Shen Gao

CL
h-index41
47papers
5,430citations
Novelty51%
AI Score61

47 Papers

AIAug 27, 2023Code
Confucius: Iterative Tool Learning from Introspection Feedback by Easy-to-Difficult Curriculum

Shen Gao, Zhengliang Shi, Minghang Zhu et al. · pku

Augmenting large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising approach to extending the capability of LLMs. Although some works employ open-source LLMs for the tool learning task, most of them are trained in a controlled environment in which LLMs only learn to execute the human-provided tools. However, selecting proper tools from the large toolset is also a crucial ability for the tool learning model to be applied in real-world applications. Existing methods usually directly employ self-instruction methods to train the model, which ignores differences in tool complexity. In this paper, we propose the Confucius, a novel tool learning framework to train LLM to use complicated tools in real-world scenarios, which contains two main phases: (1) We first propose a multi-stage learning method to teach the LLM to use various tools from an easy-to-difficult curriculum; (2) thenceforth, we propose the Iterative Self-instruct from Introspective Feedback (ISIF) to dynamically construct the dataset to improve the ability to use the complicated tool. Extensive experiments conducted on both controlled and real-world settings demonstrate the superiority of our tool learning framework in the real-world application scenarios compared to both tuning-free (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) and tuning-based baselines (e.g. GPT4Tools).

IRJul 19, 2023
Information Retrieval Meets Large Language Models: A Strategic Report from Chinese IR Community

Qingyao Ai, Ting Bai, Zhao Cao et al. · pku, tsinghua

The research field of Information Retrieval (IR) has evolved significantly, expanding beyond traditional search to meet diverse user information needs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in text understanding, generation, and knowledge inference, opening up exciting avenues for IR research. LLMs not only facilitate generative retrieval but also offer improved solutions for user understanding, model evaluation, and user-system interactions. More importantly, the synergistic relationship among IR models, LLMs, and humans forms a new technical paradigm that is more powerful for information seeking. IR models provide real-time and relevant information, LLMs contribute internal knowledge, and humans play a central role of demanders and evaluators to the reliability of information services. Nevertheless, significant challenges exist, including computational costs, credibility concerns, domain-specific limitations, and ethical considerations. To thoroughly discuss the transformative impact of LLMs on IR research, the Chinese IR community conducted a strategic workshop in April 2023, yielding valuable insights. This paper provides a summary of the workshop's outcomes, including the rethinking of IR's core values, the mutual enhancement of LLMs and IR, the proposal of a novel IR technical paradigm, and open challenges.

CLDec 20, 2022
Contrastive Learning Reduces Hallucination in Conversations

Weiwei Sun, Zhengliang Shi, Shen Gao et al. · pku

Pre-trained language models (LMs) store knowledge in their parameters and can generate informative responses when used in conversational systems. However, LMs suffer from the problem of "hallucination:" they may generate plausible-looking statements that are irrelevant or factually incorrect. To address this problem, we propose a contrastive learning scheme, named MixCL. A novel mixed contrastive objective is proposed to explicitly optimize the implicit knowledge elicitation process of LMs, and thus reduce their hallucination in conversations. We also examine negative sampling strategies of retrieved hard negatives and model-generated negatives. We conduct experiments on Wizard-of-Wikipedia, a public, open-domain knowledge-grounded dialogue benchmark, and assess the effectiveness of MixCL. MixCL effectively reduces the hallucination of LMs in conversations and achieves the highest performance among LM-based dialogue agents in terms of relevancy and factuality. We show that MixCL achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art KB-based approaches while enjoying notable advantages in terms of efficiency and scalability.

CLMay 26, 2022
Target-aware Abstractive Related Work Generation with Contrastive Learning

Xiuying Chen, Hind Alamro, Mingzhe Li et al. · pku

The related work section is an important component of a scientific paper, which highlights the contribution of the target paper in the context of the reference papers. Authors can save their time and effort by using the automatically generated related work section as a draft to complete the final related work. Most of the existing related work section generation methods rely on extracting off-the-shelf sentences to make a comparative discussion about the target work and the reference papers. However, such sentences need to be written in advance and are hard to obtain in practice. Hence, in this paper, we propose an abstractive target-aware related work generator (TAG), which can generate related work sections consisting of new sentences. Concretely, we first propose a target-aware graph encoder, which models the relationships between reference papers and the target paper with target-centered attention mechanisms. In the decoding process, we propose a hierarchical decoder that attends to the nodes of different levels in the graph with keyphrases as semantic indicators. Finally, to generate a more informative related work, we propose multi-level contrastive optimization objectives, which aim to maximize the mutual information between the generated related work with the references and minimize that with non-references. Extensive experiments on two public scholar datasets show that the proposed model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines in terms of automatic and tailored human evaluations.

CLDec 6, 2022
Neural Machine Translation with Contrastive Translation Memories

Xin Cheng, Shen Gao, Lemao Liu et al. · pku

Retrieval-augmented Neural Machine Translation models have been successful in many translation scenarios. Different from previous works that make use of mutually similar but redundant translation memories~(TMs), we propose a new retrieval-augmented NMT to model contrastively retrieved translation memories that are holistically similar to the source sentence while individually contrastive to each other providing maximal information gains in three phases. First, in TM retrieval phase, we adopt a contrastive retrieval algorithm to avoid redundancy and uninformativeness of similar translation pieces. Second, in memory encoding stage, given a set of TMs we propose a novel Hierarchical Group Attention module to gather both local context of each TM and global context of the whole TM set. Finally, in training phase, a Multi-TM contrastive learning objective is introduced to learn salient feature of each TM with respect to target sentence. Experimental results show that our framework obtains improvements over strong baselines on the benchmark datasets.

CLJul 2, 2023Code
SSP: Self-Supervised Post-training for Conversational Search

Quan Tu, Shen Gao, Xiaolong Wu et al. · pku

Conversational search has been regarded as the next-generation search paradigm. Constrained by data scarcity, most existing methods distill the well-trained ad-hoc retriever to the conversational retriever. However, these methods, which usually initialize parameters by query reformulation to discover contextualized dependency, have trouble in understanding the dialogue structure information and struggle with contextual semantic vanishing. In this paper, we propose \fullmodel (\model) which is a new post-training paradigm with three self-supervised tasks to efficiently initialize the conversational search model to enhance the dialogue structure and contextual semantic understanding. Furthermore, the \model can be plugged into most of the existing conversational models to boost their performance. To verify the effectiveness of our proposed method, we apply the conversational encoder post-trained by \model on the conversational search task using two benchmark datasets: CAsT-19 and CAsT-20. Extensive experiments that our \model can boost the performance of several existing conversational search methods. Our source code is available at \url{https://github.com/morecry/SSP}.

