Xiaolin Zheng

Chaochao Chen, Xiaohua Feng, Yuyuan Li et al.

As the parameter size of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to expand, there is an urgent need to address the scarcity of high-quality data. In response, existing research has attempted to make a breakthrough by incorporating Federated Learning (FL) into LLMs. Conversely, considering the outstanding performance of LLMs in task generalization, researchers have also tried applying LLMs within FL to tackle challenges in relevant domains. The complementarity between LLMs and FL has already ignited widespread research interest. In this paper, we aim to deeply explore the integration of LLMs and FL. We propose a research framework, dividing the fusion of LLMs and FL into three parts: the combination of LLM sub-technologies with FL, the integration of FL sub-technologies with LLMs, and the overall merger of LLMs and FL. We first provide a comprehensive review of the current state of research in the domain of LLMs combined with FL, including their typical applications, integration advantages, challenges faced, and future directions for resolution. Subsequently, we discuss the practical applications of the combination of LLMs and FL in critical scenarios such as healthcare, finance, and education, and provide new perspectives and insights into future research directions for LLMs and FL.

Yuyuan Li, Chaochao Chen, Xiaolin Zheng et al.

With the growing privacy concerns in recommender systems, recommendation unlearning, i.e., forgetting the impact of specific learned targets, is getting increasing attention. Existing studies predominantly use training data, i.e., model inputs, as the unlearning target. However, we find that attackers can extract private information, i.e., gender, race, and age, from a trained model even if it has not been explicitly encountered during training. We name this unseen information as attribute and treat it as the unlearning target. To protect the sensitive attribute of users, Attribute Unlearning (AU) aims to degrade attacking performance and make target attributes indistinguishable. In this paper, we focus on a strict but practical setting of AU, namely Post-Training Attribute Unlearning (PoT-AU), where unlearning can only be performed after the training of the recommendation model is completed. To address the PoT-AU problem in recommender systems, we design a two-component loss function that consists of i) distinguishability loss: making attribute labels indistinguishable from attackers, and ii) regularization loss: preventing drastic changes in the model that result in a negative impact on recommendation performance. Specifically, we investigate two types of distinguishability measurements, i.e., user-to-user and distribution-to-distribution. We use the stochastic gradient descent algorithm to optimize our proposed loss. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods.

Xiaolin Zheng, Senci Ying, Fei Zheng et al.

Most existing federated learning algorithms are based on the vanilla FedAvg scheme. However, with the increase of data complexity and the number of model parameters, the amount of communication traffic and the number of iteration rounds for training such algorithms increases significantly, especially in non-independently and homogeneously distributed scenarios, where they do not achieve satisfactory performance. In this work, we propose FedND: federated learning with noise distillation. The main idea is to use knowledge distillation to optimize the model training process. In the client, we propose a self-distillation method to train the local model. In the server, we generate noisy samples for each client and use them to distill other clients. Finally, the global model is obtained by the aggregation of local models. Experimental results show that the algorithm achieves the best performance and is more communication-efficient than state-of-the-art methods.

Xinting Liao, Chaochao Chen, Weiming Liu et al.

Federated learning (FL) is a distributed machine learning paradigm that needs collaboration between a server and a series of clients with decentralized data. To make FL effective in real-world applications, existing work devotes to improving the modeling of decentralized data with non-independent and identical distributions (non-IID). In non-IID settings, there are intra-client inconsistency that comes from the imbalanced data modeling, and inter-client inconsistency among heterogeneous client distributions, which not only hinders sufficient representation of the minority data, but also brings discrepant model deviations. However, previous work overlooks to tackle the above two coupling inconsistencies together. In this work, we propose FedRANE, which consists of two main modules, i.e., local relational augmentation (LRA) and global Nash equilibrium (GNE), to resolve intra- and inter-client inconsistency simultaneously. Specifically, in each client, LRA mines the similarity relations among different data samples and enhances the minority sample representations with their neighbors using attentive message passing. In server, GNE reaches an agreement among inconsistent and discrepant model deviations from clients to server, which encourages the global model to update in the direction of global optimum without breaking down the clients optimization toward their local optimums. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets to show the superiority of FedRANE in enhancing the performance of FL with non-IID data.

