Hwanjo Yu

Su Kim, Dongha Lee, SeongKu Kang et al.

Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been successfully applied to predicting molecular properties, which is one of the most classical cheminformatics tasks with various applications. Despite their effectiveness, we empirically observe that training a single GNN model for diverse molecules with distinct structural patterns limits its prediction performance. In this paper, motivated by this observation, we propose TopExpert to leverage topology-specific prediction models (referred to as experts), each of which is responsible for each molecular group sharing similar topological semantics. That is, each expert learns topology-specific discriminative features while being trained with its corresponding topological group. To tackle the key challenge of grouping molecules by their topological patterns, we introduce a clustering-based gating module that assigns an input molecule into one of the clusters and further optimizes the gating module with two different types of self-supervision: topological semantics induced by GNNs and molecular scaffolds, respectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TopExpert has boosted the performance for molecular property prediction and also achieved better generalization for new molecules with unseen scaffolds than baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/kimsu55/ToxExpert.

Dongha Lee, Jiaming Shen, Seonghyeon Lee et al. · deepmind

Topic taxonomies display hierarchical topic structures of a text corpus and provide topical knowledge to enhance various NLP applications. To dynamically incorporate new topic information, several recent studies have tried to expand (or complete) a topic taxonomy by inserting emerging topics identified in a set of new documents. However, existing methods focus only on frequent terms in documents and the local topic-subtopic relations in a taxonomy, which leads to limited topic term coverage and fails to model the global topic hierarchy. In this work, we propose a novel framework for topic taxonomy expansion, named TopicExpan, which directly generates topic-related terms belonging to new topics. Specifically, TopicExpan leverages the hierarchical relation structure surrounding a new topic and the textual content of an input document for topic term generation. This approach encourages newly-inserted topics to further cover important but less frequent terms as well as to keep their relation consistency within the taxonomy. Experimental results on two real-world text corpora show that TopicExpan significantly outperforms other baseline methods in terms of the quality of output taxonomies.

Dongmin Hyun, Chanyoung Park, Junsu Cho et al.

Sequential recommender systems have shown effective suggestions by capturing users' interest drift. There have been two groups of existing sequential models: user- and item-centric models. The user-centric models capture personalized interest drift based on each user's sequential consumption history, but do not explicitly consider whether users' interest in items sustains beyond the training time, i.e., interest sustainability. On the other hand, the item-centric models consider whether users' general interest sustains after the training time, but it is not personalized. In this work, we propose a recommender system taking advantages of the models in both categories. Our proposed model captures personalized interest sustainability, indicating whether each user's interest in items will sustain beyond the training time or not. We first formulate a task that requires to predict which items each user will consume in the recent period of the training time based on users' consumption history. We then propose simple yet effective schemes to augment users' sparse consumption history. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms 10 baseline models on 11 real-world datasets. The codes are available at https://github.com/dmhyun/PERIS.

SeongKu Kang, Wonbin Kweon, Dongha Lee et al.

Recent recommender systems have shown remarkable performance by using an ensemble of heterogeneous models. However, it is exceedingly costly because it requires resources and inference latency proportional to the number of models, which remains the bottleneck for production. Our work aims to transfer the ensemble knowledge of heterogeneous teachers to a lightweight student model using knowledge distillation (KD), to reduce the huge inference costs while retaining high accuracy. Through an empirical study, we find that the efficacy of distillation severely drops when transferring knowledge from heterogeneous teachers. Nevertheless, we show that an important signal to ease the difficulty can be obtained from the teacher's training trajectory. This paper proposes a new KD framework, named HetComp, that guides the student model by transferring easy-to-hard sequences of knowledge generated from the teachers' trajectories. To provide guidance according to the student's learning state, HetComp uses dynamic knowledge construction to provide progressively difficult ranking knowledge and adaptive knowledge transfer to gradually transfer finer-grained ranking information. Our comprehensive experiments show that HetComp significantly improves the distillation quality and the generalization of the student model.

Dongmin Hyun, Xiting Wang, Chanyoung Park et al.

Sentence summarization shortens given texts while maintaining core contents of the texts. Unsupervised approaches have been studied to summarize texts without human-written summaries. However, recent unsupervised models are extractive, which remove words from texts and thus they are less flexible than abstractive summarization. In this work, we devise an abstractive model based on reinforcement learning without ground-truth summaries. We formulate the unsupervised summarization based on the Markov decision process with rewards representing the summary quality. To further enhance the summary quality, we develop a multi-summary learning mechanism that generates multiple summaries with varying lengths for a given text, while making the summaries mutually enhance each other. Experimental results show that the proposed model substantially outperforms both abstractive and extractive models, yet frequently generating new words not contained in input texts.

Seonghyeon Lee, Suyeon Kim, Joonwon Jang et al.

We study the code generation behavior of instruction-tuned models built on top of code pre-trained language models when they could access an auxiliary function to implement a function. We design several ways to provide auxiliary functions to the models by adding them to the query or providing a response prefix to incorporate the ability to utilize auxiliary functions with the instruction-following capability. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of combining the base models' auxiliary function utilization ability with the instruction following ability. In particular, the performance of adopting our approaches with the open-sourced language models surpasses that of the recent powerful proprietary language models, i.e., gpt-4o.

Dasol Choi, DongGeon Lee, Brigitta Jesica Kartono et al.

As large language models are deployed in high-stakes enterprise applications, from healthcare to finance, ensuring adherence to organization-specific policies has become essential. Yet existing safety evaluations focus exclusively on universal harms. We present COMPASS (Company/Organization Policy Alignment Assessment), the first systematic framework for evaluating whether LLMs comply with organizational allowlist and denylist policies. We apply COMPASS to eight diverse industry scenarios, generating and validating 5,920 queries that test both routine compliance and adversarial robustness through strategically designed edge cases. Evaluating seven state-of-the-art models, we uncover a fundamental asymmetry: models reliably handle legitimate requests (>95% accuracy) but catastrophically fail at enforcing prohibitions, refusing only 13-40% of adversarial denylist violations. These results demonstrate that current LLMs lack the robustness required for policy-critical deployments, establishing COMPASS as an essential evaluation framework for organizational AI safety.

