Chaojie Wang

Chaojie Wang, Siyuan Gong, Anye Zhou et al.

Emergent cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) strategies being proposed in the literature for platoon formation in the Connected Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) context mostly assume idealized fixed information flow topologies (IFTs) for the platoon, implying guaranteed vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications for the IFT assumed. Since CACC strategies entail continuous information broadcasting, communication failures can occur in congested CAV traffic networks, leading to a platoon's IFT varying dynamically. To enhance the performance of CACC strategies, this study proposes the idea of dynamically optimizing the IFT for CACC, labeled the CACC-OIFT strategy. Under CACC-OIFT, the vehicles in the platoon cooperatively determine in real-time which vehicles will dynamically deactivate or activate the "send" functionality of their V2V communication devices to generate IFTs that optimize the platoon performance in terms of string stability under the ambient traffic conditions. Given the adaptive Proportional-Derivative (PD) controller with a two-predecessor-following scheme, and the ambient traffic conditions and the platoon size just before the start of a time period, the IFT optimization model determines the optimal IFT that maximizes the expected string stability. The optimal IFT is deployed for that time period, and the adaptive PD controller continuously determines the car-following behaviors of the vehicles based on the unfolding degeneration scenario for each time instant within that period. The effectiveness of the proposed CACC-OIFT is validated through numerical experiments in NS-3 based on NGSIM field data. The results indicate that the proposed CACC-OIFT can significantly enhance the string stability of platoon control in an unreliable V2V communication context, outperforming CACCs with fixed IFTs or with passive adaptive schemes for IFT dynamics.

Tian Lv, Chongyang Bai, Chaojie Wang

The attention mechanism has become a go-to technique for natural language processing and computer vision tasks. Recently, the MLP-Mixer and other MLP-based architectures, based simply on multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs), are also powerful compared to CNNs and attention techniques and raises a new research direction. However, the high capability of the MLP-based networks severely relies on large volume of training data, and lacks of explanation ability compared to the Vision Transformer (ViT) or ConvNets. When trained on small datasets, they usually achieved inferior results than ConvNets. To resolve it, we present (i) multi-dimensional MLP (MDMLP), a conceptually simple and lightweight MLP-based architecture yet achieves SOTA when training from scratch on small-size datasets; (ii) multi-dimension MLP Attention Tool (MDAttnTool), a novel and efficient attention mechanism based on MLPs. Even without strong data augmentation, MDMLP achieves 90.90% accuracy on CIFAR10 with only 0.3M parameters, while the well-known MLP-Mixer achieves 85.45% with 17.1M parameters. In addition, the lightweight MDAttnTool highlights objects in images, indicating its explanation power. Our code is available at https://github.com/Amoza-Theodore/MDMLP.

Dongsheng Wang, Yishi Xu, Miaoge Li et al.

We propose a Bayesian generative model for incorporating prior domain knowledge into hierarchical topic modeling. Although embedded topic models (ETMs) and its variants have gained promising performance in text analysis, they mainly focus on mining word co-occurrence patterns, ignoring potentially easy-to-obtain prior topic hierarchies that could help enhance topic coherence. While several knowledge-based topic models have recently been proposed, they are either only applicable to shallow hierarchies or sensitive to the quality of the provided prior knowledge. To this end, we develop a novel deep ETM that jointly models the documents and the given prior knowledge by embedding the words and topics into the same space. Guided by the provided knowledge, the proposed model tends to discover topic hierarchies that are organized into interpretable taxonomies. Besides, with a technique for adapting a given graph, our extended version allows the provided prior topic structure to be finetuned to match the target corpus. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model efficiently integrates the prior knowledge and improves both hierarchical topic discovery and document representation.

Dongsheng Wang, Chaojie Wang, Bo Chen et al.