Wenkai Shen, Pengyang Zhou, Jiahe Xu et al.

LLM-powered search agents enable multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, these capabilities introduce retrieval-induced safety degradation, as harmful intents may decompose into seemingly innocuous sub-queries that lead to unsafe outcomes. Existing alignment methods struggle to capture sparse safety signals and fail to supervise diverse violations across multi-step interactions. We propose COMPASS, a Cognitive MCTS-Guided Process Alignment framework designed to achieve robust safety alignment throughout the agent workflow while preserving general utility. COMPASS integrates cognitive tree exploration (CTE) to efficiently synthesize stealthy attack trajectories, and introspective step-wise alignment (ISA) to isolate risky intermediate actions for fine-grained process supervision. Empirical results show that COMPASS achieves a favorable safety-utility trade-off while requiring substantially less training data.

Jiajie Su, Chaochao Chen, Zibin Lin et al.

Sequential Recommendation (SR) captures users' dynamic preferences by modeling how users transit among items. However, SR models that utilize only single type of behavior interaction data encounter performance degradation when the sequences are short. To tackle this problem, we focus on Multi-Behavior Sequential Recommendation (MBSR) in this paper, which aims to leverage time-evolving heterogeneous behavioral dependencies for better exploring users' potential intents on the target behavior. Solving MBSR is challenging. On the one hand, users exhibit diverse multi-behavior patterns due to personal characteristics. On the other hand, there exists comprehensive co-influence between behavior correlations and item collaborations, the intensity of which is deeply affected by temporal factors. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Personalized Behavior-Aware Transformer framework (PBAT) for MBSR problem, which models personalized patterns and multifaceted sequential collaborations in a novel way to boost recommendation performance. First, PBAT develops a personalized behavior pattern generator in the representation layer, which extracts dynamic and discriminative behavior patterns for sequential learning. Second, PBAT reforms the self-attention layer with a behavior-aware collaboration extractor, which introduces a fused behavior-aware attention mechanism for incorporating both behavioral and temporal impacts into collaborative transitions. We conduct experiments on three benchmark datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness and interpretability of our framework. Our implementation code is released at https://github.com/TiliaceaeSU/PBAT.

Xiaolin Zheng, Zhongyu Wang, Chaochao Chen et al.

The delayed feedback problem is one of the most pressing challenges in predicting the conversion rate since users' conversions are always delayed in online commercial systems. Although new data are beneficial for continuous training, without complete feedback information, i.e., conversion labels, training algorithms may suffer from overwhelming fake negatives. Existing methods tend to use multitask learning or design data pipelines to solve the delayed feedback problem. However, these methods have a trade-off between data freshness and label accuracy. In this paper, we propose Delayed Feedback Modeling by Dynamic Graph Neural Network (DGDFEM). It includes three stages, i.e., preparing a data pipeline, building a dynamic graph, and training a CVR prediction model. In the model training, we propose a novel graph convolutional method named HLGCN, which leverages both high-pass and low-pass filters to deal with conversion and non-conversion relationships. The proposed method achieves both data freshness and label accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments on three industry datasets, which validate the consistent superiority of our method.

Mengling Hu, Chaochao Chen, Weiming Liu et al.

Short text clustering has been popularly studied for its significance in mining valuable insights from many short texts. In this paper, we focus on the federated short text clustering (FSTC) problem, i.e., clustering short texts that are distributed in different clients, which is a realistic problem under privacy requirements. Compared with the centralized short text clustering problem that short texts are stored on a central server, the FSTC problem has not been explored yet. To fill this gap, we propose a Federated Robust Short Text Clustering (FSTC) framework. FSTC includes two main modules, i.e., robust short text clustering module and federated cluster center aggregation module. The robust short text clustering module aims to train an effective short text clustering model with local data in each client. We innovatively combine optimal transport to generate pseudo-labels with Gaussian-uniform mixture model to ensure the reliability of the pseudo-supervised data. The federated cluster center aggregation module aims to exchange knowledge across clients without sharing local raw data in an efficient way. The server aggregates the local cluster centers from different clients and then sends the global centers back to all clients in each communication round. Our empirical studies on three short text clustering datasets demonstrate that FSTC significantly outperforms the federated short text clustering baselines.