Jeyun Lee, Junhyoung Lee, Wonbin Kweon et al.

Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.

Wonbin Kweon, Sanghwan Jang, SeongKu Kang et al.

Despite the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) for recommendation, we demonstrate that LLMs often exhibit uncertainty in their recommendations. To ensure the trustworthy use of LLMs in generating recommendations, we emphasize the importance of assessing the reliability of recommendations generated by LLMs. We start by introducing a novel framework for estimating the predictive uncertainty to quantitatively measure the reliability of LLM-based recommendations. We further propose to decompose the predictive uncertainty into recommendation uncertainty and prompt uncertainty, enabling in-depth analyses of the primary source of uncertainty. Through extensive experiments, we (1) demonstrate predictive uncertainty effectively indicates the reliability of LLM-based recommendations, (2) investigate the origins of uncertainty with decomposed uncertainty measures, and (3) propose uncertainty-aware prompting for a lower predictive uncertainty and enhanced recommendation. Our source code and model weights are available at https://github.com/WonbinKweon/UNC_LLM_REC_WWW2025

Seungha Hong, Sanghwan Jang, Wonbin Kweon et al.

Time Series forecasting (TSF) in the modern era faces significant computational and storage cost challenges due to the massive scale of real-world data. Dataset Distillation (DD), a paradigm that synthesizes a small, compact dataset to achieve training performance comparable to that of the original dataset, has emerged as a promising solution. However, conventional DD methods are not tailored for time series and suffer from architectural overfitting and limited scalability. To address these issues, we propose Harmonic Dataset Distillation for Time Series Forecasting (HDT). HDT decomposes the time series into its sinusoidal basis through the FFT and aligns the core periodic structure by Harmonic Matching. Since this process operates in the frequency domain, all updates during distillation are applied globally without disrupting temporal dependencies of time series. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HDT achieves strong cross-architecture generalization and scalability, validating its practicality for large-scale, real-world applications.

Junyoung Kim, Woojoo Kim, Jaehyung Lim et al.

Sequential Recommendation (SR) in multimodal settings typically relies on small frozen pretrained encoders, which limits semantic capacity and prevents Collaborative Filtering (CF) signals from being fully integrated into item representations. Inspired by the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) as high-capacity embedders, we investigate the use of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as CF-aware multimodal encoders for SR. However, we find that standard contrastive supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which adapts VLMs for embedding generation and injects CF signals, can amplify its inherent modality collapse. In this state, optimization is dominated by a single modality while the other degrades, ultimately undermining recommendation accuracy. To address this, we propose VLM2Rec, a VLM embedder-based framework for multimodal sequential recommendation designed to ensure balanced modality utilization. Specifically, we introduce Weak-modality Penalized Contrastive Learning to rectify gradient imbalance during optimization and Cross-Modal Relational Topology Regularization to preserve geometric consistency between modalities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VLM2Rec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and robustness across diverse scenarios.

DongGeon Lee, Joonwon Jang, Jihae Jeong et al.

Rapid deployment of vision-language models (VLMs) magnifies safety risks, yet most evaluations rely on artificial images. This study asks: How safe are current VLMs when confronted with meme images that ordinary users share? To investigate this question, we introduce MemeSafetyBench, a 50,430-instance benchmark pairing real meme images with both harmful and benign instructions. Using a comprehensive safety taxonomy and LLM-based instruction generation, we assess multiple VLMs across single and multi-turn interactions. We investigate how real-world memes influence harmful outputs, the mitigating effects of conversational context, and the relationship between model scale and safety metrics. Our findings demonstrate that VLMs are more vulnerable to meme-based harmful prompts than to synthetic or typographic images. Memes significantly increase harmful responses and decrease refusals compared to text-only inputs. Though multi-turn interactions provide partial mitigation, elevated vulnerability persists. These results highlight the need for ecologically valid evaluations and stronger safety mechanisms. MemeSafetyBench is publicly available at https://github.com/oneonlee/Meme-Safety-Bench.

Seonghyeon Lee, Sanghwan Jang, Seongbo Jang et al.

Auxiliary function is a helpful component to improve language model's code generation ability. However, a systematic exploration of how they affect has yet to be done. In this work, we comprehensively evaluate the ability to utilize auxiliary functions encoded in recent code-pretrained language models. First, we construct a human-crafted evaluation set, called HumanExtension, which contains examples of two functions where one function assists the other. With HumanExtension, we design several experiments to examine their ability in a multifaceted way. Our evaluation processes enable a comprehensive understanding of including auxiliary functions in the prompt in terms of effectiveness and robustness. An additional implementation style analysis captures the models' various implementation patterns when they access the auxiliary function. Through this analysis, we discover the models' promising ability to utilize auxiliary functions including their self-improving behavior by implementing the two functions step-by-step. However, our analysis also reveals the model's underutilized behavior to call the auxiliary function, suggesting the future direction to enhance their implementation by eliciting the auxiliary function call ability encoded in the models. We release our code and dataset to facilitate this research direction.

Seungha Hong, Sukang Chae, Suyeon Kim et al.

Online Time Series Forecasting (OTSF) requires models to continuously adapt to concept drift. However, existing methods often treat concept drift as a monolithic phenomenon. To address this limitation, we first redefine concept drift by categorizing it into two distinct types: Recurring Drift, where previously seen patterns reappear, and Emergent Drift, where entirely new patterns emerge. We then propose DynaME (Dynamic Multi-period Experts), a novel hybrid framework designed to effectively address this dual nature of drift. For Recurring Drift, DynaME employs a committee of specialized experts that are dynamically fitted to the most relevant historical periodic patterns at each time step. For Emergent Drift, the framework detects high-uncertainty scenarios and shifts reliance to a stable, general expert. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets and backbones demonstrate that DynaME effectively adapts to both concept drifts and significantly outperforms existing baselines.

