Jiaan Wang

Jiaan Wang, Yunlong Liang, Zengkui Sun et al.

Knowledge editing aims to change language models' performance on several special cases (i.e., editing scope) by infusing the corresponding expected knowledge into them. With the recent advancements in large language models (LLMs), knowledge editing has been shown as a promising technique to adapt LLMs to new knowledge without retraining from scratch. However, most of the previous studies neglect the multi-lingual nature of some main-stream LLMs (e.g., LLaMA, ChatGPT and GPT-4), and typically focus on monolingual scenarios, where LLMs are edited and evaluated in the same language. As a result, it is still unknown the effect of source language editing on a different target language. In this paper, we aim to figure out this cross-lingual effect in knowledge editing. Specifically, we first collect a large-scale cross-lingual synthetic dataset by translating ZsRE from English to Chinese. Then, we conduct English editing on various knowledge editing methods covering different paradigms, and evaluate their performance in Chinese, and vice versa. To give deeper analyses of the cross-lingual effect, the evaluation includes four aspects, i.e., reliability, generality, locality and portability. Furthermore, we analyze the inconsistent behaviors of the edited models and discuss their specific challenges. Data and codes are available at https://github.com/krystalan/Bi_ZsRE

Jiaan Wang, Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng et al. · tsinghua

Recently, the emergence of ChatGPT has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community. Many prior studies have shown that ChatGPT achieves remarkable performance on various NLP tasks in terms of automatic evaluation metrics. However, the ability of ChatGPT to serve as an evaluation metric is still underexplored. Considering assessing the quality of natural language generation (NLG) models is an arduous task and NLG metrics notoriously show their poor correlation with human judgments, we wonder whether ChatGPT is a good NLG evaluation metric. In this report, we provide a preliminary meta-evaluation on ChatGPT to show its reliability as an NLG metric. In detail, we regard ChatGPT as a human evaluator and give task-specific (e.g., summarization) and aspect-specific (e.g., relevance) instruction to prompt ChatGPT to evaluate the generated results of NLG models. We conduct experiments on five NLG meta-evaluation datasets (including summarization, story generation and data-to-text tasks). Experimental results show that compared with previous automatic metrics, ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art or competitive correlation with human judgments in most cases. In addition, we find that the effectiveness of the ChatGPT evaluator might be influenced by the creation method of the meta-evaluation datasets. For the meta-evaluation datasets which are created greatly depending on the reference and thus are biased, the ChatGPT evaluator might lose its effectiveness. We hope our preliminary study could prompt the emergence of a general-purposed reliable NLG metric.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Duo Zheng et al. · tsinghua

Cross-lingual summarization is the task of generating a summary in one language (e.g., English) for the given document(s) in a different language (e.g., Chinese). Under the globalization background, this task has attracted increasing attention of the computational linguistics community. Nevertheless, there still remains a lack of comprehensive review for this task. Therefore, we present the first systematic critical review on the datasets, approaches, and challenges in this field. Specifically, we carefully organize existing datasets and approaches according to different construction methods and solution paradigms, respectively. For each type of datasets or approaches, we thoroughly introduce and summarize previous efforts and further compare them with each other to provide deeper analyses. In the end, we also discuss promising directions and offer our thoughts to facilitate future research. This survey is for both beginners and experts in cross-lingual summarization, and we hope it will serve as a starting point as well as a source of new ideas for researchers and engineers interested in this area.

Jiaan Wang, Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng et al. · tsinghua

Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary in a different target language. Recently, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, ChatGPT and GPT-4, has attracted wide attention from the computational linguistics community. However, it is not yet known the performance of LLMs on CLS. In this report, we empirically use various prompts to guide LLMs to perform zero-shot CLS from different paradigms (i.e., end-to-end and pipeline), and provide a preliminary evaluation on the generated summaries. We find that ChatGPT and GPT-4 originally prefer to produce lengthy summaries with detailed information. These two LLMs can further balance informativeness and conciseness with the help of an interactive prompt, significantly improving their CLS performance. Experimental results on three widely-used CLS datasets show that GPT-4 achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot CLS performance, and performs competitively compared with the fine-tuned mBART-50. Moreover, we also find some multi-lingual and bilingual LLMs (i.e., BLOOMZ, ChatGLM-6B, Vicuna-13B and ChatYuan) have limited zero-shot CLS ability. Due to the composite nature of CLS, which requires models to perform summarization and translation simultaneously, accomplishing this task in a zero-shot manner is even a challenge for LLMs. Therefore, we sincerely hope and recommend future LLM research could use CLS as a testbed.

Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Jinan Xu et al. · tsinghua

Multimodal abstractive summarization (MAS) aims to produce a concise summary given the multimodal data (text and vision). Existing studies mainly focus on how to effectively use the visual features from the perspective of an article, having achieved impressive success on the high-resource English dataset. However, less attention has been paid to the visual features from the perspective of the summary, which may limit the model performance, especially in the low- and zero-resource scenarios. In this paper, we propose to improve the summary quality through summary-oriented visual features. To this end, we devise two auxiliary tasks including vision to summary task and masked image modeling task. Together with the main summarization task, we optimize the MAS model via the training objectives of all these tasks. By these means, the MAS model can be enhanced by capturing the summary-oriented visual features, thereby yielding more accurate summaries. Experiments on 44 languages, covering mid-high-, low-, and zero-resource scenarios, verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed approach, which achieves state-of-the-art performance under all scenarios. Additionally, we will contribute a large-scale multilingual multimodal abstractive summarization (MM-Sum) dataset.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Yunlong Liang et al. · tsinghua

Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims at generating a concise summary in a different target language. Unlike monolingual summarization (MS), naturally occurring source-language documents paired with target-language summaries are rare. To collect large-scale CLS data, existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation. However, the translated text is distinguished from the text originally written in that language, i.e., translationese. In this paper, we first confirm that different approaches of constructing CLS datasets will lead to different degrees of translationese. Then we systematically investigate how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. In detail, we find that (1) the translationese in documents or summaries of test sets might lead to the discrepancy between human judgment and automatic evaluation; (2) the translationese in training sets would harm model performance in real-world applications; (3) though machine-translated documents involve translationese, they are very useful for building CLS systems on low-resource languages under specific training strategies. Lastly, we give suggestions for future CLS research including dataset and model developments. We hope that our work could let researchers notice the phenomenon of translationese in CLS and take it into account in the future.

Yuxuan Cao, Jiarong Xu, Carl Yang et al.

In recent years, graph pre-training has gained significant attention, focusing on acquiring transferable knowledge from unlabeled graph data to improve downstream performance. Despite these recent endeavors, the problem of negative transfer remains a major concern when utilizing graph pre-trained models to downstream tasks. Previous studies made great efforts on the issue of what to pre-train and how to pre-train by designing a variety of graph pre-training and fine-tuning strategies. However, there are cases where even the most advanced "pre-train and fine-tune" paradigms fail to yield distinct benefits. This paper introduces a generic framework W2PGNN to answer the crucial question of when to pre-train (i.e., in what situations could we take advantage of graph pre-training) before performing effortful pre-training or fine-tuning. We start from a new perspective to explore the complex generative mechanisms from the pre-training data to downstream data. In particular, W2PGNN first fits the pre-training data into graphon bases, each element of graphon basis (i.e., a graphon) identifies a fundamental transferable pattern shared by a collection of pre-training graphs. All convex combinations of graphon bases give rise to a generator space, from which graphs generated form the solution space for those downstream data that can benefit from pre-training. In this manner, the feasibility of pre-training can be quantified as the generation probability of the downstream data from any generator in the generator space. W2PGNN offers three broad applications: providing the application scope of graph pre-trained models, quantifying the feasibility of pre-training, and assistance in selecting pre-training data to enhance downstream performance. We provide a theoretically sound solution for the first application and extensive empirical justifications for the latter two applications.

Duo Zheng, Tao Kong, Ya Jing et al. · bytedance

Reference Expression Generation (REG) and Comprehension (REC) are two highly correlated tasks. Modeling REG and REC simultaneously for utilizing the relation between them is a promising way to improve both. However, the problem of distinct inputs, as well as building connections between them in a single model, brings challenges to the design and training of the joint model. To address the problems, we propose a unified model for REG and REC, named UniRef. It unifies these two tasks with the carefully-designed Image-Region-Text Fusion layer (IRTF), which fuses the image, region and text via the image cross-attention and region cross-attention. Additionally, IRTF could generate pseudo input regions for the REC task to enable a uniform way for sharing the identical representation space across the REC and REG. We further propose Vision-conditioned Masked Language Modeling (VMLM) and Text-Conditioned Region Prediction (TRP) to pre-train UniRef model on multi-granular corpora. The VMLM and TRP are directly related to REG and REC, respectively, but could help each other. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, RefCOCO, RefCOCO+ and RefCOCOg. Experimental results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on both REG and REC.

Jiaan Wang, Tingyi Zhang, Haoxiang Shi

Sports game summarization aims to generate sports news based on real-time commentaries. The task has attracted wide research attention but is still under-explored probably due to the lack of corresponding English datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we release GOAL, the first English sports game summarization dataset. Specifically, there are 103 commentary-news pairs in GOAL, where the average lengths of commentaries and news are 2724.9 and 476.3 words, respectively. Moreover, to support the research in the semi-supervised setting, GOAL additionally provides 2,160 unlabeled commentary documents. Based on our GOAL, we build and evaluate several baselines, including extractive and abstractive baselines. The experimental results show the challenges of this task still remain. We hope our work could promote the research of sports game summarization. The dataset has been released at https://github.com/krystalan/goal.

