xinzhu Chen, Wei He, Huichuan Fan et al.

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) performs coarse-grained credit assignment in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) by assigning the same advantage to all tokens in a rollout. Process reward models can provide finer-grained supervision, but they require step-level annotation or additional reward modeling. We show that hidden-state distributions contain a useful signal for local reasoning quality that can be extracted using only outcome-level correctness labels available in RLVR. Specifically, within each GRPO group, the Wasserstein distance between span-level hidden state distributions of correct and incorrect rollouts increases around regions where their local reasoning quality diverges. This association holds both across examples and within individual trajectories, suggesting that hidden-state distributional divergence can serve as a self-supervision signal for fine-grained credit assignment. We formalize this observation with a separation theorem showing that, under mild structural assumptions, post-divergence spans have larger Wasserstein distances than pre-divergence spans whenever the population-level distributional gap exceeds finite-sample noise. Motivated by this result, we propose \textbf{S}pan-level \textbf{H}idden state \textbf{E}nabled \textbf{A}dvantage \textbf{R}eweighting (SHEAR), which modifies GRPO by using span-level Wasserstein distances to scale token-level advantages, amplifying updates on tokens whose hidden states are more separated from the opposing group. The method requires no additional model and only minimal changes to the training pipeline. Experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks and five code generation benchmarks show improvements over standard GRPO and strong performance relative to supervised process reward models, while requiring no additional annotation or reward model training.

CLDec 15, 2025Code
Memory in the Age of AI Agents

Yuyang Hu, Shichun Liu, Yanwei Yue et al.

Memory has emerged, and will continue to remain, a core capability of foundation model-based agents. As research on agent memory rapidly expands and attracts unprecedented attention, the field has also become increasingly fragmented. Existing works that fall under the umbrella of agent memory often differ substantially in their motivations, implementations, and evaluation protocols, while the proliferation of loosely defined memory terminologies has further obscured conceptual clarity. Traditional taxonomies such as long/short-term memory have proven insufficient to capture the diversity of contemporary agent memory systems. This work aims to provide an up-to-date landscape of current agent memory research. We begin by clearly delineating the scope of agent memory and distinguishing it from related concepts such as LLM memory, retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and context engineering. We then examine agent memory through the unified lenses of forms, functions, and dynamics. From the perspective of forms, we identify three dominant realizations of agent memory, namely token-level, parametric, and latent memory. From the perspective of functions, we propose a finer-grained taxonomy that distinguishes factual, experiential, and working memory. From the perspective of dynamics, we analyze how memory is formed, evolved, and retrieved over time. To support practical development, we compile a comprehensive summary of memory benchmarks and open-source frameworks. Beyond consolidation, we articulate a forward-looking perspective on emerging research frontiers, including memory automation, reinforcement learning integration, multimodal memory, multi-agent memory, and trustworthiness issues. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a conceptual foundation for rethinking memory as a first-class primitive in the design of future agentic intelligence.

CRFeb 10Code
Omni-Safety under Cross-Modality Conflict: Vulnerabilities, Dynamics Mechanisms and Efficient Alignment

Kun Wang, Zherui Li, Zhenhong Zhou et al.

Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) greatly expand LLMs' multimodal capabilities but also introduce cross-modal safety risks. However, a systematic understanding of vulnerabilities in omni-modal interactions remains lacking. To bridge this gap, we establish a modality-semantics decoupling principle and construct the AdvBench-Omni dataset, which reveals a significant vulnerability in OLLMs. Mechanistic analysis uncovers a Mid-layer Dissolution phenomenon driven by refusal vector magnitude shrinkage, alongside the existence of a modal-invariant pure refusal direction. Inspired by these insights, we extract a golden refusal vector using Singular Value Decomposition and propose OmniSteer, which utilizes lightweight adapters to modulate intervention intensity adaptively. Extensive experiments show that our method not only increases the Refusal Success Rate against harmful inputs from 69.9% to 91.2%, but also effectively preserves the general capabilities across all modalities. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zhrli324/omni-safety-research.