DongGeon Lee, Hwanjo Yu

Hallucinations in large language model (LLM) outputs severely limit their reliability in knowledge-intensive tasks such as question answering. To address this challenge, we introduce REFIND (Retrieval-augmented Factuality hallucINation Detection), a novel framework that detects hallucinated spans within LLM outputs by directly leveraging retrieved documents. As part of the REFIND, we propose the Context Sensitivity Ratio (CSR), a novel metric that quantifies the sensitivity of LLM outputs to retrieved evidence. This innovative approach enables REFIND to efficiently and accurately detect hallucinations, setting it apart from existing methods. In the evaluation, REFIND demonstrated robustness across nine languages, including low-resource settings, and significantly outperformed baseline models, achieving superior IoU scores in identifying hallucinated spans. This work highlights the effectiveness of quantifying context sensitivity for hallucination detection, thereby paving the way for more reliable and trustworthy LLM applications across diverse languages. Our code is available at https://github.com/oneonlee/REFIND.

WooJoo Kim, JunYoung Kim, JaeHyung Lim et al.

Sequential recommendation requires capturing diverse user behaviors, which a single network often fails to capture. While ensemble methods mitigate this by leveraging multiple networks, training them all from scratch leads to high computational cost and instability from noisy mutual supervision. We propose {\bf F}rozen and {\bf L}earnable networks with {\bf A}ligned {\bf M}odular {\bf E}nsemble ({\bf FLAME}), a novel framework that condenses ensemble-level diversity into a single network for efficient sequential recommendation. During training, FLAME simulates exponential diversity using only two networks via {\it modular ensemble}. By decomposing each network into sub-modules (e.g., layers or blocks) and dynamically combining them, FLAME generates a rich space of diverse representation patterns. To stabilize this process, we pretrain and freeze one network to serve as a semantic anchor and employ {\it guided mutual learning}. This aligns the diverse representations into the space of the remaining learnable network, ensuring robust optimization. Consequently, at inference, FLAME utilizes only the learnable network, achieving ensemble-level performance with zero overhead compared to a single network. Experiments on six datasets show that FLAME outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 7.69$\times$ faster convergence and 9.70\% improvement in NDCG@20. We provide the source code of FLAME at https://github.com/woo-joo/FLAME_SIGIR26.

Jihae Jeong, DaeYeop Lee, DongGeon Lee et al.

Existing physical commonsense reasoning benchmarks predominantly focus on Western contexts, overlooking cultural variations in physical problem-solving. To address this gap, we introduce EPiK (Everyday Physics in Korean Contexts), a novel benchmark comprising 181 binary-choice problems that test physical reasoning within Korean cultural contexts, ranging from kimchi (Korean food) to traditional fermentation. EPiK is constructed using a two-stage generation and verification pipeline to create culturally-authentic problems across 9 reasoning subtasks and 84 scenarios. Unlike approaches based on simple translation, our method generates problems organically from Korean contexts while upholding rigorous physical reasoning standards. Our evaluations show that Korean-specialized models consistently outperform general-purpose models of comparable size. This performance gap highlights the limitations of culturally-agnostic models and demonstrates the critical need for culturally-aware benchmarks to truly measure language understanding. Our EPiK is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/jjae/EPiK.

Seonghyeon Lee, Heejae Chon, Joonwon Jang et al.

Language models (LMs) have exhibited impressive abilities in generating code from natural language requirements. In this work, we highlight the diversity of code generated by LMs as a critical criterion for evaluating their code generation capabilities. There is a lack of studies focused on assessing the diversity of generated code, which overlooks its importance in code LMs. Therefore, we propose a systematic approach to evaluate code diversity, introducing various metrics with inter-code similarity. Specifically, we introduce code clustering methods that leverages LMs' capabilities in code understanding and reasoning, resulting in a set of metrics that represent the number of algorithms in model-generated solutions. We extensively investigate the property of model-generated solutions by contrasting them with human-written ones and quantifying the impact of various factors on code diversity: model size, temperature, instruction tuning, and problem complexity. Our analysis demonstrates that model-generated solutions exhibit low algorithmic diversity, which was neglected by the research community. Moreover, we explore methods to increase code diversity by combining solutions from different models and increasing sampling temperatures. Our findings highlight that code diversity can be enhanced with the help of heterogeneous models and setting temperature beyond 1.0 that has not been fully explored due to the functional correctness degradation. To facilitate our research direction, we publicly share our code and datasets through open-source repositories.

SeongKu Kang, Jianxun Lian, Dongha Lee et al.

Recommender systems suffer from biases that cause the collected feedback to incompletely reveal user preference. While debiasing learning has been extensively studied, they mostly focused on the specialized (called counterfactual) test environment simulated by random exposure of items, significantly degrading accuracy in the typical (called factual) test environment based on actual user-item interactions. In fact, each test environment highlights the benefit of a different aspect: the counterfactual test emphasizes user satisfaction in the long-terms, while the factual test focuses on predicting subsequent user behaviors on platforms. Therefore, it is desirable to have a model that performs well on both tests rather than only one. In this work, we introduce a new learning framework, called Bias-adaptive Preference distillation Learning (BPL), to gradually uncover user preferences with dual distillation strategies. These distillation strategies are designed to drive high performance in both factual and counterfactual test environments. Employing a specialized form of teacher-student distillation from a biased model, BPL retains accurate preference knowledge aligned with the collected feedback, leading to high performance in the factual test. Furthermore, through self-distillation with reliability filtering, BPL iteratively refines its knowledge throughout the training process. This enables the model to produce more accurate predictions across a broader range of user-item combinations, thereby improving performance in the counterfactual test. Comprehensive experiments validate the effectiveness of BPL in both factual and counterfactual tests. Our implementation is accessible via: https://github.com/SeongKu-Kang/BPL.

Wonbin Kweon, SeongKu Kang, Runchu Tian et al.

