CLApr 28, 2023
ChatGPT Evaluation on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse RelationsChunkit Chan, Jiayang Cheng, Weiqi Wang et al. · tencent-ai
This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT's promising performance across various tasks, we proceed to carry out thorough evaluations on the whole test sets of 11 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based, and dialogue-based discourse relations. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we employ three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. Through our study, we discover that ChatGPT exhibits exceptional proficiency in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, albeit it may not possess the same level of expertise in identifying the temporal order between two events. While it is capable of identifying the majority of discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, the implicit discourse relation remains a formidable challenge. Concurrently, ChatGPT demonstrates subpar performance in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.
CLOct 17, 2023Code
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question AnsweringHaochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang et al. · tencent-ai
Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model's ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33% of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.
CLJun 3, 2022
Acquiring and Modelling Abstract Commonsense Knowledge via ConceptualizationMutian He, Tianqing Fang, Weiqi Wang et al. · tencent-ai
Conceptualization, or viewing entities and situations as instances of abstract concepts in mind and making inferences based on that, is a vital component in human intelligence for commonsense reasoning. Despite recent progress in artificial intelligence to acquire and model commonsense attributed to neural language models and commonsense knowledge graphs (CKGs), conceptualization is yet to be introduced thoroughly, making current approaches ineffective to cover knowledge about countless diverse entities and situations in the real world. To address the problem, we thoroughly study the role of conceptualization in commonsense reasoning, and formulate a framework to replicate human conceptual induction by acquiring abstract knowledge about events regarding abstract concepts, as well as higher-level triples or inferences upon them. We then apply the framework to ATOMIC, a large-scale human-annotated CKG, aided by the taxonomy Probase. We annotate a dataset on the validity of contextualized conceptualizations from ATOMIC on both event and triple levels, develop a series of heuristic rules based on linguistic features, and train a set of neural models to generate and verify abstract knowledge. Based on these components, a pipeline to acquire abstract knowledge is built. A large abstract CKG upon ATOMIC is then induced, ready to be instantiated to infer about unseen entities or situations. Finally, we empirically show the benefits of augmenting CKGs with abstract knowledge in downstream tasks like commonsense inference and zero-shot commonsense QA.
CLNov 15, 2022
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense DiscoveryChanglong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu et al. · amazon-science
Understanding users' intentions in e-commerce platforms requires commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we present FolkScope, an intention knowledge graph construction framework to reveal the structure of humans' minds about purchasing items. As commonsense knowledge is usually ineffable and not expressed explicitly, it is challenging to perform information extraction. Thus, we propose a new approach that leverages the generation power of large language models~(LLMs) and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the knowledge graph. LLMs first generate intention assertions via e-commerce-specific prompts to explain shopping behaviors, where the intention can be an open reason or a predicate falling into one of 18 categories aligning with ConceptNet, e.g., IsA, MadeOf, UsedFor, etc. Then we annotate plausibility and typicality labels of sampled intentions as training data in order to populate human judgments to all automatic generations. Last, to structurize the assertions, we propose pattern mining and conceptualization to form more condensed and abstract knowledge. Extensive evaluations and studies demonstrate that our constructed knowledge graph can well model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications.
CLApr 20, 2023
CKBP v2: Better Annotation and Reasoning for Commonsense Knowledge Base PopulationTianqing Fang, Quyet V. Do, Zihao Zheng et al. · tencent-ai
Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKB) Population, which aims at automatically expanding knowledge in CSKBs with external resources, is an important yet hard task in NLP. Fang et al. (2021a) proposed a CSKB Population (CKBP) framework with an evaluation set CKBP v1. However, CKBP v1 relies on crowdsourced annotations that suffer from a considerable number of mislabeled answers, and the evaluationset lacks alignment with the external knowledge source due to random sampling. In this paper, we introduce CKBP v2, a new high-quality CSKB Population evaluation set that addresses the two aforementioned issues by employing domain experts as annotators and incorporating diversified adversarial samples to make the evaluation data more representative. We show that CKBP v2 serves as a challenging and representative evaluation dataset for the CSKB Population task, while its development set aids in selecting a population model that leads to improved knowledge acquisition for downstream commonsense reasoning. A better population model can also help acquire more informative commonsense knowledge as additional supervision signals for both generative commonsense inference and zero-shot commonsense question answering. Specifically, the question-answering model based on DeBERTa-v3-large (He et al., 2023b) even outperforms powerful large language models in a zero-shot setting, including ChatGPT and GPT-3.5.
CLOct 19, 2023
StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical UnderstandingCheng Jiayang, Lin Qiu, Tsz Ho Chan et al. · tencent-ai
Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning. In this paper, we evaluate the ability to identify and generate analogies by constructing a first-of-its-kind large-scale story-level analogy corpus, \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, which contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory. We design a set of tests on \textsc{StoryAnalogy}, presenting the first evaluation of story-level analogy identification and generation. Interestingly, we find that the analogy identification tasks are incredibly difficult not only for sentence embedding models but also for the recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMa. ChatGPT, for example, only achieved around 30% accuracy in multiple-choice questions (compared to over 85% accuracy for humans). Furthermore, we observe that the data in \textsc{StoryAnalogy} can improve the quality of analogy generation in LLMs, where a fine-tuned FlanT5-xxl model achieves comparable performance to zero-shot ChatGPT.
ROJun 30, 2022
Understanding Physical Effects for Effective Tool-useZeyu Zhang, Ziyuan Jiao, Weiqi Wang et al. · pku
We present a robot learning and planning framework that produces an effective tool-use strategy with the least joint efforts, capable of handling objects different from training. Leveraging a Finite Element Method (FEM)-based simulator that reproduces fine-grained, continuous visual and physical effects given observed tool-use events, the essential physical properties contributing to the effects are identified through the proposed Iterative Deepening Symbolic Regression (IDSR) algorithm. We further devise an optimal control-based motion planning scheme to integrate robot- and tool-specific kinematics and dynamics to produce an effective trajectory that enacts the learned properties. In simulation, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can produce more effective tool-use strategies, drastically different from the observed ones in two exemplar tasks.
ROMar 10, 2023
Rearrange Indoor Scenes for Human-Robot Co-ActivityWeiqi Wang, Zihang Zhao, Ziyuan Jiao et al. · pku
We present an optimization-based framework for rearranging indoor furniture to accommodate human-robot co-activities better. The rearrangement aims to afford sufficient accessible space for robot activities without compromising everyday human activities. To retain human activities, our algorithm preserves the functional relations among furniture by integrating spatial and semantic co-occurrence extracted from SUNCG and ConceptNet, respectively. By defining the robot's accessible space by the amount of open space it can traverse and the number of objects it can reach, we formulate the rearrangement for human-robot co-activity as an optimization problem, solved by adaptive simulated annealing (ASA) and covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES). Our experiments on the SUNCG dataset quantitatively show that rearranged scenes provide an average of 14% more accessible space and 30% more objects to interact with. The quality of the rearranged scenes is qualitatively validated by a human study, indicating the efficacy of the proposed strategy.
