Zang Li

CL
h-index29
20papers
407citations
Novelty57%
AI Score61

20 Papers

CLMay 28Code
Exploring Autonomous Agentic Data Engineering for Model Specialization

Yujie Luo, Xiangyuan Ru, Jingsheng Zheng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on general tasks, while often struggling to adapt to specialized domains without high-quality domain-specific data. Existing LLM-based data curation methods primarily rely on human-designed workflows, leaving it unexamined whether LLMs can autonomously execute an end-to-end data engineering pipeline for model specialization. We formalize \textbf{Autonomous Agentic Data Engineering}, a novel task designed to evaluate LLMs as autonomous data engineers that drive model specialization through end-to-end data curation. We frame data as an optimizable component and study agents that plan, generate, and iteratively optimize training data across multiple domains, guided by post-training performance improvement. Experiments show that autonomous LLM data engineers yield substantial gains, as GPT-5.2 constructs a training curriculum that improves a student model by \textbf{57.29\%}, entirely through iterative, agent-driven data adaptation. By illuminating both potential and bottlenecks, our study establishes autonomous data engineering as a measurable capability and charts a path toward agent-driven model specialization\footnote{Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataAgent.}.

LGMay 27Code
SPARD: Defending Harmful Fine-Tuning Attack via Safety Projection with Relevance-Diversity Data Selection

Shuhao Chen, Weisen Jiang, Yeqi Gong et al.

Fine-tuning large language models often undermines their safety alignment, a problem further amplified by harmful fine-tuning attacks in which adversarial data removes safeguards and induces unsafe behaviors. We propose SPARD, a defense framework that integrates Safety-Projected Alternating optimization with Relevance-Diversity aware data selection. SPARD employs SPAG, which optimizes alternatively between utility updates and explicit safety projections with a set of safe data to enforce safety constraints. To curate safe data, we introduce a Relevance-Diversity Determinantal Point Process to select compact safe data, balancing task relevance and safety coverage. Experiments on GSM8K and OpenBookQA under four harmful fine-tuning attacks demonstrate that SPARD consistently achieves the lowest average attack success rates, substantially outperforming state-of-the-art defense methods, while maintaining high task accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/shuhao02/SPARD.

IRJul 19, 2024Code
L^2CL: Embarrassingly Simple Layer-to-Layer Contrastive Learning for Graph Collaborative Filtering

Xinzhou Jin, Jintang Li, Liang Chen et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently emerged as an effective approach to model neighborhood signals in collaborative filtering. Towards this research line, graph contrastive learning (GCL) demonstrates robust capabilities to address the supervision label shortage issue through generating massive self-supervised signals. Despite its effectiveness, GCL for recommendation suffers seriously from two main challenges: i) GCL relies on graph augmentation to generate semantically different views for contrasting, which could potentially disrupt key information and introduce unwanted noise; ii) current works for GCL primarily focus on contrasting representations using sophisticated networks architecture (usually deep) to capture high-order interactions, which leads to increased computational complexity and suboptimal training efficiency. To this end, we propose L2CL, a principled Layer-to-Layer Contrastive Learning framework that contrasts representations from different layers. By aligning the semantic similarities between different layers, L2CL enables the learning of complex structural relationships and gets rid of the noise perturbation in stochastic data augmentation. Surprisingly, we find that L2CL, using only one-hop contrastive learning paradigm, is able to capture intrinsic semantic structures and improve the quality of node representation, leading to a simple yet effective architecture. We also provide theoretical guarantees for L2CL in minimizing task-irrelevant information. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our model over various state-of-the-art collaborative filtering methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/downeykking/L2CL.

CLFeb 16, 2024Code
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm

Yuanzhen Xie, Xinzhou Jin, Tao Xie et al.

