Yuanyuan Liang

Yuanyuan Liang, Jianing Wang, Hanlun Zhu et al.

The task of Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (KBQG) aims to convert a logical form into a natural language question. For the sake of expensive cost of large-scale question annotation, the methods of KBQG under low-resource scenarios urgently need to be developed. However, current methods heavily rely on annotated data for fine-tuning, which is not well-suited for few-shot question generation. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown their impressive generalization ability in few-shot tasks. Inspired by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which is an in-context learning strategy for reasoning, we formulate KBQG task as a reasoning problem, where the generation of a complete question is splitted into a series of sub-question generation. Our proposed prompting method KQG-CoT first retrieves supportive logical forms from the unlabeled data pool taking account of the characteristics of the logical form. Then, we write a prompt to explicit the reasoning chain of generating complicated questions based on the selected demonstrations. To further ensure prompt quality, we extend KQG-CoT into KQG-CoT+ via sorting the logical forms by their complexity. We conduct extensive experiments over three public KBQG datasets. The results demonstrate that our prompting method consistently outperforms other prompting baselines on the evaluated datasets. Remarkably, our KQG-CoT+ method could surpass existing few-shot SoTA results of the PathQuestions dataset by 18.25, 10.72, and 10.18 absolute points on BLEU-4, METEOR, and ROUGE-L, respectively.

Boyang Li, Hongzhe Shou, Yuanyuan Liang et al.

Existing Chinese toxic content detection methods mainly target sentence-level classification but often fail to provide readable and contiguous toxic evidence spans. We propose \textbf{ToxiTrace}, an explainability-oriented method for BERT-style encoders with three components: (1) \textbf{CuSA}, which refines encoder-derived saliency cues into fine-grained toxic spans with lightweight LLM guidance; (2) \textbf{GCLoss}, a gradient-constrained objective that concentrates token-level saliency on toxic evidence while suppressing irrelevant activations; and (3) \textbf{ARCL}, which constructs sample-specific contrastive reasoning pairs to sharpen the semantic boundary between toxic and non-toxic content. Experiments show that ToxiTrace improves classification accuracy and toxic span extraction while preserving efficient encoder-based inference and producing more coherent, human-readable explanations. We have released the model at https://huggingface.co/ArdLi/ToxiTrace.

Yuanyuan Liang, Tingyu Xie, Gan Peng et al.

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized many fields, not only traditional natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, research on applying LLMs to the database field has been booming, and as a typical non-relational database, the use of LLMs in graph database research has naturally gained significant attention. Recent efforts have increasingly focused on leveraging LLMs to translate natural language into graph query language (NL2GQL). Although some progress has been made, these methods have clear limitations, such as their reliance on streamlined processes that often overlook the potential of LLMs to autonomously plan and collaborate with other LLMs in tackling complex NL2GQL challenges. To address this gap, we propose NAT-NL2GQL, a novel multi-agent framework for translating natural language to graph query language. Specifically, our framework consists of three synergistic agents: the Preprocessor agent, the Generator agent, and the Refiner agent. The Preprocessor agent manages data processing as context, including tasks such as name entity recognition, query rewriting, path linking, and the extraction of query-related schemas. The Generator agent is a fine-tuned LLM trained on NL-GQL data, responsible for generating corresponding GQL statements based on queries and their related schemas. The Refiner agent is tasked with refining the GQL or context using error information obtained from the GQL execution results. Given the scarcity of high-quality open-source NL2GQL datasets based on nGQL syntax, we developed StockGQL, a dataset constructed from a financial market graph database. It is available at: https://github.com/leonyuancode/StockGQL. Experimental results on the StockGQL and SpCQL datasets reveal that our method significantly outperforms baseline approaches, highlighting its potential for advancing NL2GQL research.

Yurui Ming, Yuanyuan Liang

We report the possibility of using a simple neural network for effortless restoration of low-light images inspired by the retina model, which mimics the neurophysiological principles and dynamics of various types of optical neurons. The proposed neural network model saves the cost of computational overhead in contrast with traditional signal-processing models, and generates results comparable with complicated deep learning models from the subjective perceptual perspective. This work shows that to directly simulate the functionalities of retinal neurons using neural networks not only avoids the manually seeking for the optimal parameters, but also paves the way to build corresponding artificial versions for certain neurobiological organizations.

Tingyu Xie, Jian Zhang, Yan Zhang et al.

The strong capability of large language models (LLMs) has been applied to information extraction (IE) through either retrieval augmented prompting or instruction tuning (IT). However, the best way to incorporate information with LLMs for IE remains an open question. In this paper, we explore Retrieval Augmented Instruction Tuning (RA-IT) for IE, focusing on the task of open named entity recognition (NER). Specifically, for each training sample, we retrieve semantically similar examples from the training dataset as the context and prepend them to the input of the original instruction. To evaluate our RA-IT approach more thoroughly, we construct a Chinese IT dataset for open NER and evaluate RA-IT in both English and Chinese scenarios. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of RA-IT across various data sizes and in both English and Chinese scenarios. We also conduct thorough studies to explore the impacts of various retrieval strategies in the proposed RA-IT framework. Code and data are available at: https://github.com/Emma1066/Retrieval-Augmented-IT-OpenNER

Yuanyuan Liang, Keren Tan, Tingyu Xie et al.