To build recommender systems that not only consider user-item interactions represented as ordinal variables, but also exploit the social network describing the relationships between the users, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian model termed ordinal graph factor analysis (OGFA), which jointly models user-item and user-user interactions. OGFA not only achieves good recommendation performance, but also extracts interpretable latent factors corresponding to representative user preferences. We further extend OGFA to ordinal graph gamma belief network, which is a multi-stochastic-layer deep probabilistic model that captures the user preferences and social communities at multiple semantic levels. For efficient inference, we develop a parallel hybrid Gibbs-EM algorithm, which exploits the sparsity of the graphs and is scalable to large datasets. Our experimental results show that the proposed models not only outperform recent baselines on recommendation datasets with explicit or implicit feedback, but also provide interpretable latent representations.

Chris Yuhao Liu, Liang Zeng, Jiacai Liu et al.

In this report, we introduce a collection of methods to enhance reward modeling for LLMs, focusing specifically on data-centric techniques. We propose effective data selection and filtering strategies for curating high-quality open-source preference datasets, culminating in the Skywork-Reward data collection, which contains only 80K preference pairs -- significantly smaller than existing datasets. Using this curated dataset, we developed the Skywork-Reward model series -- Skywork-Reward-Gemma-27B and Skywork-Reward-Llama-3.1-8B -- with the former currently holding the top position on the RewardBench leaderboard. Notably, our techniques and datasets have directly enhanced the performance of many top-ranked models on RewardBench, highlighting the practical impact of our contributions in real-world preference learning applications.

Jujie He, Jiacai Liu, Chris Yuhao Liu et al.

The success of DeepSeek-R1 underscores the significant role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). In this work, we present Skywork-OR1, an effective and scalable RL implementation for long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) models. Building on the DeepSeek-R1-Distill model series, our RL approach achieves notable performance gains, increasing average accuracy across AIME24, AIME25, and LiveCodeBench from 57.8% to 72.8% (+15.0%) for the 32B model and from 43.6% to 57.5% (+13.9%) for the 7B model. Our Skywork-OR1-32B model surpasses both DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen3-32B on the AIME24 and AIME25 benchmarks, while achieving comparable results on LiveCodeBench. The Skywork-OR1-7B and Skywork-OR1-Math-7B models demonstrate competitive reasoning capabilities among models of similar size. We perform comprehensive ablation studies on the core components of our training pipeline to validate their effectiveness. Additionally, we thoroughly investigate the phenomenon of entropy collapse, identify key factors affecting entropy dynamics, and demonstrate that mitigating premature entropy collapse is critical for improved test performance. To support community research, we fully open-source our model weights, training code, and training datasets.

Guibin Chen, Dixuan Lin, Jiangping Yang et al.

SkyReels V4 is a unified multi modal video foundation model for joint video audio generation, inpainting, and editing. The model adopts a dual stream Multimodal Diffusion Transformer (MMDiT) architecture, where one branch synthesizes video and the other generates temporally aligned audio, while sharing a powerful text encoder based on the Multimodal Large Language Models (MMLM). SkyReels V4 accepts rich multi modal instructions, including text, images, video clips, masks, and audio references. By combining the MMLMs multi modal instruction following capability with in context learning in the video branch MMDiT, the model can inject fine grained visual guidance under complex conditioning, while the audio branch MMDiT simultaneously leverages audio references to guide sound generation. On the video side, we adopt a channel concatenation formulation that unifies a wide range of inpainting style tasks, such as image to video, video extension, and video editing under a single interface, and naturally extends to vision referenced inpainting and editing via multi modal prompts. SkyReels V4 supports up to 1080p resolution, 32 FPS, and 15 second duration, enabling high fidelity, multi shot, cinema level video generation with synchronized audio. To make such high resolution, long-duration generation computationally feasible, we introduce an efficiency strategy: Joint generation of low resolution full sequences and high-resolution keyframes, followed by dedicated super-resolution and frame interpolation models. To our knowledge, SkyReels V4 is the first video foundation model that simultaneously supports multi-modal input, joint video audio generation, and a unified treatment of generation, inpainting, and editing, while maintaining strong efficiency and quality at cinematic resolutions and durations.

Yewen Li, Chaojie Wang, Xiaobo Xia et al.