In-context learning of large-language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing, while extensive case studies reveal that the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. To improve the contextual learning capabilities of LLMs in text-to-SQL, a workflow paradigm method is proposed, aiming to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of LLMs through decomposition. Specifically, the information determination module for eliminating redundant information and the brand-new prompt structure based on problem classification greatly enhance the model's attention. Additionally, the inclusion of self-correction and active learning modules greatly expands the problem-solving scope of LLMs, hence improving the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms other methods by a significant margin. About 2-3 percentage point improvements compared to the existing baseline on the Spider Dev, Spider-Realistic, and Bird Dev datasets and new SOTA results on the Spider Test dataset are achieved. Our code is available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/FlyingFeather/DEA-SQL}.

IRApr 21
SAGER: Self-Evolving User Policy Skills for Recommendation Agent

Zhen Tao, Riwei Lai, Chenyun Yu et al.

Large language model (LLM) based recommendation agents personalize what they know through evolving per-user semantic memory, yet how they reason remains a universal, static system prompt shared identically across all users. This asymmetry is a fundamental bottleneck: when a recommendation fails, the agent updates its memory of user preferences but never interrogates the decision logic that produced the failure, leaving its reasoning process structurally unchanged regardless of how many mistakes it accumulates. To address this bottleneck, we propose SAGER (Self-Evolving Agent for Personalized Recommendation), the first recommendation agent framework in which each user is equipped with a dedicated policy skill, a structured natural-language document encoding personalized decision principles that evolves continuously through interaction. SAGER introduces a two-representation skill architecture that decouples a rich evolution substrate from a minimal inference-time injection, an incremental contrastive chain-of-thought engine that diagnoses reasoning flaws by contrasting accepted against unchosen items while preserving accumulated priors, and skill-augmented listwise reasoning that creates fine-grained decision boundaries where the evolved skill provides genuine discriminative value. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that SAGER achieves state-of-the-art performance, with gains orthogonal to memory accumulation, confirming that personalizing the reasoning process itself is a qualitatively distinct source of recommendation improvement.

CLMar 16
Efficient Document Parsing via Parallel Token Prediction

Lei Li, Ze Zhao, Meng Li et al.

Document parsing, as a fundamental yet crucial vision task, is being revolutionized by vision-language models (VLMs). However, the autoregressive (AR) decoding inherent to VLMs creates a significant bottleneck, severely limiting parsing speed. In this paper, we propose Parallel-Token Prediction (PTP), a plugable, model-agnostic and simple-yet-effective method that enables VLMs to generate multiple future tokens in parallel with improved sample efficiency. Specifically, we insert some learnable tokens into the input sequence and design corresponding training objectives to equip the model with parallel decoding capabilities for document parsing. Furthermore, to support effective training, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline that efficiently produces large-scale, high-quality document parsing training data for VLMs. Extensive experiments on OmniDocBench and olmOCR-bench demonstrate that our method not only significantly improves decoding speed (1.6x-2.2x) but also reduces model hallucinations and exhibits strong generalization abilities.

IRDec 31, 2025
HiGR: Efficient Generative Slate Recommendation via Hierarchical Planning and Multi-Objective Preference Alignment

Yunsheng Pang, Zijian Liu, Yudong Li et al.

Slate recommendation, which presents users with a ranked item list in a single display, is ubiquitous across mainstream online platforms. Recent advances in generative models have shown significant potential for this task via autoregressive modeling of discrete semantic ID sequences. However, existing methods suffer from three key limitations: entangled item tokenization, inefficient sequential decoding, and the absence of holistic slate planning. These issues often result in substantial inference overhead and inadequate alignment with diverse user preferences and practical business requirements, hindering the industrial deployment of generative slate recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose HiGR, an efficient generative slate recommendation framework that integrates hierarchical planning with listwise preference alignment. First, we design an auto-encoder incorporating residual quantization and contrastive constraints, which tokenizes items into semantically structured IDs to enable controllable generation. Second, HiGR decouples the generation process into two stages: a list-level planning stage to capture global slate intent, and an item-level decoding stage to select specific items, effectively reducing the search space and enabling efficient generation. Third, we introduce a multi-objective and listwise preference alignment mechanism that enhances slate quality by leveraging implicit user feedback. Extensive experiments have validated the effectiveness of our HiGR method. Notably, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 10\% in offline recommendation quality while achieving a $5\times$ inference speedup. Furthermore, we have deployed HiGR on a commercial platform under Tencent (serving hundreds of millions of users), and online A/B tests show that it increases average watch time and average video plays by 1.22\% and 1.73\%, respectively.

