Ziqi Liu

Baolin Liu, Zongyuan Yang, Pengfei Wang et al.

The goal of scene text image super-resolution is to reconstruct high-resolution text-line images from unrecognizable low-resolution inputs. The existing methods relying on the optimization of pixel-level loss tend to yield text edges that exhibit a notable degree of blurring, thereby exerting a substantial impact on both the readability and recognizability of the text. To address these issues, we propose TextDiff, the first diffusion-based framework tailored for scene text image super-resolution. It contains two modules: the Text Enhancement Module (TEM) and the Mask-Guided Residual Diffusion Module (MRD). The TEM generates an initial deblurred text image and a mask that encodes the spatial location of the text. The MRD is responsible for effectively sharpening the text edge by modeling the residuals between the ground-truth images and the initial deblurred images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our TextDiff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on public benchmark datasets and can improve the readability of scene text images. Moreover, our proposed MRD module is plug-and-play that effectively sharpens the text edges produced by SOTA methods. This enhancement not only improves the readability and recognizability of the results generated by SOTA methods but also does not require any additional joint training. Available Codes:https://github.com/Lenubolim/TextDiff.

Jian Guan, Ziqi Liu, Minlie Huang · tsinghua

Teaching morals is one of the most important purposes of storytelling. An essential ability for understanding and writing moral stories is bridging story plots and implied morals. Its challenges mainly lie in: (1) grasping knowledge about abstract concepts in morals, (2) capturing inter-event discourse relations in stories, and (3) aligning value preferences of stories and morals concerning good or bad behavior. In this paper, we propose two understanding tasks and two generation tasks to assess these abilities of machines. We present STORAL, a new dataset of Chinese and English human-written moral stories. We show the difficulty of the proposed tasks by testing various models with automatic and manual evaluation on STORAL. Furthermore, we present a retrieval-augmented algorithm that effectively exploits related concepts or events in training sets as additional guidance to improve performance on these tasks.

Fake Lin, Binbin Hu, Xi Zhu et al.

Code Agents have achieved remarkable advances in recent years, exhibiting strong capabilities across a wide range of software engineering tasks. However, their misuse often produces bloated and disorganized code that impairing readability, extensibility, and robustness. Despite this risk, existing benchmarks largely evaluate functional correctness rather than long-term maintainability of code agents. In this paper, we propose SmellBench, an extensible code refactoring benchmark that proactively injects code smells into clean code snippets from real-world repositories. This design enables the generation of controlled, high-quality, and diverse refactoring cases with human-written ground truth. Specifically, it contains 294 cases spanning 7 popular smell types, 3 difficulty levels, 2 instruction settings across 7 real-world repositories. We further design 3 evaluation aspects covering functional correctness, localization ability, and refactoring quality assessment. Experiments with 2 popular agents and 6 large langauge models (LLMs) show that the best combination - Qwen Code + Claude Sonnet 4.5 - achieved only a 50.34 score of smell elimination. Further analysis reveals that this gap arises from a focus on local code smells and a lack of cross-file understanding, which hinders comprehensive smell elimination.

Jianzhu Yao, Ziqi Liu, Jian Guan et al. · tsinghua

Many classical fairy tales, fiction, and screenplays leverage dialogue to advance story plots and establish characters. We present the first study to explore whether machines can understand and generate dialogue in stories, which requires capturing traits of different characters and the relationships between them. To this end, we propose two new tasks including Masked Dialogue Generation and Dialogue Speaker Recognition, i.e., generating missing dialogue turns and predicting speakers for specified dialogue turns, respectively. We build a new dataset DialStory, which consists of 105k Chinese stories with a large amount of dialogue weaved into the plots to support the evaluation. We show the difficulty of the proposed tasks by testing existing models with automatic and manual evaluation on DialStory. Furthermore, we propose to learn explicit character representations to improve performance on these tasks. Extensive experiments and case studies show that our approach can generate more coherent and informative dialogue, and achieve higher speaker recognition accuracy than strong baselines.

Jianyu Wei, Haichao Wang, Laixian Peng et al.

The rise of low-altitude economies and 6G is driving the evolution of low-altitude networks (LANs), making communication security a pressing concern. Unlike traditional security approaches, covert communication offers enhanced protection by hiding the transmission behavior itself. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), a key technology of 6G, efficiently supports both sensing and communication tasks through hardware integration, thereby promising significant gains for covert communication. Nevertheless, the complexity and dynamics of urban environments pose critical challenges. Drawing on the latest advances in smart radio environment (SRE) technologies, this paper introduces them into integrated sensing and covert communication (ISACC) to suppress covert channel fading and counteract sensing precision loss in LANs. We first survey the applications and state-of-the-art findings of ISACC in LANs, highlighting key practical challenges. Subsequently, we introduce the core concept of SRE and elaborate on its enabling techniques across four dimensions. To deliver more insights, we explore potential pathways for integrating SRE into ISACC. To maximize covert throughput, a reinforcement learning-based case study is conducted by jointly optimizing flight trajectory, jamming power, movable antenna position, bandwidth allocation, and beamforming vectors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance compared to the benchmark. Finally, some open challenges and potential directions are discussed.

Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lingbing Guo et al.

Multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to automatically discover the unobserved factual knowledge from a given multi-modal knowledge graph by collaboratively modeling the triple structure and multi-modal information from entities. However, real-world MMKGs present challenges due to their diverse and imbalanced nature, which means that the modality information can span various types (e.g., image, text, numeric, audio, video) but its distribution among entities is uneven, leading to missing modalities for certain entities. Existing works usually focus on common modalities like image and text while neglecting the imbalanced distribution phenomenon of modal information. To address these issues, we propose a comprehensive framework NativE to achieve MMKGC in the wild. NativE proposes a relation-guided dual adaptive fusion module that enables adaptive fusion for any modalities and employs a collaborative modality adversarial training framework to augment the imbalanced modality information. We construct a new benchmark called WildKGC with five datasets to evaluate our method. The empirical results compared with 21 recent baselines confirm the superiority of our method, consistently achieving state-of-the-art performance across different datasets and various scenarios while keeping efficient and generalizable. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/zjukg/NATIVE

Sicong Xie, Binbin Hu, Fengze Li et al.