The effectiveness of in-context learning relies heavily on selecting demonstrations that provide all the necessary information for a given test input. To achieve this, it is crucial to identify and cover fine-grained knowledge requirements. However, prior methods often retrieve demonstrations based solely on embedding similarity or generation probability, resulting in irrelevant or redundant examples. In this paper, we propose TopicK, a topic coverage-based retrieval framework that selects demonstrations to comprehensively cover topic-level knowledge relevant to both the test input and the model. Specifically, TopicK estimates the topics required by the input and assesses the model's knowledge on those topics. TopicK then iteratively selects demonstrations that introduce previously uncovered required topics, in which the model exhibits low topical knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of TopicK through extensive experiments across various datasets and both open- and closed-source LLMs. Our source code is available at https://github.com/WonbinKweon/TopicK_EMNLP2025.

Suyeon Kim, SeongKu Kang, Dongwoo Kim et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in node classification tasks but struggle with label noise in real-world data. Existing studies on graph learning with label noise commonly rely on class-dependent label noise, overlooking the complexities of instance-dependent noise and falling short of capturing real-world corruption patterns. We introduce BeGIN (Benchmarking for Graphs with Instance-dependent Noise), a new benchmark that provides realistic graph datasets with various noise types and comprehensively evaluates noise-handling strategies across GNN architectures, noisy label detection, and noise-robust learning. To simulate instance-dependent corruptions, BeGIN introduces algorithmic methods and LLM-based simulations. Our experiments reveal the challenges of instance-dependent noise, particularly LLM-based corruption, and underscore the importance of node-specific parameterization to enhance GNN robustness. By comprehensively evaluating noise-handling strategies, BeGIN provides insights into their effectiveness, efficiency, and key performance factors. We expect that BeGIN will serve as a valuable resource for advancing research on label noise in graphs and fostering the development of robust GNN training methods. The code is available at https://github.com/kimsu55/BeGIN.

Seonghyeon Lee, Dongha Lee, Seongbo Jang et al.

Recently, finetuning a pretrained language model to capture the similarity between sentence embeddings has shown the state-of-the-art performance on the semantic textual similarity (STS) task. However, the absence of an interpretation method for the sentence similarity makes it difficult to explain the model output. In this work, we explicitly describe the sentence distance as the weighted sum of contextualized token distances on the basis of a transportation problem, and then present the optimal transport-based distance measure, named RCMD; it identifies and leverages semantically-aligned token pairs. In the end, we propose CLRCMD, a contrastive learning framework that optimizes RCMD of sentence pairs, which enhances the quality of sentence similarity and their interpretation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our learning framework outperforms other baselines on both STS and interpretable-STS benchmarks, indicating that it computes effective sentence similarity and also provides interpretation consistent with human judgement. The code and checkpoint are publicly available at https://github.com/sh0416/clrcmd.

Wonbin Kweon, Hwanjo Yu

Recommender systems often suffer from selection bias as users tend to rate their preferred items. The datasets collected under such conditions exhibit entries missing not at random and thus are not randomized-controlled trials representing the target population. To address this challenge, a doubly robust estimator and its enhanced variants have been proposed as they ensure unbiasedness when accurate imputed errors or predicted propensities are provided. However, we argue that existing estimators rely on miscalibrated imputed errors and propensity scores as they depend on rudimentary models for estimation. We provide theoretical insights into how miscalibrated imputation and propensity models may limit the effectiveness of doubly robust estimators and validate our theorems using real-world datasets. On this basis, we propose a Doubly Calibrated Estimator that involves the calibration of both the imputation and propensity models. To achieve this, we introduce calibration experts that consider different logit distributions across users. Moreover, we devise a tri-level joint learning framework, allowing the simultaneous optimization of calibration experts alongside prediction and imputation models. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the superiority of the Doubly Calibrated Estimator in the context of debiased recommendation tasks.

SeongKu Kang, Shivam Agarwal, Bowen Jin et al.

Document retrieval has greatly benefited from the advancements of large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, their effectiveness is often limited in theme-specific applications for specialized areas or industries, due to unique terminologies, incomplete contexts of user queries, and specialized search intents. To capture the theme-specific information and improve retrieval, we propose to use a corpus topical taxonomy, which outlines the latent topic structure of the corpus while reflecting user-interested aspects. We introduce ToTER (Topical Taxonomy Enhanced Retrieval) framework, which identifies the central topics of queries and documents with the guidance of the taxonomy, and exploits their topical relatedness to supplement missing contexts. As a plug-and-play framework, ToTER can be flexibly employed to enhance various PLM-based retrievers. Through extensive quantitative, ablative, and exploratory experiments on two real-world datasets, we ascertain the benefits of using topical taxonomy for retrieval in theme-specific applications and demonstrate the effectiveness of ToTER.

SeongKu Kang, Yunyi Zhang, Pengcheng Jiang et al. · amazon-science

Academic paper search is an essential task for efficient literature discovery and scientific advancement. While dense retrieval has advanced various ad-hoc searches, it often struggles to match the underlying academic concepts between queries and documents, which is critical for paper search. To enable effective academic concept matching for paper search, we propose Taxonomy-guided Semantic Indexing (TaxoIndex) framework. TaxoIndex extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them as a semantic index guided by an academic taxonomy, and then leverages this index as foundational knowledge to identify academic concepts and link queries and documents. As a plug-and-play framework, TaxoIndex can be flexibly employed to enhance existing dense retrievers. Extensive experiments show that TaxoIndex brings significant improvements, even with highly limited training data, and greatly enhances interpretability.

SeongKu Kang, Bowen Jin, Wonbin Kweon et al.

In specialized fields like the scientific domain, constructing large-scale human-annotated datasets poses a significant challenge due to the need for domain expertise. Recent methods have employed large language models to generate synthetic queries, which serve as proxies for actual user queries. However, they lack control over the content generated, often resulting in incomplete coverage of academic concepts in documents. We introduce Concept Coverage-based Query set Generation (CCQGen) framework, designed to generate a set of queries with comprehensive coverage of the document's concepts. A key distinction of CCQGen is that it adaptively adjusts the generation process based on the previously generated queries. We identify concepts not sufficiently covered by previous queries, and leverage them as conditions for subsequent query generation. This approach guides each new query to complement the previous ones, aiding in a thorough understanding of the document. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CCQGen significantly enhances query quality and retrieval performance.