CLMay 23, 2023Code
OlaGPT: Empowering LLMs With Human-like Problem-Solving Abilities

Yuanzhen Xie, Tao Xie, Mingxiong Lin et al.

In most current research, large language models (LLMs) are able to perform reasoning tasks by generating chains of thought through the guidance of specific prompts. However, there still exists a significant discrepancy between their capability in solving complex reasoning problems and that of humans. At present, most approaches focus on chains of thought (COT) and tool use, without considering the adoption and application of human cognitive frameworks. It is well-known that when confronting complex reasoning challenges, humans typically employ various cognitive abilities, and necessitate interaction with all aspects of tools, knowledge, and the external environment information to accomplish intricate tasks. This paper introduces a novel intelligent framework, referred to as OlaGPT. OlaGPT carefully studied a cognitive architecture framework, and propose to simulate certain aspects of human cognition. The framework involves approximating different cognitive modules, including attention, memory, reasoning, learning, and corresponding scheduling and decision-making mechanisms. Inspired by the active learning mechanism of human beings, it proposes a learning unit to record previous mistakes and expert opinions, and dynamically refer to them to strengthen their ability to solve similar problems. The paper also outlines common effective reasoning frameworks for human problem-solving and designs Chain-of-Thought (COT) templates accordingly. A comprehensive decision-making mechanism is also proposed to maximize model accuracy. The efficacy of OlaGPT has been stringently evaluated on multiple reasoning datasets, and the experimental outcomes reveal that OlaGPT surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance. Our implementation of OlaGPT is available on GitHub: \url{https://github.com/oladata-team/OlaGPT}.

CLMay 8
Intent-Driven Semantic ID Generation for Grounded Conversational News Recommendation

Hongyang Su, Beibei Kong, Lei Cheng et al.

Conversational news recommendation requires grounding each suggestion in a rapidly evolving article corpus while addressing implicit user intents that lack explicit retrievable keywords. To characterize this scenario, we identify 6 intent types from production dialogues: five are implicit and pose fundamental challenges to standard RAG pipelines, forming a critical retrieve-first bottleneck. To address these issues, we introduce intent-driven Semantic ID (SID) generation under a Generate-then-Match paradigm. With two-stage training that consists of multi-task SID alignment and GPT-4 Chain-of-Thought distillation, an LLM maps diverse intents to hierarchical SID prefixes, which are then fuzzy-matched to the current news pool to guarantee fully grounded recommendations. Profile-Aware Dual-Signal Reasoning (PADR) further enables cold-start users to obtain valid recommendations using only profiles. On a mainstream Chinese news platform, our 7B model achieves 0% hallucination and 12.4% L1 match in the 152K open-generation SID space (4x random baseline). It matches GPT-4+Hybrid RAG on L1 while surpassing it on finer-grained metrics (L2 2x, Category +1.2pp) at ~100x lower cost. Cold-start users, where existing baselines score 0%, achieve 18.0% L1 (6x random), the highest among all user groups.

CLDec 17, 2024
Solid-SQL: Enhanced Schema-linking based In-context Learning for Robust Text-to-SQL

Geling Liu, Yunzhi Tan, Ruichao Zhong et al.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved the performance of text-to-SQL systems. Nevertheless, many state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches have overlooked the critical aspect of system robustness. Our experiments reveal that while LLM-driven methods excel on standard datasets, their accuracy is notably compromised when faced with adversarial perturbations. To address this challenge, we propose a robust text-to-SQL solution, called Solid-SQL, designed to integrate with various LLMs. We focus on the pre-processing stage, training a robust schema-linking model enhanced by LLM-based data augmentation. Additionally, we design a two-round, structural similarity-based example retrieval strategy for in-context learning. Our method achieves SOTA SQL execution accuracy levels of 82.1% and 58.9% on the general Spider and Bird benchmarks, respectively. Furthermore, experimental results show that Solid-SQL delivers an average improvement of 11.6% compared to baselines on the perturbed Spider-Syn, Spider-Realistic, and Dr. Spider benchmarks.