CLNov 15, 2023
AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment GraphZhaowei Wang, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang et al. · tencent-ai
Cognitive research indicates that abstraction ability is essential in human intelligence, which remains under-explored in language models. In this paper, we present AbsPyramid, a unified entailment graph of 221K textual descriptions of abstraction knowledge. While existing resources only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains, AbsPyramid collects abstract knowledge for three components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models in the open domain. Experimental results demonstrate that current LLMs face challenges comprehending abstraction knowledge in zero-shot and few-shot settings. By training on our rich abstraction knowledge, we find LLMs can acquire basic abstraction abilities and generalize to unseen events. In the meantime, we empirically show that our benchmark is comprehensive to enhance LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks.
LGJan 30Code
HeaPA: Difficulty-Aware Heap Sampling and On-Policy Query Augmentation for LLM Reinforcement LearningWeiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Binxuan Huang et al.
RLVR is now a standard way to train LLMs on reasoning tasks with verifiable outcomes, but when rollout generation dominates the cost, efficiency depends heavily on which prompts you sample and when. In practice, prompt pools are often static or only loosely tied to the model's learning progress, so uniform sampling can't keep up with the shifting capability frontier and ends up wasting rollouts on prompts that are already solved or still out of reach. Existing approaches improve efficiency through filtering, curricula, adaptive rollout allocation, or teacher guidance, but they typically assume a fixed pool-which makes it hard to support stable on-policy pool growth-or they add extra teacher cost and latency. We introduce HeaPA (Heap Sampling and On-Policy Query Augmentation), which maintains a bounded, evolving pool, tracks the frontier using heap-based boundary sampling, expands the pool via on-policy augmentation with lightweight asynchronous validation, and stabilizes correlated queries through topology-aware re-estimation of pool statistics and controlled reinsertion. Across two training corpora, two training recipes, and seven benchmarks, HeaPA consistently improves accuracy and reaches target performance with fewer computations while keeping wall-clock time comparable. Our analyses suggest these gains come from frontier-focused sampling and on-policy pool growth, with the benefits becoming larger as model scale increases. Our code is available at https://github.com/horizon-rl/HeaPA.
56.7SEMay 26
ConVer: Using Contracts and Loop Invariant Synthesis for Scalable Formal Software VerificationMuhammad A. A. Pirzada, Weiqi Wang, Yiannis Charalambous et al.
Formal verification of large C programs is impeded by state-space explosion: Bounded Model Checking (BMC) tools must encode the entire state space up to the predetermined bound by unrolling all nested constructs. We present ConVer, a top-down compositional verification tool. Given a C program with a top-level assertion, ConVer decomposes verification top-down: it uses a large language model (LLM) to synthesise function contracts from the system property, then alternates system-level and function-level checks in a CEGAR-CEGIS loop, refining contracts whenever a check fails via SMART ICE learning. We evaluate ConVer on four benchmark suites of increasing difficulty and against other state-of-the-art (SOTA) tools. On the Frama-C benchmark of 45 simple C programs, ConVer achieves 82-96% verification success across three LLM backends, with 93-95% of converged programs requiring only a single CEGAR-CEGIS iteration. On the X.509 parser benchmark (6~programs) and LF2C-Simple suite (17 programs), ConVer achieves 33-50% and 82-88% success respectively. On the VerifyThis suite of 11 recursive and loop-intensive programs, the Pre-Abstraction strategy achieves 55-64% success. In addition, we present ESBMC-LF a preprocessor tool that converts LF models to C while preserving the properties of the LF files, enabling ConVer to verify them. We transpile the LF Verifier Benchmarks using ESBMC-LF to C; we denote those LF-Hard. We show that ConVer successfully verifies 67% of LF-Hard benchmarks overall.
CLOct 18, 2023
Gold: A Global and Local-aware Denoising Framework for Commonsense Knowledge Graph Noise DetectionZheye Deng, Weiqi Wang, Zhaowei Wang et al.
Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (CSKGs) are crucial for commonsense reasoning, yet constructing them through human annotations can be costly. As a result, various automatic methods have been proposed to construct CSKG with larger semantic coverage. However, these unsupervised approaches introduce spurious noise that can lower the quality of the resulting CSKG, which cannot be tackled easily by existing denoising algorithms due to the unique characteristics of nodes and structures in CSKGs. To address this issue, we propose Gold (Global and Local-aware Denoising), a denoising framework for CSKGs that incorporates entity semantic information, global rules, and local structural information from the CSKG. Experiment results demonstrate that Gold outperforms all baseline methods in noise detection tasks on synthetic noisy CSKG benchmarks. Furthermore, we show that denoising a real-world CSKG is effective and even benefits the downstream zero-shot commonsense question-answering task.
AIOct 8, 2023
TILFA: A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument MiningQing Zong, Zhaowei Wang, Baixuan Xu et al.
A main goal of Argument Mining (AM) is to analyze an author's stance. Unlike previous AM datasets focusing only on text, the shared task at the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining introduces a dataset including both text and images. Importantly, these images contain both visual elements and optical characters. Our new framework, TILFA (A Unified Framework for Text, Image, and Layout Fusion in Argument Mining), is designed to handle this mixed data. It excels at not only understanding text but also detecting optical characters and recognizing layout details in images. Our model significantly outperforms existing baselines, earning our team, KnowComp, the 1st place in the leaderboard of Argumentative Stance Classification subtask in this shared task.
LGMay 21, 2022
A Novel Markov Model for Near-Term Railway Delay PredictionJin Xu, Weiqi Wang, Zheming Gao et al.
Predicting the near-future delay with accuracy for trains is momentous for railway operations and passengers' traveling experience. This work aims to design prediction models for train delays based on Netherlands Railway data. We first develop a chi-square test to show that the delay evolution over stations follows a first-order Markov chain. We then propose a delay prediction model based on non-homogeneous Markov chains. To deal with the sparsity of the transition matrices of the Markov chains, we propose a novel matrix recovery approach that relies on Gaussian kernel density estimation. Our numerical tests show that this recovery approach outperforms other heuristic approaches in prediction accuracy. The Markov chain model we propose also shows to be better than other widely-used time series models with respect to both interpretability and prediction accuracy. Moreover, our proposed model does not require a complicated training process, which is capable of handling large-scale forecasting problems.
88.7CRMay 23
Ellipsoid Control: A White-list Jailbreak Defense via Benign Latent ModelingLuoyu Chen, Weiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian et al.
