Yuexiang Xie

CL
h-index17
23papers
1,764citations
Novelty47%
AI Score54

23 Papers

25.5LGApr 11, 2022Code
FederatedScope: A Flexible Federated Learning Platform for Heterogeneity

Yuexiang Xie, Zhen Wang, Dawei Gao et al.

Although remarkable progress has been made by existing federated learning (FL) platforms to provide infrastructures for development, these platforms may not well tackle the challenges brought by various types of heterogeneity, including the heterogeneity in participants' local data, resources, behaviors and learning goals. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a novel FL platform, named FederatedScope, which employs an event-driven architecture to provide users with great flexibility to independently describe the behaviors of different participants. Such a design makes it easy for users to describe participants with various local training processes, learning goals and backends, and coordinate them into an FL course with synchronous or asynchronous training strategies. Towards an easy-to-use and flexible platform, FederatedScope enables rich types of plug-in operations and components for efficient further development, and we have implemented several important components to better help users with privacy protection, attack simulation and auto-tuning. We have released FederatedScope at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote academic research and industrial deployment of federated learning in a wide range of scenarios.

23.4LGApr 12, 2022Code
FederatedScope-GNN: Towards a Unified, Comprehensive and Efficient Package for Federated Graph Learning

Zhen Wang, Weirui Kuang, Yuexiang Xie et al.

The incredible development of federated learning (FL) has benefited various tasks in the domains of computer vision and natural language processing, and the existing frameworks such as TFF and FATE has made the deployment easy in real-world applications. However, federated graph learning (FGL), even though graph data are prevalent, has not been well supported due to its unique characteristics and requirements. The lack of FGL-related framework increases the efforts for accomplishing reproducible research and deploying in real-world applications. Motivated by such strong demand, in this paper, we first discuss the challenges in creating an easy-to-use FGL package and accordingly present our implemented package FederatedScope-GNN (FS-G), which provides (1) a unified view for modularizing and expressing FGL algorithms; (2) comprehensive DataZoo and ModelZoo for out-of-the-box FGL capability; (3) an efficient model auto-tuning component; and (4) off-the-shelf privacy attack and defense abilities. We validate the effectiveness of FS-G by conducting extensive experiments, which simultaneously gains many valuable insights about FGL for the community. Moreover, we employ FS-G to serve the FGL application in real-world E-commerce scenarios, where the attained improvements indicate great potential business benefits. We publicly release FS-G, as submodules of FederatedScope, at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope to promote FGL's research and enable broad applications that would otherwise be infeasible due to the lack of a dedicated package.

27.7LGSep 5, 2023Code
Data-Juicer: A One-Stop Data Processing System for Large Language Models

Daoyuan Chen, Yilun Huang, Zhijian Ma et al.

The immense evolution in Large Language Models (LLMs) has underscored the importance of massive, heterogeneous, and high-quality data. A data recipe is a mixture of data from different sources for training LLMs, which plays a vital role in LLMs' performance. Existing open-source tools for LLM data processing are mostly tailored for specific data recipes. To continuously uncover the potential of LLMs, incorporate data from new sources, and improve LLMs' performance, we build a new system named Data-Juicer, with which we can efficiently generate diverse data recipes, explore different possibilities in forming data mixtures, and evaluate their effects on model performance. Different from traditional data-analytics pipelines, Data-Juicer faces some unique challenges. Firstly, the possible data sources for forming data recipes are truly heterogeneous and massive with various qualities. Secondly, it is extremely expensive to precisely evaluate data recipes' impact on LLMs' performance. Thirdly, the end users of Data-Juicer, model developers, need sufficient flexibility to configure and evaluate different data recipes. Data-Juicer features a fine-grained abstraction of pipelines for constructing data recipes, with over 50 built-in operators for easy composition and extension. By incorporating visualization and auto-evaluation capabilities, Data-Juicer enables a timely feedback loop for both LLM pre-training and fine-tuning. Further, Data-Juicer is optimized and integrated with ecosystems for LLM training, evaluation, and distributed computing. The data recipes derived with Data-Juicer gain notable improvements on state-of-the-art LLMs, by up to 7.45% increase in averaged score across 16 LLM benchmarks and 17.5% higher win rate in pair-wise GPT-4 evaluations. Our system, data recipes, and tutorials are released, calling for broader data-centric research on training and understanding LLMs.

10.4LGJun 7, 2022Code
A Benchmark for Federated Hetero-Task Learning

Liuyi Yao, Dawei Gao, Zhen Wang et al.