Seongbo Jang, Seonghyeon Lee, Hwanjo Yu

As language models are often deployed as chatbot assistants, it becomes a virtue for models to engage in conversations in a user's first language. While these models are trained on a wide range of languages, a comprehensive evaluation of their proficiency in low-resource languages such as Korean has been lacking. In this work, we introduce KoDialogBench, a benchmark designed to assess language models' conversational capabilities in Korean. To this end, we collect native Korean dialogues on daily topics from public sources, or translate dialogues from other languages. We then structure these conversations into diverse test datasets, spanning from dialogue comprehension to response selection tasks. Leveraging the proposed benchmark, we conduct extensive evaluations and analyses of various language models to measure a foundational understanding of Korean dialogues. Experimental results indicate that there exists significant room for improvement in models' conversation skills. Furthermore, our in-depth comparisons across different language models highlight the effectiveness of recent training techniques in enhancing conversational proficiency. We anticipate that KoDialogBench will promote the progress towards conversation-aware Korean language models.

Jaehyun Lee, SeongKu Kang, Hwanjo Yu

Matrix completion is an important area of research in recommender systems. Recent methods view a rating matrix as a user-item bi-partite graph with labeled edges denoting observed ratings and predict the edges between the user and item nodes by using the graph neural network (GNN). Despite their effectiveness, they treat each rating type as an independent relation type and thus cannot sufficiently consider the ordinal nature of the ratings. In this paper, we explore a new approach to exploit rating ordinality for GNN, which has not been studied well in the literature. We introduce a new method, called ROGMC, to leverage Rating Ordinality in GNN-based Matrix Completion. It uses cumulative preference propagation to directly incorporate rating ordinality in GNN's message passing, allowing for users' stronger preferences to be more emphasized based on inherent orders of rating types. This process is complemented by interest regularization which facilitates preference learning using the underlying interest information. Our extensive experiments show that ROGMC consistently outperforms the existing strategies of using rating types for GNN. We expect that our attempt to explore the feasibility of utilizing rating ordinality for GNN may stimulate further research in this direction.

Jaehyun Lee, Sanghwan Jang, SeongKu Kang et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently emerged as powerful training-free recommenders. However, their knowledge of individual items is inevitably uneven due to imbalanced information exposure during pretraining, a phenomenon we refer to as knowledge gap problem. To address this, most prior methods have employed a naive uniform augmentation that appends external information for every item in the input prompt. However, this approach not only wastes limited context budget on redundant augmentation for well-known items but can also hinder the model's effective reasoning. To this end, we propose KnowSA_CKP (Knowledge-aware Selective Augmentation with Comparative Knowledge Probing) to mitigate the knowledge gap problem. KnowSA_CKP estimates the LLM's internal knowledge by evaluating its capability to capture collaborative relationships and selectively injects additional information only where it is most needed. By avoiding unnecessary augmentation for well-known items, KnowSA_CKP focuses on items that benefit most from knowledge supplementation, thereby making more effective use of the context budget. KnowSA_CKP requires no fine-tuning step, and consistently improves both recommendation accuracy and context efficiency across four real-world datasets.

Joonwon Jang, Jaehee Kim, Wonbin Kweon et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on generating extensive intermediate reasoning units (e.g., tokens, sentences) to enhance final answer quality across a wide range of complex tasks. While this approach has proven effective, it inevitably increases substantial inference costs. Previous methods adopting token-level reduction without clear criteria result in poor performance compared to models trained with complete rationale. To address this challenge, we propose a novel sentence-level rationale reduction framework leveraging likelihood-based criteria, verbosity, to identify and remove redundant reasoning sentences. Unlike previous approaches, our method leverages verbosity to selectively remove redundant reasoning sentences while preserving reasoning capabilities. Our experimental results across various reasoning tasks demonstrate that our method improves performance by an average of 7.71% while reducing token generation by 19.87% compared to model trained with complete reasoning paths.

Sangwon Ryu, Heejin Do, Daehee Kim et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in abstractive summarization tasks. However, their ability to precisely control summary attributes (e.g., length or topic) remains underexplored, limiting their adaptability to specific user preferences. In this paper, we systematically explore the controllability of LLMs. To this end, we revisit summary attribute measurements and introduce iterative evaluation metrics, failure rate and average iteration count to precisely evaluate controllability of LLMs, rather than merely assessing errors. Our findings show that LLMs struggle more with numerical attributes than with linguistic attributes. To address this challenge, we propose a guide-to-explain framework (GTE) for controllable summarization. Our GTE framework enables the model to identify misaligned attributes in the initial draft and guides it in self-explaining errors in the previous output. By allowing the model to reflect on its misalignment, GTE generates well-adjusted summaries that satisfy the desired attributes with robust effectiveness, requiring surprisingly fewer iterations than other iterative approaches.

Tyler A. Chang, Catherine Arnett, Abdelrahman Eldesokey et al. · uw

To date, there exist almost no culturally-specific evaluation benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) that cover a large number of languages and cultures. In this paper, we present Global PIQA, a participatory commonsense reasoning benchmark for over 100 languages, constructed by hand by 335 researchers from 65 countries around the world. The 116 language varieties in Global PIQA cover five continents, 14 language families, and 23 writing systems. In the non-parallel split of Global PIQA, over 50% of examples reference local foods, customs, traditions, or other culturally-specific elements. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs perform well on Global PIQA in aggregate, but they exhibit weaker performance in lower-resource languages (up to a 37% accuracy gap, despite random chance at 50%). Open models generally perform worse than proprietary models. Global PIQA highlights that in many languages and cultures, everyday knowledge remains an area for improvement, alongside more widely-discussed capabilities such as complex reasoning and expert knowledge. Beyond its uses for LLM evaluation, we hope that Global PIQA provides a glimpse into the wide diversity of cultures in which human language is embedded.

Suchan Lee, Jihoon Choi, Sohyeon Lee et al.