86.9CLMay 11
Towards Understanding Continual Factual Knowledge Acquisition of Language Models: From Theory to Algorithm

Haoyu Wang, Yifan Shang, Zhongxiang Sun et al.

Continual Pre-Training (CPT) is essential for enabling Language Models (LMs) to integrate new knowledge without erasing old. While classical CPT techniques like data replay have become the standard paradigm, the mechanisms underlying how LMs acquire and retain facts over time, termed as continual Factual Knowledge Acquisition (cFKA), remain unclear. In this work, we present a theoretical framework that characterizes the training dynamics of cFKA using a single-layer Transformer, offering a unified explanation for the behavior of representative CPT methods. Our analysis reveals that regularization-based methods merely adjust the convergence rate of parameters without altering the inherent forgetting tendency, whereas data replay methods succeed in shifting convergence dynamics and stabilizing pretrained knowledge. Building on these insights, we propose a novel generative data replay approach, called \textbf{S}electing \textbf{T}okens via attenti\textbf{O}n \textbf{C}ontribution~(STOC), which identifies influential factual snippets to guide replay data generation. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets validate our findings and demonstrate that STOC effectively enhances cFKA by mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

AIJan 5
Streaming Hallucination Detection in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Haolang Lu, Minghui Pan, Ripeng Li et al.

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves the performance of large language models, yet hallucinations in such settings often emerge subtly and propagate across reasoning steps. We suggest that hallucination in long CoT reasoning is better understood as an evolving latent state rather than a one-off erroneous event. Accordingly, we treat step-level hallucination judgments as local observations and introduce a cumulative prefix-level hallucination signal that tracks the global evolution of the reasoning state over the entire trajectory. Overall, our approach enables streaming hallucination detection in long CoT reasoning, providing real-time, interpretable evidence.

CLOct 15, 2024
ReDeEP: Detecting Hallucination in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Mechanistic Interpretability

Zhongxiang Sun, Xiaoxue Zang, Kai Zheng et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models are designed to incorporate external knowledge, reducing hallucinations caused by insufficient parametric (internal) knowledge. However, even with accurate and relevant retrieved content, RAG models can still produce hallucinations by generating outputs that conflict with the retrieved information. Detecting such hallucinations requires disentangling how Large Language Models (LLMs) utilize external and parametric knowledge. Current detection methods often focus on one of these mechanisms or without decoupling their intertwined effects, making accurate detection difficult. In this paper, we investigate the internal mechanisms behind hallucinations in RAG scenarios. We discover hallucinations occur when the Knowledge FFNs in LLMs overemphasize parametric knowledge in the residual stream, while Copying Heads fail to effectively retain or integrate external knowledge from retrieved content. Based on these findings, we propose ReDeEP, a novel method that detects hallucinations by decoupling LLM's utilization of external context and parametric knowledge. Our experiments show that ReDeEP significantly improves RAG hallucination detection accuracy. Additionally, we introduce AARF, which mitigates hallucinations by modulating the contributions of Knowledge FFNs and Copying Heads.

AIFeb 16
Diagnosing Knowledge Conflict in Multimodal Long-Chain Reasoning

Jing Tang, Kun Wang, Haolang Lu et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in long chain-of-thought reasoning often fail when different knowledge sources provide conflicting signals. We formalize these failures under a unified notion of knowledge conflict, distinguishing input-level objective conflict from process-level effective conflict. Through probing internal representations, we reveal that: (I) Linear Separability: different conflict types are explicitly encoded as linearly separable features rather than entangled; (II) Depth Localization: conflict signals concentrate in mid-to-late layers, indicating a distinct processing stage for conflict encoding; (III) Hierarchical Consistency: aggregating noisy token-level signals along trajectories robustly recovers input-level conflict types; and (IV) Directional Asymmetry: reinforcing the model's implicit source preference under conflict is far easier than enforcing the opposite source. Our findings provide a mechanism-level view of multimodal reasoning under knowledge conflict and enable principled diagnosis and control of long-CoT failures.

