Binxuan Huang

Zijie Huang, Daheng Wang, Binxuan Huang et al.

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) have been extensively studied to embed large-scale relational data for many real-world applications. Existing methods have long ignored the fact many KGs contain two fundamentally different views: high-level ontology-view concepts and fine-grained instance-view entities. They usually embed all nodes as vectors in one latent space. However, a single geometric representation fails to capture the structural differences between two views and lacks probabilistic semantics towards concepts' granularity. We propose Concept2Box, a novel approach that jointly embeds the two views of a KG using dual geometric representations. We model concepts with box embeddings, which learn the hierarchy structure and complex relations such as overlap and disjoint among them. Box volumes can be interpreted as concepts' granularity. Different from concepts, we model entities as vectors. To bridge the gap between concept box embeddings and entity vector embeddings, we propose a novel vector-to-box distance metric and learn both embeddings jointly. Experiments on both the public DBpedia KG and a newly-created industrial KG showed the effectiveness of Concept2Box.

Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Binxuan Huang et al.

RLVR is now a standard way to train LLMs on reasoning tasks with verifiable outcomes, but when rollout generation dominates the cost, efficiency depends heavily on which prompts you sample and when. In practice, prompt pools are often static or only loosely tied to the model's learning progress, so uniform sampling can't keep up with the shifting capability frontier and ends up wasting rollouts on prompts that are already solved or still out of reach. Existing approaches improve efficiency through filtering, curricula, adaptive rollout allocation, or teacher guidance, but they typically assume a fixed pool-which makes it hard to support stable on-policy pool growth-or they add extra teacher cost and latency. We introduce HeaPA (Heap Sampling and On-Policy Query Augmentation), which maintains a bounded, evolving pool, tracks the frontier using heap-based boundary sampling, expands the pool via on-policy augmentation with lightweight asynchronous validation, and stabilizes correlated queries through topology-aware re-estimation of pool statistics and controlled reinsertion. Across two training corpora, two training recipes, and seven benchmarks, HeaPA consistently improves accuracy and reaches target performance with fewer computations while keeping wall-clock time comparable. Our analyses suggest these gains come from frontier-focused sampling and on-policy pool growth, with the benefits becoming larger as model scale increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/horizon-rl/HeaPA.

Chaitanya Dwivedi, Binxuan Huang, Himanshu Gupta et al. · amazon-science

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become the dominant architecture for scaling large language models: frontier models routinely decouple total parameters from per-token computation through sparse expert routing. Scaling laws show that under fixed active computation, model quality scales predictably with total parameters, and MoEs realize this by increasing expert count. However, training large MoEs is expensive, as memory requirements and inter-device communication both scale with total parameter count. We propose expert upcycling, a method for progressively expanding MoE capacity by increasing the number of experts during continued pre-training (CPT). Given a trained E-expert model, the upcycling operator constructs an mE-expert model through expert duplication and router extension while holding top-K routing fixed, preserving per-token inference cost. Duplication provides a warm initialization: the expanded model inherits the source checkpoint's learned representations, starting from a substantially lower loss than random initialization. Subsequent CPT then breaks the symmetry among duplicated experts to drive specialization. We formalize the upcycling operator and develop a theoretical framework decomposing the quality gap into a capacity term and an initialization term. We further introduce utility-based expert selection, which uses gradient-based importance scores to guide non-uniform duplication, more than tripling gap closure when CPT is limited. In our 7B-13B total parameter experiments, the upcycled model matches the fixed-size baseline on validation loss while saving 32% of GPU hours. Comprehensive ablations across model scales, activation ratios, MoE architectures, and training budgets yield a practical recipe for deploying expert upcycling, establishing it as a principled, compute-efficient alternative to training large MoE models from scratch.

Kewei Cheng, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang et al.

Reasoning encompasses two typical types: deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Despite extensive research into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), most studies have failed to rigorously differentiate between inductive and deductive reasoning, leading to a blending of the two. This raises an essential question: In LLM reasoning, which poses a greater challenge - deductive or inductive reasoning? While the deductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, (i.e. their capacity to follow instructions in reasoning tasks), have received considerable attention, their abilities in true inductive reasoning remain largely unexplored. To investigate into the true inductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, we propose a novel framework, SolverLearner. This framework enables LLMs to learn the underlying function (i.e., $y = f_w(x)$), that maps input data points $(x)$ to their corresponding output values $(y)$, using only in-context examples. By focusing on inductive reasoning and separating it from LLM-based deductive reasoning, we can isolate and investigate inductive reasoning of LLMs in its pure form via SolverLearner. Our observations reveal that LLMs demonstrate remarkable inductive reasoning capabilities through SolverLearner, achieving near-perfect performance with ACC of 1 in most cases. Surprisingly, despite their strong inductive reasoning abilities, LLMs tend to relatively lack deductive reasoning capabilities, particularly in tasks involving ``counterfactual'' reasoning.