Recent advances have investigated the use of pretrained large language models (LLMs) for time-series forecasting by aligning numerical inputs with LLM embedding spaces. However, existing multimodal approaches often overlook the distinct statistical properties and temporal dependencies that are fundamental to time-series data. To bridge this gap, we propose MAP4TS, a novel Multi-Aspect Prompting Framework that explicitly incorporates classical time-series analysis into the prompt design. Our framework introduces four specialized prompt components: a Global Domain Prompt that conveys dataset-level context, a Local Domain Prompt that encodes recent trends and series-specific behaviors, and a pair of Statistical and Temporal Prompts that embed handcrafted insights derived from autocorrelation (ACF), partial autocorrelation (PACF), and Fourier analysis. Multi-Aspect Prompts are combined with raw time-series embeddings and passed through a cross-modality alignment module to produce unified representations, which are then processed by an LLM and projected for final forecasting. Extensive experiments across eight diverse datasets show that MAP4TS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art LLM-based methods. Our ablation studies further reveal that prompt-aware designs significantly enhance performance stability and that GPT-2 backbones, when paired with structured prompts, outperform larger models like LLaMA in long-term forecasting tasks.

Kyumin Lee, Minjin Jeon, Sanghwan Jang et al.

Answering complex real-world questions requires step-by-step retrieval and integration of relevant information to generate well-grounded responses. However, existing knowledge distillation methods overlook the need for different reasoning abilities at different steps, hindering transfer in multi-step retrieval-augmented frameworks. To address this, we propose Stepwise Knowledge Distillation for Enhancing Reasoning Ability in Multi-Step Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (StepER). StepER employs step-wise supervision to align with evolving information and reasoning demands across stages. Additionally, it incorporates difficulty-aware training to progressively optimize learning by prioritizing suitable steps. Our method is adaptable to various multi-step retrieval-augmented language models, including those that use retrieval queries for reasoning paths or decomposed questions. Extensive experiments show that StepER outperforms prior methods on multi-hop QA benchmarks, with an 8B model achieving performance comparable to a 70B teacher model.

Namu Kim, Wonbin Kweon, Minsoo Kim et al.

We observe that zero-shot appearance transfer with large-scale image generation models faces a significant challenge: Attention Leakage. This challenge arises when the semantic mapping between two images is captured by the Query-Key alignment. To tackle this issue, we introduce Q-Align, utilizing Query-Query alignment to mitigate attention leakage and improve the semantic alignment in zero-shot appearance transfer. Q-Align incorporates three core contributions: (1) Query-Query alignment, facilitating the sophisticated spatial semantic mapping between two images; (2) Key-Value rearrangement, enhancing feature correspondence through realignment; and (3) Attention refinement using rearranged keys and values to maintain semantic consistency. We validate the effectiveness of Q-Align through extensive experiments and analysis, and Q-Align outperforms state-of-the-art methods in appearance fidelity while maintaining competitive structure preservation.

Jaehyung Lim, Wonbin Kweon, Woojoo Kim et al.

The increasing emphasis on privacy in recommendation systems has led to the adoption of Federated Learning (FL) as a privacy-preserving solution, enabling collaborative training without sharing user data. While Federated Recommendation (FedRec) effectively protects privacy, existing methods struggle with non-stationary data streams, failing to maintain consistent recommendation quality over time. On the other hand, Continual Learning Recommendation (CLRec) methods address evolving user preferences but typically assume centralized data access, making them incompatible with FL constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce Federated Continual Recommendation (FCRec), a novel task that integrates FedRec and CLRec, requiring models to learn from streaming data while preserving privacy. As a solution, we propose F3CRec, a framework designed to balance knowledge retention and adaptation under the strict constraints of FCRec. F3CRec introduces two key components: Adaptive Replay Memory on the client side, which selectively retains past preferences based on user-specific shifts, and Item-wise Temporal Mean on the server side, which integrates new knowledge while preserving prior information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that F3CRec outperforms existing approaches in maintaining recommendation quality over time in a federated environment.

Seongbo Jang, Minjin Jeon, Jaehoon Lee et al.

While research on dialogue response generation has primarily focused on generating coherent responses conditioning on textual context, the critical question of when to respond grounded on the temporal context remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel task called timely dialogue response generation and introduce the TimelyChat benchmark, which evaluates the capabilities of language models to predict appropriate time intervals and generate time-conditioned responses. Additionally, we construct a large-scale training dataset by leveraging unlabeled event knowledge from a temporal commonsense knowledge graph and employing a large language model (LLM) to synthesize 55K event-driven dialogues. We then train Timer, a dialogue agent designed to proactively predict time intervals and generate timely responses that align with those intervals. Experimental results show that Timer outperforms prompting-based LLMs and other fine-tuned baselines in both turn-level and dialogue-level evaluations. We publicly release our data, model, and code.

Seongbo Jang, Seonghyeon Lee, Dongha Lee et al.

Multimodal chatbots have become one of the major topics for dialogue systems in both research community and industry. Recently, researchers have shed light on the multimodality of responses as well as dialogue contexts. This work explores how a dialogue system can output responses in various modalities such as text and image. To this end, we first formulate a multimodal dialogue response retrieval task for retrieval-based systems as the combination of three subtasks. We then propose three integration methods based on a two-step approach and an end-to-end approach, and compare the merits and demerits of each method. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that the end-to-end approach achieves comparable performance without an intermediate step in the two-step approach. In addition, a parameter sharing strategy not only reduces the number of parameters but also boosts performance by transferring knowledge across the subtasks and the modalities.

Joonwon Jang, Sanghwan Jang, Wonbin Kweon et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are able to solve various tasks with only a few demonstrations utilizing their in-context learning (ICL) abilities. However, LLMs often rely on their pre-trained semantic priors of demonstrations rather than on the input-label relationships to proceed with ICL prediction. In this work, we term this phenomenon as the 'Demonstration Shortcut'. While previous works have primarily focused on improving ICL prediction results for predefined tasks, we aim to rectify the Demonstration Shortcut, thereby enabling the LLM to effectively learn new input-label relationships from demonstrations. To achieve this, we introduce In-Context Calibration, a demonstration-aware calibration method. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in two settings: (1) the Original ICL Task using the standard label space and (2) the Task Learning setting, where the label space is replaced with semantically unrelated tokens. In both settings, In-Context Calibration demonstrates substantial improvements, with results generalized across three LLM families (OPT, GPT, and Llama2) under various configurations.