CLJan 14, 2025
ReARTeR: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning with Trustworthy Process Rewarding

Zhongxiang Sun, Qipeng Wang, Weijie Yu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in knowledge-intensive tasks but face limitations in complex multi-step reasoning. While recent methods have integrated RAG with chain-of-thought reasoning or test-time search using Process Reward Models (PRMs), these approaches encounter challenges such as a lack of explanations, bias in PRM training data, early-step bias in PRM scores, and insufficient post-training optimization of reasoning potential. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning through Trustworthy Process Rewarding (ReARTeR), a framework that enhances RAG systems' reasoning capabilities through post-training and test-time scaling. At test time, ReARTeR introduces Trustworthy Process Rewarding via a Process Reward Model for accurate scalar scoring and a Process Explanation Model (PEM) for generating natural language explanations, enabling step refinement. During post-training, it utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search guided by Trustworthy Process Rewarding to collect high-quality step-level preference data, optimized through Iterative Preference Optimization. ReARTeR addresses three core challenges: (1) misalignment between PRM and PEM, tackled through off-policy preference learning; (2) bias in PRM training data, mitigated by balanced annotation methods and stronger annotations for challenging examples; and (3) early-step bias in PRM, resolved through a temporal-difference-based look-ahead search strategy. Experimental results on multi-step reasoning benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements, underscoring ReARTeR's potential to advance the reasoning capabilities of RAG systems.

AIMay 19, 2025
Detection and Mitigation of Hallucination in Large Reasoning Models: A Mechanistic Perspective

Zhongxiang Sun, Qipeng Wang, Haoyu Wang et al.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown impressive capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, alongside these successes, a more deceptive form of model error has emerged--Reasoning Hallucination--where logically coherent but factually incorrect reasoning traces lead to persuasive yet faulty conclusions. Unlike traditional hallucinations, these errors are embedded within structured reasoning, making them more difficult to detect and potentially more harmful. In this work, we investigate reasoning hallucinations from a mechanistic perspective. We propose the Reasoning Score, which quantifies the depth of reasoning by measuring the divergence between logits obtained from projecting late layers of LRMs to the vocabulary space, effectively distinguishing shallow pattern-matching from genuine deep reasoning. Using this score, we conduct an in-depth analysis on the ReTruthQA dataset and identify two key reasoning hallucination patterns: early-stage fluctuation in reasoning depth and incorrect backtracking to flawed prior steps. These insights motivate our Reasoning Hallucination Detection (RHD) framework, which achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple domains. To mitigate reasoning hallucinations, we further introduce GRPO-R, an enhanced reinforcement learning algorithm that incorporates step-level deep reasoning rewards via potential-based shaping. Our theoretical analysis establishes stronger generalization guarantees, and experiments demonstrate improved reasoning quality and reduced hallucination rates.

IRMar 3, 2024
Logic Rules as Explanations for Legal Case Retrieval

Zhongxiang Sun, Kepu Zhang, Weijie Yu et al.

In this paper, we address the issue of using logic rules to explain the results from legal case retrieval. The task is critical to legal case retrieval because the users (e.g., lawyers or judges) are highly specialized and require the system to provide logical, faithful, and interpretable explanations before making legal decisions. Recently, research efforts have been made to learn explainable legal case retrieval models. However, these methods usually select rationales (key sentences) from the legal cases as explanations, failing to provide faithful and logically correct explanations. In this paper, we propose Neural-Symbolic enhanced Legal Case Retrieval (NS-LCR), a framework that explicitly conducts reasoning on the matching of legal cases through learning case-level and law-level logic rules. The learned rules are then integrated into the retrieval process in a neuro-symbolic manner. Benefiting from the logic and interpretable nature of the logic rules, NS-LCR is equipped with built-in faithful explainability. We also show that NS-LCR is a model-agnostic framework that can be plugged in for multiple legal retrieval models. To showcase NS-LCR's superiority, we enhance existing benchmarks by adding manually annotated logic rules and introducing a novel explainability metric using Large Language Models (LLMs). Our comprehensive experiments reveal NS-LCR's effectiveness for ranking, alongside its proficiency in delivering reliable explanations for legal case retrieval.