Aiming at helping users locally discovery retail services (e.g., entertainment and dinning), Online to Offline (O2O) service platforms have become popular in recent years, which greatly challenge current recommender systems. With the real data in Alipay, a feeds-like scenario for O2O services, we find that recurrence based temporal patterns and position biases commonly exist in our scenarios, which seriously threaten the recommendation effectiveness. To this end, we propose COUPA, an industrial system targeting for characterizing user preference with following two considerations: (1) Time aware preference: we employ the continuous time aware point process equipped with an attention mechanism to fully capture temporal patterns for recommendation. (2) Position aware preference: a position selector component equipped with a position personalization module is elaborately designed to mitigate position bias in a personalized manner. Finally, we carefully implement and deploy COUPA on Alipay with a cooperation of edge, streaming and batch computing, as well as a two-stage online serving mode, to support several popular recommendation scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that COUPA consistently achieves superior performance and has potential to provide intuitive evidences for recommendation

Yichi Zhang, Zhuo Chen, Lingbing Guo et al.

Multi-modal knowledge graph completion (MMKGC) aims to discover unobserved knowledge from given knowledge graphs, collaboratively leveraging structural information from the triples and multi-modal information of the entities to overcome the inherent incompleteness. Existing MMKGC methods usually extract multi-modal features with pre-trained models, resulting in coarse handling of multi-modal entity information, overlooking the nuanced, fine-grained semantic details and their complex interactions. To tackle this shortfall, we introduce a novel framework MyGO to tokenize, fuse, and augment the fine-grained multi-modal representations of entities and enhance the MMKGC performance. Motivated by the tokenization technology, MyGO tokenizes multi-modal entity information as fine-grained discrete tokens and learns entity representations with a cross-modal entity encoder. To further augment the multi-modal representations, MyGO incorporates fine-grained contrastive learning to highlight the specificity of the entity representations. Experiments on standard MMKGC benchmarks reveal that our method surpasses 19 of the latest models, underlining its superior performance. Code and data can be found in https://github.com/zjukg/MyGO

Ling Team, Binwei Zeng, Chao Huang et al.

In this technical report, we tackle the challenges of training large-scale Mixture of Experts (MoE) models, focusing on overcoming cost inefficiency and resource limitations prevalent in such systems. To address these issues, we present two differently sized MoE large language models (LLMs), namely Ling-Lite and Ling-Plus (referred to as "Bailing" in Chinese, spelled Bǎilíng in Pinyin). Ling-Lite contains 16.8 billion parameters with 2.75 billion activated parameters, while Ling-Plus boasts 290 billion parameters with 28.8 billion activated parameters. Both models exhibit comparable performance to leading industry benchmarks. This report offers actionable insights to improve the efficiency and accessibility of AI development in resource-constrained settings, promoting more scalable and sustainable technologies. Specifically, to reduce training costs for large-scale MoE models, we propose innovative methods for (1) optimization of model architecture and training processes, (2) refinement of training anomaly handling, and (3) enhancement of model evaluation efficiency. Additionally, leveraging high-quality data generated from knowledge graphs, our models demonstrate superior capabilities in tool use compared to other models. Ultimately, our experimental findings demonstrate that a 300B MoE LLM can be effectively trained on lower-performance devices while achieving comparable performance to models of a similar scale, including dense and MoE models. Compared to high-performance devices, utilizing a lower-specification hardware system during the pre-training phase demonstrates significant cost savings, reducing computing costs by approximately 20%. The models can be accessed at https://huggingface.co/inclusionAI.

Yichi Zhang, Binbin Hu, Zhuo Chen et al.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide reliable external knowledge for a wide variety of AI tasks in the form of structured triples. Knowledge graph pre-training (KGP) aims to pre-train neural networks on large-scale KGs and provide unified interfaces to enhance different downstream tasks, which is a key direction for KG management, maintenance, and applications. Existing works often focus on purely research questions in open domains, or they are not open source due to data security and privacy in real scenarios. Meanwhile, existing studies have not explored the training efficiency and transferability of KGP models in depth. To address these problems, We propose a framework MuDoK to achieve multi-domain collaborative pre-training and efficient prefix prompt tuning to serve diverse downstream tasks like recommendation and text understanding. Our design is a plug-and-play prompt learning approach that can be flexibly adapted to different downstream task backbones. In response to the lack of open-source benchmarks, we constructed a new multi-domain KGP benchmark called KPI with two large-scale KGs and six different sub-domain tasks to evaluate our method and open-sourced it for subsequent research. We evaluated our approach based on constructed KPI benchmarks using diverse backbone models in heterogeneous downstream tasks. The experimental results show that our framework brings significant performance gains, along with its generality, efficiency, and transferability.

Yongchao Feng, Yajie Liu, Shuai Yang et al.

Vision-Language Model (VLM) have gained widespread adoption in Open-Vocabulary (OV) object detection and segmentation tasks. Despite they have shown promise on OV-related tasks, their effectiveness in conventional vision tasks has thus far been unevaluated. In this work, we present the systematic review of VLM-based detection and segmentation, view VLM as the foundational model and conduct comprehensive evaluations across multiple downstream tasks for the first time: 1) The evaluation spans eight detection scenarios (closed-set detection, domain adaptation, crowded objects, etc.) and eight segmentation scenarios (few-shot, open-world, small object, etc.), revealing distinct performance advantages and limitations of various VLM architectures across tasks. 2) As for detection tasks, we evaluate VLMs under three finetuning granularities: \textit{zero prediction}, \textit{visual fine-tuning}, and \textit{text prompt}, and further analyze how different finetuning strategies impact performance under varied task. 3) Based on empirical findings, we provide in-depth analysis of the correlations between task characteristics, model architectures, and training methodologies, offering insights for future VLM design. 4) We believe that this work shall be valuable to the pattern recognition experts working in the fields of computer vision, multimodal learning, and vision foundation models by introducing them to the problem, and familiarizing them with the current status of the progress while providing promising directions for future research. A project associated with this review and evaluation has been created at https://github.com/better-chao/perceptual_abilities_evaluation.

Ziqi Liu

Long-term time series forecasting is essential in areas like finance and weather prediction. Besides traditional methods that operate in the time domain, many recent models transform time series data into the frequency domain to better capture complex patterns. However, these methods often use filtering techniques to remove certain frequency signals as noise, which may unintentionally discard important information and reduce prediction accuracy. To address this, we propose the Frequency Decomposition Mixture-of-Experts (FreqMoE) model, which dynamically decomposes time series data into frequency bands, each processed by a specialized expert. A gating mechanism adjusts the importance of each output of expert based on frequency characteristics, and the aggregated results are fed into a prediction module that iteratively refines the forecast using residual connections. Our experiments demonstrate that FreqMoE outperforms state-of-the-art models, achieving the best performance on 51 out of 70 metrics across all tested datasets, while significantly reducing the number of required parameters to under 50k, providing notable efficiency advantages. Code is available at: https://github.com/sunbus100/FreqMoE-main

Kiljae Lee, Ziqi Liu, Weijing Tang et al.