Representation engineering (RepE) defenses have shown strong robustness against jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs). However, these methods fundamentally rely on black-list supervision: they learn jailbreak-to-refusal activation transformations from harmful or jailbreak data that are inherently incomplete and continuously evolving. Hence, the performance of RepE-based defenses becomes tightly coupled to the quality and coverage of collected harmful samples, leaving models vulnerable to unseen attacks. This reliance also obscures the distinction between defenses that fit known harmful distributions and defenses that protect a benign latent region without estimating the harmful distribution. We adopt the opposite, the white-list perspective, by leveraging the accessibility and abundance of benign data. The goal is to elicit refusal on arbitrary inputs while ensuring that harmless inputs are not falsely rejected. This shifts the core research question to: How can we design a robust benign-latent preservation mechanism such that the benign latent distribution remains intact while refusal is elicited? To answer this, we propose Ellipsoid Control, a test-time defense. It performs projected gradient descent that can elicit refusal on arbitrary inputs, aiming to improve defense effectiveness. At the same time, an anisotropic benign-geometry ellipsoid is fitted from abundant benign data to constrain the update to minimize distortion of the benign latent geometry. This tight constraint helps preserve model utility. Across multiple LLMs, jailbreak attacks, benign tasks, and safety-boundary evaluations, Ellipsoid Control consistently enhances safety while better preserving utility, demonstrating the effectiveness of the white-list approach for jailbreak defense
72.4CRMay 23
Steering Beyond the Support: Adversarial Training on Unsupervised Jailbroken Activation SimulationLuoyu Chen, Weiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian et al.
Jailbreak prompts can trigger harmful completions on aligned LLMs, In accordance, safety steering has been proposed: test-time activation interventions that steer jailbreak activations to trigger refusal while preserving benign utility. However, existing steering methods are fundamentally supervised and tied to a static, limited training set, whereas real jailbreaks evolve and are often out-of-distributed from the training set, leading to failures on unseen attacks. In this paper, we tackle the failure on unseen jailbreaks problem, base on unsupervised latent direction discovery. We propose a bi-level adversarial training framework for zero-shot jailbreak defense. In the inner step, we simulate diverse jail-broken activations by extrapolating from refusal-state harmful-request activations via unsupervised latent direction discovery, which expands the coverage of real jailbreak activation subspaces. In the outer step, we train a potential-induced steering field to push these adversarial jailbroken states into refusal regions while keeping benign unchanged. Across three LLMs and six classical jailbreak families, our method achieves strong defense with attack success rates mostly below 5%, and rising subspace coverage throughout training helps explain the improved generalization.
CLJan 14, 2024Code
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense ReasoningWeiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li et al. · tencent-ai
The sequential process of conceptualization and instantiation is essential to generalizable commonsense reasoning as it allows the application of existing knowledge to unfamiliar scenarios. However, existing works tend to undervalue the step of instantiation and heavily rely on pre-built concept taxonomies and human annotations to collect both types of knowledge, resulting in a lack of instantiated knowledge to complete reasoning, high cost, and limited scalability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce CANDLE, a distillation framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. By applying CANDLE to ATOMIC, we construct a comprehensive knowledge base comprising six million conceptualizations and instantiated commonsense knowledge triples. Both types of knowledge are firmly rooted in the original ATOMIC dataset, and intrinsic evaluations demonstrate their exceptional quality and diversity. Empirical results indicate that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across four downstream tasks. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CANDLE.
CLApr 22, 2024Code
Text-Tuple-Table: Towards Information Integration in Text-to-Table Generation via Global Tuple ExtractionZheye Deng, Chunkit Chan, Weiqi Wang et al.
The task of condensing large chunks of textual information into concise and structured tables has gained attention recently due to the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential benefit for downstream tasks, such as text summarization and text mining. Previous approaches often generate tables that directly replicate information from the text, limiting their applicability in broader contexts, as text-to-table generation in real-life scenarios necessitates information extraction, reasoning, and integration. However, there is a lack of both datasets and methodologies towards this task. In this paper, we introduce LiveSum, a new benchmark dataset created for generating summary tables of competitions based on real-time commentary texts. We evaluate the performances of state-of-the-art LLMs on this task in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings, and additionally propose a novel pipeline called $T^3$(Text-Tuple-Table) to improve their performances. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LLMs still struggle with this task even after fine-tuning, while our approach can offer substantial performance gains without explicit training. Further analyses demonstrate that our method exhibits strong generalization abilities, surpassing previous approaches on several other text-to-table datasets. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/LiveSum.
CLMay 19, 2025Code
From Automation to Autonomy: A Survey on Large Language Models in Scientific DiscoveryTianshi Zheng, Zheye Deng, Hong Ting Tsang et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are catalyzing a paradigm shift in scientific discovery, evolving from task-specific automation tools into increasingly autonomous agents and fundamentally redefining research processes and human-AI collaboration. This survey systematically charts this burgeoning field, placing a central focus on the changing roles and escalating capabilities of LLMs in science. Through the lens of the scientific method, we introduce a foundational three-level taxonomy-Tool, Analyst, and Scientist-to delineate their escalating autonomy and evolving responsibilities within the research lifecycle. We further identify pivotal challenges and future research trajectories such as robotic automation, self-improvement, and ethical governance. Overall, this survey provides a conceptual architecture and strategic foresight to navigate and shape the future of AI-driven scientific discovery, fostering both rapid innovation and responsible advancement. Github Repository: https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/Awesome-LLM-Scientific-Discovery.
26.6LGMay 20
Approximate Machine Unlearning through Manifold Representation Forgetting Guided by Self Mode ConnectivityWeiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, Chenhan Zhang et al.
Machine unlearning is a fundamental mechanism that enforces the right to be forgotten. Existing unlearning studies that rely on label manipulation or task-gradient reversal often deliver limited unlearning effectiveness. Moreover, they can undermine the original learning objective and typically do not guarantee equivalence to standard unlearning by retraining. In this paper, we propose \textbf{ManiF-SMC} (\textbf{Mani}fold \textbf{F}orgetting with \textbf{S}elf \textbf{M}ode \textbf{C}onnectivity), motivated by the observation that a model retrained on the remaining data tends to classify erased samples by their semantic similarity to the retained data. We begin with systematically recasting the approximate unlearning as pushing each erased sample away from its original learned manifold representation centroid toward its nearest semantic neighbors in the retained data. This reformulation aligns unlearning with retraining behavior and operates purely in representation space, reducing reliance on labels and task-specific gradients. To tackle the manifold representation-based unlearning problem, ManiF-SMC encapsulates the unlearning and representation preservation goals in a margin-based triplet loss. Because finding a suitable margin for unlearning is challenging, we propose a self-mode-connectivity module that rapidly reconstructs the local manifold to guide the adaptive margins generation for each unlearning case. Extensive experiments on four representative datasets show that ManiF-SMC achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to state-of-the-art approximate methods while operating solely within the model's representation space.
AIFeb 22, 2025Code
Patterns Over Principles: The Fragility of Inductive Reasoning in LLMs under Noisy ObservationsChunyang Li, Weiqi Wang, Tianshi Zheng et al.