SeongKu Kang, Dongha Lee, Wonbin Kweon et al.

Over the past decades, for One-Class Collaborative Filtering (OCCF), many learning objectives have been researched based on a variety of underlying probabilistic models. From our analysis, we observe that models trained with different OCCF objectives capture distinct aspects of user-item relationships, which in turn produces complementary recommendations. This paper proposes a novel OCCF framework, named ConCF, that exploits the complementarity from heterogeneous objectives throughout the training process, generating a more generalizable model. ConCF constructs a multi-branch variant of a given target model by adding auxiliary heads, each of which is trained with heterogeneous objectives. Then, it generates consensus by consolidating the various views from the heads, and guides the heads based on the consensus. The heads are collaboratively evolved based on their complementarity throughout the training, which again results in generating more accurate consensus iteratively. After training, we convert the multi-branch architecture back to the original target model by removing the auxiliary heads, thus there is no extra inference cost for the deployment. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that ConCF significantly improves the generalization of the model by exploiting the complementarity from heterogeneous objectives.

Dongha Lee, Jiaming Shen, SeongKu Kang et al.

Topic taxonomies, which represent the latent topic (or category) structure of document collections, provide valuable knowledge of contents in many applications such as web search and information filtering. Recently, several unsupervised methods have been developed to automatically construct the topic taxonomy from a text corpus, but it is challenging to generate the desired taxonomy without any prior knowledge. In this paper, we study how to leverage the partial (or incomplete) information about the topic structure as guidance to find out the complete topic taxonomy. We propose a novel framework for topic taxonomy completion, named TaxoCom, which recursively expands the topic taxonomy by discovering novel sub-topic clusters of terms and documents. To effectively identify novel topics within a hierarchical topic structure, TaxoCom devises its embedding and clustering techniques to be closely-linked with each other: (i) locally discriminative embedding optimizes the text embedding space to be discriminative among known (i.e., given) sub-topics, and (ii) novelty adaptive clustering assigns terms into either one of the known sub-topics or novel sub-topics. Our comprehensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that TaxoCom not only generates the high-quality topic taxonomy in terms of term coherency and topic coverage but also outperforms all other baselines for a downstream task.

Wonbin Kweon, SeongKu Kang, Hwanjo Yu

For personalized ranking models, the well-calibrated probability of an item being preferred by a user has great practical value. While existing work shows promising results in image classification, probability calibration has not been much explored for personalized ranking. In this paper, we aim to estimate the calibrated probability of how likely a user will prefer an item. We investigate various parametric distributions and propose two parametric calibration methods, namely Gaussian calibration and Gamma calibration. Each proposed method can be seen as a post-processing function that maps the ranking scores of pre-trained models to well-calibrated preference probabilities, without affecting the recommendation performance. We also design the unbiased empirical risk minimization framework that guides the calibration methods to learning of true preference probability from the biased user-item interaction dataset. Extensive evaluations with various personalized ranking models on real-world datasets show that both the proposed calibration methods and the unbiased empirical risk minimization significantly improve the calibration performance.

Dongha Lee, Dongmin Hyun, Jiawei Han et al.

Identifying outlier documents, whose content is different from the majority of the documents in a corpus, has played an important role to manage a large text collection. However, due to the absence of explicit information about the inlier (or target) distribution, existing unsupervised outlier detectors are likely to make unreliable results depending on the density or diversity of the outliers in the corpus. To address this challenge, we introduce a new task referred to as out-of-category detection, which aims to distinguish the documents according to their semantic relevance to the inlier (or target) categories by using the category names as weak supervision. In practice, this task can be widely applicable in that it can flexibly designate the scope of target categories according to users' interests while requiring only the target-category names as minimum guidance. In this paper, we present an out-of-category detection framework, which effectively measures how confidently each document belongs to one of the target categories based on its category-specific relevance score. Our framework adopts a two-step approach; (i) it first generates the pseudo-category label of all unlabeled documents by exploiting the word-document similarity encoded in a text embedding space, then (ii) it trains a neural classifier by using the pseudo-labels in order to compute the confidence from its target-category prediction. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves the best detection performance among all baseline methods in various scenarios specifying different target categories.

Dongha Lee, Su Kim, Seonghyeon Lee et al.

With the great success of deep learning in various domains, graph neural networks (GNNs) also become a dominant approach to graph classification. By the help of a global readout operation that simply aggregates all node (or node-cluster) representations, existing GNN classifiers obtain a graph-level representation of an input graph and predict its class label using the representation. However, such global aggregation does not consider the structural information of each node, which results in information loss on the global structure. Particularly, it limits the discrimination power by enforcing the same weight parameters of the classifier for all the node representations; in practice, each of them contributes to target classes differently depending on its structural semantic. In this work, we propose structural semantic readout (SSRead) to summarize the node representations at the position-level, which allows to model the position-specific weight parameters for classification as well as to effectively capture the graph semantic relevant to the global structure. Given an input graph, SSRead aims to identify structurally-meaningful positions by using the semantic alignment between its nodes and structural prototypes, which encode the prototypical features of each position. The structural prototypes are optimized to minimize the alignment cost for all training graphs, while the other GNN parameters are trained to predict the class labels. Our experimental results demonstrate that SSRead significantly improves the classification performance and interpretability of GNN classifiers while being compatible with a variety of aggregation functions, GNN architectures, and learning frameworks.

Dongha Lee, Sehun Yu, Hyunjun Ju et al.