Yidan Sun, Mengying Zhu, Feiyue Chen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in text generation tasks; however, their embedding spaces often suffer from the isotropy problem, resulting in poor discrimination of domain-specific terminology, particularly in legal and financial contexts. This weakness in terminology-level representation can severely hinder downstream tasks such as legal judgment prediction or financial risk analysis, where subtle semantic distinctions are critical. To address this problem, we propose TermGPT, a multi-level contrastive fine-tuning framework designed for terminology adaptation. We first construct a sentence graph to capture semantic and structural relations, and generate semantically consistent yet discriminative positive and negative samples based on contextual and topological cues. We then devise a multi-level contrastive learning approach at both the sentence and token levels, enhancing global contextual understanding and fine-grained terminology discrimination. To support robust evaluation, we construct the first financial terminology dataset derived from official regulatory documents. Experiments show that TermGPT outperforms existing baselines in term discrimination tasks within the finance and legal domains.

Xiaolin Zheng, Mengling Hu, Weiming Liu et al.

Short text clustering is challenging since it takes imbalanced and noisy data as inputs. Existing approaches cannot solve this problem well, since (1) they are prone to obtain degenerate solutions especially on heavy imbalanced datasets, and (2) they are vulnerable to noises. To tackle the above issues, we propose a Robust Short Text Clustering (RSTC) model to improve robustness against imbalanced and noisy data. RSTC includes two modules, i.e., pseudo-label generation module and robust representation learning module. The former generates pseudo-labels to provide supervision for the later, which contributes to more robust representations and correctly separated clusters. To provide robustness against the imbalance in data, we propose self-adaptive optimal transport in the pseudo-label generation module. To improve robustness against the noise in data, we further introduce both class-wise and instance-wise contrastive learning in the robust representation learning module. Our empirical studies on eight short text clustering datasets demonstrate that RSTC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models. The code is available at: https://github.com/hmllmh/RSTC.

Xinting Liao, Weiming Liu, Chaochao Chen et al.

Federated learning achieves effective performance in modeling decentralized data. In practice, client data are not well-labeled, which makes it potential for federated unsupervised learning (FUSL) with non-IID data. However, the performance of existing FUSL methods suffers from insufficient representations, i.e., (1) representation collapse entanglement among local and global models, and (2) inconsistent representation spaces among local models. The former indicates that representation collapse in local model will subsequently impact the global model and other local models. The latter means that clients model data representation with inconsistent parameters due to the deficiency of supervision signals. In this work, we propose FedU2 which enhances generating uniform and unified representation in FUSL with non-IID data. Specifically, FedU2 consists of flexible uniform regularizer (FUR) and efficient unified aggregator (EUA). FUR in each client avoids representation collapse via dispersing samples uniformly, and EUA in server promotes unified representation by constraining consistent client model updating. To extensively validate the performance of FedU2, we conduct both cross-device and cross-silo evaluation experiments on two benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR10 and CIFAR100.

Li Zhang, Chaochao Chen, Zhongxuan Han et al.

Federated learning (FL) has garnered considerable interest for its capability to learn from decentralized data sources. Given the increasing application of FL in decision-making scenarios, addressing fairness issues across different sensitive groups (e.g., female, male) in FL is crucial. Current research often focuses on facilitating fairness at each client's data (local fairness) or within the entire dataset across all clients (global fairness). However, existing approaches that focus exclusively on either local or global fairness fail to address two key challenges: (\textbf{CH1}) Under statistical heterogeneity, global fairness does not imply local fairness, and vice versa. (\textbf{CH2}) Achieving fairness under model-agnostic setting. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a novel post-processing framework for achieving both Local and Global Fairness in the FL context, namely LoGoFair. To address CH1, LoGoFair endeavors to seek the Bayes optimal classifier under local and global fairness constraints, which strikes the optimal accuracy-fairness balance in the probabilistic sense. To address CH2, LoGoFair employs a model-agnostic federated post-processing procedure that enables clients to collaboratively optimize global fairness while ensuring local fairness, thereby achieving the optimal fair classifier within FL. Experimental results on three real-world datasets further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed LoGoFair framework.