Ritesh Sarkhel, Binxuan Huang, Colin Lockard et al.

Extracting structured information from HTML documents is a long-studied problem with a broad range of applications, including knowledge base construction, faceted search, and personalized recommendation. Prior works rely on a few human-labeled web pages from each target website or thousands of human-labeled web pages from some seed websites to train a transferable extraction model that generalizes on unseen target websites. Noisy content, low site-level consistency, and lack of inter-annotator agreement make labeling web pages a time-consuming and expensive ordeal. We develop LEAST -- a Label-Efficient Self-Training method for Semi-Structured Web Documents to overcome these limitations. LEAST utilizes a few human-labeled pages to pseudo-annotate a large number of unlabeled web pages from the target vertical. It trains a transferable web-extraction model on both human-labeled and pseudo-labeled samples using self-training. To mitigate error propagation due to noisy training samples, LEAST re-weights each training sample based on its estimated label accuracy and incorporates it in training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to propose end-to-end training for transferable web extraction models utilizing only a few human-labeled pages. Experiments on a large-scale public dataset show that using less than ten human-labeled pages from each seed website for training, a LEAST-trained model outperforms previous state-of-the-art by more than 26 average F1 points on unseen websites, reducing the number of human-labeled pages to achieve similar performance by more than 10x.

Guanliang Liu, Abhinandan Patni, Congzhu Lin et al.

Training frontier-scale foundation models involves coordinating tens of thousands of GPUs over multi-month runs, where even minor performance degradations can accumulate into substantial efficiency losses. Existing health-check mechanisms, such as NCCL tests or GPU burn-in, primarily focus on functional correctness and often fail to detect fail-slow behaviors that silently degrade system performance. In this paper, we present Guard, a scalable system for detecting stragglers and ensuring node health in large-scale training clusters. Guard combines lightweight online performance monitoring during training with an offline node-sweep mechanism that systematically evaluates and qualifies nodes before they participate in production workloads. This design enables Guard to detect both acute failures and long-running fail-slow behaviors that traditional diagnostics cannot capture. Deployed on large-scale foundation model pretraining workloads, Guard improves mean FLOPs utilization by up to 1.7x, reduces run-to-run training step variance from 20% to 1%, increases mean time to failure (MTTF), and significantly reduces operational and debugging overhead. These results demonstrate that proactive straggler detection and systematic node qualification are critical for maintaining stable and efficient large-scale training.

Liming Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zixuan Zhang et al.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) decode multiple tokens in parallel, but aggressive multi-token decoding amplifies cross-token dependency errors and can sharply degrade generation quality. We propose BackPlay, a frozen-backbone self-correction framework that trains only a lightweight correction head on a finetuned DLM without updating any backbone or adapter parameters. Because the head is trained on errors produced by the same frozen generator used at inference time, its training distribution aligns with the error patterns of the deployed model. We further introduce Look-back Correction, a training mechanism that injects predictions from earlier, more corrupted denoising states into later, richer contexts, enabling the head to leverage later context to detect mistakes made in earlier generation steps. During inference, BackPlay periodically revisits previously generated tokens through selective remasking and regeneration to limit error accumulation. Across mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks, BackPlay improves the speed--quality trade-off of the underlying DLM under multi-token decoding.

Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang et al.

Due to the scarcity of agent-oriented pre-training data, LLM-based autonomous agents typically rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning, which often fails to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. We introduce Hephaestus-Forge, the first large-scale pre-training corpus designed to enhance the fundamental capabilities of LLM agents in API function calling, intrinsic reasoning and planning, and adapting to environmental feedback. Hephaestus-Forge comprises 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs, including both tool documentation to introduce knowledge of API functions and function calling trajectories to strengthen intrinsic reasoning. To explore effective training protocols, we investigate scaling laws to identify the optimal recipe in data mixing ratios. By continual pre-training on Hephaestus-Forge, Hephaestus outperforms small- to medium-scale open-source LLMs and rivals commercial LLMs on three agent benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our pre-training corpus in enhancing fundamental agentic capabilities and generalization of LLMs to new tasks or environments.