Shapley value and its priority-aware extensions are widely used for valuation in machine learning, but existing methods require pairwise priority to be binary and acyclic, a restriction spectacularly violated in real-data examples such as aggregated human preferences and multi-criterion comparisons. We introduce the generalized priority-aware Shapley value (GPASV), a random order value defined on arbitrary directed weighted priority graphs, in which pairwise edges penalize rather than forbid order violations. GPASV covers a range of classical models as boundary cases. We establish GPASV through an axiomatic characterization, develop the associated computational methods, and introduce a priority sweeping diagnostic extending PASV's. We apply GPASV to LLM ensemble valuation on the cyclic Chatbot Arena preference graph, illustrating that priority-aware valuation is not a one-button operation: different balances of pairwise graph priority versus individual soft priority produce substantively different valuations of the same data.

Long Phan, Alice Gatti, Ziwen Han et al. · amazon-science, apple-ml

Benchmarks are important tools for tracking the rapid advancements in large language model (LLM) capabilities. However, benchmarks are not keeping pace in difficulty: LLMs now achieve over 90\% accuracy on popular benchmarks like MMLU, limiting informed measurement of state-of-the-art LLM capabilities. In response, we introduce Humanity's Last Exam (HLE), a multi-modal benchmark at the frontier of human knowledge, designed to be the final closed-ended academic benchmark of its kind with broad subject coverage. HLE consists of 2,500 questions across dozens of subjects, including mathematics, humanities, and the natural sciences. HLE is developed globally by subject-matter experts and consists of multiple-choice and short-answer questions suitable for automated grading. Each question has a known solution that is unambiguous and easily verifiable, but cannot be quickly answered via internet retrieval. State-of-the-art LLMs demonstrate low accuracy and calibration on HLE, highlighting a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the expert human frontier on closed-ended academic questions. To inform research and policymaking upon a clear understanding of model capabilities, we publicly release HLE at https://lastexam.ai.

Shuyang Hou, Ziqi Liu, Haoyue Jiao et al.

Pixel-level slum mapping has long been constrained by limited cross-city generalisation, the absence of continuous density estimation, and weak global comparability. AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF), a globally consistent 64-dimensional annual surface embedding at 10 m, offers a new analysis-ready basis for lightweight slum monitoring, but its applicability to slum detection - an indirectly coupled task shaped by both built form and socio-economic processes - remains untested. We evaluate AEF on slum classification and sub-pixel density estimation across 12 cities and 69 city-year pairs (2017-2024), using GRAM pseudo-masks as supervisory labels. The evaluation spans four training strategies, two protocols (random split and 3x3 spatial block cross-validation), six auxiliary feature configurations, and five baseline models, complemented by representation-level analyses (PCA, SHAP) and full-AOI mapping. Five findings emerge. (1) Same-city cross-year training is optimal under both protocols (median spatial F1 = 0.616, R^2 = 0.466); temporal expansion outperforms cross-city transfer, indicating city-scale representational drift. (2) Regression R^2 is driven primarily by zero/non-zero boundary discrimination: positive-pixel R^2 is consistently negative across all cities, revealing limited capacity to model intra-pixel density gradients at 10 m. (3) PC36 is consistently top-ranked across tasks; classification saturates at k = 32 while regression remains unsaturated at k = 64. (4) POI features yield the largest density gain (Delta R^2 = +0.064). (5) For six cities meeting dual-task usability thresholds, full-AOI inference across 2017-2024 preserves slum cluster structure (mean SSIM = 0.926). The study delineates the capabilities and complementarity needs of foundation-model embeddings for slum monitoring.

Ziqi Liu, Ziyang Zhou, Yilin Li et al.

Empathetic response generation is a crucial task for creating more human-like and supportive conversational agents. However, existing methods face a core trade-off between the analytical depth of specialized models and the generative fluency of Large Language Models (LLMs). To address this, we propose TRACE, Task-decomposed Reasoning for Affective Communication and Empathy, a novel framework that models empathy as a structured cognitive process by decomposing the task into a pipeline for analysis and synthesis. By building a comprehensive understanding before generation, TRACE unites deep analysis with expressive generation. Experimental results show that our framework significantly outperforms strong baselines in both automatic and LLM-based evaluations, confirming that our structured decomposition is a promising paradigm for creating more capable and interpretable empathetic agents. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TRACE-18EF/README.md.

Zongyuan Yang, Baolin Liu, Yongping Xiong et al.

Removing degradation from document images not only improves their visual quality and readability, but also enhances the performance of numerous automated document analysis and recognition tasks. However, existing regression-based methods optimized for pixel-level distortion reduction tend to suffer from significant loss of high-frequency information, leading to distorted and blurred text edges. To compensate for this major deficiency, we propose DocDiff, the first diffusion-based framework specifically designed for diverse challenging document enhancement problems, including document deblurring, denoising, and removal of watermarks and seals. DocDiff consists of two modules: the Coarse Predictor (CP), which is responsible for recovering the primary low-frequency content, and the High-Frequency Residual Refinement (HRR) module, which adopts the diffusion models to predict the residual (high-frequency information, including text edges), between the ground-truth and the CP-predicted image. DocDiff is a compact and computationally efficient model that benefits from a well-designed network architecture, an optimized training loss objective, and a deterministic sampling process with short time steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DocDiff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on multiple benchmark datasets, and can significantly enhance the readability and recognizability of degraded document images. Furthermore, our proposed HRR module in pre-trained DocDiff is plug-and-play and ready-to-use, with only 4.17M parameters. It greatly sharpens the text edges generated by SOTA deblurring methods without additional joint training. Available codes: https://github.com/Royalvice/DocDiff

Ziqi Pan, Ziqi Liu, Jinhan Zhang et al.

In today's in-person group discussions, smartphones are integrated as intelligent workstations; yet given their co-presence in such face-to-face interactions, whether and how they may enhance people's behavioral engagement with others remains underexplored. This work investigates how animating personal smartphones to move expressively, without compromising regular functions, can transform them into active embodied facilitators for co-located group interaction. In the four-stranger small-group discussion setting, guided by Tuckman's group-development theory, we conducted a design workshop (n=12) to identify problematic group-work circumstances and design expressive, attention-efficient animated phone facilitations. Subsequently, we developed AnimaStand, a movement-enabled phone stand that animates phones to deliver group facilitation cues according to conversation dynamics. In a between-subjects Wizard-of-Oz study (n=56) with four-stranger group discussions, where everyone's phone was on an AnimaStand, the facilitations re-engaged inactive members, enhancing group dynamics, task operation performance, and relationships. We finally discuss prospects for more adaptive and generalizable animated device personal facilitation.