CLJan 2, 2023
Follow the Timeline! Generating Abstractive and Extractive Timeline Summary in Chronological Order

Xiuying Chen, Mingzhe Li, Shen Gao et al. · pku

Nowadays, time-stamped web documents related to a general news query floods spread throughout the Internet, and timeline summarization targets concisely summarizing the evolution trajectory of events along the timeline. Unlike traditional document summarization, timeline summarization needs to model the time series information of the input events and summarize important events in chronological order. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a Unified Timeline Summarizer (UTS) that can generate abstractive and extractive timeline summaries in time order. Concretely, in the encoder part, we propose a graph-based event encoder that relates multiple events according to their content dependency and learns a global representation of each event. In the decoder part, to ensure the chronological order of the abstractive summary, we propose to extract the feature of event-level attention in its generation process with sequential information remained and use it to simulate the evolutionary attention of the ground truth summary. The event-level attention can also be used to assist in extracting summary, where the extracted summary also comes in time sequence. We augment the previous Chinese large-scale timeline summarization dataset and collect a new English timeline dataset. Extensive experiments conducted on these datasets and on the out-of-domain Timeline 17 dataset show that UTS achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic and human evaluations.

LGDec 1, 2025Code
CoSineVerifier: Tool-Augmented Answer Verification for Computation-Oriented Scientific Questions

Ruixiang Feng, Zhenwei An, Yuntao Wen et al.

Answer verification methods are widely employed in language model training pipelines spanning data curation, evaluation, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While prior work focus on developing unified verifiers applicable across multiple reasoning scenarios, significant challenges remain in computation-oriented scientific domains, such as algebraic equivalence checking and physical constant substitution. In this paper, we introduce \model, a tool-augmented verifier that leverages external executors to perform precise computations and symbolic simplifications. \model enables robust verification that goes beyond simple semantic matching. We propose a novel two-stage pipeline, which begin with cold-start fine-tuning and followed by multi-turn reinforcement learning with tool integration. Extensive experiments conducted on STEM subjects, general QA, and long-form reasoning tasks demonstrates strong generalization of \model. The results shows that the \model achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerifyBench-Hard and SCI-Bench. And we also employ our \model in RLVR as a reward model, the results show that it consistently outperforms both rubric-based and model-based verifiers on AIME'24 and AIME'25, demonstrating strong potential to enhance reasoning capabilities of LLM. Our model is released at \hyperlink{https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B}{https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B}.

CLDec 8, 2022
Scientific Paper Extractive Summarization Enhanced by Citation Graphs

Xiuying Chen, Mingzhe Li, Shen Gao et al.

In a citation graph, adjacent paper nodes share related scientific terms and topics. The graph thus conveys unique structure information of document-level relatedness that can be utilized in the paper summarization task, for exploring beyond the intra-document information. In this work, we focus on leveraging citation graphs to improve scientific paper extractive summarization under different settings. We first propose a Multi-granularity Unsupervised Summarization model (MUS) as a simple and low-cost solution to the task. MUS finetunes a pre-trained encoder model on the citation graph by link prediction tasks. Then, the abstract sentences are extracted from the corresponding paper considering multi-granularity information. Preliminary results demonstrate that citation graph is helpful even in a simple unsupervised framework. Motivated by this, we next propose a Graph-based Supervised Summarization model (GSS) to achieve more accurate results on the task when large-scale labeled data are available. Apart from employing the link prediction as an auxiliary task, GSS introduces a gated sentence encoder and a graph information fusion module to take advantage of the graph information to polish the sentence representation. Experiments on a public benchmark dataset show that MUS and GSS bring substantial improvements over the prior state-of-the-art model.

CLJan 27, 2023
Towards Personalized Review Summarization by Modeling Historical Reviews from Customer and Product Separately

Xin Cheng, Shen Gao, Yuchi Zhang et al.

Review summarization is a non-trivial task that aims to summarize the main idea of the product review in the E-commerce website. Different from the document summary which only needs to focus on the main facts described in the document, review summarization should not only summarize the main aspects mentioned in the review but also reflect the personal style of the review author. Although existing review summarization methods have incorporated the historical reviews of both customer and product, they usually simply concatenate and indiscriminately model this two heterogeneous information into a long sequence. Moreover, the rating information can also provide a high-level abstraction of customer preference, it has not been used by the majority of methods. In this paper, we propose the Heterogeneous Historical Review aware Review Summarization Model (HHRRS) which separately models the two types of historical reviews with the rating information by a graph reasoning module with a contrastive loss. We employ a multi-task framework that conducts the review sentiment classification and summarization jointly. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of HHRRS on both tasks.

83.8CVMay 26
Gemini Embedding 2: A Native Multimodal Embedding Model from Gemini

Madhuri Shanbhogue, Zhe Li, Shanfeng Zhang et al.

We introduce Gemini Embedding 2, a native multimodal embedding model that allows embedding video, audio, image, and text modalities in a unified representation space. We leverage the multimodal capabilities of Gemini to produce embeddings for arbitrary combinations of interleaved inputs across all these modalities that generalize well across a wide variety of tasks. Applying large-scale contrastive learning in a multi-task multi-stage training setup, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on key embedding benchmarks including unimodal, cross-modal, and multimodal retrieval spanning a diverse set of tasks. We show that our embedding model demonstrates strong performance (with a score of 62.9 R@1 on MSCOCO, 68.8 NDCG@10 on Vatex, 69.9 on MTEB multilingual and 84.0 on MTEB Code) across a variety of tasks surpassing the performance of specialized models. These unified capabilities make Gemini Embedding 2 a promising candidate for downstream use cases such as RAG, recommendation and search. Furthermore, its robust zero-shot performance across distinct fields - from astronomy and bioscience to fine arts and the culinary arts - establishes it as a highly reliable, out-of-the-box representation even for specialized domains.

CLMar 5, 2024Code
Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents

Zhengliang Shi, Shen Gao, Xiuyi Chen et al. · baidu

Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools and extend their utility. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating execution results into the next action prediction. Despite their progress, these methods suffer from performance degradation when addressing practical tasks due to: (1) the pre-defined pipeline with restricted flexibility to calibrate incorrect actions, and (2) the struggle to adapt a general LLM-based agent to perform a variety of specialized actions. To mitigate these problems, we propose ConAgents, a Cooperative and interactive Agents framework, which coordinates three specialized agents for tool selection, tool execution, and action calibration separately. ConAgents introduces two communication protocols to enable the flexible cooperation of agents. To effectively generalize the ConAgents into open-source models, we also propose specialized action distillation, enhancing their ability to perform specialized actions in our framework. Our extensive experiments on three datasets show that the LLMs, when equipped with the ConAgents, outperform baselines with substantial improvement (i.e., up to 14% higher success rate).