Inductive reasoning, a cornerstone of human cognition, enables generalization from limited data but hasn't yet been fully achieved by large language models (LLMs). While modern LLMs excel at reasoning tasks, their ability to maintain stable and consistent rule abstraction under imperfect observations remains underexplored. To fill this gap, in this work, we introduce Robust Rule Induction, a task that evaluates LLMs' capability in inferring rules from data that are fused with noisy examples. To address this task, we further propose Sample-steered Rule Refinement (SRR), a method enhancing reasoning stability via observation diversification and execution-guided feedback. Experiments across arithmetic, cryptography, and list functions reveal: (1) SRR outperforms other methods with minimal performance degradation under noise; (2) Despite slight accuracy variation, LLMs exhibit instability under noise (e.g., 0% accuracy change with only 70% consistent score); (3) Counterfactual task gaps highlight LLMs' reliance on memorized patterns over genuine abstraction. Our findings challenge LLMs' reasoning robustness, revealing susceptibility to hypothesis drift and pattern overfitting, while providing empirical evidence critical for developing human-like inductive systems. Code and data are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/Robust-Rule-Induction.
CLMay 30, 2025Code
Revisiting Epistemic Markers in Confidence Estimation: Can Markers Accurately Reflect Large Language Models' Uncertainty?Jiayu Liu, Qing Zong, Weiqi Wang et al.
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes domains, accurately assessing their confidence is crucial. Humans typically express confidence through epistemic markers (e.g., "fairly confident") instead of numerical values. However, it remains unclear whether LLMs consistently use these markers to reflect their intrinsic confidence due to the difficulty of quantifying uncertainty associated with various markers. To address this gap, we first define marker confidence as the observed accuracy when a model employs an epistemic marker. We evaluate its stability across multiple question-answering datasets in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings for open-source and proprietary LLMs. Our results show that while markers generalize well within the same distribution, their confidence is inconsistent in out-of-distribution scenarios. These findings raise significant concerns about the reliability of epistemic markers for confidence estimation, underscoring the need for improved alignment between marker based confidence and actual model uncertainty. Our code is available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/MarCon.
CLApr 14, 2025Code
Can LLMs Generate Tabular Summaries of Science Papers? Rethinking the Evaluation ProtocolWeiqi Wang, Jiefu Ou, Yangqiu Song et al.
Literature review tables are essential for summarizing and comparing collections of scientific papers. We explore the task of generating tables that best fulfill a user's informational needs given a collection of scientific papers. Building on recent work (Newman et al., 2024), we extend prior approaches to address real-world complexities through a combination of LLM-based methods and human annotations. Our contributions focus on three key challenges encountered in real-world use: (i) User prompts are often under-specified; (ii) Retrieved candidate papers frequently contain irrelevant content; and (iii) Task evaluation should move beyond shallow text similarity techniques and instead assess the utility of inferred tables for information-seeking tasks (e.g., comparing papers). To support reproducible evaluation, we introduce ARXIV2TABLE, a more realistic and challenging benchmark for this task, along with a novel approach to improve literature review table generation in real-world scenarios. Our extensive experiments on this benchmark show that both open-weight and proprietary LLMs struggle with the task, highlighting its difficulty and the need for further advancements. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/arXiv2Table.
CRJan 12
BlindU: Blind Machine Unlearning without Revealing Erasing DataWeiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, Chenhan Zhang et al.
Machine unlearning enables data holders to remove the contribution of their specified samples from trained models to protect their privacy. However, it is paradoxical that most unlearning methods require the unlearning requesters to firstly upload their data to the server as a prerequisite for unlearning. These methods are infeasible in many privacy-preserving scenarios where servers are prohibited from accessing users' data, such as federated learning (FL). In this paper, we explore how to implement unlearning under the condition of not uncovering the erasing data to the server. We propose \textbf{Blind Unlearning (BlindU)}, which carries out unlearning using compressed representations instead of original inputs. BlindU only involves the server and the unlearning user: the user locally generates privacy-preserving representations, and the server performs unlearning solely on these representations and their labels. For the FL model training, we employ the information bottleneck (IB) mechanism. The encoder of the IB-based FL model learns representations that distort maximum task-irrelevant information from inputs, allowing FL users to generate compressed representations locally. For effective unlearning using compressed representation, BlindU integrates two dedicated unlearning modules tailored explicitly for IB-based models and uses a multiple gradient descent algorithm to balance forgetting and utility retaining. While IB compression already provides protection for task-irrelevant information of inputs, to further enhance the privacy protection, we introduce a noise-free differential privacy (DP) masking method to deal with the raw erasing data before compressing. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results illustrate the superiority of BlindU in privacy protection and unlearning effectiveness compared with the best existing privacy-preserving unlearning benchmarks.
LGFeb 3
EVE: Efficient Verification of Data Erasure through Customized Perturbation in Approximate UnlearningWeiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, Chenhan Zhang et al.
Verifying whether the machine unlearning process has been properly executed is critical but remains underexplored. Some existing approaches propose unlearning verification methods based on backdooring techniques. However, these methods typically require participation in the model's initial training phase to backdoor the model for later verification, which is inefficient and impractical. In this paper, we propose an efficient verification of erasure method (EVE) for verifying machine unlearning without requiring involvement in the model's initial training process. The core idea is to perturb the unlearning data to ensure the model prediction of the specified samples will change before and after unlearning with perturbed data. The unlearning users can leverage the observation of the changes as a verification signal. Specifically, the perturbations are designed with two key objectives: ensuring the unlearning effect and altering the unlearned model's prediction of target samples. We formalize the perturbation generation as an adversarial optimization problem, solving it by aligning the unlearning gradient with the gradient of boundary change for target samples. We conducted extensive experiments, and the results show that EVE can verify machine unlearning without involving the model's initial training process, unlike backdoor-based methods. Moreover, EVE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art unlearning verification methods, offering significant speedup in efficiency while enhancing verification accuracy. The source code of EVE is released at \uline{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EVE-C143}, providing a novel tool for verification of machine unlearning.
CLMay 22, 2025Code
INFERENCEDYNAMICS: Efficient Routing Across LLMs through Structured Capability and Knowledge ProfilingHaochen Shi, Tianshi Zheng, Weiqi Wang et al.
Large Language Model (LLM) routing is a pivotal technique for navigating a diverse landscape of LLMs, aiming to select the best-performing LLMs tailored to the domains of user queries, while managing computational resources. However, current routing approaches often face limitations in scalability when dealing with a large pool of specialized LLMs, or in their adaptability to extending model scope and evolving capability domains. To overcome those challenges, we propose InferenceDynamics, a flexible and scalable multi-dimensional routing framework by modeling the capability and knowledge of models. We operate it on our comprehensive dataset RouteMix, and demonstrate its effectiveness and generalizability in group-level routing using modern benchmarks including MMLU-Pro, GPQA, BigGenBench, and LiveBench, showcasing its ability to identify and leverage top-performing models for given tasks, leading to superior outcomes with efficient resource utilization. The broader adoption of Inference Dynamics can empower users to harness the full specialized potential of the LLM ecosystem, and our code will be made publicly available to encourage further research.