Yuling Wang, Changxin Tian, Binbin Hu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) open up new horizons for sequential recommendations, owing to their remarkable language comprehension and generation capabilities. However, there are still numerous challenges that should be addressed to successfully implement sequential recommendations empowered by LLMs. Firstly, user behavior patterns are often complex, and relying solely on one-step reasoning from LLMs may lead to incorrect or task-irrelevant responses. Secondly, the prohibitively resource requirements of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT-175B) are overwhelmingly high and impractical for real sequential recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel Step-by-step knowLedge dIstillation fraMework for recommendation (SLIM), paving a promising path for sequential recommenders to enjoy the exceptional reasoning capabilities of LLMs in a "slim" (i.e., resource-efficient) manner. We introduce CoT prompting based on user behavior sequences for the larger teacher model. The rationales generated by the teacher model are then utilized as labels to distill the downstream smaller student model (e.g., LLaMA2-7B). In this way, the student model acquires the step-by-step reasoning capabilities in recommendation tasks. We encode the generated rationales from the student model into a dense vector, which empowers recommendation in both ID-based and ID-agnostic scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SLIM over state-of-the-art baselines, and further analysis showcasing its ability to generate meaningful recommendation reasoning at affordable costs.

Ziqi Liu, Kiljae Lee, Yuan Zhang et al.

Probabilistic values, including Shapley values and semivalues, provide a model-agnostic framework to attribute the behavior of a black-box model to data points or features, with a wide range of applications including explainable artificial intelligence and data valuation. However, their exact computation requires utility evaluations over exponentially many coalitions, making Monte Carlo approximation essential in modern machine learning applications. Existing estimators are often developed through different identification strategies, including weighted averages, self-normalized weighting, regression adjustment, and weighted least squares. Our key observation is that these seemingly distinct constructions share a common first-order error structure, in which the leading term is an augmented inverse-probability weighted influence term determined by the sampling law and a working surrogate function. This first-order representation yields an explicit expression for the leading mean squared error (MSE), which characterizes how the sampling law and the surrogate jointly determine statistical efficiency. Guided by this criterion, we propose an Efficiency-Aware Surrogate-adjusted Estimator (EASE) that directly chooses the sampling law and surrogate to minimize the first-order MSE. We demonstrate that EASE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art estimators for various probabilistic values.

Qian Zhao, Hao Qian, Ziqi Liu et al.

Recommendation systems are widely used in e-commerce websites and online platforms to address information overload. However, existing systems primarily rely on historical data and user feedback, making it difficult to capture user intent transitions. Recently, Knowledge Base (KB)-based models are proposed to incorporate expert knowledge, but it struggle to adapt to new items and the evolving e-commerce environment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Large Language Model based Complementary Knowledge Enhanced Recommendation System (LLM-KERec). It introduces an entity extractor that extracts unified concept terms from item and user information. To provide cost-effective and reliable prior knowledge, entity pairs are generated based on entity popularity and specific strategies. The large language model determines complementary relationships in each entity pair, constructing a complementary knowledge graph. Furthermore, a new complementary recall module and an Entity-Entity-Item (E-E-I) weight decision model refine the scoring of the ranking model using real complementary exposure-click samples. Extensive experiments conducted on three industry datasets demonstrate the significant performance improvement of our model compared to existing approaches. Additionally, detailed analysis shows that LLM-KERec enhances users' enthusiasm for consumption by recommending complementary items. In summary, LLM-KERec addresses the limitations of traditional recommendation systems by incorporating complementary knowledge and utilizing a large language model to capture user intent transitions, adapt to new items, and enhance recommendation efficiency in the evolving e-commerce landscape.

Xinyu Tang, Xiaolei Wang, Zhihao Lv et al.

Recent advancements in long chain-of-thoughts(long CoTs) have significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models(LLMs). Existing work finds that the capability of long CoT reasoning can be efficiently elicited by tuning on only a few examples and can easily transfer to other tasks. This motivates us to investigate whether long CoT reasoning is a general capability for LLMs. In this work, we conduct an empirical analysis for this question from the perspective of representation. We find that LLMs do encode long CoT reasoning as a general capability, with a clear distinction from vanilla CoTs. Furthermore, domain-specific representations are also required for the effective transfer of long CoT reasoning. Inspired by these findings, we propose GLoRE, a novel representation engineering method to unleash the general long CoT reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GLoRE in both in-domain and cross-domain scenarios.

Mingxuan Hu, Hongbo Ma, Xinlan Wu et al.

Audio-based depression detection models have demonstrated promising performance but often suffer from gender bias due to imbalanced training data. Epidemiological statistics show a higher prevalence of depression in females, leading models to learn spurious correlations between gender and depression. Consequently, models tend to over-diagnose female patients while underperforming on male patients, raising significant fairness concerns. To address this, we propose a novel Counterfactual Debiasing Framework grounded in causal inference. We construct a causal graph to model the decision-making process and identify gender bias as the direct causal effect of gender on the prediction. During inference, we employ counterfactual inference to estimate and subtract this direct effect, ensuring the model relies primarily on authentic acoustic pathological features. Extensive experiments on the DAIC-WOZ dataset using two advanced acoustic backbones demonstrate that our framework not only significantly reduces gender bias but also improves overall detection performance compared to existing debiasing strategies.

Kiljae Lee, Ziqi Liu, Weijing Tang et al.

Shapley values are widely used for model-agnostic data valuation and feature attribution, yet they implicitly assume contributors are interchangeable. This can be problematic when contributors are dependent (e.g., reused/augmented data or causal feature orderings) or when contributions should be adjusted by factors such as trust or risk. We propose Priority-Aware Shapley Value (PASV), which incorporates both hard precedence constraints and soft, contributor-specific priority weights. PASV is applicable to general precedence structures, recovers precedence-only and weight-only Shapley variants as special cases, and is uniquely characterized by natural axioms. We develop an efficient adjacent-swap Metropolis-Hastings sampler for scalable Monte Carlo estimation and analyze limiting regimes induced by extreme priority weights. Experiments on data valuation (MNIST/CIFAR10) and feature attribution (Census Income) demonstrate more structure-faithful allocations and a practical sensitivity analysis via our proposed "priority sweeping".

Chunjing Gan, Dan Yang, Binbin Hu et al.