CLJul 3, 2024
What Affects the Stability of Tool Learning? An Empirical Study on the Robustness of Tool Learning Frameworks

Chengrui Huang, Zhengliang Shi, Yuntao Wen et al.

Tool learning methods have enhanced the ability of large language models (LLMs) to interact with real-world applications. Many existing works fine-tune LLMs or design prompts to enable LLMs to select appropriate tools and correctly invoke them to meet user requirements. However, it is observed in previous works that the performance of tool learning varies from tasks, datasets, training settings, and algorithms. Without understanding the impact of these factors, it can lead to inconsistent results, inefficient model deployment, and suboptimal tool utilization, ultimately hindering the practical integration and scalability of LLMs in real-world scenarios. Therefore, in this paper, we explore the impact of both internal and external factors on the performance of tool learning frameworks. Through extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, we find several insightful conclusions for future work, including the observation that LLMs can benefit significantly from increased trial and exploration. We believe our empirical study provides a new perspective for future tool learning research.

93.9CLApr 27Code
DPEPO: Diverse Parallel Exploration Policy Optimization for LLM-based Agents

Junshuo Zhang, Chengrui Huang, Feng Guo et al.

Large language model (LLM) agents that follow the sequential "reason-then-act" paradigm have achieved superior performance in many complex tasks.However, these methods suffer from limited exploration and incomplete environmental understanding, as they interact with only a single environment per step. In this paper, we first introduce a novel paradigm that enables an agent to interact with multiple environments simultaneously and share cross-trajectory experiences. Building upon this paradigm, we further propose DPEPO, a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that encourages the agent to perform diverse parallel exploration. There are two stages in DPEPO: initial supervised fine-tuning (SFT) imparts basic parallel reasoning and action generation, followed by reinforcement learning stage with a hierarchical reward scheme. We design a parallel trajectory-level success reward and two step-level rewards: Diverse Action Reward and Diverse State Transition Reward, which actively penalize behavioral redundancy and promote broad exploration. Extensive experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that DPEPO achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) success rates, while maintaining comparable efficiency to strong sequential baselines. (Code is available at https://github.com/LePanda026/Code-for-DPEPO)

CLFeb 12
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning

Ruixiang Feng, Yuntao Wen, Silin Zhou et al.

Language Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by scaling test-time computation but often suffer from ``overthinking'', producing excessively long reasoning traces that increase latency and memory usage. Existing LRMs typically enforce conciseness with uniform length penalties, which over-compress crucial early deduction steps at the sequence level and indiscriminately penalize all queries at the group level. To solve these limitations, we propose \textbf{\model}, a dual-level framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision. At the sequence level, prefix-protected optimization employs decaying mixed rollouts to maintain valid reasoning paths while promoting conciseness. At the group level, difficulty-aware penalty dynamically scales length constraints based on query complexity, maintaining exploration for harder questions while curbing redundancy on easier ones. Extensive experiments on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen (1.5B/7B) demonstrate that \model achieves a substantial reduction in token usage (up to \textbf{55.7\%}) while simultaneously improving accuracy (up to \textbf{4.1\%}) on math benchmarks, with generalization ability to code, science, and general domains.

29.5CLApr 13
HTAA: Enhancing LLM Planning via Hybrid Toolset Agentization & Adaptation

Chengrui Huang, Junshuo Zhang, Zhiyuan Ma et al.

Enabling large language models to scale and reliably use hundreds of tools is critical for real-world applications, yet challenging due to the inefficiency and error accumulation inherent in flat tool-calling architectures. To address this, we propose Hybrid Toolset Agentization & Adaptation (HTAA), a hierarchical framework for scalable tool-use planning. We propose a novel toolset agentization paradigm, which encapsulates frequently co-used tools into specialized agent tools, thereby reducing the planner's action space and mitigating redundancy. To ensure effective coordination, we design Asymmetric Planner Adaptation, a trajectory-based training paradigm that aligns the high-level planner with agent tools via backward reconstruction and forward refinement. To validate the performance of HTAA, we conduct experiments on a real-world internal dataset, InfoVerify, based on the POI validation workflow of China's largest online large-scale ride-hailing platform, featuring long-horizon executable tool trajectories. Experiments on InfoVerify and widely-used benchmarks show that HTAA consistently achieves higher task success rates, requires short tool calling trajectories, and significantly reduces context overhead compared to strong baselines. Furthermore, in a production deployment, HTAA substantially reduces manual validation effort and operational cost, demonstrating its practical efficacy.

CLMay 26, 2025Code
CulFiT: A Fine-grained Cultural-aware LLM Training Paradigm via Multilingual Critique Data Synthesis

Ruixiang Feng, Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks, yet they often exhibit a specific cultural biases, neglecting the values and linguistic diversity of low-resource regions. This cultural bias not only undermines universal equality, but also risks reinforcing stereotypes and perpetuating discrimination. To address this, we propose CulFiT, a novel culturally-aware training paradigm that leverages multilingual data and fine-grained reward modeling to enhance cultural sensitivity and inclusivity. Our approach synthesizes diverse cultural-related questions, constructs critique data in culturally relevant languages, and employs fine-grained rewards to decompose cultural texts into verifiable knowledge units for interpretable evaluation. We also introduce GlobalCultureQA, a multilingual open-ended question-answering dataset designed to evaluate culturally-aware responses in a global context. Extensive experiments on three existing benchmarks and our GlobalCultureQA demonstrate that CulFiT achieves state-of-the-art open-source model performance in cultural alignment and general reasoning.

CLJun 8, 2024Code
Flexible and Adaptable Summarization via Expertise Separation

Xiuying Chen, Mingzhe Li, Shen Gao et al.

A proficient summarization model should exhibit both flexibility -- the capacity to handle a range of in-domain summarization tasks, and adaptability -- the competence to acquire new knowledge and adjust to unseen out-of-domain tasks. Unlike large language models (LLMs) that achieve this through parameter scaling, we propose a more parameter-efficient approach in this study. Our motivation rests on the principle that the general summarization ability to capture salient information can be shared across different tasks, while the domain-specific summarization abilities need to be distinct and tailored. Concretely, we propose MoeSumm, a Mixture-of-Expert Summarization architecture, which utilizes a main expert for gaining the general summarization capability and deputy experts that selectively collaborate to meet specific summarization task requirements. We further propose a max-margin loss to stimulate the separation of these abilities. Our model's distinct separation of general and domain-specific summarization abilities grants it with notable flexibility and adaptability, all while maintaining parameter efficiency. MoeSumm achieves flexibility by managing summarization across multiple domains with a single model, utilizing a shared main expert and selected deputy experts. It exhibits adaptability by tailoring deputy experts to cater to out-of-domain few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. Experimental results on 11 datasets show the superiority of our model compared with recent baselines and LLMs. We also provide statistical and visual evidence of the distinct separation of the two abilities in MoeSumm (https://github.com/iriscxy/MoE_Summ).