CLApr 1, 2024
Exploring the Nexus of Large Language Models and Legal Systems: A Short Survey

Weicong Qin, Zhongxiang Sun

With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a profound transformation occurring in the realm of natural language processing tasks within the legal domain. The capabilities of LLMs are increasingly demonstrating unique roles in the legal sector, bringing both distinctive benefits and various challenges. This survey delves into the synergy between LLMs and the legal system, such as their applications in tasks like legal text comprehension, case retrieval, and analysis. Furthermore, this survey highlights key challenges faced by LLMs in the legal domain, including bias, interpretability, and ethical considerations, as well as how researchers are addressing these issues. The survey showcases the latest advancements in fine-tuned legal LLMs tailored for various legal systems, along with legal datasets available for fine-tuning LLMs in various languages. Additionally, it proposes directions for future research and development.

CLMay 19, 2024
Effective In-Context Example Selection through Data Compression

Zhongxiang Sun, Kepu Zhang, Haoyu Wang et al.

In-context learning has been extensively validated in large language models. However, the mechanism and selection strategy for in-context example selection, which is a crucial ingredient in this approach, lacks systematic and in-depth research. In this paper, we propose a data compression approach to the selection of in-context examples. We introduce a two-stage method that can effectively choose relevant examples and retain sufficient information about the training dataset within the in-context examples. Our method shows a significant improvement of an average of 5.90% across five different real-world datasets using four language models.

CLAug 6, 2025
Balancing Stylization and Truth via Disentangled Representation Steering

Chenglei Shen, Zhongxiang Sun, Teng Shi et al.

Generating stylized large language model (LLM) responses via representation editing is a promising way for fine-grained output control. However, there exists an inherent trade-off: imposing a distinctive style often degrades truthfulness. Existing representation editing methods, by naively injecting style signals, overlook this collateral impact and frequently contaminate the model's core truthfulness representations, resulting in reduced answer correctness. We term this phenomenon stylization-induced truthfulness collapse. We attribute this issue to latent coupling between style and truth directions in certain key attention heads, and propose StyliTruth, a mechanism that preserves stylization while keeping truthfulness intact. StyliTruth separates the style-relevant and truth-relevant subspaces in the model's representation space via an orthogonal deflation process. This decomposition enables independent control of style and truth in their own subspaces, minimizing interference. By designing adaptive, token-level steering vectors within each subspace, we dynamically and precisely control the generation process to maintain both stylistic fidelity and truthfulness. We validate our method on multiple styles and languages. Extensive experiments and analyses show that StyliTruth significantly reduces stylization-induced truthfulness collapse and outperforms existing inference-time intervention methods in balancing style adherence with truthfulness.

CLApr 5, 2025
An Explicit Syllogistic Legal Reasoning Framework for Large Language Models

Kepu Zhang, Weijie Yu, Zhongxiang Sun et al.

Syllogistic reasoning is crucial for sound legal decision-making, allowing legal professionals to draw logical conclusions by applying general principles to specific case facts. While large language models (LLMs) can answer legal questions, they often struggle with explicit syllogistic reasoning. Their outputs tend to be implicit, unstructured, and consequently, less explainable and trustworthy. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SyLeR, a novel framework designed to enable LLMs to perform explicit syllogistic legal reasoning. SyLeR employs a tree-structured hierarchical retrieval mechanism to synthesize relevant legal statutes and precedents, thereby constructing comprehensive major premises. This is followed by a two-stage fine-tuning process: an initial supervised fine-tuning warm-up establishes a foundational understanding of syllogistic reasoning, while reinforcement learning, guided by a structure-aware reward mechanism, refines the model's capacity to generate diverse, logically sound, and well-structured reasoning paths. We conducted extensive experiments to evaluate SyLeR's performance. Our evaluations spanned diverse dimensions, including both in-domain and cross-domain user groups (legal laypersons and practitioners), multiple languages (Chinese and French), and various LLM backbones (legal-specific and open-domain LLMs). The results consistently demonstrate that SyLeR significantly enhances response accuracy and reliably produces explicit, explainable, and trustworthy legal reasoning.