Jing Yang Lee, Hamed Bonab, Nasser Zalmout et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in multi-turn conversational tasks, yet their pre-training data predominantly consists of continuous prose, creating a potential mismatch between required capabilities and training paradigms. We introduce a novel approach to address this discrepancy by synthesizing conversational data from existing text corpora. We present a pipeline that transforms a cluster of multiple related documents into an extended multi-turn, multi-topic information-seeking dialogue. Applying our pipeline to Wikipedia articles, we curate DocTalk, a multi-turn pre-training dialogue corpus consisting of over 730k long conversations. We hypothesize that exposure to such synthesized conversational structures during pre-training can enhance the fundamental multi-turn capabilities of LLMs, such as context memory and understanding. Empirically, we show that incorporating DocTalk during pre-training results in up to 40% gain in context memory and understanding, without compromising base performance. DocTalk is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/AmazonScience/DocTalk.

Yangyi Chen, Binxuan Huang, Yifan Gao et al.

Precise estimation of downstream performance in large language models (LLMs) prior to training is essential for guiding their development process. Scaling laws analysis utilizes the statistics of a series of significantly smaller sampling language models (LMs) to predict the performance of the target LLM. For downstream performance prediction, the critical challenge lies in the emergent abilities in LLMs that occur beyond task-specific computational thresholds. In this work, we focus on the pre-training loss as a more computation-efficient metric for performance estimation. Our two-stage approach FLP consists of first estimating a function that maps computational resources (e.g., FLOPs) to the pre-training Loss using a series of fully-converged sampling models, followed by mapping the pre-training loss to downstream task Performance using the intermediate models with emerged performance. In our experiments, this FLP solution accurately predicts the performance of LLMs with 7B and 13B parameters using a series of sampling LMs up to 3B, achieving error margins of 5% and 10%, respectively, and significantly outperforming the FLOPs-to-Performance approach. Further, we present FLP-M, a fundamental approach for performance prediction that addresses the practical need to integrate datasets from multiple sources during pre-training. FLP-M extends the power law analytical function to predict domain-specific pre-training loss based on FLOPs across data sources, and employs a two-layer neural network to model the non-linear relationship between multiple domain-specific loss and downstream performance. By utilizing a 3B LLM trained on a specific ratio and a series of smaller sampling LMs, FLP-M can effectively forecast the performance of 3B and 7B LLMs across various data mixtures for most benchmarks within 10% error margins.

Hongye Jin, Pei Chen, Jingfeng Yang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, they are often distracted by irrelevant or noisy context in input sequences that degrades output quality. This problem affects both long- and short-context scenarios, such as retrieval-augmented generation, table question-answering, and in-context learning. We reveal that LLMs can implicitly identify whether input sequences contain useful information at early layers, prior to token generation. Leveraging this insight, we introduce Early Noise Dropping (\textsc{END}), a novel approach to mitigate this issue without requiring fine-tuning the LLMs. \textsc{END} segments input sequences into chunks and employs a linear prober on the early layers of LLMs to differentiate between informative and noisy chunks. By discarding noisy chunks early in the process, \textsc{END} preserves critical information, reduces distraction, and lowers computational overhead. Extensive experiments demonstrate that \textsc{END} significantly improves both performance and efficiency across different LLMs on multiple evaluation datasets. Furthermore, by investigating LLMs' implicit understanding to the input with the prober, this work also deepens understanding of how LLMs do reasoning with contexts internally.

Xiang Deng, Prashant Shiralkar, Colin Lockard et al.

HTML documents are an important medium for disseminating information on the Web for human consumption. An HTML document presents information in multiple text formats including unstructured text, structured key-value pairs, and tables. Effective representation of these documents is essential for machine understanding to enable a wide range of applications, such as Question Answering, Web Search, and Personalization. Existing work has either represented these documents using visual features extracted by rendering them in a browser, which is typically computationally expensive, or has simply treated them as plain text documents, thereby failing to capture useful information presented in their HTML structure. We argue that the text and HTML structure together convey important semantics of the content and therefore warrant a special treatment for their representation learning. In this paper, we introduce a novel representation learning approach for web pages, dubbed DOM-LM, which addresses the limitations of existing approaches by encoding both text and DOM tree structure with a transformer-based encoder and learning generalizable representations for HTML documents via self-supervised pre-training. We evaluate DOM-LM on a variety of webpage understanding tasks, including Attribute Extraction, Open Information Extraction, and Question Answering. Our extensive experiments show that DOM-LM consistently outperforms all baselines designed for these tasks. In particular, DOM-LM demonstrates better generalization performance both in few-shot and zero-shot settings, making it attractive for making it suitable for real-world application settings with limited labeled data.