Yuyuan Li, Junjie Fang, Chaochao Chen et al.

In this paper, we reproduce the experimental results presented in our previous work titled "Making Users Indistinguishable: Attribute-wise Unlearning in Recommender Systems," which was published in the proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia. This paper aims to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and help others reproduce our experimental results. We provide detailed descriptions of our preprocessed datasets, source code structure, configuration file settings, experimental environment, and reproduced experimental results.

Zhongxuan Han, Chaochao Chen, Xiaolin Zheng et al.

Recommender systems are typically biased toward a small group of users, leading to severe unfairness in recommendation performance, i.e., User-Oriented Fairness (UOF) issue. The existing research on UOF is limited and fails to deal with the root cause of the UOF issue: the learning process between advantaged and disadvantaged users is unfair. To tackle this issue, we propose an In-processing User Constrained Dominant Sets (In-UCDS) framework, which is a general framework that can be applied to any backbone recommendation model to achieve user-oriented fairness. We split In-UCDS into two stages, i.e., the UCDS modeling stage and the in-processing training stage. In the UCDS modeling stage, for each disadvantaged user, we extract a constrained dominant set (a user cluster) containing some advantaged users that are similar to it. In the in-processing training stage, we move the representations of disadvantaged users closer to their corresponding cluster by calculating a fairness loss. By combining the fairness loss with the original backbone model loss, we address the UOF issue and maintain the overall recommendation performance simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that In-UCDS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, leading to a fairer model with better overall recommendation performance.

Weiming Liu, Xiaolin Zheng, Mengling Hu et al.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) has been popularly studied to utilize different domain knowledge to solve the data sparsity and cold-start problem in recommender systems. In this paper, we focus on the Review-based Non-overlapped Recommendation (RNCDR) problem. The problem is commonly-existed and challenging due to two main aspects, i.e, there are only positive user-item ratings on the target domain and there is no overlapped user across different domains. Most previous CDR approaches cannot solve the RNCDR problem well, since (1) they cannot effectively combine review with other information (e.g., ID or ratings) to obtain expressive user or item embedding, (2) they cannot reduce the domain discrepancy on users and items. To fill this gap, we propose Collaborative Filtering with Attribution Alignment model (CFAA), a cross-domain recommendation framework for the RNCDR problem. CFAA includes two main modules, i.e., rating prediction module and embedding attribution alignment module. The former aims to jointly mine review, one-hot ID, and multi-hot historical ratings to generate expressive user and item embeddings. The later includes vertical attribution alignment and horizontal attribution alignment, tending to reduce the discrepancy based on multiple perspectives. Our empirical study on Douban and Amazon datasets demonstrates that CFAA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models under the RNCDR setting.

Ke Wang, Yangbin Shi, Jiayi Wang et al.

Quality Estimation (QE) plays an essential role in applications of Machine Translation (MT). Traditionally, a QE system accepts the original source text and translation from a black-box MT system as input. Recently, a few studies indicate that as a by-product of translation, QE benefits from the model and training data's information of the MT system where the translations come from, and it is called the "glass-box QE". In this paper, we extend the definition of "glass-box QE" generally to uncertainty quantification with both "black-box" and "glass-box" approaches and design several features deduced from them to blaze a new trial in improving QE's performance. We propose a framework to fuse the feature engineering of uncertainty quantification into a pre-trained cross-lingual language model to predict the translation quality. Experiment results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performances on the datasets of WMT 2020 QE shared task.

Yanchao Tan, Carl Yang, Xiangyu Wei et al.