CLMar 19, 2024Code
Characteristic AI Agents via Large Language Models

Xi Wang, Hongliang Dai, Shen Gao et al.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant enhancements in the performance of chatbot systems. Many researchers have dedicated their efforts to the development of bringing characteristics to chatbots. While there have been commercial products for developing role-driven chatbots using LLMs, it is worth noting that academic research in this area remains relatively scarce. Our research focuses on investigating the performance of LLMs in constructing Characteristic AI Agents by simulating real-life individuals across different settings. Current investigations have primarily focused on act on roles with simple profiles. In response to this research gap, we create a benchmark for the characteristic AI agents task, including dataset, techniques, and evaluation metrics. A dataset called ``Character100'' is built for this benchmark, comprising the most-visited people on Wikipedia for language models to role-play. With the constructed dataset, we conduct comprehensive assessment of LLMs across various settings. In addition, we devise a set of automatic metrics for quantitative performance evaluation. The experimental results underscore the potential directions for further improvement in the capabilities of LLMs in constructing characteristic AI agents. The benchmark is available at https://github.com/nuaa-nlp/Character100.

LGNov 11, 2025
Beyond Superficial Forgetting: Thorough Unlearning through Knowledge Density Estimation and Block Re-insertion

Feng Guo, Yuntao Wen, Shen Gao et al.

Machine unlearning, which selectively removes harmful knowledge from a pre-trained model without retraining from scratch, is crucial for addressing privacy, regulatory compliance, and ethical concerns in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing unlearning methods often struggle to thoroughly remove harmful knowledge, leaving residual harmful knowledge that can be easily recovered. To address these limitations, we propose Knowledge Density-Guided Unlearning via Blocks Reinsertion (KUnBR), a novel approach that first identifies layers with rich harmful knowledge and then thoroughly eliminates the harmful knowledge via re-insertion strategy. Our method introduces knowledge density estimation to quantify and locate layers containing the most harmful knowledge, enabling precise unlearning. Additionally, we design a layer re-insertion strategy that extracts and re-inserts harmful knowledge-rich layers into the original LLM, bypassing gradient obstruction caused by cover layers and ensuring effective gradient propagation during unlearning. Extensive experiments conducted on several unlearning and general capability benchmarks demonstrate that KUnBR achieves state-of-the-art forgetting performance while maintaining model utility.

IRFeb 2, 2024
A Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System

Jiabao Fang, Shen Gao, Pengjie Ren et al.

Due to strong capabilities in conducting fluent, multi-turn conversations with users, Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to further improve the performance of Conversational Recommender System (CRS). Unlike the aimless chit-chat that LLM excels at, CRS has a clear target. So it is imperative to control the dialogue flow in the LLM to successfully recommend appropriate items to the users. Furthermore, user feedback in CRS can assist the system in better modeling user preferences, which has been ignored by existing studies. However, simply prompting LLM to conduct conversational recommendation cannot address the above two key challenges. In this paper, we propose Multi-Agent Conversational Recommender System (MACRS) which contains two essential modules. First, we design a multi-agent act planning framework, which can control the dialogue flow based on four LLM-based agents. This cooperative multi-agent framework will generate various candidate responses based on different dialogue acts and then choose the most appropriate response as the system response, which can help MACRS plan suitable dialogue acts. Second, we propose a user feedback-aware reflection mechanism which leverages user feedback to reason errors made in previous turns to adjust the dialogue act planning, and higher-level user information from implicit semantics. We conduct extensive experiments based on user simulator to demonstrate the effectiveness of MACRS in recommendation and user preferences collection. Experimental results illustrate that MACRS demonstrates an improvement in user interaction experience compared to directly using LLMs.

CLDec 17, 2024
LLMs are Also Effective Embedding Models: An In-depth Overview

Chongyang Tao, Tao Shen, Shen Gao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing by achieving state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. Recently, their effectiveness as embedding models has gained attention, marking a paradigm shift from traditional encoder-only models like ELMo and BERT to decoder-only, large-scale LLMs such as GPT, LLaMA, and Mistral. This survey provides an in-depth overview of this transition, beginning with foundational techniques before the LLM era, followed by LLM-based embedding models through two main strategies to derive embeddings from LLMs. 1) Direct prompting: We mainly discuss the prompt designs and the underlying rationale for deriving competitive embeddings. 2) Data-centric tuning: We cover extensive aspects that affect tuning an embedding model, including model architecture, training objectives, data constructions, etc. Upon the above, we also cover advanced methods for producing embeddings from longer texts, multilingual, code, cross-modal data, as well as reasoning-aware and other domain-specific scenarios. Furthermore, we discuss factors affecting choices of embedding models, such as performance/efficiency comparisons, dense vs sparse embeddings, pooling strategies, and scaling law. Lastly, the survey highlights the limitations and challenges in adapting LLMs for embeddings, including cross-task embedding quality, trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy, low-resource, long-context, data bias, robustness, etc. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners by synthesizing current advancements, highlighting key challenges, and offering a comprehensive framework for future work aimed at enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of LLMs as embedding models.

CLFeb 18, 2025
Beyond Profile: From Surface-Level Facts to Deep Persona Simulation in LLMs

Zixiao Wang, Duzhen Zhang, Ishita Agrawal et al.

Previous approaches to persona simulation large language models (LLMs) have typically relied on learning basic biographical information, or using limited role-play dialogue datasets to capture a character's responses. However, a holistic representation of an individual goes beyond surface-level facts or conversations to deeper thoughts and thinking. In this work, we introduce CharacterBot, a model designed to replicate both the linguistic patterns and distinctive thought patterns as manifested in the textual works of a character. Using Lu Xun, a renowned Chinese writer as a case study, we propose four training tasks derived from his 17 essay collections. These include a pre-training task focused on mastering external linguistic structures and knowledge, as well as three fine-tuning tasks: multiple-choice question answering, generative question answering, and style transfer, each aligning the LLM with Lu Xun's internal ideation and writing style. To optimize learning across these tasks, we introduce a CharLoRA parameter updating mechanism, where a general linguistic style expert collaborates with other task-specific experts to better study both the language style and the understanding of deeper thoughts. We evaluate CharacterBot on three tasks for linguistic accuracy and opinion comprehension, demonstrating that it significantly outperforms the baselines on our adapted metrics. We hope this work inspires future research on deep character persona simulation LLMs while considering the importance of ethical standards.

CLFeb 22, 2024
Rethinking Scientific Summarization Evaluation: Grounding Explainable Metrics on Facet-aware Benchmark

Xiuying Chen, Tairan Wang, Qingqing Zhu et al.