CLApr 18, 2025Code
Science Hierarchography: Hierarchical Organization of Science LiteratureMuhan Gao, Jash Shah, Weiqi Wang et al.
Scientific knowledge is growing rapidly, making it difficult to track progress and high-level conceptual links across broad disciplines. While tools like citation networks and search engines help retrieve related papers, they lack the abstraction needed to capture the needed to represent the density and structure of activity across subfields. We motivate SCIENCE HIERARCHOGRAPHY, the goal of organizing scientific literature into a high-quality hierarchical structure that spans multiple levels of abstraction -- from broad domains to specific studies. Such a representation can provide insights into which fields are well-explored and which are under-explored. To achieve this goal, we develop a hybrid approach that combines efficient embedding-based clustering with LLM-based prompting, striking a balance between scalability and semantic precision. Compared to LLM-heavy methods like iterative tree construction, our approach achieves superior quality-speed trade-offs. Our hierarchies capture different dimensions of research contributions, reflecting the interdisciplinary and multifaceted nature of modern science. We evaluate its utility by measuring how effectively an LLM-based agent can navigate the hierarchy to locate target papers. Results show that our method improves interpretability and offers an alternative pathway for exploring scientific literature beyond traditional search methods. Code, data and demo are available: https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/science-hierarchography
AIDec 17, 2025
Beyond Accuracy: A Geometric Stability Analysis of Large Language Models in Chess EvaluationXidan Song, Weiqi Wang, Ruifeng Cao et al.
The evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning domains typically relies on performance alignment with ground-truth oracles. In the domain of chess, this standard manifests as accuracy benchmarks against strong engines like Stockfish. However, high scalar accuracy does not necessarily imply robust conceptual understanding. This paper argues that standard accuracy metrics fail to distinguish between genuine geometric reasoning and the superficial memorization of canonical board states. To address this gap, we propose a Geometric Stability Framework, a novel evaluation methodology that rigorously tests model consistency under invariant transformations-including board rotation, mirror symmetry, color inversion, and format conversion. We applied this framework to a comparative analysis of six state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-5.1, Claude Sonnet 4.5, and Kimi K2 Turbo, utilizing a dataset of approximately 3,000 positions. Our results reveal a significant Accuracy-Stability Paradox. While models such as GPT-5.1 achieve near-optimal accuracy on standard positions, they exhibit catastrophic degradation under geometric perturbation, specifically in rotation tasks where error rates surge by over 600%. This disparity suggests a reliance on pattern matching over abstract spatial logic. Conversely, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Kimi K2 Turbo demonstrate superior dual robustness, maintaining high consistency across all transformation axes. Furthermore, we analyze the trade-off between helpfulness and safety, identifying Gemini 2.5 Flash as the leader in illegal state rejection (96.0%). We conclude that geometric stability provides an orthogonal and essential metric for AI evaluation, offering a necessary proxy for disentangling reasoning capabilities from data contamination and overfitting in large-scale models.
AIAug 12, 2025Code
Prospect Theory Fails for LLMs: Revealing Instability of Decision-Making under Epistemic UncertaintyRui Wang, Qihan Lin, Jiayu Liu et al.
Prospect Theory (PT) models human decision-making under uncertainty, while epistemic markers (e.g., maybe) serve to express uncertainty in language. However, it remains largely unexplored whether Prospect Theory applies to contemporary Large Language Models and whether epistemic markers, which express human uncertainty, affect their decision-making behaviour. To address these research gaps, we design a three-stage experiment based on economic questionnaires. We propose a more general and precise evaluation framework to model LLMs' decision-making behaviour under PT, introducing uncertainty through the empirical probability values associated with commonly used epistemic markers in comparable contexts. We then incorporate epistemic markers into the evaluation framework based on their corresponding probability values to examine their influence on LLM decision-making behaviours. Our findings suggest that modelling LLMs' decision-making with PT is not consistently reliable, particularly when uncertainty is expressed in diverse linguistic forms. Our code is released in https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/MarPT.
CLDec 16, 2024Code
ConKE: Conceptualization-Augmented Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models for Commonsense ReasoningLiyu Zhang, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang et al. · tencent-ai
Knowledge Editing (KE) aims to adjust a Large Language Model's (LLM) internal representations and parameters to correct inaccuracies and improve output consistency without incurring the computational expense of re-training the entire model. However, editing commonsense knowledge still faces difficulties, including limited knowledge coverage in existing resources, the infeasibility of annotating labels for an overabundance of commonsense knowledge, and the strict knowledge formats of current editing methods. In this paper, we address these challenges by presenting ConceptEdit, a framework that integrates conceptualization and instantiation into the KE pipeline for LLMs to enhance their commonsense reasoning capabilities. ConceptEdit dynamically diagnoses implausible commonsense knowledge within an LLM using another verifier LLM and augments the source knowledge to be edited with conceptualization for stronger generalizability. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs enhanced with ConceptEdit successfully generate commonsense knowledge with improved plausibility compared to other baselines and achieve stronger performance across multiple question answering benchmarks. Our data, code, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/ConKE.
CLMar 7, 2024
Common 7B Language Models Already Possess Strong Math CapabilitiesChen Li, Weiqi Wang, Jingcheng Hu et al.
Mathematical capabilities were previously believed to emerge in common language models only at a very large scale or require extensive math-related pre-training. This paper shows that the LLaMA-2 7B model with common pre-training already exhibits strong mathematical abilities, as evidenced by its impressive accuracy of 97.7% and 72.0% on the GSM8K and MATH benchmarks, respectively, when selecting the best response from 256 random generations. The primary issue with the current base model is the difficulty in consistently eliciting its inherent mathematical capabilities. Notably, the accuracy for the first answer drops to 49.5% and 7.9% on the GSM8K and MATH benchmarks, respectively. We find that simply scaling up the SFT data can significantly enhance the reliability of generating correct answers. However, the potential for extensive scaling is constrained by the scarcity of publicly available math questions. To overcome this limitation, we employ synthetic data, which proves to be nearly as effective as real data and shows no clear saturation when scaled up to approximately one million samples. This straightforward approach achieves an accuracy of 82.6% on GSM8K and 40.6% on MATH using LLaMA-2 7B models, surpassing previous models by 14.2% and 20.8%, respectively. We also provide insights into scaling behaviors across different reasoning complexities and error types.
CLJun 17, 2024Code
GoldCoin: Grounding Large Language Models in Privacy Laws via Contextual Integrity TheoryWei Fan, Haoran Li, Zheye Deng et al.