Unsupervised out-of-distribution (U-OOD) detection is to identify OOD data samples with a detector trained solely on unlabeled in-distribution (ID) data. The likelihood function estimated by a deep generative model (DGM) could be a natural detector, but its performance is limited in some popular "hard" benchmarks, such as FashionMNIST (ID) vs. MNIST (OOD). Recent studies have developed various detectors based on DGMs to move beyond likelihood. However, despite their success on "hard" benchmarks, most of them struggle to consistently surpass or match the performance of likelihood on some "non-hard" cases, such as SVHN (ID) vs. CIFAR10 (OOD) where likelihood could be a nearly perfect detector. Therefore, we appeal for more attention to incremental effectiveness on likelihood, i.e., whether a method could always surpass or at least match the performance of likelihood in U-OOD detection. We first investigate the likelihood of variational DGMs and find its detection performance could be improved in two directions: i) alleviating latent distribution mismatch, and ii) calibrating the dataset entropy-mutual integration. Then, we apply two techniques for each direction, specifically post-hoc prior and dataset entropy-mutual calibration. The final method, named Resultant, combines these two directions for better incremental effectiveness compared to either technique alone. Experimental results demonstrate that the Resultant could be a new state-of-the-art U-OOD detector while maintaining incremental effectiveness on likelihood in a wide range of tasks.

Jinkai Qiu, Alessandro Saviolo, Chaojie Wang et al.

Realistic highway simulation is critical for scalable safety evaluation of autonomous vehicles, particularly for interactions that are too rare to study from logged data alone. Yet highway traffic generation remains challenging because it requires broad coverage across speeds and maneuvers, controllable generation of rare safety-critical scenarios, and behavioral credibility in multi-agent interactions. We present PHASE, Policy for Heterogeneous Agent Self-play on Expressway, a context-aware self-play framework that addresses these three requirements through explicit per-agent conditioning for controllability, synthetic scenario generation for broad highway coverage, and closed-loop multi-agent training for realistic interaction dynamics. PHASE further supports different vehicle profiles, for example, passenger cars and articulated trailer trucks, within a single policy via vehicle-aware dynamics and context-conditioned actions, and stabilizes self-play with early termination of unrecoverable states, at-fault collision attribution, highway-aware reward shaping, coupled curricula, and robust policy optimization. Despite being trained only on synthetic data, PHASE transfers zero-shot to 512 unseen high-interaction real scenarios in exiD, achieving a 96.3% success rate and reducing ADE/FDE from 6.57/12.07 m to 2.44/5.25 m relative to a prior self-play baseline. In a learned trajectory embedding space, it also improves behavioral realism over IDM, reducing Frechet trajectory distance by 13.1% and energy distance by 20.2%. These results show that synthetic self-play can provide a scalable route to controllable and realistic highway scenario generation without direct imitation of expert logs.

Chaojie Wang, Yanchen Deng, Zhiyi Lyu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in many natural language tasks. However, the auto-regressive generation process makes LLMs prone to produce errors, hallucinations and inconsistent statements when performing multi-step reasoning. In this paper, by casting multi-step reasoning of LLMs as a heuristic search problem, we aim to alleviate the pathology by introducing Q*, a general, versatile and agile framework for guiding LLMs decoding process with deliberative planning. By learning a plug-and-play Q-value model as heuristic function for estimating expected future rewards, our Q* can effectively guide LLMs to select the most promising next reasoning step without fine-tuning LLMs for the current task, which avoids the significant computational overhead and potential risk of performance degeneration on other tasks. Extensive experiments on GSM8K, MATH and MBPP demonstrate the superiority of our method, contributing to improving the reasoning performance of existing open-source LLMs.

Weihao Tan, Wentao Zhang, Xinrun Xu et al.