The summarization capabilities of pretrained and large language models (LLMs) have been widely validated in general areas, but their use in scientific corpus, which involves complex sentences and specialized knowledge, has been less assessed. This paper presents conceptual and experimental analyses of scientific summarization, highlighting the inadequacies of traditional evaluation methods, such as $n$-gram, embedding comparison, and QA, particularly in providing explanations, grasping scientific concepts, or identifying key content. Subsequently, we introduce the Facet-aware Metric (FM), employing LLMs for advanced semantic matching to evaluate summaries based on different aspects. This facet-aware approach offers a thorough evaluation of abstracts by decomposing the evaluation task into simpler subtasks.Recognizing the absence of an evaluation benchmark in this domain, we curate a Facet-based scientific summarization Dataset (FD) with facet-level annotations. Our findings confirm that FM offers a more logical approach to evaluating scientific summaries. In addition, fine-tuned smaller models can compete with LLMs in scientific contexts, while LLMs have limitations in learning from in-context information in scientific domains. This suggests an area for future enhancement of LLMs.

70.6IRApr 6
FAVE: Flow-based Average Velocity Establishment for Sequential Recommendation

Ke Shi, Yao Zhang, Feng Guo et al.

Generative recommendation has emerged as a transformative paradigm for capturing the dynamic evolution of user intents in sequential recommendation. While flow-based methods improve the efficiency of diffusion models, they remain hindered by the ``Noise-to-Data'' paradigm, which introduces two critical inefficiencies: prior mismatch, where generation starts from uninformative noise, forcing a lengthy recovery trajectory; and linear redundancy, where iterative solvers waste computation on modeling deterministic preference transitions. To address these limitations, we propose a Flow-based Average Velocity Establishment (Fave) framework for one-step generation recommendation that learns a direct trajectory from an informative prior to the target distribution. Fave is structured via a progressive two-stage training strategy. In Stage 1, we establish a stable preference space through dual-end semantic alignment, applying constraints at both the source (user history) and target (next item) to prevent representation collapse. In Stage 2, we directly resolve the efficiency bottlenecks by introducing a semantic anchor prior, which initializes the flow with a masked embedding from the user's interaction history, providing an informative starting point. Then we learn a global average velocity, consolidating the multi-step trajectory into a single displacement vector, and enforce trajectory straightness via a JVP-based consistency constraint to ensure one-step generation. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that Fave not only achieves state-of-the-art recommendation performance but also delivers an order-of-magnitude improvement in inference efficiency, making it practical for latency-sensitive scenarios.

AIApr 8, 2024
360$^\circ$REA: Towards A Reusable Experience Accumulation with 360° Assessment for Multi-Agent System

Shen Gao, Hao Li, Chengrui Huang et al.

Large language model agents have demonstrated remarkable advancements across various complex tasks. Recent works focus on optimizing the agent team or employing self-reflection to iteratively solve complex tasks. Since these agents are all based on the same LLM, only conducting self-evaluation or removing underperforming agents does not substantively enhance the capability of the agents. We argue that a comprehensive evaluation and accumulating experience from evaluation feedback is an effective approach to improving system performance. In this paper, we propose Reusable Experience Accumulation with 360$^\circ$ Assessment (360$^\circ$REA), a hierarchical multi-agent framework inspired by corporate organizational practices. The framework employs a novel 360$^\circ$ performance assessment method for multi-perspective performance evaluation with fine-grained assessment. To enhance the capability of agents in addressing complex tasks, we introduce dual-level experience pool for agents to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment. Extensive experiments on complex task datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of 360$^\circ$REA.

IRMar 22, 2024
Selecting Query-bag as Pseudo Relevance Feedback for Information-seeking Conversations

Xiaoqing Zhang, Xiuying Chen, Shen Gao et al.

Information-seeking dialogue systems are widely used in e-commerce systems, with answers that must be tailored to fit the specific settings of the online system. Given the user query, the information-seeking dialogue systems first retrieve a subset of response candidates, then further select the best response from the candidate set through re-ranking. Current methods mainly retrieve response candidates based solely on the current query, however, incorporating similar questions could introduce more diverse content, potentially refining the representation and improving the matching process. Hence, in this paper, we proposed a Query-bag based Pseudo Relevance Feedback framework (QB-PRF), which constructs a query-bag with related queries to serve as pseudo signals to guide information-seeking conversations. Concretely, we first propose a Query-bag Selection module (QBS), which utilizes contrastive learning to train the selection of synonymous queries in an unsupervised manner by leveraging the representations learned from pre-trained VAE. Secondly, we come up with a Query-bag Fusion module (QBF) that fuses synonymous queries to enhance the semantic representation of the original query through multidimensional attention computation. We verify the effectiveness of the QB-PRF framework on two competitive pretrained backbone models, including BERT and GPT-2. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our framework achieves superior performance over strong baselines.

CLJul 8, 2025
Evolution without Large Models: Training Language Model with Task Principles

Minghang Zhu, Shen Gao, Zhengliang Shi et al.

A common training approach for language models involves using a large-scale language model to expand a human-provided dataset, which is subsequently used for model training.This method significantly reduces training costs by eliminating the need for extensive human data annotation. However, it still faces challenges such as high carbon emissions during data augmentation and the risk of data leakage when we use closed-source LLMs. To address these issues, we propose a self-evolution method for language models. First, we introduce the Multi-level Principle Generation, which enables a large-scale model to summarize task-completion principles based on a small amount of task data. Then, we propose the Principle-based Instance Generation, in which a smaller-scale language model uses these task principles to generate a large amount of data. This data is then used for model training. Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly improves model performance compared to directly using a smaller-scale language model to generate data. Additionally, since we only use the large-scale language model to generate the task-completion principles, the carbon emissions associated with training the model are greatly reduced.

CLJun 28, 2024
Simulating Financial Market via Large Language Model based Agents

Shen Gao, Yuntao Wen, Minghang Zhu et al.

Most economic theories typically assume that financial market participants are fully rational individuals and use mathematical models to simulate human behavior in financial markets. However, human behavior is often not entirely rational and is challenging to predict accurately with mathematical models. In this paper, we propose \textbf{A}gent-based \textbf{S}imulated \textbf{F}inancial \textbf{M}arket (ASFM), which first constructs a simulated stock market with a real order matching system. Then, we propose a large language model based agent as the stock trader, which contains the profile, observation, and tool-learning based action module. The trading agent can comprehensively understand current market dynamics and financial policy information, and make decisions that align with their trading strategy. In the experiments, we first verify that the reactions of our ASFM are consistent with the real stock market in two controllable scenarios. In addition, we also conduct experiments in two popular economics research directions, and we find that conclusions drawn in our \model align with the preliminary findings in economics research. Based on these observations, we believe our proposed ASFM provides a new paradigm for economic research.