IRFeb 12, 2025
MixDec Sampling: A Soft Link-based Sampling Method of Graph Neural Network for Recommendation

Xiangjin Xie, Yuxin Chen, Ruipeng Wang et al.

Graph neural networks have been widely used in recent recommender systems, where negative sampling plays an important role. Existing negative sampling methods restrict the relationship between nodes as either hard positive pairs or hard negative pairs. This leads to the loss of structural information, and lacks the mechanism to generate positive pairs for nodes with few neighbors. To overcome limitations, we propose a novel soft link-based sampling method, namely MixDec Sampling, which consists of Mixup Sampling module and Decay Sampling module. The Mixup Sampling augments node features by synthesizing new nodes and soft links, which provides sufficient number of samples for nodes with few neighbors. The Decay Sampling strengthens the digestion of graph structure information by generating soft links for node embedding learning. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to model sampling relationships between nodes by soft links in GNN-based recommender systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed MixDec Sampling can significantly and consistently improve the recommendation performance of several representative GNN-based models on various recommendation benchmarks.

CLJun 1, 2025
Toward Structured Knowledge Reasoning: Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience

Jiawei Gu, Ziting Xian, Yuanzhen Xie et al.

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on plain text tasks but underperform on structured data like tables and databases. Potential challenges arise from their underexposure during pre-training and rigid text-to-structure transfer mechanisms. Unlike humans who seamlessly apply learned patterns across data modalities, LLMs struggle to infer implicit relationships embedded in tabular formats, especially in the absence of explicit structural guidance. To bridge this cognitive gap, we introduce Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience (CoRE), a framework that builds experience memory representations and enhances generalization through contrastive In-Context Learning (ICL) to simulate human-like knowledge transfer. Experiments on Text-to-SQL and TableQA show CoRE significantly improves performance, achieving average gains of 3.44% and 4.24%, with up to 17.2% on challenging tasks. Our Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-generated Experience Memory expands training data 8-9x, enhancing diversity and domain coverage. This training-free and continual method propels LLMs toward structured knowledge expertise.

IRAug 7, 2025
G-UBS: Towards Robust Understanding of Implicit Feedback via Group-Aware User Behavior Simulation

Boyu Chen, Siran Chen, Zhengrong Yue et al.

User feedback is critical for refining recommendation systems, yet explicit feedback (e.g., likes or dislikes) remains scarce in practice. As a more feasible alternative, inferring user preferences from massive implicit feedback has shown great potential (e.g., a user quickly skipping a recommended video usually indicates disinterest). Unfortunately, implicit feedback is often noisy: a user might skip a video due to accidental clicks or other reasons, rather than disliking it. Such noise can easily misjudge user interests, thereby undermining recommendation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-aware User Behavior Simulation (G-UBS) paradigm, which leverages contextual guidance from relevant user groups, enabling robust and in-depth interpretation of implicit feedback for individual users. Specifically, G-UBS operates via two key agents. First, the User Group Manager (UGM) effectively clusters users to generate group profiles utilizing a ``summarize-cluster-reflect" workflow based on LLMs. Second, the User Feedback Modeler (UFM) employs an innovative group-aware reinforcement learning approach, where each user is guided by the associated group profiles during the reinforcement learning process, allowing UFM to robustly and deeply examine the reasons behind implicit feedback. To assess our G-UBS paradigm, we have constructed a Video Recommendation benchmark with Implicit Feedback (IF-VR). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-modal benchmark for implicit feedback evaluation in video recommendation, encompassing 15k users, 25k videos, and 933k interaction records with implicit feedback. Extensive experiments on IF-VR demonstrate that G-UBS significantly outperforms mainstream LLMs and MLLMs, with a 4.0% higher proportion of videos achieving a play rate > 30% and 14.9% higher reasoning accuracy on IF-VR.