Nowadays, the rapid development of mobile economy has promoted the flourishing of online marketing campaigns, whose success greatly hinges on the efficient matching between user preferences and desired marketing campaigns where a well-established Marketing-oriented Knowledge Graph (dubbed as MoKG) could serve as the critical "bridge" for preference propagation. In this paper, we seek to carefully prompt a Large Language Model (LLM) with domain-level knowledge as a better marketing-oriented knowledge miner for marketing-oriented knowledge graph construction, which is however non-trivial, suffering from several inevitable issues in real-world marketing scenarios, i.e., uncontrollable relation generation of LLMs,insufficient prompting ability of a single prompt, the unaffordable deployment cost of LLMs. To this end, we propose PAIR, a novel Progressive prompting Augmented mIning fRamework for harvesting marketing-oriented knowledge graph with LLMs. In particular, we reduce the pure relation generation to an LLM based adaptive relation filtering process through the knowledge-empowered prompting technique. Next, we steer LLMs for entity expansion with progressive prompting augmentation,followed by a reliable aggregation with comprehensive consideration of both self-consistency and semantic relatedness. In terms of online serving, we specialize in a small and white-box PAIR (i.e.,LightPAIR),which is fine-tuned with a high-quality corpus provided by a strong teacher-LLM. Extensive experiments and practical applications in audience targeting verify the effectiveness of the proposed (Light)PAIR.

Changxin Tian, Kunlong Chen, Jia Liu et al.

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has become a dominant architecture for scaling Large Language Models (LLMs) efficiently by decoupling total parameters from computational cost. However, this decoupling creates a critical challenge: predicting the model capacity of a given MoE configurations (e.g., expert activation ratio and granularity) remains an unresolved problem. To address this gap, we introduce Efficiency Leverage (EL), a metric quantifying the computational advantage of an MoE model over a dense equivalent. We conduct a large-scale empirical study, training over 300 models up to 28B parameters, to systematically investigate the relationship between MoE architectural configurations and EL. Our findings reveal that EL is primarily driven by the expert activation ratio and the total compute budget, both following predictable power laws, while expert granularity acts as a non-linear modulator with a clear optimal range. We integrate these discoveries into a unified scaling law that accurately predicts the EL of an MoE architecture based on its configuration. To validate our derived scaling laws, we designed and trained Ling-mini-beta, a pilot model for Ling-2.0 series with only 0.85B active parameters, alongside a 6.1B dense model for comparison. When trained on an identical 1T high-quality token dataset, Ling-mini-beta matched the performance of the 6.1B dense model while consuming over 7x fewer computational resources, thereby confirming the accuracy of our scaling laws. This work provides a principled and empirically-grounded foundation for the scaling of efficient MoE models.

Ziyue Huang, Yongchao Feng, Shuai Yang et al.

Remote sensing object detection has made significant progress, but most studies still focus on closed-set detection, limiting generalization across diverse datasets. Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) provides a solution by leveraging multimodal associations between text prompts and visual features. However, existing OVD methods for remote sensing (RS) images are constrained by small-scale datasets and fail to address the unique challenges of remote sensing interpretation, include oriented object detection and the need for both high precision and real-time performance in diverse scenarios. To tackle these challenges, we propose OpenRSD, a universal open-prompt RS object detection framework. OpenRSD supports multimodal prompts and integrates multi-task detection heads to balance accuracy and real-time requirements. Additionally, we design a multi-stage training pipeline to enhance the generalization of model. Evaluated on seven public datasets, OpenRSD demonstrates superior performance in oriented and horizontal bounding box detection, with real-time inference capabilities suitable for large-scale RS image analysis. Compared to YOLO-World, OpenRSD exhibits an 8.7\% higher average precision and achieves an inference speed of 20.8 FPS. Codes and models will be released.

Changxin Tian, Jiapeng Wang, Qian Zhao et al.

Recent advances in learning rate (LR) scheduling have demonstrated the effectiveness of decay-free approaches that eliminate the traditional decay phase while maintaining competitive performance. Model merging techniques have emerged as particularly promising solutions in this domain. We present Warmup-Stable and Merge (WSM), a general framework that establishes a formal connection between learning rate decay and model merging. WSM provides a unified theoretical foundation for emulating various decay strategies-including cosine decay, linear decay and inverse square root decay-as principled model averaging schemes, while remaining fully compatible with diverse optimization methods. Through extensive experiments, we identify merge duration-the training window for checkpoint aggregation-as the most critical factor influencing model performance, surpassing the importance of both checkpoint interval and merge quantity. Our framework consistently outperforms the widely-adopted Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) approach across multiple benchmarks, achieving significant improvements of +3.5% on MATH, +2.9% on HumanEval, and +5.5% on MMLU-Pro. The performance advantages extend to supervised fine-tuning scenarios, highlighting WSM's potential for long-term model refinement.

Ling Team, Ang Li, Ben Liu et al.

We introduce Ling 2.0, a series reasoning-oriented language foundation built upon the principle that every activation boosts reasoning capability. Designed to scale from tens of billions to one trillion parameters under a unified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, Ling 2.0 emphasizes high sparsity, cross-scale consistency, and efficiency guided by empirical scaling laws. The series includes three non-thinking (instruct) models - Ling-mini-2.0, Ling-flash-2.0, and Ling-1T - ranging from 16B to 1T total parameters and achieving up to 7-fold active-compute efficiency compared with dense counterparts. Ling 2.0 integrates coordinated innovations across model architecture, pre-training, post-training, and infrastructure: a high-sparsity MoE with MTP for efficient reasoning, reasoning-oriented data and mid-training CoT activation, reinforcement-based fine-tuning (DFT, Evo-CoT), and full-scale FP8 training with fine-grained heterogeneous pipelines. At the trillion scale, Ling-1T establishes a new Pareto frontier of reasoning accuracy versus computational efficiency, demonstrating that sparse activation, when properly aligned with reasoning objectives, enables scalable and efficient intelligence. Collectively, Ling 2.0 provides a coherent, open, and efficient foundation for advancing future reasoning and thinking models, including the Ring series built upon the same base.

Ziqi Liu, Yangbin Chen, Ziyang Zhou et al.

Sarcasm detection is a crucial yet challenging Natural Language Processing task. Existing Large Language Model methods are often limited by single-perspective analysis, static reasoning pathways, and a susceptibility to hallucination when processing complex ironic rhetoric, which impacts their accuracy and reliability. To address these challenges, we propose **SEVADE**, a novel **S**elf-**Ev**olving multi-agent **A**nalysis framework with **D**ecoupled **E**valuation for hallucination-resistant sarcasm detection. The core of our framework is a Dynamic Agentive Reasoning Engine (DARE), which utilizes a team of specialized agents grounded in linguistic theory to perform a multifaceted deconstruction of the text and generate a structured reasoning chain. Subsequently, a separate lightweight rationale adjudicator (RA) performs the final classification based solely on this reasoning chain. This decoupled architecture is designed to mitigate the risk of hallucination by separating complex reasoning from the final judgment. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with average improvements of **6.75%** in Accuracy and **6.29%** in Macro-F1 score.