Despite the success in specific scenarios, existing foundation agents still struggle to generalize across various virtual scenarios, mainly due to the dramatically different encapsulations of environments with manually designed observation and action spaces. To handle this issue, we propose the General Computer Control (GCC) setting to restrict foundation agents to interact with software through the most unified and standardized interface, i.e., using screenshots as input and keyboard and mouse actions as output. We introduce Cradle, a modular and flexible LMM-powered framework, as a preliminary attempt towards GCC. Enhanced by six key modules, Cradle can understand input screenshots and output executable code for low-level keyboard and mouse control after high-level planning, so that Cradle can interact with any software and complete long-horizon complex tasks without relying on any built-in APIs. Experimental results show that Cradle exhibits remarkable generalizability and impressive performance across four previously unexplored commercial video games, five software applications, and a comprehensive benchmark, OSWorld. Cradle is the first to enable foundation agents to follow the main storyline and complete 40-minute-long real missions in the complex AAA game Red Dead Redemption 2 (RDR2). Cradle can also create a city of a thousand people in Cities: Skylines, farm and harvest parsnips in Stardew Valley, and trade and bargain with a maximal weekly total profit of 87% in Dealer's Life 2. Cradle can not only operate daily software, like Chrome, Outlook, and Feishu, but also edit images and videos using Meitu and CapCut. Cradle greatly extends the reach of foundation agents by enabling the easy conversion of any software, especially complex games, into benchmarks to evaluate agents' various abilities and facilitate further data collection, thus paving the way for generalist agents.

Chris Yuhao Liu, Liang Zeng, Yuzhen Xiao et al.

Despite the critical role of reward models (RMs) in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), current state-of-the-art open RMs perform poorly on most existing evaluation benchmarks, failing to capture the spectrum of nuanced and sophisticated human preferences. Even approaches that incorporate advanced training techniques have not yielded meaningful performance improvements. We hypothesize that this brittleness stems primarily from limitations in preference datasets, which are often narrowly scoped, synthetically labeled, or lack rigorous quality control. To address these challenges, we present a large-scale preference dataset comprising 40 million preference pairs, named SynPref-40M. To enable data curation at scale, we design a human-AI synergistic two-stage pipeline that leverages the complementary strengths of human annotation quality and AI scalability. In this pipeline, humans provide verified annotations, while large language models perform automatic curation based on human guidance. Training on this preference mixture, we introduce Skywork-Reward-V2, a suite of eight reward models ranging from 0.6B to 8B parameters, trained on a carefully curated subset of 26 million preference pairs from SynPref-40M. We demonstrate that Skywork-Reward-V2 is versatile across a wide range of capabilities, including alignment with human preferences, objective correctness, safety, resistance to stylistic biases, and best-of-N scaling, achieving state-of-the-art performance across seven major reward model benchmarks. Ablation studies confirm that the effectiveness of our approach stems not only from data scale but also from high-quality curation. The Skywork-Reward-V2 series represents substantial progress in open reward models, highlighting the untapped potential of existing preference datasets and demonstrating how human-AI curation synergy can unlock significantly higher data quality.

Chaojie Wang, Yishi Xu, Zhong Peng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, especially for question answering. However, in the face of problems beyond the scope of knowledge, these LLMs tend to talk nonsense with a straight face, where the potential solution could be incorporating an Information Retrieval (IR) module and generating response based on these retrieved knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel framework to assist LLMs, such as ChatGPT, to retrieve question-related structured information on the knowledge graph, and demonstrate that Knowledge-based question answering (Keqing) could be a nature Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mentor to guide the LLM to sequentially find the answer entities of a complex question through interpretable logical chains. Specifically, the workflow of Keqing will execute decomposing a complex question according to predefined templates, retrieving candidate entities on knowledge graph, reasoning answers of sub-questions, and finally generating response with reasoning paths, which greatly improves the reliability of LLM's response. The experimental results on KBQA datasets show that Keqing can achieve competitive performance and illustrate the logic of answering each question.

Jiacai Liu, Chaojie Wang, Chris Yuhao Liu et al.