Most recent studies on detecting and localizing temporal anomalies have mainly employed deep neural networks to learn the normal patterns of temporal data in an unsupervised manner. Unlike them, the goal of our work is to fully utilize instance-level (or weak) anomaly labels, which only indicate whether any anomalous events occurred or not in each instance of temporal data. In this paper, we present WETAS, a novel framework that effectively identifies anomalous temporal segments (i.e., consecutive time points) in an input instance. WETAS learns discriminative features from the instance-level labels so that it infers the sequential order of normal and anomalous segments within each instance, which can be used as a rough segmentation mask. Based on the dynamic time warping (DTW) alignment between the input instance and its segmentation mask, WETAS obtains the result of temporal segmentation, and simultaneously, it further enhances itself by using the mask as additional supervision. Our experiments show that WETAS considerably outperforms other baselines in terms of the localization of temporal anomalies, and also it provides more informative results than point-level detection methods.

Junsu Cho, SeongKu Kang, Dongmin Hyun et al.

Session-based Recommender Systems (SRSs) have been actively developed to recommend the next item of an anonymous short item sequence (i.e., session). Unlike sequence-aware recommender systems where the whole interaction sequence of each user can be used to model both the short-term interest and the general interest of the user, the absence of user-dependent information in SRSs makes it difficult to directly derive the user's general interest from data. Therefore, existing SRSs have focused on how to effectively model the information about short-term interest within the sessions, but they are insufficient to capture the general interest of users. To this end, we propose a novel framework to overcome the limitation of SRSs, named ProxySR, which imitates the missing information in SRSs (i.e., general interest of users) by modeling proxies of sessions. ProxySR selects a proxy for the input session in an unsupervised manner, and combines it with the encoded short-term interest of the session. As a proxy is jointly learned with the short-term interest and selected by multiple sessions, a proxy learns to play the role of the general interest of a user and ProxySR learns how to select a suitable proxy for an input session. Moreover, we propose another real-world situation of SRSs where a few users are logged-in and leave their identifiers in sessions, and a revision of ProxySR for the situation. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that ProxySR considerably outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors, and the proxies successfully imitate the general interest of the users without any user-dependent information.

SeongKu Kang, Junyoung Hwang, Wonbin Kweon et al.

Recommender Systems (RS) have employed knowledge distillation which is a model compression technique training a compact student model with the knowledge transferred from a pre-trained large teacher model. Recent work has shown that transferring knowledge from the teacher's intermediate layer significantly improves the recommendation quality of the student. However, they transfer the knowledge of individual representation point-wise and thus have a limitation in that primary information of RS lies in the relations in the representation space. This paper proposes a new topology distillation approach that guides the student by transferring the topological structure built upon the relations in the teacher space. We first observe that simply making the student learn the whole topological structure is not always effective and even degrades the student's performance. We demonstrate that because the capacity of the student is highly limited compared to that of the teacher, learning the whole topological structure is daunting for the student. To address this issue, we propose a novel method named Hierarchical Topology Distillation (HTD) which distills the topology hierarchically to cope with the large capacity gap. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors. We also provide in-depth analyses to ascertain the benefit of distilling the topology for RS.

Wonbin Kweon, SeongKu Kang, Hwanjo Yu

Recommender systems (RS) have started to employ knowledge distillation, which is a model compression technique training a compact model (student) with the knowledge transferred from a cumbersome model (teacher). The state-of-the-art methods rely on unidirectional distillation transferring the knowledge only from the teacher to the student, with an underlying assumption that the teacher is always superior to the student. However, we demonstrate that the student performs better than the teacher on a significant proportion of the test set, especially for RS. Based on this observation, we propose Bidirectional Distillation (BD) framework whereby both the teacher and the student collaboratively improve with each other. Specifically, each model is trained with the distillation loss that makes to follow the other's prediction along with its original loss function. For effective bidirectional distillation, we propose rank discrepancy-aware sampling scheme to distill only the informative knowledge that can fully enhance each other. The proposed scheme is designed to effectively cope with a large performance gap between the teacher and the student. Trained in the bidirectional way, it turns out that both the teacher and the student are significantly improved compared to when being trained separately. Our extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our proposed framework consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors. We also provide analyses for an in-depth understanding of BD and ablation studies to verify the effectiveness of each proposed component.

Seonghyeon Lee, Dongha Lee, Hwanjo Yu

Recent studies on neural networks with pre-trained weights (i.e., BERT) have mainly focused on a low-dimensional subspace, where the embedding vectors computed from input words (or their contexts) are located. In this work, we propose a new approach to finding and regularizing the remainder of the space, referred to as out-of-manifold, which cannot be accessed through the words. Specifically, we synthesize the out-of-manifold embeddings based on two embeddings obtained from actually-observed words, to utilize them for fine-tuning the network. A discriminator is trained to detect whether an input embedding is located inside the manifold or not, and simultaneously, a generator is optimized to produce new embeddings that can be easily identified as out-of-manifold by the discriminator. These two modules successfully collaborate in a unified and end-to-end manner for regularizing the out-of-manifold. Our extensive evaluation on various text classification benchmarks demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach, as well as its good compatibility with existing data augmentation techniques which aim to enhance the manifold.

Dongha Lee, SeongKu Kang, Hyunjun Ju et al.

The goal of one-class collaborative filtering (OCCF) is to identify the user-item pairs that are positively-related but have not been interacted yet, where only a small portion of positive user-item interactions (e.g., users' implicit feedback) are observed. For discriminative modeling between positive and negative interactions, most previous work relied on negative sampling to some extent, which refers to considering unobserved user-item pairs as negative, as actual negative ones are unknown. However, the negative sampling scheme has critical limitations because it may choose "positive but unobserved" pairs as negative. This paper proposes a novel OCCF framework, named as BUIR, which does not require negative sampling. To make the representations of positively-related users and items similar to each other while avoiding a collapsed solution, BUIR adopts two distinct encoder networks that learn from each other; the first encoder is trained to predict the output of the second encoder as its target, while the second encoder provides the consistent targets by slowly approximating the first encoder. In addition, BUIR effectively alleviates the data sparsity issue of OCCF, by applying stochastic data augmentation to encoder inputs. Based on the neighborhood information of users and items, BUIR randomly generates the augmented views of each positive interaction each time it encodes, then further trains the model by this self-supervision. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that BUIR consistently and significantly outperforms all baseline methods by a large margin especially for much sparse datasets in which any assumptions about negative interactions are less valid.