Jingdan Zhang, Jiaan Wang, Xiaodan Wang et al.

Multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs) combine different modal data (e.g., text and image) for a comprehensive understanding of entities. Despite the recent progress of large-scale MMKGs, existing MMKGs neglect the multi-aspect nature of entities, limiting the ability to comprehend entities from various perspectives. In this paper, we construct AspectMMKG, the first MMKG with aspect-related images by matching images to different entity aspects. Specifically, we collect aspect-related images from a knowledge base, and further extract aspect-related sentences from the knowledge base as queries to retrieve a large number of aspect-related images via an online image search engine. Finally, AspectMMKG contains 2,380 entities, 18,139 entity aspects, and 645,383 aspect-related images. We demonstrate the usability of AspectMMKG in entity aspect linking (EAL) downstream task and show that previous EAL models achieve a new state-of-the-art performance with the help of AspectMMKG. To facilitate the research on aspect-related MMKG, we further propose an aspect-related image retrieval (AIR) model, that aims to correct and expand aspect-related images in AspectMMKG. We train an AIR model to learn the relationship between entity image and entity aspect-related images by incorporating entity image, aspect, and aspect image information. Experimental results indicate that the AIR model could retrieve suitable images for a given entity w.r.t different aspects.

Shaohui Zheng, Zhixu Li, Jiaan Wang et al.

Cross-Lingual Summarization (CLS) aims at generating summaries in one language for the given documents in another language. CLS has attracted wide research attention due to its practical significance in the multi-lingual world. Though great contributions have been made, existing CLS works typically focus on short documents, such as news articles, short dialogues and guides. Different from these short texts, long documents such as academic articles and business reports usually discuss complicated subjects and consist of thousands of words, making them non-trivial to process and summarize. To promote CLS research on long documents, we construct Perseus, the first long-document CLS dataset which collects about 94K Chinese scientific documents paired with English summaries. The average length of documents in Perseus is more than two thousand tokens. As a preliminary study on long-document CLS, we build and evaluate various CLS baselines, including pipeline and end-to-end methods. Experimental results on Perseus show the superiority of the end-to-end baseline, outperforming the strong pipeline models equipped with sophisticated machine translation systems. Furthermore, to provide a deeper understanding, we manually analyze the model outputs and discuss specific challenges faced by current approaches. We hope that our work could benchmark long-document CLS and benefit future studies.

Kexin Wang, Zhixu Li, Jiaan Wang et al.

Grounding dialogue system with external knowledge is a promising way to improve the quality of responses. Most existing works adopt knowledge graphs (KGs) as the external resources, paying attention to the contribution of entities in the last utterance of the dialogue for context understanding and response generation. Nevertheless, the correlations between knowledge implied in the multi-turn context and the transition regularities between relations in KGs are under-explored. To this end, we propose a Relation Transition aware Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation model (RT-KGD). Specifically, inspired by the latent logic of human conversation, our model integrates dialogue-level relation transition regularities with turn-level entity semantic information. In this manner, the interaction between knowledge is considered to produce abundant clues for predicting the appropriate knowledge and generating coherent responses. The experimental results on both automatic evaluation and manual evaluation indicate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.

Jiaan Wang, Jianfeng Qu, Yunlong Liang et al.

Constructing commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs) has attracted wide research attention due to its significant importance in cognitive intelligence. Nevertheless, existing CKGs are typically oriented to English, limiting the research in non-English languages. Meanwhile, the emergence of foundation models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 has shown promising intelligence with the help of reinforcement learning from human feedback. Under the background, in this paper, we utilize foundation models to construct a Chinese CKG, named Snowman. Specifically, we distill different types of commonsense head items from ChatGPT, and continue to use it to collect tail items with respect to the head items and pre-defined relations. Based on the preliminary analysis, we find the negative commonsense knowledge distilled by ChatGPT achieves lower human acceptance compared to other knowledge. Therefore, we design a simple yet effective self-instruct filtering strategy to filter out invalid negative commonsense. Overall, the constructed Snowman covers more than ten million Chinese commonsense triples, making it the largest Chinese CKG. Moreover, human studies show the acceptance of Snowman achieves 90.6\%, indicating the high-quality triples distilled by the cutting-edge foundation model. We also conduct experiments on commonsense knowledge models to show the usability and effectiveness of our Snowman.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Yunlong Liang et al.