Yu Zhang, Wei Wei, Binxuan Huang et al.

Real-time location inference of social media users is the fundamental of some spatial applications such as localized search and event detection. While tweet text is the most commonly used feature in location estimation, most of the prior works suffer from either the noise or the sparsity of textual features. In this paper, we aim to tackle these two problems. We use topic modeling as a building block to characterize the geographic topic variation and lexical variation so that "one-hot" encoding vectors will no longer be directly used. We also incorporate other features which can be extracted through the Twitter streaming API to overcome the noise problem. Experimental results show that our RATE algorithm outperforms several benchmark methods, both in the precision of region classification and the mean distance error of latitude and longitude regression.

Daheng Wang, Prashant Shiralkar, Colin Lockard et al.

Information extraction from semi-structured webpages provides valuable long-tailed facts for augmenting knowledge graph. Relational Web tables are a critical component containing additional entities and attributes of rich and diverse knowledge. However, extracting knowledge from relational tables is challenging because of sparse contextual information. Existing work linearize table cells and heavily rely on modifying deep language models such as BERT which only captures related cells information in the same table. In this work, we propose a novel relational table representation learning approach considering both the intra- and inter-table contextual information. On one hand, the proposed Table Convolutional Network model employs the attention mechanism to adaptively focus on the most informative intra-table cells of the same row or column; and, on the other hand, it aggregates inter-table contextual information from various types of implicit connections between cells across different tables. Specifically, we propose three novel aggregation modules for (i) cells of the same value, (ii) cells of the same schema position, and (iii) cells linked to the same page topic. We further devise a supervised multi-task training objective for jointly predicting column type and pairwise column relation, as well as a table cell recovery objective for pre-training. Experiments on real Web table datasets demonstrate our method can outperform competitive baselines by +4.8% of F1 for column type prediction and by +4.1% of F1 for pairwise column relation prediction.

Binxuan Huang, Kathleen M. Carley

An identity denotes the role an individual or a group plays in highly differentiated contemporary societies. In this paper, our goal is to classify Twitter users based on their role identities. We first collect a coarse-grained public figure dataset automatically, then manually label a more fine-grained identity dataset. We propose a hierarchical self-attention neural network for Twitter user role identity classification. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms multiple baselines. We further propose a transfer learning scheme that improves our model's performance by a large margin. Such transfer learning also greatly reduces the need for a large amount of human labeled data.

Binxuan Huang, Kathleen M. Carley

Accurate estimation of user location is important for many online services. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the hierarchical structure among locations. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical location prediction neural network for Twitter user geolocation. Our model first predicts the home country for a user, then uses the country result to guide the city-level prediction. In addition, we employ a character-aware word embedding layer to overcome the noisy information in tweets. With the feature fusion layer, our model can accommodate various feature combinations and achieves state-of-the-art results over three commonly used benchmarks under different feature settings. It not only improves the prediction accuracy but also greatly reduces the mean error distance.

Binxuan Huang, Kathleen M. Carley

We introduce a novel parameterized convolutional neural network for aspect level sentiment classification. Using parameterized filters and parameterized gates, we incorporate aspect information into convolutional neural networks (CNN). Experiments demonstrate that our parameterized filters and parameterized gates effectively capture the aspect-specific features, and our CNN-based models achieve excellent results on SemEval 2014 datasets.

Binxuan Huang, Kathleen M. Carley

Aspect level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards an aspect given a context sentence. Previous neural network based methods largely ignore the syntax structure in one sentence. In this paper, we propose a novel target-dependent graph attention network (TD-GAT) for aspect level sentiment classification, which explicitly utilizes the dependency relationship among words. Using the dependency graph, it propagates sentiment features directly from the syntactic context of an aspect target. In our experiments, we show our method outperforms multiple baselines with GloVe embeddings. We also demonstrate that using BERT representations further substantially boosts the performance.