Privacy issues arise prominently during the inappropriate transmission of information between entities. Existing research primarily studies privacy by exploring various privacy attacks, defenses, and evaluations within narrowly predefined patterns, while neglecting that privacy is not an isolated, context-free concept limited to traditionally sensitive data (e.g., social security numbers), but intertwined with intricate social contexts that complicate the identification and analysis of potential privacy violations. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities for incorporating the nuanced scenarios outlined in privacy laws to tackle these complex privacy issues. However, the scarcity of open-source relevant case studies restricts the efficiency of LLMs in aligning with specific legal statutes. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel framework, GoldCoin, designed to efficiently ground LLMs in privacy laws for judicial assessing privacy violations. Our framework leverages the theory of contextual integrity as a bridge, creating numerous synthetic scenarios grounded in relevant privacy statutes (e.g., HIPAA), to assist LLMs in comprehending the complex contexts for identifying privacy risks in the real world. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that GoldCoin markedly enhances LLMs' capabilities in recognizing privacy risks across real court cases, surpassing the baselines on different judicial tasks.
CLJun 14, 2024Code
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerceWenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Heng Douglas Kwok et al.
Enhancing Language Models' (LMs) ability to understand purchase intentions in E-commerce scenarios is crucial for their effective assistance in various downstream tasks. However, previous approaches that distill intentions from LMs often fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. This raises concerns about the true comprehension and utilization of purchase intentions by LMs. In this paper, we present IntentionQA, a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. Specifically, LMs are tasked to infer intentions based on purchased products and utilize them to predict additional purchases. IntentionQA consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. Human evaluations demonstrate the high quality and low false-negative rate of our benchmark. Extensive experiments across 19 language models show that they still struggle with certain scenarios, such as understanding products and intentions accurately, jointly reasoning with products and intentions, and more, in which they fall far behind human performances. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/IntentionQA.
CLJun 4, 2024Code
MARS: Benchmarking the Metaphysical Reasoning Abilities of Language Models with a Multi-task Evaluation DatasetWeiqi Wang, Yangqiu Song
To enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to function as conscious agents with generalizable reasoning capabilities, it is crucial that they possess the reasoning ability to comprehend situational changes (transitions) in distribution triggered by environmental factors or actions from other agents. Despite its fundamental significance, this ability remains underexplored due to the complexity of modeling infinite possible changes in an event and their associated distributions, coupled with the lack of benchmark data with situational transitions. Addressing these gaps, we propose a novel formulation of reasoning with distributional changes as a three-step discriminative process, termed as MetAphysical ReaSoning. We then introduce the first-ever benchmark, MARS, comprising three tasks corresponding to each step. These tasks systematically assess LLMs' capabilities in reasoning the plausibility of (i) changes in actions, (ii) states caused by changed actions, and (iii) situational transitions driven by changes in action. Extensive evaluations with 20 (L)LMs of varying sizes and methods indicate that all three tasks in this process pose significant challenges, even for state-of-the-art LLMs and LMs after fine-tuning. Further analyses reveal potential causes for the underperformance of LLMs and demonstrate that pre-training them on large-scale conceptualization taxonomies can potentially enhance their metaphysical reasoning capabilities. Our data and models are publicly accessible at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/MARS.
CLMay 24, 2023Code
CAR: Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question AnsweringWeiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Wenxuan Ding et al.
The task of zero-shot commonsense question answering evaluates models on their capacity to reason about general scenarios beyond those presented in specific datasets. Existing approaches for tackling this task leverage external knowledge from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) by pretraining the model on synthetic QA pairs constructed from CSKBs. In these approaches, negative examples (distractors) are formulated by randomly sampling from CSKBs using fairly primitive keyword constraints. However, two bottlenecks limit these approaches: the inherent incompleteness of CSKBs limits the semantic coverage of synthetic QA pairs, and the lack of human annotations makes the sampled negative examples potentially uninformative and contradictory. To tackle these limitations above, we propose Conceptualization-Augmented Reasoner (CAR), a zero-shot commonsense question-answering framework that fully leverages the power of conceptualization. Specifically, CAR abstracts a commonsense knowledge triple to many higher-level instances, which increases the coverage of CSKB and expands the ground-truth answer space, reducing the likelihood of selecting false-negative distractors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAR more robustly generalizes to answering questions about zero-shot commonsense scenarios than existing methods, including large language models, such as GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Our codes, data, and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAR.
CLMay 8, 2023Code
CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense ReasoningWeiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Baixuan Xu et al.
Commonsense reasoning, aiming at endowing machines with a human-like ability to make situational presumptions, is extremely challenging to generalize. For someone who barely knows about "meditation," while is knowledgeable about "singing," he can still infer that "meditation makes people relaxed" from the existing knowledge that "singing makes people relaxed" by first conceptualizing "singing" as a "relaxing event" and then instantiating that event to "meditation." This process, known as conceptual induction and deduction, is fundamental to commonsense reasoning while lacking both labeled data and methodologies to enhance commonsense modeling. To fill such a research gap, we propose CAT (Contextualized ConceptuAlization and InsTantiation), a semi-supervised learning framework that integrates event conceptualization and instantiation to conceptualize commonsense knowledge bases at scale. Extensive experiments show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performances on two conceptualization tasks, and the acquired abstract commonsense knowledge can significantly improve commonsense inference modeling. Our code, data, and fine-tuned models are publicly available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CAT.
CLSep 16, 2021Code
Benchmarking Commonsense Knowledge Base Population with an Effective Evaluation DatasetTianqing Fang, Weiqi Wang, Sehyun Choi et al.
Reasoning over commonsense knowledge bases (CSKB) whose elements are in the form of free-text is an important yet hard task in NLP. While CSKB completion only fills the missing links within the domain of the CSKB, CSKB population is alternatively proposed with the goal of reasoning unseen assertions from external resources. In this task, CSKBs are grounded to a large-scale eventuality (activity, state, and event) graph to discriminate whether novel triples from the eventuality graph are plausible or not. However, existing evaluations on the population task are either not accurate (automatic evaluation with randomly sampled negative examples) or of small scale (human annotation). In this paper, we benchmark the CSKB population task with a new large-scale dataset by first aligning four popular CSKBs, and then presenting a high-quality human-annotated evaluation set to probe neural models' commonsense reasoning ability. We also propose a novel inductive commonsense reasoning model that reasons over graphs. Experimental results show that generalizing commonsense reasoning on unseen assertions is inherently a hard task. Models achieving high accuracy during training perform poorly on the evaluation set, with a large gap between human performance. We will make the data publicly available for future contributions. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/CSKB-Population.
CLJan 1, 2021Code
DISCOS: Bridging the Gap between Discourse Knowledge and Commonsense KnowledgeTianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Weiqi Wang et al.