CLJun 21, 2024
Generate-then-Ground in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering

Zhengliang Shi, Weiwei Sun, Shen Gao et al.

Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) tasks present a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the intensive knowledge required. Current solutions, like Retrieval-Augmented Generation, typically retrieve potential documents from an external corpus to read an answer. However, the performance of this retrieve-then-read paradigm is constrained by the retriever and the inevitable noise in the retrieved documents. To mitigate these challenges, we introduce a novel generate-then-ground (GenGround) framework, synergizing the parametric knowledge of LLMs and external documents to solve a multi-hop question. GenGround empowers LLMs to alternate two phases until the final answer is derived: (1) formulate a simpler, single-hop question and directly generate the answer; (2) ground the question-answer pair in retrieved documents, amending any wrong predictions in the answer. We also propose an instructional grounding distillation method to generalize our method into smaller models. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets illustrate the superiority of our method.

CLJun 8, 2024
Write Summary Step-by-Step: A Pilot Study of Stepwise Summarization

Xiuying Chen, Shen Gao, Mingzhe Li et al.

Nowadays, neural text generation has made tremendous progress in abstractive summarization tasks. However, most of the existing summarization models take in the whole document all at once, which sometimes cannot meet the needs in practice. Practically, social text streams such as news events and tweets keep growing from time to time, and can only be fed to the summarization system step by step. Hence, in this paper, we propose the task of Stepwise Summarization, which aims to generate a new appended summary each time a new document is proposed. The appended summary should not only summarize the newly added content but also be coherent with the previous summary, to form an up-to-date complete summary. To tackle this challenge, we design an adversarial learning model, named Stepwise Summary Generator (SSG). First, SSG selectively processes the new document under the guidance of the previous summary, obtaining polished document representation. Next, SSG generates the summary considering both the previous summary and the document. Finally, a convolutional-based discriminator is employed to determine whether the newly generated summary is coherent with the previous summary. For the experiment, we extend the traditional two-step update summarization setting to a multi-step stepwise setting, and re-propose a large-scale stepwise summarization dataset based on a public story generation dataset. Extensive experiments on this dataset show that SSG achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each module in our framework. We also discuss the benefits and limitations of recent large language models on this task.

CLDec 10, 2023
Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning

Yougang Lyu, Jitai Hao, Zihan Wang et al.

Multiple defendants in a criminal fact description generally exhibit complex interactions, and cannot be well handled by existing Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) methods which focus on predicting judgment results (e.g., law articles, charges, and terms of penalty) for single-defendant cases. To address this problem, we propose the task of multi-defendant LJP, which aims to automatically predict the judgment results for each defendant of multi-defendant cases. Two challenges arise with the task of multi-defendant LJP: (1) indistinguishable judgment results among various defendants; and (2) the lack of a real-world dataset for training and evaluation. To tackle the first challenge, we formalize the multi-defendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains and introduce a multi-defendant LJP method, named Hierarchical Reasoning Network (HRN), which follows the hierarchical reasoning chains to determine criminal relationships, sentencing circumstances, law articles, charges, and terms of penalty for each defendant. To tackle the second challenge, we collect a real-world multi-defendant LJP dataset, namely MultiLJP, to accelerate the relevant research in the future. Extensive experiments on MultiLJP verify the effectiveness of our proposed HRN.

CLMay 26, 2023
UMSE: Unified Multi-scenario Summarization Evaluation

Shen Gao, Zhitao Yao, Chongyang Tao et al.

Summarization quality evaluation is a non-trivial task in text summarization. Contemporary methods can be mainly categorized into two scenarios: (1) reference-based: evaluating with human-labeled reference summary; (2) reference-free: evaluating the summary consistency of the document. Recent studies mainly focus on one of these scenarios and explore training neural models built on PLMs to align with human criteria. However, the models from different scenarios are optimized individually, which may result in sub-optimal performance since they neglect the shared knowledge across different scenarios. Besides, designing individual models for each scenario caused inconvenience to the user. Inspired by this, we propose Unified Multi-scenario Summarization Evaluation Model (UMSE). More specifically, we propose a perturbed prefix tuning method to share cross-scenario knowledge between scenarios and use a self-supervised training paradigm to optimize the model without extra human labeling. Our UMSE is the first unified summarization evaluation framework engaged with the ability to be used in three evaluation scenarios. Experimental results across three typical scenarios on the benchmark dataset SummEval indicate that our UMSE can achieve comparable performance with several existing strong methods which are specifically designed for each scenario.

CLMay 19, 2023
A Topic-aware Summarization Framework with Different Modal Side Information

Xiuying Chen, Mingzhe Li, Shen Gao et al.

Automatic summarization plays an important role in the exponential document growth on the Web. On content websites such as CNN.com and WikiHow.com, there often exist various kinds of side information along with the main document for attention attraction and easier understanding, such as videos, images, and queries. Such information can be used for better summarization, as they often explicitly or implicitly mention the essence of the article. However, most of the existing side-aware summarization methods are designed to incorporate either single-modal or multi-modal side information, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. In this paper, we propose a general summarization framework, which can flexibly incorporate various modalities of side information. The main challenges in designing a flexible summarization model with side information include: (1) the side information can be in textual or visual format, and the model needs to align and unify it with the document into the same semantic space, (2) the side inputs can contain information from various aspects, and the model should recognize the aspects useful for summarization. To address these two challenges, we first propose a unified topic encoder, which jointly discovers latent topics from the document and various kinds of side information. The learned topics flexibly bridge and guide the information flow between multiple inputs in a graph encoder through a topic-aware interaction. We secondly propose a triplet contrastive learning mechanism to align the single-modal or multi-modal information into a unified semantic space, where the summary quality is enhanced by better understanding the document and side information. Results show that our model significantly surpasses strong baselines on three public single-modal or multi-modal benchmark summarization datasets.

CLDec 27, 2021
HeteroQA: Learning towards Question-and-Answering through Multiple Information Sources via Heterogeneous Graph Modeling

Shen Gao, Yuchi Zhang, Yongliang Wang et al.

Community Question Answering (CQA) is a well-defined task that can be used in many scenarios, such as E-Commerce and online user community for special interests. In these communities, users can post articles, give comment, raise a question and answer it. These data form the heterogeneous information sources where each information source have their own special structure and context (comments attached to an article or related question with answers). Most of the CQA methods only incorporate articles or Wikipedia to extract knowledge and answer the user's question. However, various types of information sources in the community are not fully explored by these CQA methods and these multiple information sources (MIS) can provide more related knowledge to user's questions. Thus, we propose a question-aware heterogeneous graph transformer to incorporate the MIS in the user community to automatically generate the answer. To evaluate our proposed method, we conduct the experiments on two datasets: $\text{MSM}^{\text{plus}}$ the modified version of benchmark dataset MS-MARCO and the AntQA dataset which is the first large-scale CQA dataset with four types of MIS. Extensive experiments on two datasets show that our model outperforms all the baselines in terms of all the metrics.