Recently, O1-like models have emerged as representative examples, illustrating the effectiveness of long chain-of-thought (CoT) in reasoning tasks such as math and coding tasks. In this paper, we introduce DRT, an attempt to bring the success of long CoT to neural machine translation (MT). Specifically, in view of the literature books that might involve similes and metaphors, translating these texts to a target language is very difficult in practice due to cultural differences. In such cases, literal translation often fails to convey the intended meaning effectively. Even for professional human translators, considerable thought must be given to preserving semantics throughout the translation process. To simulate LLMs' long thought ability in MT, we first mine sentences containing similes or metaphors from existing literature books, and then develop a multi-agent framework to translate these sentences via long thought. In the multi-agent framework, a translator is used to iteratively translate the source sentence under the suggestions provided by an advisor. To ensure the effectiveness of the long thoughts, an evaluator is also employed to quantify the translation quality in each round. In this way, we collect tens of thousands of long-thought MT data, which is used to train our DRT. Using Qwen2.5 and LLama-3.1 as the backbones, DRT models can learn the thought process during machine translation, and outperform vanilla LLMs as well as LLMs which are simply fine-tuning on the paired sentences without long thought, showing its effectiveness. The synthesized data and model checkpoints are released at https://github.com/krystalan/DRT.

Haoxiang Shi, Jiaan Wang, Jiarong Xu et al.

Text-to-Table aims to generate structured tables to convey the key information from unstructured documents. Existing text-to-table datasets are typically oriented English, limiting the research in non-English languages. Meanwhile, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has shown great success as general task solvers in multi-lingual settings (e.g., ChatGPT), theoretically enabling text-to-table in other languages. In this paper, we propose a Chinese text-to-table dataset, CT-Eval, to benchmark LLMs on this task. Our preliminary analysis of English text-to-table datasets highlights two key factors for dataset construction: data diversity and data hallucination. Inspired by this, the CT-Eval dataset selects a popular Chinese multidisciplinary online encyclopedia as the source and covers 28 domains to ensure data diversity. To minimize data hallucination, we first train an LLM to judge and filter out the task samples with hallucination, then employ human annotators to clean the hallucinations in the validation and testing sets. After this process, CT-Eval contains 88.6K task samples. Using CT-Eval, we evaluate the performance of open-source and closed-source LLMs. Our results reveal that zero-shot LLMs (including GPT-4) still have a significant performance gap compared with human judgment. Furthermore, after fine-tuning, open-source LLMs can significantly improve their text-to-table ability, outperforming GPT-4 by a large margin. In short, CT-Eval not only helps researchers evaluate and quickly understand the Chinese text-to-table ability of existing LLMs but also serves as a valuable resource to significantly improve the text-to-table performance of LLMs.

Zhou Zhang, Dongzeng Tan, Jiaan Wang et al.

Emojis have gained immense popularity on social platforms, serving as a common means to supplement or replace text. However, existing data mining approaches generally either completely ignore or simply treat emojis as ordinary Unicode characters, which may limit the model's ability to grasp the rich semantic information in emojis and the interaction between emojis and texts. Thus, it is necessary to release the emoji's power in social media data mining. To this end, we first construct a heterogeneous graph consisting of three types of nodes, i.e. post, word and emoji nodes to improve the representation of different elements in posts. The edges are also well-defined to model how these three elements interact with each other. To facilitate the sharing of information among post, word and emoji nodes, we propose a graph pre-train framework for text and emoji co-modeling, which contains two graph pre-training tasks: node-level graph contrastive learning and edge-level link reconstruction learning. Extensive experiments on the Xiaohongshu and Twitter datasets with two types of downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach proves significant improvement over previous strong baseline methods.

Chenming Zhou, Jiaan Wang, Yu Li et al.

The rapid evolution of generative technologies necessitates reliable methods for detecting AI-generated images. A critical limitation of current detectors is their failure to generalize to images from unseen generative models, as they often overfit to source-specific semantic cues rather than learning universal generative artifacts. To overcome this, we introduce a simple yet remarkably effective pixel-level mapping pre-processing step to disrupt the pixel value distribution of images and break the fragile, non-essential semantic patterns that detectors commonly exploit as shortcuts. This forces the detector to focus on more fundamental and generalizable high-frequency traces inherent to the image generation process. Through comprehensive experiments on GAN and diffusion-based generators, we show that our approach significantly boosts the cross-generator performance of state-of-the-art detectors. Extensive analysis further verifies our hypothesis that the disruption of semantic cues is the key to generalization.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Zengkui Sun et al.

Many-to-many summarization (M2MS) aims to process documents in any language and generate the corresponding summaries also in any language. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown strong multi-lingual abilities, giving them the potential to perform M2MS in real applications. This work presents a systematic empirical study on LLMs' M2MS ability. Specifically, we first reorganize M2MS data based on eight previous domain-specific datasets. The reorganized data contains 47.8K samples spanning five domains and six languages, which could be used to train and evaluate LLMs. Then, we benchmark 18 LLMs in a zero-shot manner and an instruction-tuning manner. Fine-tuned traditional models (e.g., mBART) are also conducted for comparisons. Our experiments reveal that, zero-shot LLMs achieve competitive results with fine-tuned traditional models. After instruct-tuning, open-source LLMs can significantly improve their M2MS ability, and outperform zero-shot LLMs (including GPT-4) in terms of automatic evaluations. In addition, we demonstrate that this task-specific improvement does not sacrifice the LLMs' general task-solving abilities. However, as revealed by our human evaluation, LLMs still face the factuality issue, and the instruction tuning might intensify the issue. Thus, how to control factual errors becomes the key when building LLM summarizers in real applications, and is worth noting in future research.

Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen et al.

Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application, which aims to reduce human stress, offer emotional guidance, and ultimately enhance human mental and physical well-being. With the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), many researchers have employed LLMs as the ESC models. However, the evaluation of these LLM-based ESCs remains uncertain. Inspired by the awesome development of role-playing agents, we propose an ESC Evaluation framework (ESC-Eval), which uses a role-playing agent to interact with ESC models, followed by a manual evaluation of the interactive dialogues. In detail, we first re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards from seven existing datasets to define the roles of the role-playing agent. Second, we train a specific role-playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4. Third, through ESC-Role and organized role cards, we systematically conduct experiments using 14 LLMs as the ESC models, including general AI-assistant LLMs (ChatGPT) and ESC-oriented LLMs (ExTES-Llama). We conduct comprehensive human annotations on interactive multi-turn dialogues of different ESC models. The results show that ESC-oriented LLMs exhibit superior ESC abilities compared to general AI-assistant LLMs, but there is still a gap behind human performance. Moreover, to automate the scoring process for future ESC models, we developed ESC-RANK, which trained on the annotated data, achieving a scoring performance surpassing 35 points of GPT-4. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/AIFlames/Esc-Eval.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Ziyao Lu et al.

We present ClidSum, a benchmark dataset for building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. It consists of 67k+ dialogue documents from two subsets (i.e., SAMSum and MediaSum) and 112k+ annotated summaries in different target languages. Based on the proposed ClidSum, we introduce two benchmark settings for supervised and semi-supervised scenarios, respectively. We then build various baseline systems in different paradigms (pipeline and end-to-end) and conduct extensive experiments on ClidSum to provide deeper analyses. Furthermore, we propose mDialBART which extends mBART-50 (a multi-lingual BART) via further pre-training. The multiple objectives used in the further pre-training stage help the pre-trained model capture the structural characteristics as well as important content in dialogues and the transformation from source to the target language. Experimental results show the superiority of mDialBART, as an end-to-end model, outperforms strong pipeline models on ClidSum. Finally, we discuss specific challenges that current approaches faced with this task and give multiple promising directions for future research. We have released the dataset and code at https://github.com/krystalan/ClidSum.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Yingxue Zhang et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) introduces additional information to enhance large language models (LLMs). In machine translation (MT), previous work typically retrieves in-context examples from paired MT corpora, or domain-specific knowledge from knowledge graphs, to enhance MT models. However, a large amount of world knowledge is organized in unstructured documents, and might not be fully paired across different languages. In this paper, we study retrieval-augmented MT using unstructured documents. Specifically, we build RAGtrans, the first benchmark to train and evaluate LLMs' retrieval-augmented MT ability. RAGtrans contains 169K MT samples collected via GPT-4o and human translators. Besides, documents from various languages are also provided to supply the knowledge to these samples. Based on RAGtrans, we further propose a multi-task training method to teach LLMs how to use information from multilingual documents during their translation. The method uses existing multilingual corpora to create auxiliary training objectives without additional labeling requirements. Extensive experiments show that the method improves LLMs by 1.6-3.1 BLEU and 1.0-2.0 COMET scores in En-Zh, and 1.7-2.9 BLEU and 2.1-2.7 COMET scores in En-De. We also conclude the critical difficulties that current LLMs face with this task.

Jiaan Wang, Jianfeng Qu, Kexin Wang et al.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue (KGD) learns to generate an informative response based on a given dialogue context and external knowledge (\emph{e.g.}, knowledge graphs; KGs). Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) and pre-training techniques has brought great success to knowledge-grounded dialogue. However, when building KGD systems in real applications, there are various real-world noises that are inevitable to face. For example, the dialogue context might involve perturbations such as misspellings and abbreviations. In addition, KGs typically suffer from incompletion and also might contain erroneous and outdated facts. Such real-world noises pose a challenge to the robustness of KGD systems and hinder their applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose an entity-based contrastive learning framework for improving the robustness of KGD. Specifically, we make use of the entity information in a KGD sample to create both its positive and negative samples which involve semantic-irrelevant and semantic-relevant perturbations, respectively. The contrastive learning framework ensures the KGD model is aware of these two types of perturbations, thus generating informative responses with the potentially noisy inputs in real applications. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance in terms of automatic evaluation scores, verifying its effectiveness and potentiality. Furthermore, we show that our method can generate better responses than comparison models in both the noisy and the few-shot settings.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou

In recent years, the emergence of large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, has shown impressive capabilities in complex problems, e.g., mathematics and coding. Some pioneering studies attempt to bring the success of LRMs in neural machine translation (MT). They try to build LRMs with deep reasoning MT ability via reinforcement learning (RL). Despite some progress that has been made, these attempts generally focus on several high-resource languages, e.g., English and Chinese, leaving the performance on other languages unclear. Besides, the reward modeling methods in previous work do not fully unleash the potential of reinforcement learning in MT. In this work, we first design a new reward modeling method that compares the translation results of the policy MT model with a strong LRM (i.e., DeepSeek-R1-671B), and quantifies the comparisons to provide rewards. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the reward modeling method. Using Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct as the backbone, the trained model achieves the new state-of-the-art performance in literary translation, and outperforms strong LRMs including OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeeK-R1. Furthermore, we extend our method to the multilingual settings with 11 languages. With a carefully designed lightweight reward modeling in RL, we can simply transfer the strong MT ability from a single direction into multiple (i.e., 90) translation directions and achieve impressive multilingual MT performance.

Zhiwei Zha, Jiaan Wang, Zhixu Li et al.

Multimodal knowledge bases (MMKBs) provide cross-modal aligned knowledge crucial for multimodal tasks. However, the images in existing MMKBs are generally collected for entities in encyclopedia knowledge graphs. Therefore, detailed groundings of visual semantics with linguistic concepts are lacking, which are essential for the visual concept cognition ability of multimodal models. Addressing this gap, we introduce M^2ConceptBase, the first concept-centric MMKB. M^2ConceptBase models concepts as nodes with associated images and detailed textual descriptions. We propose a context-aware multimodal symbol grounding approach to align concept-image and concept-description pairs using context information from image-text datasets. Comprising 951K images and 152K concepts, M^2ConceptBase links each concept to an average of 6.27 images and a single description, ensuring comprehensive visual and textual semantics. Human studies confirm more than 95% alignment accuracy, underscoring its quality. Additionally, our experiments demonstrate that M^2ConceptBase significantly enhances VQA model performance on the OK-VQA task. M^2ConceptBase also substantially improves the fine-grained concept understanding capabilities of multimodal large language models through retrieval augmentation in two concept-related tasks, highlighting its value.

Yuxuan Cao, Jiarong Xu, Chen Zhao et al.

In recent years, graph anomaly detection has found extensive applications in various domains such as social, financial, and communication networks. However, anomalies in graph-structured data present unique challenges, including label scarcity, ill-defined anomalies, and varying anomaly types, making supervised or semi-supervised methods unreliable. Researchers often adopt unsupervised approaches to address these challenges, assuming that anomalies deviate significantly from the normal data distribution. Yet, when the available data is insufficient, capturing the normal distribution accurately and comprehensively becomes difficult. To overcome this limitation, we propose to utilize external graph data (i.e., graph data in the wild) to help anomaly detection tasks. This naturally raises the question: How can we use external data to help graph anomaly detection tasks? To answer this question, we propose a framework called Wild-GAD. It is built upon a unified database, UniWildGraph, which comprises a large and diverse collection of graph data with broad domain coverage, ample data volume, and a unified feature space. Further, we develop selection criteria based on representativity and diversity to identify the most suitable external data for anomaly detection task. Extensive experiments on six real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Wild-GAD. Compared to the baseline methods, our framework has an average 18% AUCROC and 32% AUCPR improvement over the best-competing methods.

Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Jiaan Wang et al.

The challenge of slang translation lies in capturing context-dependent semantic extensions, as slang terms often convey meanings beyond their literal interpretation. While slang detection, explanation, and translation have been studied as isolated tasks in the era of large language models (LLMs), their intrinsic interdependence remains underexplored. The main reason is lacking of a benchmark where the two tasks can be a prerequisite for the third one, which can facilitate idiomatic translation. In this paper, we introduce the interpretative slang translation task (named SlangDIT) consisting of three sub-tasks: slang detection, cross-lingual slang explanation, and slang translation within the current context, aiming to generate more accurate translation with the help of slang detection and slang explanation. To this end, we construct a SlangDIT dataset, containing over 25k English-Chinese sentence pairs. Each source sentence mentions at least one slang term and is labeled with corresponding cross-lingual slang explanation. Based on the benchmark, we propose a deep thinking model, named SlangOWL. It firstly identifies whether the sentence contains a slang, and then judges whether the slang is polysemous and analyze its possible meaning. Further, the SlangOWL provides the best explanation of the slang term targeting on the current context. Finally, according to the whole thought, the SlangOWL offers a suitable translation. Our experiments on LLMs (\emph{e.g.}, Qwen2.5 and LLama-3.1), show that our deep thinking approach indeed enhances the performance of LLMs where the proposed SLangOWL significantly surpasses the vanilla models and supervised fine-tuned models without thinking.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou

Recently, deep reasoning LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1) have shown promising performance in various downstream tasks. Free translation is an important and interesting task in the multilingual world, which requires going beyond word-for-word translation. However, the task is still under-explored in deep reasoning LLMs. In this paper, we introduce DeepTrans, a deep reasoning translation model that learns free translation via reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, we carefully build a reward model with pre-defined scoring criteria on both the translation results and the thought processes. The reward model teaches DeepTrans how to think and free-translate the given sentences during RL. Besides, our RL training does not need any labeled translations, avoiding the human-intensive annotation or resource-intensive data synthesis. Experimental results show the effectiveness of DeepTrans. Using Qwen2.5-7B as the backbone, DeepTrans improves performance by 16.3% in literature translation, and outperforms strong deep reasoning LLMs. Moreover, we summarize the failures and interesting findings during our RL exploration. We hope this work could inspire other researchers in free translation.