To investigate the heterogeneity in federated learning in real-world scenarios, we generalize the classic federated learning to federated hetero-task learning, which emphasizes the inconsistency across the participants in federated learning in terms of both data distribution and learning tasks. We also present B-FHTL, a federated hetero-task learning benchmark consisting of simulation dataset, FL protocols and a unified evaluation mechanism. B-FHTL dataset contains three well-designed federated learning tasks with increasing heterogeneity. Each task simulates the clients with different non-IID data and learning tasks. To ensure fair comparison among different FL algorithms, B-FHTL builds in a full suite of FL protocols by providing high-level APIs to avoid privacy leakage, and presets most common evaluation metrics spanning across different learning tasks, such as regression, classification, text generation and etc. Furthermore, we compare the FL algorithms in fields of federated multi-task learning, federated personalization and federated meta learning within B-FHTL, and highlight the influence of heterogeneity and difficulties of federated hetero-task learning. Our benchmark, including the federated dataset, protocols, the evaluation mechanism and the preliminary experiment, is open-sourced at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/master/benchmark/B-FHTL

1.4CLDec 12, 2022Code
Collaborating Heterogeneous Natural Language Processing Tasks via Federated Learning

Chenhe Dong, Yuexiang Xie, Bolin Ding et al.

The increasing privacy concerns on personal private text data promote the development of federated learning (FL) in recent years. However, the existing studies on applying FL in NLP are not suitable to coordinate participants with heterogeneous or private learning objectives. In this study, we further broaden the application scope of FL in NLP by proposing an Assign-Then-Contrast (denoted as ATC) framework, which enables clients with heterogeneous NLP tasks to construct an FL course and learn useful knowledge from each other. Specifically, the clients are suggested to first perform local training with the unified tasks assigned by the server rather than using their own learning objectives, which is called the Assign training stage. After that, in the Contrast training stage, clients train with different local learning objectives and exchange knowledge with other clients who contribute consistent and useful model updates. We conduct extensive experiments on six widely-used datasets covering both Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks, and the proposed ATC framework achieves significant improvements compared with various baseline methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/master/federatedscope/nlp/hetero_tasks}.

11.3MAJul 25, 2024Code
Very Large-Scale Multi-Agent Simulation in AgentScope

Xuchen Pan, Dawei Gao, Yuexiang Xie et al.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have opened new avenues for applying multi-agent systems in very large-scale simulations. However, there remain several challenges when conducting multi-agent simulations with existing platforms, such as limited scalability and low efficiency, unsatisfied agent diversity, and effort-intensive management processes. To address these challenges, we develop several new features and components for AgentScope, a user-friendly multi-agent platform, enhancing its convenience and flexibility for supporting very large-scale multi-agent simulations. Specifically, we propose an actor-based distributed mechanism as the underlying technological infrastructure towards great scalability and high efficiency, and provide flexible environment support for simulating various real-world scenarios, which enables parallel execution of multiple agents, automatic workflow conversion for distributed deployment, and both inter-agent and agent-environment interactions. Moreover, we integrate an easy-to-use configurable tool and an automatic background generation pipeline in AgentScope, simplifying the process of creating agents with diverse yet detailed background settings. Last but not least, we provide a web-based interface for conveniently monitoring and managing a large number of agents that might deploy across multiple devices. We conduct a comprehensive simulation to demonstrate the effectiveness of these proposed enhancements in AgentScope, and provide detailed observations and insightful discussions to highlight the great potential of applying multi-agent systems in large-scale simulations. The source code is released on GitHub at https://github.com/modelscope/agentscope/tree/main/examples/paper_large_scale_simulation to inspire further research and development in large-scale multi-agent simulations.

21.8CLNov 12, 2023Code
Tunable Soft Prompts are Messengers in Federated Learning

Chenhe Dong, Yuexiang Xie, Bolin Ding et al.

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple participants to collaboratively train machine learning models using decentralized data sources, alleviating privacy concerns that arise from directly sharing local data. However, the lack of model privacy protection in FL becomes an unneglectable challenge, especially when people want to federally finetune models based on a proprietary large language model. In this study, we propose a novel FL training approach that accomplishes information exchange among participants via tunable soft prompts. These soft prompts, updated and transmitted between the server and clients, assume the role of the global model parameters and serve as messengers to deliver useful knowledge from the local data and global model. As the global model itself is not required to be shared and the local training is conducted based on an auxiliary model with fewer parameters than the global model, the proposed approach provides protection for the global model while reducing communication and computation costs in FL. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to several baselines. We have released the source code at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/fedsp/federatedscope/nlp/fedsp}.