Commonsense knowledge is crucial for artificial intelligence systems to understand natural language. Previous commonsense knowledge acquisition approaches typically rely on human annotations (for example, ATOMIC) or text generation models (for example, COMET.) Human annotation could provide high-quality commonsense knowledge, yet its high cost often results in relatively small scale and low coverage. On the other hand, generation models have the potential to automatically generate more knowledge. Nonetheless, machine learning models often fit the training data well and thus struggle to generate high-quality novel knowledge. To address the limitations of previous approaches, in this paper, we propose an alternative commonsense knowledge acquisition framework DISCOS (from DIScourse to COmmonSense), which automatically populates expensive complex commonsense knowledge to more affordable linguistic knowledge resources. Experiments demonstrate that we can successfully convert discourse knowledge about eventualities from ASER, a large-scale discourse knowledge graph, into if-then commonsense knowledge defined in ATOMIC without any additional annotation effort. Further study suggests that DISCOS significantly outperforms previous supervised approaches in terms of novelty and diversity with comparable quality. In total, we can acquire 3.4M ATOMIC-like inferential commonsense knowledge by populating ATOMIC on the core part of ASER. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/DISCOS-commonsense.
NAJun 2, 2022
Compressive Fourier collocation methods for high-dimensional diffusion equations with periodic boundary conditionsWeiqi Wang, Simone Brugiapaglia
High-dimensional Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are a popular mathematical modelling tool, with applications ranging from finance to computational chemistry. However, standard numerical techniques for solving these PDEs are typically affected by the curse of dimensionality. In this work, we tackle this challenge while focusing on stationary diffusion equations defined over a high-dimensional domain with periodic boundary conditions. Inspired by recent progress in sparse function approximation in high dimensions, we propose a new method called compressive Fourier collocation. Combining ideas from compressive sensing and spectral collocation, our method replaces the use of structured collocation grids with Monte Carlo sampling and employs sparse recovery techniques, such as orthogonal matching pursuit and $\ell^1$ minimization, to approximate the Fourier coefficients of the PDE solution. We conduct a rigorous theoretical analysis showing that the approximation error of the proposed method is comparable with the best $s$-term approximation (with respect to the Fourier basis) to the solution. Using the recently introduced framework of random sampling in bounded Riesz systems, our analysis shows that the compressive Fourier collocation method mitigates the curse of dimensionality with respect to the number of collocation points under sufficient conditions on the regularity of the diffusion coefficient. We also present numerical experiments that illustrate the accuracy and stability of the method for the approximation of sparse and compressible solutions.
CLApr 21, 2024
NegotiationToM: A Benchmark for Stress-testing Machine Theory of Mind on Negotiation SurroundingChunkit Chan, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim et al.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked substantial interest and debate concerning their potential emergence of Theory of Mind (ToM) ability. Theory of mind evaluations currently focuses on testing models using machine-generated data or game settings prone to shortcuts and spurious correlations, which lacks evaluation of machine ToM ability in real-world human interaction scenarios. This poses a pressing demand to develop new real-world scenario benchmarks. We introduce NegotiationToM, a new benchmark designed to stress-test machine ToM in real-world negotiation surrounding covered multi-dimensional mental states (i.e., desires, beliefs, and intentions). Our benchmark builds upon the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent modeling theory and conducts the necessary empirical experiments to evaluate large language models. Our findings demonstrate that NegotiationToM is challenging for state-of-the-art LLMs, as they consistently perform significantly worse than humans, even when employing the chain-of-thought (CoT) method.
CRMay 13, 2024
Machine Unlearning: A Comprehensive SurveyWeiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, Chenhan Zhang et al.
As the right to be forgotten has been legislated worldwide, many studies attempt to design unlearning mechanisms to protect users' privacy when they want to leave machine learning service platforms. Specifically, machine unlearning is to make a trained model to remove the contribution of an erased subset of the training dataset. This survey aims to systematically classify a wide range of machine unlearning and discuss their differences, connections and open problems. We categorize current unlearning methods into four scenarios: centralized unlearning, distributed and irregular data unlearning, unlearning verification, and privacy and security issues in unlearning. Since centralized unlearning is the primary domain, we use two parts to introduce: firstly, we classify centralized unlearning into exact unlearning and approximate unlearning; secondly, we offer a detailed introduction to the techniques of these methods. Besides the centralized unlearning, we notice some studies about distributed and irregular data unlearning and introduce federated unlearning and graph unlearning as the two representative directions. After introducing unlearning methods, we review studies about unlearning verification. Moreover, we consider the privacy and security issues essential in machine unlearning and organize the latest related literature. Finally, we discuss the challenges of various unlearning scenarios and address the potential research directions.
CLMay 21, 2025
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product AssociationWeiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu et al.
Goal-oriented script planning, or the ability to devise coherent sequences of actions toward specific goals, is commonly employed by humans to plan for typical activities. In e-commerce, customers increasingly seek LLM-based assistants to generate scripts and recommend products at each step, thereby facilitating convenient and efficient shopping experiences. However, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges, including the inability of LLMs to simultaneously conduct script planning and product retrieval, difficulties in matching products caused by semantic discrepancies between planned actions and search queries, and a lack of methods and benchmark data for evaluation. In this paper, we step forward by formally defining the task of E-commerce Script Planning (EcomScript) as three sequential subtasks. We propose a novel framework that enables the scalable generation of product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. By applying our framework to real-world e-commerce data, we construct the very first large-scale EcomScript dataset, EcomScriptBench, which includes 605,229 scripts sourced from 2.4 million products. Human annotations are then conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset, forming an evaluation benchmark. Extensive experiments reveal that current (L)LMs face significant challenges with EcomScript tasks, even after fine-tuning, while injecting product purchase intentions improves their performance.
CLFeb 28, 2024
MIKO: Multimodal Intention Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Social-Media Commonsense DiscoveryFeihong Lu, Weiqi Wang, Yangyifei Luo et al.
Social media has become a ubiquitous tool for connecting with others, staying updated with news, expressing opinions, and finding entertainment. However, understanding the intention behind social media posts remains challenging due to the implicitness of intentions in social media posts, the need for cross-modality understanding of both text and images, and the presence of noisy information such as hashtags, misspelled words, and complicated abbreviations. To address these challenges, we present MIKO, a Multimodal Intention Kowledge DistillatiOn framework that collaboratively leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) and a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to uncover users' intentions. Specifically, we use an MLLM to interpret the image and an LLM to extract key information from the text and finally instruct the LLM again to generate intentions. By applying MIKO to publicly available social media datasets, we construct an intention knowledge base featuring 1,372K intentions rooted in 137,287 posts. We conduct a two-stage annotation to verify the quality of the generated knowledge and benchmark the performance of widely used LLMs for intention generation. We further apply MIKO to a sarcasm detection dataset and distill a student model to demonstrate the downstream benefits of applying intention knowledge.
CLMar 23, 2025
Unmasking Deceptive Visuals: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models on Misleading Chart Question AnsweringZixin Chen, Sicheng Song, Kashun Shum et al.