Zengkui Sun, Yijin Liu, Jiaan Wang et al.

Recently, Knowledge Editing has received increasing attention, since it could update the specific knowledge from outdated ones in pretrained models without re-training. However, as pointed out by recent studies, existing related methods tend to merely memorize the superficial word composition of the edited knowledge, rather than truly learning and absorbing it. Consequently, on the reasoning questions, we discover that existing methods struggle to utilize the edited knowledge to reason the new answer, and tend to retain outdated responses, which are generated by the original models utilizing original knowledge. Nevertheless, the outdated responses are unexpected for the correct answers to reasoning questions, which we named as the outdated issue. To alleviate this issue, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective decoding strategy, i.e., outDated ISsue aware deCOding (DISCO), to enhance the performance of edited models on reasoning questions. Specifically, we capture the difference in the probability distribution between the original and edited models. Further, we amplify the difference of the token prediction in the edited model to alleviate the outdated issue, and thus enhance the model performance w.r.t the edited knowledge. Experimental results suggest that applying DISCO could enhance edited models to reason, e.g., on reasoning questions, DISCO outperforms the prior SOTA method by 12.99 F1 scores, and reduces the ratio of the outdated issue to 5.78% on the zsRE dataset.

Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Jiaan Wang et al.

Many-to-many multimodal summarization (M$^3$S) task aims to generate summaries in any language with document inputs in any language and the corresponding image sequence, which essentially comprises multimodal monolingual summarization (MMS) and multimodal cross-lingual summarization (MXLS) tasks. Although much work has been devoted to either MMS or MXLS and has obtained increasing attention in recent years, little research pays attention to the M$^3$S task. Besides, existing studies mainly focus on 1) utilizing MMS to enhance MXLS via knowledge distillation without considering the performance of MMS or 2) improving MMS models by filtering summary-unrelated visual features with implicit learning or explicitly complex training objectives. In this paper, we first introduce a general and practical task, i.e., M$^3$S. Further, we propose a dual knowledge distillation and target-oriented vision modeling framework for the M$^3$S task. Specifically, the dual knowledge distillation method guarantees that the knowledge of MMS and MXLS can be transferred to each other and thus mutually prompt both of them. To offer target-oriented visual features, a simple yet effective target-oriented contrastive objective is designed and responsible for discarding needless visual information. Extensive experiments on the many-to-many setting show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Additionally, we will contribute a many-to-many multimodal summarization (M$^3$Sum) dataset.

Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Duo Zheng et al.

To adapt text summarization to the multilingual world, previous work proposes multi-lingual summarization (MLS) and cross-lingual summarization (CLS). However, these two tasks have been studied separately due to the different definitions, which limits the compatible and systematic research on both of them. In this paper, we aim to unify MLS and CLS into a more general setting, i.e., many-to-many summarization (M2MS), where a single model could process documents in any language and generate their summaries also in any language. As the first step towards M2MS, we conduct preliminary studies to show that M2MS can better transfer task knowledge across different languages than MLS and CLS. Furthermore, we propose Pisces, a pre-trained M2MS model that learns language modeling, cross-lingual ability and summarization ability via three-stage pre-training. Experimental results indicate that our Pisces significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines, especially in the zero-shot directions, where there is no training data from the source-language documents to the target-language summaries.

Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Jinan Xu et al.

Existing neural machine translation (NMT) studies mainly focus on developing dataset-specific models based on data from different tasks (e.g., document translation and chat translation). Although the dataset-specific models have achieved impressive performance, it is cumbersome as each dataset demands a model to be designed, trained, and stored. In this work, we aim to unify these translation tasks into a more general setting. Specifically, we propose a ``versatile'' model, i.e., the Unified Model Learning for NMT (UMLNMT) that works with data from different tasks, and can translate well in multiple settings simultaneously, and theoretically it can be as many as possible. Through unified learning, UMLNMT is able to jointly train across multiple tasks, implementing intelligent on-demand translation. On seven widely-used translation tasks, including sentence translation, document translation, and chat translation, our UMLNMT results in substantial improvements over dataset-specific models with significantly reduced model deployment costs. Furthermore, UMLNMT can achieve competitive or better performance than state-of-the-art dataset-specific methods. Human evaluation and in-depth analysis also demonstrate the superiority of our approach on generating diverse and high-quality translations. Additionally, we provide a new genre translation dataset about famous aphorisms with 186k Chinese->English sentence pairs.