19.6LGMar 23, 2023
FS-Real: Towards Real-World Cross-Device Federated Learning

Daoyuan Chen, Dawei Gao, Yuexiang Xie et al.

Federated Learning (FL) aims to train high-quality models in collaboration with distributed clients while not uploading their local data, which attracts increasing attention in both academia and industry. However, there is still a considerable gap between the flourishing FL research and real-world scenarios, mainly caused by the characteristics of heterogeneous devices and its scales. Most existing works conduct evaluations with homogeneous devices, which are mismatched with the diversity and variability of heterogeneous devices in real-world scenarios. Moreover, it is challenging to conduct research and development at scale with heterogeneous devices due to limited resources and complex software stacks. These two key factors are important yet underexplored in FL research as they directly impact the FL training dynamics and final performance, making the effectiveness and usability of FL algorithms unclear. To bridge the gap, in this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable prototyping system for real-world cross-device FL, FS-Real. It supports heterogeneous device runtime, contains parallelism and robustness enhanced FL server, and provides implementations and extensibility for advanced FL utility features such as personalization, communication compression and asynchronous aggregation. To demonstrate the usability and efficiency of FS-Real, we conduct extensive experiments with various device distributions, quantify and analyze the effect of the heterogeneous device and various scales, and further provide insights and open discussions about real-world FL scenarios. Our system is released to help to pave the way for further real-world FL research and broad applications involving diverse devices and scales.

4.2CRAug 12, 2024Code
Understanding Byzantine Robustness in Federated Learning with A Black-box Server

Fangyuan Zhao, Yuexiang Xie, Xuebin Ren et al.

Federated learning (FL) becomes vulnerable to Byzantine attacks where some of participators tend to damage the utility or discourage the convergence of the learned model via sending their malicious model updates. Previous works propose to apply robust rules to aggregate updates from participators against different types of Byzantine attacks, while at the same time, attackers can further design advanced Byzantine attack algorithms targeting specific aggregation rule when it is known. In practice, FL systems can involve a black-box server that makes the adopted aggregation rule inaccessible to participants, which can naturally defend or weaken some Byzantine attacks. In this paper, we provide an in-depth understanding on the Byzantine robustness of the FL system with a black-box server. Our investigation demonstrates the improved Byzantine robustness of a black-box server employing a dynamic defense strategy. We provide both empirical evidence and theoretical analysis to reveal that the black-box server can mitigate the worst-case attack impact from a maximum level to an expectation level, which is attributed to the inherent inaccessibility and randomness offered by a black-box server.The source code is available at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/Byzantine_attack_defense to promote further research in the community.

22.7AIMay 29
Learning Agent-Compatible Context Management for Long-Horizon Tasks

Lu Yi, Runlin Lei, Liuyi Yao et al.

LLM agents increasingly face long-horizon tasks such as web search and deep research in real-world applications, where accumulated context can cause long-context degradation and reasoning failures. Prior work mitigates this through context management with agent-side context control or fixed strategies such as summarization, which require training the agent itself for adaptation - making it impractical for closed-source agents and ignoring that different agents may require different strategies. We introduce Adaptive Context Management (AdaCoM), which trains an external LLM to manage the context of a frozen agent through flexible modification actions and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Across diverse agents on web search and deep research benchmarks, AdaCoM substantially improves performance by preserving task constraints and progress while pruning stale content. The learned strategies reveal a Fidelity-Reliability Trade-off: agents with higher vanilla ReAct performance benefit from higher-fidelity context preservation, whereas lower-performing agents require more aggressive compression to stay within a reliable reasoning regime. Transfer experiments show that AdaCoM generalizes most effectively across agents with similar capability (measured by vanilla ReAct performance), suggesting a practical path toward reusable context managers for agent systems.

11.3CLJan 5
Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents

Yi Yu, Liuyi Yao, Yuexiang Xie et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents face fundamental limitations in long-horizon reasoning due to finite context windows, making effective memory management critical. Existing methods typically handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. In this paper, we propose Agentic Memory (AgeMem), a unified framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy. AgeMem exposes memory operations as tool-based actions, enabling the LLM agent to autonomously decide what and when to store, retrieve, update, summarize, or discard information. To train such unified behaviors, we propose a three-stage progressive reinforcement learning strategy and design a step-wise GRPO to address sparse and discontinuous rewards induced by memory operations. Experiments on five long-horizon benchmarks demonstrate that AgeMem consistently outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines across multiple LLM backbones, achieving improved task performance, higher-quality long-term memory, and more efficient context usage.