Jingwei Wang, Zai Zhang, Hao Qian et al.

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to use tools is crucial for improving their problem-solving abilities and expanding their applications. However, effectively using tools is challenging because it requires a deep understanding of tool functionalities and user intentions. Previous methods relied mainly on LLMs to generate instruction data, but the quality of these data was often insufficient. In this paper, we propose a new method that uses knowledge graphs to generate high-quality instruction data for LLMs. Knowledge graphs are manually curated datasets rich in semantic information. We begin by extracting various query pathways from a given knowledge graph, which are transformed into a broad spectrum of user queries. We then translate the relationships between entities into actionable tools and parse the pathways of each query into detailed solution steps, thereby creating high-quality instruction data. Our experiments show that fine-tuning on just a small sample of this synthetic data can significantly improve the tool utilization and overall capabilities of LLMs.

Chunjing Gan, Dan Yang, Binbin Hu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have become a disruptive force in the industry, introducing unprecedented capabilities in natural language processing, logical reasoning and so on. However, the challenges of knowledge updates and hallucination issues have limited the application of LLMs in medical scenarios, where retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can offer significant assistance. Nevertheless, existing retrieve-then-read approaches generally digest the retrieved documents, without considering the timeliness, authoritativeness and commonality of retrieval. We argue that these approaches can be suboptimal, especially in real-world applications where information from different sources might conflict with each other and even information from the same source in different time scale might be different, and totally relying on this would deteriorate the performance of RAG approaches. We propose PolyRAG that carefully incorporate judges from different perspectives and finally integrate the polyviews for retrieval augmented generation in medical applications. Due to the scarcity of real-world benchmarks for evaluation, to bridge the gap we propose PolyEVAL, a benchmark consists of queries and documents collected from real-world medical scenarios (including medical policy, hospital & doctor inquiry and healthcare) with multiple tagging (e.g., timeliness, authoritativeness) on them. Extensive experiments and analysis on PolyEVAL have demonstrated the superiority of PolyRAG.

Qingwen Tian, Yuxin Xu, Yixuan Yang et al.

Molecular 3D conformations play a key role in determining how molecules interact with other molecules or protein surfaces. Recent deep learning advancements have improved conformation prediction, but slow training speeds and difficulties in utilizing high-degree features limit performance. We propose EquiFlow, an equivariant conditional flow matching model with optimal transport. EquiFlow uniquely applies conditional flow matching in molecular 3D conformation prediction, leveraging simulation-free training to address slow training speeds. It uses a modified Equiformer model to encode Cartesian molecular conformations along with their atomic and bond properties into higher-degree embeddings. Additionally, EquiFlow employs an ODE solver, providing faster inference speeds compared to diffusion models with SDEs. Experiments on the QM9 dataset show that EquiFlow predicts small molecule conformations more accurately than current state-of-the-art models.

Binbin Hu, Zhicheng An, Zhengwei Wu et al.

Estimating individual treatment effects (ITE) from observational data is a critical task across various domains. However, many existing works on ITE estimation overlook the influence of hidden confounders, which remain unobserved at the individual unit level. To address this limitation, researchers have utilized graph neural networks to aggregate neighbors' features to capture the hidden confounders and mitigate confounding bias by minimizing the discrepancy of confounder representations between the treated and control groups. Despite the success of these approaches, practical scenarios often treat all features as confounders and involve substantial differences in feature distributions between the treated and control groups. Confusing the adjustment and confounder and enforcing strict balance on the confounder representations could potentially undermine the effectiveness of outcome prediction. To mitigate this issue, we propose a novel framework called the \textit{Graph Disentangle Causal model} (GDC) to conduct ITE estimation in the network setting. GDC utilizes a causal disentangle module to separate unit features into adjustment and confounder representations. Then we design a graph aggregation module consisting of three distinct graph aggregators to obtain adjustment, confounder, and counterfactual confounder representations. Finally, a causal constraint module is employed to enforce the disentangled representations as true causal factors. The effectiveness of our proposed method is demonstrated by conducting comprehensive experiments on two networked datasets.

Jiapeng Wang, Changxin Tian, Kunlong Chen et al.

Optimizing data mixtures is essential for unlocking the full potential of large language models (LLMs), yet identifying the optimal composition remains computationally prohibitive due to reliance on heuristic trials or expensive proxy training. To address this, we introduce \textbf{MergeMix}, a novel approach that efficiently determines optimal data mixing ratios by repurposing model merging weights as a high-fidelity, low-cost performance proxy. By training domain-specific experts on minimal tokens and optimizing their merging weights against downstream benchmarks, MergeMix effectively optimizes the performance of data mixtures without incurring the cost of full-scale training. Extensive experiments on models with 8B and 16B parameters validate that MergeMix achieves performance comparable to or surpassing exhaustive manual tuning while drastically reducing search costs. Furthermore, MergeMix exhibits high rank consistency (Spearman $ρ> 0.9$) and strong cross-scale transferability, offering a scalable, automated solution for data mixture optimization.

Juncheng Wang, Lei Shang, Ziqi Liu et al.

Crowd localization plays a crucial role in visual scene understanding towards predicting each pedestrian location in a crowd, thus being applicable to various downstream tasks. However, existing approaches suffer from significant performance degradation due to discrepancies in head scale distributions (scale shift) between training and testing data, a challenge known as domain generalization (DG). This paper aims to comprehend the nature of scale shift within the context of domain generalization for crowd localization models. To this end, we address four critical questions: (i) How does scale shift influence crowd localization in a DG scenario? (ii) How can we quantify this influence? (iii) What causes this influence? (iv) How to mitigate the influence? Initially, we conduct a systematic examination of how crowd localization performance varies with different levels of scale shift. Then, we establish a benchmark, ScaleBench, and reproduce 20 advanced DG algorithms to quantify the influence. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the limitations of existing algorithms and underscore the importance and complexity of scale shift, a topic that remains insufficiently explored. To deepen our understanding, we provide a rigorous theoretical analysis on scale shift. Building on these insights, we further propose an effective algorithm called Causal Feature Decomposition and Anisotropic Processing (Catto) to mitigate the influence of scale shift in DG settings. Later, we also provide extensive analytical experiments, revealing four significant insights for future research. Our results emphasize the importance of this novel and applicable research direction, which we term Scale Shift Domain Generalization.

Jiapeng Wang, Changxin Tian, Kunlong Chen et al.