Misleading visualizations, which manipulate chart representations to support specific claims, can distort perception and lead to incorrect conclusions. Despite decades of research, they remain a widespread issue, posing risks to public understanding and raising safety concerns for AI systems involved in data-driven communication. While recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show strong chart comprehension abilities, their capacity to detect and interpret misleading charts remains unexplored. We introduce Misleading ChartQA benchmark, a large-scale multimodal dataset designed to evaluate MLLMs on misleading chart reasoning. It contains 3,026 curated examples spanning 21 misleader types and 10 chart types, each with standardized chart code, CSV data, multiple-choice questions, and labeled explanations, validated through iterative MLLM checks and expert human review. We benchmark 24 state-of-the-art MLLMs, analyze their performance across misleader types and chart formats, and propose a novel region-aware reasoning pipeline that enhances model accuracy. Our work lays the foundation for developing MLLMs that are robust, trustworthy, and aligned with the demands of responsible visual communication.
CLMay 20, 2025
Legal Rule Induction: Towards Generalizable Principle Discovery from Analogous Judicial PrecedentsWei Fan, Tianshi Zheng, Yiran Hu et al.
Legal rules encompass not only codified statutes but also implicit adjudicatory principles derived from precedents that contain discretionary norms, social morality, and policy. While computational legal research has advanced in applying established rules to cases, inducing legal rules from judicial decisions remains understudied, constrained by limitations in model inference efficacy and symbolic reasoning capability. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers unprecedented opportunities for automating the extraction of such latent principles, yet progress is stymied by the absence of formal task definitions, benchmark datasets, and methodologies. To address this gap, we formalize Legal Rule Induction (LRI) as the task of deriving concise, generalizable doctrinal rules from sets of analogous precedents, distilling their shared preconditions, normative behaviors, and legal consequences. We introduce the first LRI benchmark, comprising 5,121 case sets (38,088 Chinese cases in total) for model tuning and 216 expert-annotated gold test sets. Experimental results reveal that: 1) State-of-the-art LLMs struggle with over-generalization and hallucination; 2) Training on our dataset markedly enhances LLMs capabilities in capturing nuanced rule patterns across similar cases.
CRFeb 27, 2025
SCU: An Efficient Machine Unlearning Scheme for Deep Learning Enabled Semantic CommunicationsWeiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, Chenhan Zhang et al.
Deep learning (DL) enabled semantic communications leverage DL to train encoders and decoders (codecs) to extract and recover semantic information. However, most semantic training datasets contain personal private information. Such concerns call for enormous requirements for specified data erasure from semantic codecs when previous users hope to move their data from the semantic system. {Existing machine unlearning solutions remove data contribution from trained models, yet usually in supervised sole model scenarios. These methods are infeasible in semantic communications that often need to jointly train unsupervised encoders and decoders.} In this paper, we investigate the unlearning problem in DL-enabled semantic communications and propose a semantic communication unlearning (SCU) scheme to tackle the problem. {SCU includes two key components. Firstly,} we customize the joint unlearning method for semantic codecs, including the encoder and decoder, by minimizing mutual information between the learned semantic representation and the erased samples. {Secondly,} to compensate for semantic model utility degradation caused by unlearning, we propose a contrastive compensation method, which considers the erased data as the negative samples and the remaining data as the positive samples to retrain the unlearned semantic models contrastively. Theoretical analysis and extensive experimental results on three representative datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed methods.
CLDec 16, 2024
Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for User Intention Relation ModelingJiaxin Bai, Zhaobo Wang, Junfei Cheng et al.
Understanding user intentions is challenging for online platforms. Recent work on intention knowledge graphs addresses this but often lacks focus on connecting intentions, which is crucial for modeling user behavior and predicting future actions. This paper introduces a framework to automatically generate an intention knowledge graph, capturing connections between user intentions. Using the Amazon m2 dataset, we construct an intention graph with 351 million edges, demonstrating high plausibility and acceptance. Our model effectively predicts new session intentions and enhances product recommendations, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods and showcasing the approach's practical utility.
CLMay 12, 2025
Towards Multi-Agent Reasoning Systems for Collaborative Expertise Delegation: An Exploratory Design StudyBaixuan Xu, Chunyang Li, Weiqi Wang et al.
Designing effective collaboration structure for multi-agent LLM systems to enhance collective reasoning is crucial yet remains under-explored. In this paper, we systematically investigate how collaborative reasoning performance is affected by three key design dimensions: (1) Expertise-Domain Alignment, (2) Collaboration Paradigm (structured workflow vs. diversity-driven integration), and (3) System Scale. Our findings reveal that expertise alignment benefits are highly domain-contingent, proving most effective for contextual reasoning tasks. Furthermore, collaboration focused on integrating diverse knowledge consistently outperforms rigid task decomposition. Finally, we empirically explore the impact of scaling the multi-agent system with expertise specialization and study the computational trade off, highlighting the need for more efficient communication protocol design. This work provides concrete guidelines for configuring specialized multi-agent system and identifies critical architectural trade-offs and bottlenecks for scalable multi-agent reasoning. The code will be made available upon acceptance.
CLAug 17, 2025
Structuring the Unstructured: A Systematic Review of Text-to-Structure Generation for Agentic AI with a Universal Evaluation FrameworkZheye Deng, Chunkit Chan, Tianshi Zheng et al.
The evolution of AI systems toward agentic operation and context-aware retrieval necessitates transforming unstructured text into structured formats like tables, knowledge graphs, and charts. While such conversions enable critical applications from summarization to data mining, current research lacks a comprehensive synthesis of methodologies, datasets, and metrics. This systematic review examines text-to-structure techniques and the encountered challenges, evaluates current datasets and assessment criteria, and outlines potential directions for future research. We also introduce a universal evaluation framework for structured outputs, establishing text-to-structure as foundational infrastructure for next-generation AI systems.
CRFeb 27, 2025
TAPE: Tailored Posterior Difference for Auditing of Machine UnlearningWeiqi Wang, Zhiyi Tian, An Liu et al.
With the increasing prevalence of Web-based platforms handling vast amounts of user data, machine unlearning has emerged as a crucial mechanism to uphold users' right to be forgotten, enabling individuals to request the removal of their specified data from trained models. However, the auditing of machine unlearning processes remains significantly underexplored. Although some existing methods offer unlearning auditing by leveraging backdoors, these backdoor-based approaches are inefficient and impractical, as they necessitate involvement in the initial model training process to embed the backdoors. In this paper, we propose a TAilored Posterior diffErence (TAPE) method to provide unlearning auditing independently of original model training. We observe that the process of machine unlearning inherently introduces changes in the model, which contains information related to the erased data. TAPE leverages unlearning model differences to assess how much information has been removed through the unlearning operation. Firstly, TAPE mimics the unlearned posterior differences by quickly building unlearned shadow models based on first-order influence estimation. Secondly, we train a Reconstructor model to extract and evaluate the private information of the unlearned posterior differences to audit unlearning. Existing privacy reconstructing methods based on posterior differences are only feasible for model updates of a single sample. To enable the reconstruction effective for multi-sample unlearning requests, we propose two strategies, unlearned data perturbation and unlearned influence-based division, to augment the posterior difference. Extensive experimental results indicate the significant superiority of TAPE over the state-of-the-art unlearning verification methods, at least 4.5$\times$ efficiency speedup and supporting the auditing for broader unlearning scenarios.