5.8AIFeb 13, 2025Code
KIMAs: A Configurable Knowledge Integrated Multi-Agent System

Zitao Li, Fei Wei, Yuexiang Xie et al.

Knowledge-intensive conversations supported by large language models (LLMs) have become one of the most popular and helpful applications that can assist people in different aspects. Many current knowledge-intensive applications are centered on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques. While many open-source RAG frameworks facilitate the development of RAG-based applications, they often fall short in handling practical scenarios complicated by heterogeneous data in topics and formats, conversational context management, and the requirement of low-latency response times. This technical report presents a configurable knowledge integrated multi-agent system, KIMAs, to address these challenges. KIMAs features a flexible and configurable system for integrating diverse knowledge sources with 1) context management and query rewrite mechanisms to improve retrieval accuracy and multi-turn conversational coherency, 2) efficient knowledge routing and retrieval, 3) simple but effective filter and reference generation mechanisms, and 4) optimized parallelizable multi-agent pipeline execution. Our work provides a scalable framework for advancing the deployment of LLMs in real-world settings. To show how KIMAs can help developers build knowledge-intensive applications with different scales and emphases, we demonstrate how we configure the system to three applications already running in practice with reliable performance.

37.8LGSep 1, 2023Code
FederatedScope-LLM: A Comprehensive Package for Fine-tuning Large Language Models in Federated Learning

Weirui Kuang, Bingchen Qian, Zitao Li et al.

LLMs have demonstrated great capabilities in various NLP tasks. Different entities can further improve the performance of those LLMs on their specific downstream tasks by fine-tuning LLMs. When several entities have similar interested tasks, but their data cannot be shared because of privacy concerns regulations, federated learning (FL) is a mainstream solution to leverage the data of different entities. However, fine-tuning LLMs in federated learning settings still lacks adequate support from existing FL frameworks because it has to deal with optimizing the consumption of significant communication and computational resources, data preparation for different tasks, and distinct information protection demands. This paper first discusses these challenges of federated fine-tuning LLMs, and introduces our package FS-LLM as a main contribution, which consists of the following components: (1) we build an end-to-end benchmarking pipeline, automizing the processes of dataset preprocessing, federated fine-tuning execution, and performance evaluation on federated LLM fine-tuning; (2) we provide comprehensive federated parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm implementations and versatile programming interfaces for future extension in FL scenarios with low communication and computation costs, even without accessing the full model; (3) we adopt several accelerating and resource-efficient operators for fine-tuning LLMs with limited resources and the flexible pluggable sub-routines for interdisciplinary study. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of FS-LLM and benchmark advanced LLMs with state-of-the-art parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithms in FL settings, which also yields valuable insights into federated fine-tuning LLMs for the research community. To facilitate further research and adoption, we release FS-LLM at https://github.com/alibaba/FederatedScope/tree/llm.

31.1CLAug 30, 2021Code
Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation

Yuexiang Xie, Fei Sun, Yang Deng et al.

Despite significant progress has been achieved in text summarization, factual inconsistency in generated summaries still severely limits its practical applications. Among the key factors to ensure factual consistency, a reliable automatic evaluation metric is the first and the most crucial one. However, existing metrics either neglect the intrinsic cause of the factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks, leading to an unsatisfied correlation with human judgments or increasing the inconvenience of usage in practice. In light of these challenges, we propose a novel metric to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship among the source document, the generated summary, and the language prior. We remove the effect of language prior, which can cause factual inconsistency, from the total causal effect on the generated summary, and provides a simple yet effective way to evaluate consistency without relying on other auxiliary tasks. We conduct a series of experiments on three public abstractive text summarization datasets, and demonstrate the advantages of the proposed metric in both improving the correlation with human judgments and the convenience of usage. The source code is available at https://github.com/xieyxclack/factual_coco.

30.0CLFeb 8, 2025Code
Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation

Xiangrong Zhu, Yuexiang Xie, Yi Liu et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising technology for addressing hallucination issues in the responses generated by large language models (LLMs). Existing studies on RAG primarily focus on applying semantic-based approaches to retrieve isolated relevant chunks, which ignore their intrinsic relationships. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation (KG$^2$RAG) framework that utilizes knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide fact-level relationships between chunks, improving the diversity and coherence of the retrieved results. Specifically, after performing a semantic-based retrieval to provide seed chunks, KG$^2$RAG employs a KG-guided chunk expansion process and a KG-based chunk organization process to deliver relevant and important knowledge in well-organized paragraphs. Extensive experiments conducted on the HotpotQA dataset and its variants demonstrate the advantages of KG$^2$RAG compared to existing RAG-based approaches, in terms of both response quality and retrieval quality.