DBFeb 7, 2025
PSM-SQL: Progressive Schema Learning with Multi-granularity Semantics for Text-to-SQL

Zhuopan Yang, Yuanzhen Xie, Ruichao Zhong et al.

It is challenging to convert natural language (NL) questions into executable structured query language (SQL) queries for text-to-SQL tasks due to the vast number of database schemas with redundancy, which interferes with semantic learning, and the domain shift between NL and SQL. Existing works for schema linking focus on the table level and perform it once, ignoring the multi-granularity semantics and chainable cyclicity of schemas. In this paper, we propose a progressive schema linking with multi-granularity semantics (PSM-SQL) framework to reduce the redundant database schemas for text-to-SQL. Using the multi-granularity schema linking (MSL) module, PSM-SQL learns the schema semantics at the column, table, and database levels. More specifically, a triplet loss is used at the column level to learn embeddings, while fine-tuning LLMs is employed at the database level for schema reasoning. MSL employs classifier and similarity scores to model schema interactions for schema linking at the table level. In particular, PSM-SQL adopts a chain loop strategy to reduce the task difficulty of schema linking by continuously reducing the number of redundant schemas. Experiments conducted on text-to-SQL datasets show that the proposed PSM-SQL is 1-3 percentage points higher than the existing methods.

CLOct 27, 2025
DCMM-SQL: Automated Data-Centric Pipeline and Multi-Model Collaboration Training for Text-to-SQL Model

Yuanzhen Xie, Liu Ye, Jiqun Chu et al.

Text-to-SQL tasks have gained attractive improvements since the release of ChatGPT. Among them, agent-based frameworks have been widely used in this field. However, the impact of data-centric strategies on text-to-SQL tasks has rarely been explored. In this paper, we systemically design a fully automated data-centric pipeline for text-to-SQL tasks, including \emph{adaptive data repair}, which can automatically find and fix errors in the training dataset; and \emph{error data augmentation}, where we specifically diffuse and enhance erroneous data predicted by the initially trained models. Meanwhile, we propose a Multi-Model collaboration training schema, aiming to train multiple models with different augmented data, enabling them to possess distinct capabilities and work together to complement each other, because it has been found that the capability of a single fine-tuned model is very limited. Furthermore, we utilize an ensemble strategy to integrate the capabilities of multiple models to solve a multiple-choice question, aiming to further improve the accuracy of text-to-SQL tasks. The experiment results and ablation study have demonstrated the effectiveness of data-centric pipeline and Multi-Model(MM) interactive iterative strategies, achieving first place in lightweight text-to-SQL models (within 70B).

LGMay 11, 2024
CTRL: Continuous-Time Representation Learning on Temporal Heterogeneous Information Network

Chenglin Li, Yuanzhen Xie, Chenyun Yu et al.

Inductive representation learning on temporal heterogeneous graphs is crucial for scalable deep learning on heterogeneous information networks (HINs) which are time-varying, such as citation networks. However, most existing approaches are not inductive and thus cannot handle new nodes or edges. Moreover, previous temporal graph embedding methods are often trained with the temporal link prediction task to simulate the link formation process of temporal graphs, while ignoring the evolution of high-order topological structures on temporal graphs. To fill these gaps, we propose a Continuous-Time Representation Learning (CTRL) model on temporal HINs. To preserve heterogeneous node features and temporal structures, CTRL integrates three parts in a single layer, they are 1) a \emph{heterogeneous attention} unit that measures the semantic correlation between nodes, 2) a \emph{edge-based Hawkes process} to capture temporal influence between heterogeneous nodes, and 3) \emph{dynamic centrality} that indicates the dynamic importance of a node. We train the CTRL model with a future event (a subgraph) prediction task to capture the evolution of the high-order network structure. Extensive experiments have been conducted on three benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that our model significantly boosts performance and outperforms various state-of-the-art approaches. Ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the model design.