Reliable evaluation is fundamental to the progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the evaluation process during pre-training is plagued by significant instability that obscures true learning dynamics. In this work, we systematically diagnose this instability, attributing it to two distinct sources: \textit{Parameter Instability} from training stochasticity and \textit{Evaluation Instability} from noisy measurement protocols. To counteract both sources of noise, we introduce \textbf{MaP}, a dual-pronged framework that synergistically integrates checkpoint \underline{M}erging \underline{a}nd the \underline{P}ass@k metric. Checkpoint merging smooths the parameter space by averaging recent model weights, while Pass@k provides a robust, low-variance statistical estimate of model capability. Extensive experiments show that MaP yields significantly smoother performance curves, reduces inter-run variance, and ensures more consistent model rankings. Ultimately, MaP provides a more reliable and faithful lens for observing LLM training dynamics, laying a crucial empirical foundation for LLM research.

Shuyang Hou, Haoyue Jiao, Ziqi Liu et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) tasks within general databases. However, extending to GeoSQL introduces additional complexity from spatial data types, function invocation, and coordinate systems, which greatly increases generation and execution difficulty. Existing benchmarks mainly target general SQL, and a systematic evaluation framework for GeoSQL is still lacking. To fill this gap, we present GeoSQL-Eval, the first end-to-end automated evaluation framework for PostGIS query generation, together with GeoSQL-Bench, a benchmark for assessing LLM performance in NL2GeoSQL tasks. GeoSQL-Bench defines three task categories-conceptual understanding, syntax-level SQL generation, and schema retrieval-comprising 14,178 instances, 340 PostGIS functions, and 82 thematic databases. GeoSQL-Eval is grounded in Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) model, covering four cognitive dimensions, five capability levels, and twenty task types to establish a comprehensive process from knowledge acquisition and syntax generation to semantic alignment, execution accuracy, and robustness. We evaluate 24 representative models across six categories and apply the entropy weight method with statistical analyses to uncover performance differences, common error patterns, and resource usage. Finally, we release a public GeoSQL-Eval leaderboard platform for continuous testing and global comparison. This work extends the NL2GeoSQL paradigm and provides a standardized, interpretable, and extensible framework for evaluating LLMs in spatial database contexts, offering valuable references for geospatial information science and related applications.

Sirui Chen, Changxin Tian, Binbin Hu et al.

Enhancing the mathematical reasoning of large language models (LLMs) demands high-quality training data, yet conventional methods face critical challenges in scalability, cost, and data reliability. To address these limitations, we propose a novel program-assisted synthesis framework that systematically generates a high-quality mathematical corpus with guaranteed diversity, complexity, and correctness. This framework integrates mathematical knowledge systems and domain-specific tools to create executable programs. These programs are then translated into natural language problem-solution pairs and vetted by a bilateral validation mechanism that verifies solution correctness against program outputs and ensures program-problem consistency. We have generated 12.3 million such problem-solving triples. Experiments demonstrate that models fine-tuned on our data significantly improve their inference capabilities, achieving state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets and showcasing the effectiveness of our synthesis approach.

Ziqi Liu, Pei Zeng, Yi Ding

Real-world multichannel time series prediction faces growing demands for efficiency across edge and cloud environments, making channel compression a timely and essential problem. Motivated by success of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) methods, we propose a predictability-aware compression-decompression framework to reduce runtime, lower communication cost, and maintain prediction accuracy across diverse predictors. The core idea involves using a circular periodicity key matrix with orthogonality to capture underlying time series predictability during compression and to mitigate reconstruction errors during decompression by relaxing oversimplified data assumptions. Theoretical and empirical analyses show that the proposed framework is both time-efficient and scalable under a large number of channels. Extensive experiments on six datasets across various predictors demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior overall performance by jointly considering prediction accuracy and runtime, while maintaining strong compatibility with diverse predictors.

Yiwen Tu, Ziqi Liu, Jiaqi W. Ma et al.

Measuring task relatedness and mitigating negative transfer remain a critical open challenge in Multitask Learning (MTL). This work extends data attribution -- which quantifies the influence of individual training data points on model predictions -- to MTL setting for measuring task relatedness. We propose the MultiTask Influence Function (MTIF), a method that adapts influence functions to MTL models with hard or soft parameter sharing. Compared to conventional task relatedness measurements, MTIF provides a fine-grained, instance-level relatedness measure beyond the entire-task level. This fine-grained relatedness measure enables a data selection strategy to effectively mitigate negative transfer in MTL. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed MTIF efficiently and accurately approximates the performance of models trained on data subsets. Moreover, the data selection strategy enabled by MTIF consistently improves model performance in MTL. Our work establishes a novel connection between data attribution and MTL, offering an efficient and fine-grained solution for measuring task relatedness and enhancing MTL models.

Kiljae Lee, Ziqi Liu, Weijing Tang et al.

Data Shapley is an important tool for data valuation, which quantifies the contribution of individual data points to machine learning models. In practice, group-level data valuation is desirable when data providers contribute data in batch. However, we identify that existing group-level extensions of Data Shapley are vulnerable to shell company attacks, where strategic group splitting can unfairly inflate valuations. We propose Faithful Group Shapley Value (FGSV) that uniquely defends against such attacks. Building on original mathematical insights, we develop a provably fast and accurate approximation algorithm for computing FGSV. Empirical experiments demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in computational efficiency and approximation accuracy, while ensuring faithful group-level valuation.

Jianxiang Yu, Jiapeng Zhu, Hao Qian et al.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similarly, graph foundation models (GFMs) have emerged as a promising direction in graph learning, aiming to generalize across diverse datasets through large-scale pre-training. However, unlike language models that rely on explicit token representations, graphs lack a well-defined unit for generalization, making it challenging to design effective pre-training strategies. In this work, we propose REEF, a novel framework that leverages relation tokens as the basic units for GFMs. Inspired by the token vocabulary in LLMs, we construct a relation vocabulary of relation tokens to store relational information within graphs. To accommodate diverse relations, we introduce two hypernetworks that adaptively generate the parameters of aggregators and classifiers in graph neural networks based on relation tokens. In addition, we design another hypernetwork to construct dataset-specific projectors and incorporate a dataset-level feature bias into the initial node representations, enhancing flexibility across different datasets with the same relation. Further, we adopt graph data augmentation and a mixed-dataset pre-training strategy, allowing REEF to capture relational diversity more effectively and exhibit strong generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments show that REEF significantly outperforms existing methods on both pre-training and transfer learning tasks, underscoring its potential as a powerful foundation model for graph-based applications.