19.7LGMay 23, 2025Code
Trinity-RFT: A General-Purpose and Unified Framework for Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

Xuchen Pan, Yanxi Chen, Yushuo Chen et al.

Trinity-RFT is a general-purpose, unified and easy-to-use framework designed for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of large language models. It is built with a modular and decoupled design, consisting of (1) an RFT-core that unifies and generalizes synchronous/asynchronous, on-policy/off-policy, and online/offline modes of RFT; (2) seamless integration for agent-environment interaction with high efficiency and robustness; and (3) systematic data pipelines optimized for RFT. Trinity-RFT can be easily adapted for diverse application scenarios, and serves as a unified platform for development and research of advanced reinforcement learning paradigms at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. This technical report outlines the vision, features, design and implementations of Trinity-RFT, accompanied by extensive examples, applications and experiments that demonstrate its functionalities and user-friendliness.

9.4LGApr 3, 2025
Tree-based Models for Vertical Federated Learning: A Survey

Bingchen Qian, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li et al.

Tree-based models have achieved great success in a wide range of real-world applications due to their effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability, which inspired people to apply them in vertical federated learning (VFL) scenarios in recent years. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive study to give an overall picture of applying tree-based models in VFL, from the perspective of their communication and computation protocols. We categorize tree-based models in VFL into two types, i.e., feature-gathering models and label-scattering models, and provide a detailed discussion regarding their characteristics, advantages, privacy protection mechanisms, and applications. This study also focuses on the implementation of tree-based models in VFL, summarizing several design principles for better satisfying various requirements from both academic research and industrial deployment. We conduct a series of experiments to provide empirical observations on the differences and advances of different types of tree-based models.

8.4CVMay 21, 2025
Comprehensive Evaluation and Analysis for NSFW Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Die Chen, Zhiwen Li, Cen Chen et al.

Text-to-image diffusion models have gained widespread application across various domains, demonstrating remarkable creative potential. However, the strong generalization capabilities of diffusion models can inadvertently lead to the generation of not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, posing significant risks to their safe deployment. While several concept erasure methods have been proposed to mitigate the issue associated with NSFW content, a comprehensive evaluation of their effectiveness across various scenarios remains absent. To bridge this gap, we introduce a full-pipeline toolkit specifically designed for concept erasure and conduct the first systematic study of NSFW concept erasure methods. By examining the interplay between the underlying mechanisms and empirical observations, we provide in-depth insights and practical guidance for the effective application of concept erasure methods in various real-world scenarios, with the aim of advancing the understanding of content safety in diffusion models and establishing a solid foundation for future research and development in this critical area.

0.9CLMay 18, 2023
Counterfactual Debiasing for Generating Factually Consistent Text Summaries

Chenhe Dong, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li et al.

Despite substantial progress in abstractive text summarization to generate fluent and informative texts, the factual inconsistency in the generated summaries remains an important yet challenging problem to be solved. In this paper, we construct causal graphs for abstractive text summarization and identify the intrinsic causes of the factual inconsistency, i.e., the language bias and irrelevancy bias, and further propose a debiasing framework, named CoFactSum, to alleviate the causal effects of these biases by counterfactual estimation. Specifically, the proposed CoFactSum provides two counterfactual estimation strategies, i.e., Explicit Counterfactual Masking with an explicit dynamic masking strategy, and Implicit Counterfactual Training with an implicit discriminative cross-attention mechanism. Meanwhile, we design a Debiasing Degree Adjustment mechanism to dynamically adapt the debiasing degree at each decoding step. Extensive experiments on two widely-used summarization datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CoFactSum in enhancing the factual consistency of generated summaries compared with several baselines.

1.2CLApr 12, 2021
Contextualized Knowledge-aware Attentive Neural Network: Enhancing Answer Selection with Knowledge

Yang Deng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li et al.