Graph Databases (Graph DB) find extensive application across diverse domains such as finance, social networks, and medicine. Yet, the translation of Natural Language (NL) into the Graph Query Language (GQL), referred to as NL2GQL, poses significant challenges owing to its intricate and specialized nature. Some approaches have sought to utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) to address analogous tasks like text2SQL. Nonetheless, in the realm of NL2GQL tasks tailored to a particular domain, the absence of domain-specific NL-GQL data pairs adds complexity to aligning LLMs with the graph DB. To tackle this challenge, we present a well-defined pipeline. Initially, we utilize ChatGPT to generate NL-GQL data pairs, leveraging the provided graph DB with self-instruction. Subsequently, we employ the generated data to fine-tune LLMs, ensuring alignment between LLMs and the graph DB. Moreover, we find the importance of relevant schema in efficiently generating accurate GQLs. Thus, we introduce a method to extract relevant schema as the input context. We evaluate our method using two carefully constructed datasets derived from graph DBs in the finance and medicine domains, named FinGQL and MediGQL. Experimental results reveal that our approach significantly outperforms a set of baseline methods, with improvements of 5.90 and 6.36 absolute points on EM, and 6.00 and 7.09 absolute points on EX for FinGQL and MediGQL, respectively.

Yuanyuan Liang, Lei Pan, Tingyu Xie et al.

In recent years, research on transforming natural language into graph query language (NL2GQL) has been increasing. Most existing methods focus on single-turn transformation from NL to GQL. In practical applications, user interactions with graph databases are typically multi-turn, dynamic, and context-dependent. While single-turn methods can handle straightforward queries, more complex scenarios often require users to iteratively adjust their queries, investigate the connections between entities, or request additional details across multiple dialogue turns. Research focused on single-turn conversion fails to effectively address multi-turn dialogues and complex context dependencies. Additionally, the scarcity of high-quality multi-turn NL2GQL datasets further hinders the progress of this field. To address this challenge, we propose an automated method for constructing multi-turn NL2GQL datasets based on Large Language Models (LLMs) , and apply this method to develop the MTGQL dataset, which is constructed from a financial market graph database and will be publicly released for future research. Moreover, we propose three types of baseline methods to assess the effectiveness of multi-turn NL2GQL translation, thereby laying a solid foundation for future research.

Yuanyuan Liang, Xiaoman Wang, Tingyu Xie et al.

Current large language models (LLMs) excel at general NLP tasks but often lack domain specific precision in professional settings. Building a high quality domain specific multi turn dialogue dataset is essential for developing specialized conversational systems. However, existing methods such as manual annotation, simulated human LLM interactions, and role based LLM dialogues are resource intensive or suffer from limitations in dialogue quality and domain coverage. To address these challenges, we introduce ProKG Dial, a progressive framework for constructing knowledge intensive multi turn dialogue datasets using domain specific knowledge graphs (KGs). ProKG Dial leverages the structured nature of KGs to encode complex domain knowledge and relationships, providing a solid foundation for generating meaningful and coherent dialogues. Specifically, ProKG Dial begins by applying community detection to partition the KG into semantically cohesive subgraphs. For each subgraph, the framework incrementally generates a series of questions and answers centered around a target entity, ensuring relevance and coverage. A rigorous filtering step is employed to maintain high dialogue quality. We validate ProKG Dial on a medical knowledge graph by evaluating the generated dialogues in terms of diversity, semantic coherence, and entity coverage. Furthermore, we fine tune a base LLM on the resulting dataset and benchmark it against several baselines. Both automatic metrics and human evaluations demonstrate that ProKG Dial substantially improves dialogue quality and domain specific performance, highlighting its effectiveness and practical utility.

Yuanyuan Liang, Tianhao Zhang, Tingyu Xie

Handling anomalies is a critical preprocessing step in multivariate time series prediction. However, existing approaches that separate anomaly preprocessing from model training for multivariate time series prediction encounter significant limitations. Specifically, these methods fail to utilize auxiliary information crucial for identifying latent anomalies associated with spatiotemporal factors during the preprocessing stage. Instead, they rely solely on data distribution for anomaly detection, which can result in the incorrect processing of numerous samples that could otherwise contribute positively to model training. To address this, we propose STTS-EAD, an end-to-end method that seamlessly integrates anomaly detection into the training process of multivariate time series forecasting and aims to improve Spatio-Temporal learning based Time Series prediction via Embedded Anomaly Detection. Our proposed STTS-EAD leverages spatio-temporal information for forecasting and anomaly detection, with the two parts alternately executed and optimized for each other. To the best of our knowledge, STTS-EAD is the first to integrate anomaly detection and forecasting tasks in the training phase for improving the accuracy of multivariate time series forecasting. Extensive experiments on a public stock dataset and two real-world sales datasets from a renowned coffee chain enterprise show that our proposed method can effectively process detected anomalies in the training stage to improve forecasting performance in the inference stage and significantly outperform baselines.