The role of reinforcement learning (RL) in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly significant. Despite the success of RL in many scenarios, there are still many challenges in improving the reasoning of LLMs. One challenge is the sparse reward, which makes optimization difficult for RL and necessitates a large amount of data samples. Another challenge stems from the inherent instability of RL, particularly when using Actor-Critic (AC) methods to derive optimal policies, which often leads to unstable training processes. To address these issues, we introduce Direct Advantage Policy Optimization (DAPO), an novel step-level offline RL algorithm. Unlike standard alignment that rely solely outcome rewards to optimize policies (such as DPO), DAPO employs a critic function to predict the reasoning accuracy at each step, thereby generating dense signals to refine the generation strategy. Additionally, the Actor and Critic components in DAPO are trained independently, avoiding the co-training instability observed in standard AC algorithms like PPO. We train DAPO on mathematical and code query datasets and then evaluate its performance on multiple benchmarks. Our results show that DAPO can effectively enhance the mathematical and code capabilities on both SFT models and RL models, demonstrating the effectiveness of DAPO.

Fuxiang Zhang, Jiacheng Xu, Chaojie Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in complex reasoning tasks through both post-training and test-time scaling laws. While prevalent test-time scaling approaches are often realized by using external reward models to guide the model generation process, we find that only marginal gains can be acquired when scaling a model post-trained on specific reasoning tasks. We identify that the limited improvement stems from distribution discrepancies between the specific post-trained generator and the general reward model. To address this, we propose a framework that incentivizes LLMs to self-verify their own answers. By unifying answer generation and verification within a single reinforcement learning (RL) process, we train models that can effectively assess the correctness of their own solutions. The trained model can further scale its performance at inference time by verifying its generations, without the need for external verifiers. We train our self-verification models based on Qwen2.5-Math-7B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, demonstrating their capabilities across varying reasoning context lengths. Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that our models can not only improve post-training performance but also enable effective test-time scaling.

Xiaoxuan Lou, Chaojie Wang, Bo An

Mathematical reasoning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs), yet achieving high performance in this domain remains a significant challenge. The auto-regressive generation process often makes LLMs susceptible to errors, hallucinations, and inconsistencies, particularly during multi-step reasoning. In this paper, we propose Mars-PO, a novel framework to improve the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs through a multi-agent system. It combines high-quality outputs from multiple agents into a hybrid positive sample set and pairs them with agent-specific negative samples to construct robust preference pairs for training. By aligning agents with shared positive samples while addressing individual weaknesses, Mars-PO achieves substantial performance improvements on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. For example, it increases the accuracy on the MATH benchmark of the state-of-the-art instruction-tuned LLM, Llama3.1-8B-Instruct, from 50.38% to 57.82%. Experimental results further demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms other baselines, such as supervised fine-tuning, vanilla DPO, and its enhanced versions, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach.

Chaojie Wang, Xinyang Liu, Dongsheng Wang et al.

Although existing variational graph autoencoders (VGAEs) have been widely used for modeling and generating graph-structured data, most of them are still not flexible enough to approximate the sparse and skewed latent node representations, especially those of document relational networks (DRNs) with discrete observations. To analyze a collection of interconnected documents, a typical branch of Bayesian models, specifically relational topic models (RTMs), has proven their efficacy in describing both link structures and document contents of DRNs, which motives us to incorporate RTMs with existing VGAEs to alleviate their potential issues when modeling the generation of DRNs. In this paper, moving beyond the sophisticated approximate assumptions of traditional RTMs, we develop a graph Poisson factor analysis (GPFA), which provides analytic conditional posteriors to improve the inference accuracy, and extend GPFA to a multi-stochastic-layer version named graph Poisson gamma belief network (GPGBN) to capture the hierarchical document relationships at multiple semantic levels. Then, taking GPGBN as the decoder, we combine it with various Weibull-based graph inference networks, resulting in two variants of Weibull graph auto-encoder (WGAE), equipped with model inference algorithms. Experimental results demonstrate that our models can extract high-quality hierarchical latent document representations and achieve promising performance on various graph analytic tasks.

Chuqiao Zong, Chaojie Wang, Molei Qin et al.