Implicit feedback is widely explored by modern recommender systems. Since the feedback is often sparse and imbalanced, it poses great challenges to the learning of complex interactions among users and items. Metric learning has been proposed to capture user-item interactions from implicit feedback, but existing methods only represent users and items in a single metric space, ignoring the fact that users can have multiple preferences and items can have multiple properties, which leads to potential conflicts limiting their performance in recommendation. To capture the multiple facets of user preferences and item properties while resolving their potential conflicts, we propose the novel framework of Multi-fAcet Recommender networks with Spherical optimization (MARS). By designing a cross-facet similarity measurement, we project users and items into multiple metric spaces for fine-grained representation learning, and compare them only in the proper spaces. Furthermore, we devise a spherical optimization strategy to enhance the effectiveness and robustness of the multi-facet recommendation framework. Extensive experiments on six real-world benchmark datasets show drastic performance gains brought by MARS, which constantly achieves up to 40\% improvements over the state-of-the-art baselines regarding both HR and nDCG metrics.

Chaochao Chen, Kevin C. Chang, Qibing Li et al.

Recently latent factor model (LFM) has been drawing much attention in recommender systems due to its good performance and scalability. However, existing LFMs predict missing values in a user-item rating matrix only based on the known ones, and thus the sparsity of the rating matrix always limits their performance. Meanwhile, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides an effective way to alleviate the label (i.e., rating) sparsity problem by performing label propagation, which is mainly based on the smoothness insight on affinity graphs. However, graph-based SSL suffers serious scalability and graph unreliable problems when directly being applied to do recommendation. In this paper, we propose a novel probabilistic chain graph model (CGM) to marry SSL with LFM. The proposed CGM is a combination of Bayesian network and Markov random field. The Bayesian network is used to model the rating generation and regression procedures, and the Markov random field is used to model the confidence-aware smoothness constraint between the generated ratings. Experimental results show that our proposed CGM significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in terms of four evaluation metrics, and with a larger performance margin when data sparsity increases.

Chaochao Chen, Jun Zhou, Bingzhe Wu et al.

Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation has been extensively studied and successfully applied in industry recently. However, most existing approaches build centralized models on the basis of collecting users' data. Both private data and models are held by the recommender, which causes serious privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose a novel Privacy preserving POI Recommendation (PriRec) framework. First, to protect data privacy, users' private data (features and actions) are kept on their own side, e.g., Cellphone or Pad. Meanwhile, the public data need to be accessed by all the users are kept by the recommender to reduce the storage costs of users' devices. Those public data include: (1) static data only related to the status of POI, such as POI categories, and (2) dynamic data depend on user-POI actions such as visited counts. The dynamic data could be sensitive, and we develop local differential privacy techniques to release such data to public with privacy guarantees. Second, PriRec follows the representations of Factorization Machine (FM) that consists of linear model and the feature interaction model. To protect the model privacy, the linear models are saved on users' side, and we propose a secure decentralized gradient descent protocol for users to learn it collaboratively. The feature interaction model is kept by the recommender since there is no privacy risk, and we adopt secure aggregation strategy in federated learning paradigm to learn it. To this end, PriRec keeps users' private raw data and models in users' own hands, and protects user privacy to a large extent. We apply PriRec in real-world datasets, and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that, compared with FM, PriRec achieves comparable or even better recommendation accuracy.

Mengying Zhu, Xiaolin Zheng, Yan Wang et al.

As the cornerstone of modern portfolio theory, Markowitz's mean-variance optimization is considered a major model adopted in portfolio management. However, due to the difficulty of estimating its parameters, it cannot be applied to all periods. In some cases, naive strategies such as Equally-weighted and Value-weighted portfolios can even get better performance. Under these circumstances, we can use multiple classic strategies as multiple strategic arms in multi-armed bandit to naturally establish a connection with the portfolio selection problem. This can also help to maximize the rewards in the bandit algorithm by the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. In this paper, we present a portfolio bandit strategy through Thompson sampling which aims to make online portfolio choices by effectively exploiting the performances among multiple arms. Also, by constructing multiple strategic arms, we can obtain the optimal investment portfolio to adapt different investment periods. Moreover, we devise a novel reward function based on users' different investment risk preferences, which can be adaptive to various investment styles. Our experimental results demonstrate that our proposed portfolio strategy has marked superiority across representative real-world market datasets in terms of extensive evaluation criteria.