Jiaan Wang, Beiqi Zou, Zhixu Li et al.

Story ending generation is an interesting and challenging task, which aims to generate a coherent and reasonable ending given a story context. The key challenges of the task lie in how to comprehend the story context sufficiently and handle the implicit knowledge behind story clues effectively, which are still under-explored by previous work. In this paper, we propose a Story Heterogeneous Graph Network (SHGN) to explicitly model both the information of story context at different granularity levels and the multi-grained interactive relations among them. In detail, we consider commonsense knowledge, words and sentences as three types of nodes. To aggregate non-local information, a global node is also introduced. Given this heterogeneous graph network, the node representations are updated through graph propagation, which adequately utilizes commonsense knowledge to facilitate story comprehension. Moreover, we design two auxiliary tasks to implicitly capture the sentiment trend and key events lie in the context. The auxiliary tasks are jointly optimized with the primary story ending generation task in a multi-task learning strategy. Extensive experiments on the ROCStories Corpus show that the developed model achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Human study further demonstrates that our model generates more reasonable story endings.

Jiaan Wang, Zhixu Li, Tingyi Zhang et al.

Sports game summarization aims at generating sports news from live commentaries. However, existing datasets are all constructed through automated collection and cleaning processes, resulting in a lot of noise. Besides, current works neglect the knowledge gap between live commentaries and sports news, which limits the performance of sports game summarization. In this paper, we introduce K-SportsSum, a new dataset with two characteristics: (1) K-SportsSum collects a large amount of data from massive games. It has 7,854 commentary-news pairs. To improve the quality, K-SportsSum employs a manual cleaning process; (2) Different from existing datasets, to narrow the knowledge gap, K-SportsSum further provides a large-scale knowledge corpus that contains the information of 523 sports teams and 14,724 sports players. Additionally, we also introduce a knowledge-enhanced summarizer that utilizes both live commentaries and the knowledge to generate sports news. Extensive experiments on K-SportsSum and SportsSum datasets show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Qualitative analysis and human study further verify that our model generates more informative sports news.

Jiaan Wang, Zhixu Li, Qiang Yang et al.

Sports game summarization aims to generate news articles from live text commentaries. A recent state-of-the-art work, SportsSum, not only constructs a large benchmark dataset, but also proposes a two-step framework. Despite its great contributions, the work has three main drawbacks: 1) the noise existed in SportsSum dataset degrades the summarization performance; 2) the neglect of lexical overlap between news and commentaries results in low-quality pseudo-labeling algorithm; 3) the usage of directly concatenating rewritten sentences to form news limits its practicability. In this paper, we publish a new benchmark dataset SportsSum2.0, together with a modified summarization framework. In particular, to obtain a clean dataset, we employ crowd workers to manually clean the original dataset. Moreover, the degree of lexical overlap is incorporated into the generation of pseudo labels. Further, we introduce a reranker-enhanced summarizer to take into account the fluency and expressiveness of the summarized news. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline.

Duo Zheng, Zipeng Xu, Fandong Meng et al.

Considering the importance of building a good Visual Dialog (VD) Questioner, many researchers study the topic under a Q-Bot-A-Bot image-guessing game setting, where the Questioner needs to raise a series of questions to collect information of an undisclosed image. Despite progress has been made in Supervised Learning (SL) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), issues still exist. Firstly, previous methods do not provide explicit and effective guidance for Questioner to generate visually related and informative questions. Secondly, the effect of RL is hampered by an incompetent component, i.e., the Guesser, who makes image predictions based on the generated dialogs and assigns rewards accordingly. To enhance VD Questioner: 1) we propose a Related entity enhanced Questioner (ReeQ) that generates questions under the guidance of related entities and learns entity-based questioning strategy from human dialogs; 2) we propose an Augmented Guesser (AugG) that is strong and is optimized for the VD setting especially. Experimental results on the VisDial v1.0 dataset show that our approach achieves state-of-theart performance on both image-guessing task and question diversity. Human study further proves that our model generates more visually related, informative and coherent questions.

Jiaan Wang, Zhixu Li, Binbin Gu et al.

We discuss a novel task, Chorus Recognition, which could potentially benefit downstream tasks such as song search and music summarization. Different from the existing tasks such as music summarization or lyrics summarization relying on single-modal information, this paper models chorus recognition as a multi-modal one by utilizing both the lyrics and the tune information of songs. We propose a multi-modal Chorus Recognition model that considers diverse features. Besides, we also create and publish the first Chorus Recognition dataset containing 627 songs for public use. Our empirical study performed on the dataset demonstrates that our approach outperforms several baselines in chorus recognition. In addition, our approach also helps to improve the accuracy of its downstream task - song search by more than 10.6%.