High-frequency trading (HFT) that executes algorithmic trading in short time scales, has recently occupied the majority of cryptocurrency market. Besides traditional quantitative trading methods, reinforcement learning (RL) has become another appealing approach for HFT due to its terrific ability of handling high-dimensional financial data and solving sophisticated sequential decision-making problems, \emph{e.g.,} hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) has shown its promising performance on second-level HFT by training a router to select only one sub-agent from the agent pool to execute the current transaction. However, existing RL methods for HFT still have some defects: 1) standard RL-based trading agents suffer from the overfitting issue, preventing them from making effective policy adjustments based on financial context; 2) due to the rapid changes in market conditions, investment decisions made by an individual agent are usually one-sided and highly biased, which might lead to significant loss in extreme markets. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Memory Augmented Context-aware Reinforcement learning method On HFT, \emph{a.k.a.} MacroHFT, which consists of two training phases: 1) we first train multiple types of sub-agents with the market data decomposed according to various financial indicators, specifically market trend and volatility, where each agent owns a conditional adapter to adjust its trading policy according to market conditions; 2) then we train a hyper-agent to mix the decisions from these sub-agents and output a consistently profitable meta-policy to handle rapid market fluctuations, equipped with a memory mechanism to enhance the capability of decision-making. Extensive experiments on various cryptocurrency markets demonstrate that MacroHFT can achieve state-of-the-art performance on minute-level trading tasks.

Zitao Song, Chao Yang, Chaojie Wang et al.

Modern high-stakes systems, such as healthcare or robotics, often generate vast streaming event sequences. Our goal is to design an efficient, plug-and-play tool to elicit logic tree-based explanations from Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide customized insights into each observed event sequence. Built on the temporal point process model for events, our method employs the likelihood function as a score to evaluate generated logic trees. We propose an amortized Expectation-Maximization (EM) learning framework and treat the logic tree as latent variables. In the E-step, we evaluate the posterior distribution over the latent logic trees using an LLM prior and the likelihood of the observed event sequences. LLM provides a high-quality prior for the latent logic trees, however, since the posterior is built over a discrete combinatorial space, we cannot get the closed-form solution. We propose to generate logic tree samples from the posterior using a learnable GFlowNet, which is a diversity-seeking generator for structured discrete variables. The M-step employs the generated logic rules to approximate marginalization over the posterior, facilitating the learning of model parameters and refining the tunable LLM prior parameters. In the online setting, our locally built, lightweight model will iteratively extract the most relevant rules from LLMs for each sequence using only a few iterations. Empirical demonstrations showcase the promising performance and adaptability of our framework.

Yilin He, Chaojie Wang, Hao Zhang et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs), which propagate the node features through the edges and learn how to transform the aggregated features under label supervision, have achieved great success in supervised feature extraction for both node-level and graph-level classification tasks. However, GNNs typically treat the graph structure as given and ignore how the edges are formed. This paper introduces a graph generative process to model how the observed edges are generated by aggregating the node interactions over a set of overlapping node communities, each of which contributes to the edges via a logical OR mechanism. Based on this generative model, we partition each edge into the summation of multiple community-specific weighted edges and use them to define community-specific GNNs. A variational inference framework is proposed to jointly learn a GNN-based inference network that partitions the edges into different communities, these community-specific GNNs, and a GNN-based predictor that combines community-specific GNNs for the end classification task. Extensive evaluations on real-world graph datasets have verified the effectiveness of the proposed method in learning discriminative representations for both node-level and graph-level classification tasks.

Zhibin Duan, Yishi Xu, Bo Chen et al.

Existing deep hierarchical topic models are able to extract semantically meaningful topics from a text corpus in an unsupervised manner and automatically organize them into a topic hierarchy. However, it is unclear how to incorporate prior beliefs such as knowledge graph to guide the learning of the topic hierarchy. To address this issue, we introduce TopicNet as a deep hierarchical topic model that can inject prior structural knowledge as an inductive bias to influence learning. TopicNet represents each topic as a Gaussian-distributed embedding vector, projects the topics of all layers into a shared embedding space, and explores both the symmetric and asymmetric similarities between Gaussian embedding vectors to incorporate prior semantic hierarchies. With an auto-encoding variational inference network, the model parameters are optimized by minimizing the evidence lower bound and a regularization term via stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on widely used benchmarks show that TopicNet outperforms related deep topic models on discovering deeper interpretable topics and mining better document~representations.