Xiaolin Zheng, Mengying Zhu, Qibing Li et al.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the core technology of technological revolution and industrial transformation. As one of the new intelligent needs in the AI 2.0 era, financial intelligence has elicited much attention from the academia and industry. In our current dynamic capital market, financial intelligence demonstrates a fast and accurate machine learning capability to handle complex data and has gradually acquired the potential to become a "financial brain". In this work, we survey existing studies on financial intelligence. First, we describe the concept of financial intelligence and elaborate on its position in the financial technology field. Second, we introduce the development of financial intelligence and review state-of-the-art techniques in wealth management, risk management, financial security, financial consulting, and blockchain. Finally, we propose a research framework called FinBrain and summarize four open issues, namely, explainable financial agents and causality, perception and prediction under uncertainty, risk-sensitive and robust decision making, and multi-agent game and mechanism design. We believe that these research directions can lay the foundation for the development of AI 2.0 in the finance field.

Menghan Wang, Xiaolin Zheng, Kun Zhang

This paper considers recommendation algorithm ensembles in a user-sensitive manner. Recently researchers have proposed various effective recommendation algorithms, which utilized different aspects of the data and different techniques. However, the "user skewed prediction" problem may exist for almost all recommendation algorithms -- algorithms with best average predictive accuracy may cover up that the algorithms may perform poorly for some part of users, which will lead to biased services in real scenarios. In this paper, we propose a user-sensitive ensemble method named "UREC" to address this issue. We first cluster users based on the recommendation predictions, then we use multi-task learning to learn the user-sensitive ensemble function for the users. In addition, to alleviate the negative effects of new user problem to clustering users, we propose an approximate approach based on a spectral relaxation. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our methods.

Qibing Li, Xiaolin Zheng, Xinyue Wu

In recent years, deep neural networks have yielded state-of-the-art performance on several tasks. Although some recent works have focused on combining deep learning with recommendation, we highlight three issues of existing models. First, these models cannot work on both explicit and implicit feedback, since the network structures are specially designed for one particular case. Second, due to the difficulty on training deep neural networks, existing explicit models do not fully exploit the expressive potential of deep learning. Third, neural network models are easier to overfit on the implicit setting than shallow models. To tackle these issues, we present a generic recommender framework called Neural Collaborative Autoencoder (NCAE) to perform collaborative filtering, which works well for both explicit feedback and implicit feedback. NCAE can effectively capture the subtle hidden relationships between interactions via a non-linear matrix factorization process. To optimize the deep architecture of NCAE, we develop a three-stage pre-training mechanism that combines supervised and unsupervised feature learning. Moreover, to prevent overfitting on the implicit setting, we propose an error reweighting module and a sparsity-aware data-augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that NCAE can significantly advance the state-of-the-art.

Menghan Wang, Xiaolin Zheng, Yang Yang et al.

This paper is concerned with how to make efficient use of social information to improve recommendations. Most existing social recommender systems assume people share similar preferences with their social friends. Which, however, may not hold true due to various motivations of making online friends and dynamics of online social networks. Inspired by recent causal process based recommendations that first model user exposures towards items and then use these exposures to guide rating prediction, we utilize social information to capture user exposures rather than user preferences. We assume that people get information of products from their online friends and they do not have to share similar preferences, which is less restrictive and seems closer to reality. Under this new assumption, in this paper, we present a novel recommendation approach (named SERec) to integrate social exposure into collaborative filtering. We propose two methods to implement SERec, namely social regularization and social boosting, each with different ways to construct social exposures. Experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our methods outperform the state-of-the-art methods on top-N recommendations. Further study compares the robustness and scalability of the two proposed methods.