Answer selection, which is involved in many natural language processing applications such as dialog systems and question answering (QA), is an important yet challenging task in practice, since conventional methods typically suffer from the issues of ignoring diverse real-world background knowledge. In this paper, we extensively investigate approaches to enhancing the answer selection model with external knowledge from knowledge graph (KG). First, we present a context-knowledge interaction learning framework, Knowledge-aware Neural Network (KNN), which learns the QA sentence representations by considering a tight interaction with the external knowledge from KG and the textual information. Then, we develop two kinds of knowledge-aware attention mechanism to summarize both the context-based and knowledge-based interactions between questions and answers. To handle the diversity and complexity of KG information, we further propose a Contextualized Knowledge-aware Attentive Neural Network (CKANN), which improves the knowledge representation learning with structure information via a customized Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and comprehensively learns context-based and knowledge-based sentence representation via the multi-view knowledge-aware attention mechanism. We evaluate our method on four widely-used benchmark QA datasets, including WikiQA, TREC QA, InsuranceQA and Yahoo QA. Results verify the benefits of incorporating external knowledge from KG, and show the robust superiority and extensive applicability of our method.

8.5LGJul 29, 2020
FIVES: Feature Interaction Via Edge Search for Large-Scale Tabular Data

Yuexiang Xie, Zhen Wang, Yaliang Li et al.

High-order interactive features capture the correlation between different columns and thus are promising to enhance various learning tasks on ubiquitous tabular data. To automate the generation of interactive features, existing works either explicitly traverse the feature space or implicitly express the interactions via intermediate activations of some designed models. These two kinds of methods show that there is essentially a trade-off between feature interpretability and search efficiency. To possess both of their merits, we propose a novel method named Feature Interaction Via Edge Search (FIVES), which formulates the task of interactive feature generation as searching for edges on the defined feature graph. Specifically, we first present our theoretical evidence that motivates us to search for useful interactive features with increasing order. Then we instantiate this search strategy by optimizing both a dedicated graph neural network (GNN) and the adjacency tensor associated with the defined feature graph. In this way, the proposed FIVES method simplifies the time-consuming traversal as a typical training course of GNN and enables explicit feature generation according to the learned adjacency tensor. Experimental results on both benchmark and real-world datasets show the advantages of FIVES over several state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, the interactive features identified by FIVES are deployed on the recommender system of Taobao, a worldwide leading e-commerce platform. Results of an online A/B testing further verify the effectiveness of the proposed method FIVES, and we further provide FIVES as AI utilities for the customers of Alibaba Cloud.

4.1CLNov 22, 2019Code
Joint Learning of Answer Selection and Answer Summary Generation in Community Question Answering

Yang Deng, Wai Lam, Yuexiang Xie et al.

Community question answering (CQA) gains increasing popularity in both academy and industry recently. However, the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers limit the performance of answer selection and lead to reading difficulties and misunderstandings for community users. To solve these problems, we tackle the tasks of answer selection and answer summary generation in CQA with a novel joint learning model. Specifically, we design a question-driven pointer-generator network, which exploits the correlation information between question-answer pairs to aid in attending the essential information when generating answer summaries. Meanwhile, we leverage the answer summaries to alleviate noise in original lengthy answers when ranking the relevancy degrees of question-answer pairs. In addition, we construct a new large-scale CQA corpus, WikiHowQA, which contains long answers for answer selection as well as reference summaries for answer summarization. The experimental results show that the joint learning method can effectively address the answer redundancy issue in CQA and achieves state-of-the-art results on both answer selection and text summarization tasks. Furthermore, the proposed model is shown to be of great transferring ability and applicability for resource-poor CQA tasks, which lack of reference answer summaries.

3.6CLDec 6, 2018Code
Multi-Task Learning with Multi-View Attention for Answer Selection and Knowledge Base Question Answering

Yang Deng, Yuexiang Xie, Yaliang Li et al.

Answer selection and knowledge base question answering (KBQA) are two important tasks of question answering (QA) systems. Existing methods solve these two tasks separately, which requires large number of repetitive work and neglects the rich correlation information between tasks. In this paper, we tackle answer selection and KBQA tasks simultaneously via multi-task learning (MTL), motivated by the following motivations. First, both answer selection and KBQA can be regarded as a ranking problem, with one at text-level while the other at knowledge-level. Second, these two tasks can benefit each other: answer selection can incorporate the external knowledge from knowledge base (KB), while KBQA can be improved by learning contextual information from answer selection. To fulfill the goal of jointly learning these two tasks, we propose a novel multi-task learning scheme that utilizes multi-view attention learned from various perspectives to enable these tasks to interact with each other as well as learn more comprehensive sentence representations. The experiments conducted on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, and the performance of answer selection and KBQA is improved. Also, the multi-view attention scheme is proved to be effective in assembling attentive information from different representational perspectives.