CLDec 14, 2020
The Style-Content Duality of Attractiveness: Learning to Write Eye-Catching Headlines via Disentanglement

Mingzhe Li, Xiuying Chen, Min Yang et al.

Eye-catching headlines function as the first device to trigger more clicks, bringing reciprocal effect between producers and viewers. Producers can obtain more traffic and profits, and readers can have access to outstanding articles. When generating attractive headlines, it is important to not only capture the attractive content but also follow an eye-catching written style. In this paper, we propose a Disentanglement-based Attractive Headline Generator (DAHG) that generates headline which captures the attractive content following the attractive style. Concretely, we first devise a disentanglement module to divide the style and content of an attractive prototype headline into latent spaces, with two auxiliary constraints to ensure the two spaces are indeed disentangled. The latent content information is then used to further polish the document representation and help capture the salient part. Finally, the generator takes the polished document as input to generate headline under the guidance of the attractive style. Extensive experiments on the public Kuaibao dataset show that DAHG achieves state-of-the-art performance. Human evaluation also demonstrates that DAHG triggers 22% more clicks than existing models.

CLNov 14, 2020
Meaningful Answer Generation of E-Commerce Question-Answering

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Zhaochun Ren et al.

In e-commerce portals, generating answers for product-related questions has become a crucial task. In this paper, we focus on the task of product-aware answer generation, which learns to generate an accurate and complete answer from large-scale unlabeled e-commerce reviews and product attributes. However, safe answer problems pose significant challenges to text generation tasks, and e-commerce question-answering task is no exception. To generate more meaningful answers, in this paper, we propose a novel generative neural model, called the Meaningful Product Answer Generator (MPAG), which alleviates the safe answer problem by taking product reviews, product attributes, and a prototype answer into consideration. Product reviews and product attributes are used to provide meaningful content, while the prototype answer can yield a more diverse answer pattern. To this end, we propose a novel answer generator with a review reasoning module and a prototype answer reader. Our key idea is to obtain the correct question-aware information from a large scale collection of reviews and learn how to write a coherent and meaningful answer from an existing prototype answer. To be more specific, we propose a read-and-write memory consisting of selective writing units to conduct reasoning among these reviews. We then employ a prototype reader consisting of comprehensive matching to extract the answer skeleton from the prototype answer. Finally, we propose an answer editor to generate the final answer by taking the question and the above parts as input. Conducted on a real-world dataset collected from an e-commerce platform, extensive experimental results show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Human evaluation also demonstrates that our model can consistently generate specific and proper answers.

CLNov 5, 2020
Learning to Respond with Your Favorite Stickers: A Framework of Unifying Multi-Modality and User Preference in Multi-Turn Dialog

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Li Liu et al.

Stickers with vivid and engaging expressions are becoming increasingly popular in online messaging apps, and some works are dedicated to automatically select sticker response by matching the stickers image with previous utterances. However, existing methods usually focus on measuring the matching degree between the dialog context and sticker image, which ignores the user preference of using stickers. Hence, in this paper, we propose to recommend an appropriate sticker to user based on multi-turn dialog context and sticker using history of user. Two main challenges are confronted in this task. One is to model the sticker preference of user based on the previous sticker selection history. Another challenge is to jointly fuse the user preference and the matching between dialog context and candidate sticker into final prediction making. To tackle these challenges, we propose a \emph{Preference Enhanced Sticker Response Selector} (PESRS) model. Specifically, PESRS first employs a convolutional based sticker image encoder and a self-attention based multi-turn dialog encoder to obtain the representation of stickers and utterances. Next, deep interaction network is proposed to conduct deep matching between the sticker and each utterance. Then, we model the user preference by using the recently selected stickers as input, and use a key-value memory network to store the preference representation. PESRS then learns the short-term and long-term dependency between all interaction results by a fusion network, and dynamically fuse the user preference representation into the final sticker selection prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world dialog dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all commonly-used metrics. Experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component of PESRS.

CLOct 12, 2020
VMSMO: Learning to Generate Multimodal Summary for Video-based News Articles

Mingzhe Li, Xiuying Chen, Shen Gao et al.

A popular multimedia news format nowadays is providing users with a lively video and a corresponding news article, which is employed by influential news media including CNN, BBC, and social media including Twitter and Weibo. In such a case, automatically choosing a proper cover frame of the video and generating an appropriate textual summary of the article can help editors save time, and readers make the decision more effectively. Hence, in this paper, we propose the task of Video-based Multimodal Summarization with Multimodal Output (VMSMO) to tackle such a problem. The main challenge in this task is to jointly model the temporal dependency of video with semantic meaning of article. To this end, we propose a Dual-Interaction-based Multimodal Summarizer (DIMS), consisting of a dual interaction module and multimodal generator. In the dual interaction module, we propose a conditional self-attention mechanism that captures local semantic information within video and a global-attention mechanism that handles the semantic relationship between news text and video from a high level. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world VMSMO dataset show that DIMS achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

CLMay 10, 2020
From Standard Summarization to New Tasks and Beyond: Summarization with Manifold Information

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Zhaochun Ren et al.

Text summarization is the research area aiming at creating a short and condensed version of the original document, which conveys the main idea of the document in a few words. This research topic has started to attract the attention of a large community of researchers, and it is nowadays counted as one of the most promising research areas. In general, text summarization algorithms aim at using a plain text document as input and then output a summary. However, in real-world applications, most of the data is not in a plain text format. Instead, there is much manifold information to be summarized, such as the summary for a web page based on a query in the search engine, extreme long document (e.g., academic paper), dialog history and so on. In this paper, we focus on the survey of these new summarization tasks and approaches in the real-world application.

CLMar 10, 2020
Learning to Respond with Stickers: A Framework of Unifying Multi-Modality in Multi-Turn Dialog

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Chang Liu et al.