Yongrui Chen, Xinnan Guo, Chaojie Wang et al.

Single-table text-to-SQL aims to transform a natural language question into a SQL query according to one single table. Recent work has made promising progress on this task by pre-trained language models and a multi-submodule framework. However, zero-shot table, that is, the invisible table in the training set, is currently the most critical bottleneck restricting the application of existing approaches to real-world scenarios. Although some work has utilized auxiliary tasks to help handle zero-shot tables, expensive extra manual annotation limits their practicality. In this paper, we propose a new approach for the zero-shot text-to-SQL task which does not rely on any additional manual annotations. Our approach consists of two parts. First, we propose a new model that leverages the abundant information of table content to help establish the mapping between questions and zero-shot tables. Further, we propose a simple but efficient meta-learning strategy to train our model. The strategy utilizes the two-step gradient update to force the model to learn a generalization ability towards zero-shot tables. We conduct extensive experiments on a public open-domain text-to-SQL dataset WikiSQL and a domain-specific dataset ESQL. Compared to existing approaches using the same pre-trained model, our approach achieves significant improvements on both datasets. Compared to the larger pre-trained model and the tabular-specific pre-trained model, our approach is still competitive. More importantly, on the zero-shot subsets of both the datasets, our approach further increases the improvements.

Zhibin Duan, Dongsheng Wang, Bo Chen et al.

Hierarchical topic models such as the gamma belief network (GBN) have delivered promising results in mining multi-layer document representations and discovering interpretable topic taxonomies. However, they often assume in the prior that the topics at each layer are independently drawn from the Dirichlet distribution, ignoring the dependencies between the topics both at the same layer and across different layers. To relax this assumption, we propose sawtooth factorial topic embedding guided GBN, a deep generative model of documents that captures the dependencies and semantic similarities between the topics in the embedding space. Specifically, both the words and topics are represented as embedding vectors of the same dimension. The topic matrix at a layer is factorized into the product of a factor loading matrix and a topic embedding matrix, the transpose of which is set as the factor loading matrix of the layer above. Repeating this particular type of factorization, which shares components between adjacent layers, leads to a structure referred to as sawtooth factorization. An auto-encoding variational inference network is constructed to optimize the model parameter via stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on big corpora show that our models outperform other neural topic models on extracting deeper interpretable topics and deriving better document representations.

Dandan Guo, Bo Chen, Wenchao Chen et al.

We develop a recurrent gamma belief network (rGBN) for radar automatic target recognition (RATR) based on high-resolution range profile (HRRP), which characterizes the temporal dependence across the range cells of HRRP. The proposed rGBN adopts a hierarchy of gamma distributions to build its temporal deep generative model. For scalable training and fast out-of-sample prediction, we propose the hybrid of a stochastic-gradient Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and a recurrent variational inference model to perform posterior inference. To utilize the label information to extract more discriminative latent representations, we further propose supervised rGBN to jointly model the HRRP samples and their corresponding labels. Experimental results on synthetic and measured HRRP data show that the proposed models are efficient in computation, have good classification accuracy and generalization ability, and provide highly interpretable multi-stochastic-layer latent structure.

Chaojie Wang, Bo Chen, Sucheng Xiao et al.

For text analysis, one often resorts to a lossy representation that either completely ignores word order or embeds each word as a low-dimensional dense feature vector. In this paper, we propose convolutional Poisson factor analysis (CPFA) that directly operates on a lossless representation that processes the words in each document as a sequence of high-dimensional one-hot vectors. To boost its performance, we further propose the convolutional Poisson gamma belief network (CPGBN) that couples CPFA with the gamma belief network via a novel probabilistic pooling layer. CPFA forms words into phrases and captures very specific phrase-level topics, and CPGBN further builds a hierarchy of increasingly more general phrase-level topics. For efficient inference, we develop both a Gibbs sampler and a Weibull distribution based convolutional variational auto-encoder. Experimental results demonstrate that CPGBN can extract high-quality text latent representations that capture the word order information, and hence can be leveraged as a building block to enrich a wide variety of existing latent variable models that ignore word order.