CLDec 17, 2024
Trigger$^3$: Refining Query Correction via Adaptive Model Selector

Kepu Zhang, Zhongxiang Sun, Xiao Zhang et al.

In search scenarios, user experience can be hindered by erroneous queries due to typos, voice errors, or knowledge gaps. Therefore, query correction is crucial for search engines. Current correction models, usually small models trained on specific data, often struggle with queries beyond their training scope or those requiring contextual understanding. While the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a potential solution, they are still limited by their pre-training data and inference cost, particularly for complex queries, making them not always effective for query correction. To tackle these, we propose Trigger$^3$, a large-small model collaboration framework that integrates the traditional correction model and LLM for query correction, capable of adaptively choosing the appropriate correction method based on the query and the correction results from the traditional correction model and LLM. Trigger$^3$ first employs a correction trigger to filter out correct queries. Incorrect queries are then corrected by the traditional correction model. If this fails, an LLM trigger is activated to call the LLM for correction. Finally, for queries that no model can correct, a fallback trigger decides to return the original query. Extensive experiments demonstrate Trigger$^3$ outperforms correction baselines while maintaining efficiency.

CLOct 15, 2024
LargePiG: Your Large Language Model is Secretly a Pointer Generator

Zhongxiang Sun, Zihua Si, Xiaoxue Zang et al.

Recent research on query generation has focused on using Large Language Models (LLMs), which despite bringing state-of-the-art performance, also introduce issues with hallucinations in the generated queries. In this work, we introduce relevance hallucination and factuality hallucination as a new typology for hallucination problems brought by query generation based on LLMs. We propose an effective way to separate content from form in LLM-generated queries, which preserves the factual knowledge extracted and integrated from the inputs and compiles the syntactic structure, including function words, using the powerful linguistic capabilities of the LLM. Specifically, we introduce a model-agnostic and training-free method that turns the Large Language Model into a Pointer-Generator (LargePiG), where the pointer attention distribution leverages the LLM's inherent attention weights, and the copy probability is derived from the difference between the vocabulary distribution of the model's high layers and the last layer. To validate the effectiveness of LargePiG, we constructed two datasets for assessing the hallucination problems in query generation, covering both document and video scenarios. Empirical studies on various LLMs demonstrated the superiority of LargePiG on both datasets. Additional experiments also verified that LargePiG could reduce hallucination in large vision language models and improve the accuracy of document-based question-answering and factuality evaluation tasks.

IRMay 18, 2023
When Search Meets Recommendation: Learning Disentangled Search Representation for Recommendation

Zihua Si, Zhongxiang Sun, Xiao Zhang et al.

Modern online service providers such as online shopping platforms often provide both search and recommendation (S&R) services to meet different user needs. Rarely has there been any effective means of incorporating user behavior data from both S&R services. Most existing approaches either simply treat S&R behaviors separately, or jointly optimize them by aggregating data from both services, ignoring the fact that user intents in S&R can be distinctively different. In our paper, we propose a Search-Enhanced framework for the Sequential Recommendation (SESRec) that leverages users' search interests for recommendation, by disentangling similar and dissimilar representations within S&R behaviors. Specifically, SESRec first aligns query and item embeddings based on users' query-item interactions for the computations of their similarities. Two transformer encoders are used to learn the contextual representations of S&R behaviors independently. Then a contrastive learning task is designed to supervise the disentanglement of similar and dissimilar representations from behavior sequences of S&R. Finally, we extract user interests by the attention mechanism from three perspectives, i.e., the contextual representations, the two separated behaviors containing similar and dissimilar interests. Extensive experiments on both industrial and public datasets demonstrate that SESRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models. Empirical studies further validate that SESRec successfully disentangle similar and dissimilar user interests from their S&R behaviors.