Binxuan Huang, Kathleen M. Carley

Geotagging on social media has become an important proxy for understanding people's mobility and social events. Research that uses geotags to infer public opinions relies on several key assumptions about the behavior of geotagged and non-geotagged users. However, these assumptions have not been fully validated. Lack of understanding the geotagging behavior prohibits people further utilizing it. In this paper, we present an empirical study of geotagging behavior on Twitter based on more than 40 billion tweets collected from 20 million users. There are three main findings that may challenge these common assumptions. Firstly, different groups of users have different geotagging preferences. For example, less than 3% of users speaking in Korean are geotagged, while more than 40% of users speaking in Indonesian use geotags. Secondly, users who report their locations in profiles are more likely to use geotags, which may affects the generability of those location prediction systems on non-geotagged users. Thirdly, strong homophily effect exists in users' geotagging behavior, that users tend to connect to friends with similar geotagging preferences.

Tai-Long He, Dylan B. A. Jones, Binxuan Huang et al.

We use a hybrid deep learning model to predict June-July-August (JJA) daily maximum 8-h average (MDA8) surface ozone concentrations in the US. A set of meteorological fields from the ERA-Interim reanalysis as well as monthly mean NO$_x$ emissions from the Community Emissions Data System (CEDS) inventory are selected as predictors. Ozone measurements from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Air Quality System (AQS) from 1980 to 2009 are used to train the model, whereas data from 2010 to 2014 are used to evaluate the performance of the model. The model captures well daily, seasonal and interannual variability in MDA8 ozone across the US. Feature maps show that the model captures teleconnections between MDA8 ozone and the meteorological fields, which are responsible for driving the ozone dynamics. We used the model to evaluate recent trends in NO$_x$ emissions in the US and found that the trend in the EPA emission inventory produced the largest negative bias in MDA8 ozone between 2010-2016. The top-down emission trends from the Tropospheric Chemistry Reanalysis (TCR-2), which is based on satellite observations, produced predictions in best agreement with observations. In urban regions, the trend in AQS NO$_2$ observations provided ozone predictions in agreement with observations, whereas in rural regions the satellite-derived trends produced the best agreement. In both rural and urban regions the EPA trend resulted in the largest negative bias in predicted ozone. Our results suggest that the EPA inventory is overestimating the reductions in NO$_x$ emissions and that the satellite-derived trend reflects the influence of reductions in NO$_x$ emissions as well as changes in background NO$_x$. Our results demonstrate the significantly greater predictive capability that the deep learning model provides over conventional atmospheric chemical transport models for air quality analyses.

Binxuan Huang, Kathleen M. Carley

In this paper, we study the problem of node representation learning with graph neural networks. We present a graph neural network class named recurrent graph neural network (RGNN), that address the shortcomings of prior methods. By using recurrent units to capture the long-term dependency across layers, our methods can successfully identify important information during recursive neighborhood expansion. In our experiments, we show that our model class achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks: the Pubmed, Reddit, and PPI network datasets. Our in-depth analyses also demonstrate that incorporating recurrent units is a simple yet effective method to prevent noisy information in graphs, which enables a deeper graph neural network.

Binxuan Huang, Yanglan Ou, Kathleen M. Carley

Aspect-level sentiment classification aims to identify the sentiment expressed towards some aspects given context sentences. In this paper, we introduce an attention-over-attention (AOA) neural network for aspect level sentiment classification. Our approach models aspects and sentences in a joint way and explicitly captures the interaction between aspects and context sentences. With the AOA module, our model jointly learns the representations for aspects and sentences, and automatically focuses on the important parts in sentences. Our experiments on laptop and restaurant datasets demonstrate our approach outperforms previous LSTM-based architectures.

Yujie Qian, Jie Tang, Zhilin Yang et al.

We study the extent to which we can infer users' geographical locations from social media. Location inference from social media can benefit many applications, such as disaster management, targeted advertising, and news content tailoring. The challenges, however, lie in the limited amount of labeled data and the large scale of social networks. In this paper, we formalize the problem of inferring location from social media into a semi-supervised factor graph model (SSFGM). The model provides a probabilistic framework in which various sources of information (e.g., content and social network) can be combined together. We design a two-layer neural network to learn feature representations, and incorporate the learned latent features into SSFGM. To deal with the large-scale problem, we propose a Two-Chain Sampling (TCS) algorithm to learn SSFGM. The algorithm achieves a good trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. Experiments on Twitter and Weibo show that the proposed TCS algorithm for SSFGM can substantially improve the inference accuracy over several state-of-the-art methods. More importantly, TCS achieves over 100x speedup comparing with traditional propagation-based methods (e.g., loopy belief propagation).