Stickers with vivid and engaging expressions are becoming increasingly popular in online messaging apps, and some works are dedicated to automatically select sticker response by matching text labels of stickers with previous utterances. However, due to their large quantities, it is impractical to require text labels for the all stickers. Hence, in this paper, we propose to recommend an appropriate sticker to user based on multi-turn dialog context history without any external labels. Two main challenges are confronted in this task. One is to learn semantic meaning of stickers without corresponding text labels. Another challenge is to jointly model the candidate sticker with the multi-turn dialog context. To tackle these challenges, we propose a sticker response selector (SRS) model. Specifically, SRS first employs a convolutional based sticker image encoder and a self-attention based multi-turn dialog encoder to obtain the representation of stickers and utterances. Next, deep interaction network is proposed to conduct deep matching between the sticker with each utterance in the dialog history. SRS then learns the short-term and long-term dependency between all interaction results by a fusion network to output the the final matching score. To evaluate our proposed method, we collect a large-scale real-world dialog dataset with stickers from one of the most popular online chatting platform. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all commonly-used metrics. Experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component of SRS. To facilitate further research in sticker selection field, we release this dataset of 340K multi-turn dialog and sticker pairs.

ITMar 8, 2020
Reinforcement Learning Based Cooperative Coded Caching under Dynamic Popularities in Ultra-Dense Networks

Shen Gao, Peihao Dong, Zhiwen Pan et al.

For ultra-dense networks with wireless backhaul, caching strategy at small base stations (SBSs), usually with limited storage, is critical to meet massive high data rate requests. Since the content popularity profile varies with time in an unknown way, we exploit reinforcement learning (RL) to design a cooperative caching strategy with maximum-distance separable (MDS) coding. We model the MDS coding based cooperative caching as a Markov decision process to capture the popularity dynamics and maximize the long-term expected cumulative traffic load served directly by the SBSs without accessing the macro base station. For the formulated problem, we first find the optimal solution for a small-scale system by embedding the cooperative MDS coding into Q-learning. To cope with the large-scale case, we approximate the state-action value function heuristically. The approximated function includes only a small number of learnable parameters and enables us to propose a fast and efficient action-selection approach, which dramatically reduces the complexity. Numerical results verify the optimality/near-optimality of the proposed RL based algorithms and show the superiority compared with the baseline schemes. They also exhibit good robustness to different environments.

CLOct 28, 2019
RPM-Oriented Query Rewriting Framework for E-commerce Keyword-Based Sponsored Search

Xiuying Chen, Daorui Xiao, Shen Gao et al.

Sponsored search optimizes revenue and relevance, which is estimated by Revenue Per Mille (RPM). Existing sponsored search models are all based on traditional statistical models, which have poor RPM performance when queries follow a heavy-tailed distribution. Here, we propose an RPM-oriented Query Rewriting Framework (RQRF) which outputs related bid keywords that can yield high RPM. RQRF embeds both queries and bid keywords to vectors in the same implicit space, converting the rewriting probability between each query and keyword to the distance between the two vectors. For label construction, we propose an RPM-oriented sample construction method, labeling keywords based on whether or not they can lead to high RPM. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate performance of RQRF. In a one month large-scale real-world traffic of e-commerce sponsored search system, the proposed model significantly outperforms traditional baseline.

CLSep 19, 2019
How to Write Summaries with Patterns? Learning towards Abstractive Summarization through Prototype Editing

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li et al.

Under special circumstances, summaries should conform to a particular style with patterns, such as court judgments and abstracts in academic papers. To this end, the prototype document-summary pairs can be utilized to generate better summaries. There are two main challenges in this task: (1) the model needs to incorporate learned patterns from the prototype, but (2) should avoid copying contents other than the patternized words---such as irrelevant facts---into the generated summaries. To tackle these challenges, we design a model named Prototype Editing based Summary Generator (PESG). PESG first learns summary patterns and prototype facts by analyzing the correlation between a prototype document and its summary. Prototype facts are then utilized to help extract facts from the input document. Next, an editing generator generates new summary based on the summary pattern or extracted facts. Finally, to address the second challenge, a fact checker is used to estimate mutual information between the input document and generated summary, providing an additional signal for the generator. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale real-world text summarization dataset show that PESG achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

CLJan 23, 2019
Product-Aware Answer Generation in E-Commerce Question-Answering

Shen Gao, Zhaochun Ren, Yihong Eric Zhao et al.

In e-commerce portals, generating answers for product-related questions has become a crucial task. In this paper, we propose the task of product-aware answer generation, which tends to generate an accurate and complete answer from large-scale unlabeled e-commerce reviews and product attributes. Unlike existing question-answering problems, answer generation in e-commerce confronts three main challenges: (1) Reviews are informal and noisy; (2) joint modeling of reviews and key-value product attributes is challenging; (3) traditional methods easily generate meaningless answers. To tackle above challenges, we propose an adversarial learning based model, named PAAG, which is composed of three components: a question-aware review representation module, a key-value memory network encoding attributes, and a recurrent neural network as a sequence generator. Specifically, we employ a convolutional discriminator to distinguish whether our generated answer matches the facts. To extract the salience part of reviews, an attention-based review reader is proposed to capture the most relevant words given the question. Conducted on a large-scale real-world e-commerce dataset, our extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of each module in our proposed model. Moreover, our experiments show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

CLDec 13, 2018
Abstractive Text Summarization by Incorporating Reader Comments

Shen Gao, Xiuying Chen, Piji Li et al.

In neural abstractive summarization field, conventional sequence-to-sequence based models often suffer from summarizing the wrong aspect of the document with respect to the main aspect. To tackle this problem, we propose the task of reader-aware abstractive summary generation, which utilizes the reader comments to help the model produce better summary about the main aspect. Unlike traditional abstractive summarization task, reader-aware summarization confronts two main challenges: (1) Comments are informal and noisy; (2) jointly modeling the news document and the reader comments is challenging. To tackle the above challenges, we design an adversarial learning model named reader-aware summary generator (RASG), which consists of four components: (1) a sequence-to-sequence based summary generator; (2) a reader attention module capturing the reader focused aspects; (3) a supervisor modeling the semantic gap between the generated summary and reader focused aspects; (4) a goal tracker producing the goal for each generation step. The supervisor and the goal tacker are used to guide the training of our framework in an adversarial manner. Extensive experiments are conducted on our large-scale real-world text summarization dataset, and the results show that RASG achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both automatic metrics and human evaluations. The experimental results also demonstrate the effectiveness of each module in our framework. We release our large-scale dataset for further research.

CLSep 27, 2018
Iterative Document Representation Learning Towards Summarization with Polishing

Xiuying Chen, Shen Gao, Chongyang Tao et al.

In this paper, we introduce Iterative Text Summarization (ITS), an iteration-based model for supervised extractive text summarization, inspired by the observation that it is often necessary for a human to read an article multiple times in order to fully understand and summarize its contents. Current summarization approaches read through a document only once to generate a document representation, resulting in a sub-optimal representation. To address this issue we introduce a model which iteratively polishes the document representation on many passes through the document. As part of our model, we also introduce a selective reading mechanism that decides more accurately the extent to which each sentence in the model should be updated. Experimental results on the CNN/DailyMail and DUC2002 datasets demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art extractive systems when evaluated by machines and by humans.