AIDec 29, 2023
Olapa-MCoT: Enhancing the Chinese Mathematical Reasoning Capability of LLMs

Shaojie Zhu, Zhaobin Wang, Chengxiang Zhuo et al.

CoT (Chain-of-Thought) is a way to solve reasoning problems for LLMs . Recently, many researches appear for improving the CoT capability of LLMs. In this work, we also proposed Olapa-MCoT, which is a LLMs based on llama2-13B PLM for finetuning and alignment learning. During the alignment training, we proposed the SimRRHF algorithm and Incorrect Data Relearning and mainly focused on optimizing the Chinese mathematical reasoning ability of Olapa-MCoT. The experiment achieved significant results, with the accuracy of Chinese mathematical reasoning up to 50%, 36% rise compared to llama2-13B. In addition, the accuracy of English reasoning ability also increased by nearly 4%.

LGDec 19, 2019
An Attention-based Graph Neural Network for Heterogeneous Structural Learning

Huiting Hong, Hantao Guo, Yucheng Lin et al.

In this paper, we focus on graph representation learning of heterogeneous information network (HIN), in which various types of vertices are connected by various types of relations. Most of the existing methods conducted on HIN revise homogeneous graph embedding models via meta-paths to learn low-dimensional vector space of HIN. In this paper, we propose a novel Heterogeneous Graph Structural Attention Neural Network (HetSANN) to directly encode structural information of HIN without meta-path and achieve more informative representations. With this method, domain experts will not be needed to design meta-path schemes and the heterogeneous information can be processed automatically by our proposed model. Specifically, we implicitly represent heterogeneous information using the following two methods: 1) we model the transformation between heterogeneous vertices through a projection in low-dimensional entity spaces; 2) afterwards, we apply the graph neural network to aggregate multi-relational information of projected neighborhood by means of attention mechanism. We also present three extensions of HetSANN, i.e., voices-sharing product attention for the pairwise relationships in HIN, cycle-consistency loss to retain the transformation between heterogeneous entity spaces, and multi-task learning with full use of information. The experiments conducted on three public datasets demonstrate that our proposed models achieve significant and consistent improvements compared to state-of-the-art solutions.

CLOct 14, 2019
Interpretable Text Classification Using CNN and Max-pooling

Hao Cheng, Xiaoqing Yang, Zang Li et al.

Deep neural networks have been widely used in text classification. However, it is hard to interpret the neural models due to the complicate mechanisms. In this work, we study the interpretability of a variant of the typical text classification model which is based on convolutional operation and max-pooling layer. Two mechanisms: convolution attribution and n-gram feature analysis are proposed to analyse the process procedure for the CNN model. The interpretability of the model is reflected by providing posterior interpretation for neural network predictions. Besides, a multi-sentence strategy is proposed to enable the model to beused in multi-sentence situation without loss of performance and interpret ability. We evaluate the performance of the model on several classification tasks and justify the interpretable performance with some case studies.

SIAug 20, 2019
AHINE: Adaptive Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding

Yucheng Lin, Xiaoqing Yang, Zang Li et al.

Network embedding is an effective way to solve the network analytics problems such as node classification, link prediction, etc. It represents network elements using low dimensional vectors such that the graph structural information and properties are maximumly preserved. Many prior works focused on embeddings for networks with the same type of edges or vertices, while some works tried to generate embeddings for heterogeneous network using mechanisms like specially designed meta paths. In this paper, we propose two novel algorithms, GHINE (General Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding) and AHINE (Adaptive Heterogeneous Information Network Embedding), to compute distributed representations for elements in heterogeneous networks. Specially, AHINE uses an adaptive deep model to learn network embeddings that maximizes the likelihood of preserving the relationship chains between non-adjacent nodes. We apply our embeddings to a large network of points of interest (POIs) and achieve superior accuracy on some prediction problems on a ride-hailing platform. In addition, we show that AHINE outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a set of learning tasks on public datasets, including node labelling and similarity ranking in bibliographic networks.