Jiayang Wu, Xingyi Zhang, Xiangyu Dong et al.

Antibody co-design represents a critical frontier in drug development, where accurate prediction of both 1D sequence and 3D structure of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) is essential for targeting specific epitopes. Despite recent advances in equivariant graph neural networks for antibody design, current approaches often fall short in capturing the intricate interactions that govern antibody-antigen recognition and binding specificity. In this work, we present Igformer, a novel end-to-end framework that addresses these limitations through innovative modeling of antibody-antigen binding interfaces. Our approach refines the inter-graph representation by integrating personalized propagation with global attention mechanisms, enabling comprehensive capture of the intricate interplay between local chemical interactions and global conformational dependencies that characterize effective antibody-antigen binding. Through extensive validation on epitope-binding CDR design and structure prediction tasks, Igformer demonstrates significant improvements over existing methods, suggesting that explicit modeling of multi-scale residue interactions can substantially advance computational antibody design for therapeutic applications.

Siqi Du, Hongsheng Huang, Kaixin Shen et al.

In Earth sciences, unobserved factors exhibit non-stationary spatial distributions, causing the relationships between features and targets to display spatial heterogeneity. In geographic machine learning tasks, conventional statistical learning methods often struggle to capture spatial heterogeneity, leading to unsatisfactory prediction accuracy and unreliable interpretability. While approaches like Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) capture local variations, they fall short of uncovering global patterns and tracking the continuous evolution of spatial heterogeneity. Motivated by this limitation, we propose a novel perspective - that is, simultaneously modeling common features across different locations alongside spatial differences using deep neural networks. The proposed method is a dual-branch neural network with an encoder-decoder structure. In the encoding stage, the method aggregates node information in a spatiotemporal conditional graph using GCN and LSTM, encoding location-specific spatiotemporal heterogeneity as an implicit conditional vector. Additionally, a self-attention-based encoder is used to extract location-invariant common features from the data. In the decoding stage, the approach employs a conditional generation strategy that predicts response variables and interpretative weights based on data features under spatiotemporal conditions. The approach is validated by predicting vegetation gross primary productivity (GPP) using global climate and land cover data from 2001 to 2020. Trained on 50 million samples and tested on 2.8 million, the proposed model achieves an RMSE of 0.836, outperforming LightGBM (1.063) and TabNet (0.944). Visualization analyses indicate that our method can reveal the distribution differences of the dominant factors of GPP across various times and locations.

Junjie Wang, Mingyang Chen, Binbin Hu et al.

Improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) in complex question-answering (QA) scenarios has always been a research focal point. Recent studies have attempted to enhance LLMs' performance by combining step-wise planning with external retrieval. While effective for advanced models like GPT-3.5, smaller LLMs face challenges in decomposing complex questions, necessitating supervised fine-tuning. Previous work has relied on manual annotation and knowledge distillation from teacher LLMs, which are time-consuming and not accurate enough. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework for enhancing LLMs' planning capabilities by using planning data derived from knowledge graphs (KGs). LLMs fine-tuned with this data have improved planning capabilities, better equipping them to handle complex QA tasks that involve retrieval. Evaluations on multiple datasets, including our newly proposed benchmark, highlight the effectiveness of our framework and the benefits of KG-derived planning data.

Boxin Zhao, Weishi Wang, Dingyuan Zhu et al.

The causal dependence in data is often characterized by Directed Acyclic Graphical (DAG) models, widely used in many areas. Causal discovery aims to recover the DAG structure using observational data. This paper focuses on causal discovery with multi-variate count data. We are motivated by real-world web visit data, recording individual user visits to multiple websites. Building a causal diagram can help understand user behavior in transitioning between websites, inspiring operational strategy. A challenge in modeling is user heterogeneity, as users with different backgrounds exhibit varied behaviors. Additionally, social network connections can result in similar behaviors among friends. We introduce personalized Binomial DAG models to address heterogeneity and network dependency between observations, which are common in real-world applications. To learn the proposed DAG model, we develop an algorithm that embeds the network structure into a dimension-reduced covariate, learns each node's neighborhood to reduce the DAG search space, and explores the variance-mean relation to determine the ordering. Simulations show our algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art competitors in heterogeneous data. We demonstrate its practical usefulness on a real-world web visit dataset.

Hao Qian, Hongting Zhou, Qian Zhao et al.

The stock market is a crucial component of the financial system, but predicting the movement of stock prices is challenging due to the dynamic and intricate relations arising from various aspects such as economic indicators, financial reports, global news, and investor sentiment. Traditional sequential methods and graph-based models have been applied in stock movement prediction, but they have limitations in capturing the multifaceted and temporal influences in stock price movements. To address these challenges, the Multi-relational Dynamic Graph Neural Network (MDGNN) framework is proposed, which utilizes a discrete dynamic graph to comprehensively capture multifaceted relations among stocks and their evolution over time. The representation generated from the graph offers a complete perspective on the interrelationships among stocks and associated entities. Additionally, the power of the Transformer structure is leveraged to encode the temporal evolution of multiplex relations, providing a dynamic and effective approach to predicting stock investment. Further, our proposed MDGNN framework achieves the best performance in public datasets compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) stock investment methods.

Jihong Wang, Minnan Luo, Jundong Li et al.

Recent studies have revealed that GNNs are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Most existing robust graph learning methods measure model robustness based on label information, rendering them infeasible when label information is not available. A straightforward direction is to employ the widely used Infomax technique from typical Unsupervised Graph Representation Learning (UGRL) to learn robust unsupervised representations. Nonetheless, directly transplanting the Infomax technique from typical UGRL to robust UGRL may involve a biased assumption. In light of the limitation of Infomax, we propose a novel unbiased robust UGRL method called Robust Graph Information Bottleneck (RGIB), which is grounded in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle. Our RGIB attempts to learn robust node representations against adversarial perturbations by preserving the original information in the benign graph while eliminating the adversarial information in the adversarial graph. There are mainly two challenges to optimize RGIB: 1) high complexity of adversarial attack to perturb node features and graph structure jointly in the training procedure; 2) mutual information estimation upon adversarially attacked graphs. To tackle these problems, we further propose an efficient adversarial training strategy with only feature perturbations and an effective mutual information estimator with subgraph-level summary. Moreover, we theoretically establish a connection between our proposed RGIB and the robustness of downstream classifiers, revealing that RGIB can provide a lower bound on the adversarial risk of downstream classifiers. Extensive experiments over several benchmarks and downstream tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method.

Boxin Zhao, Lingxiao Wang, Ziqi Liu et al.

Due to the high cost of communication, federated learning (FL) systems need to sample a subset of clients that are involved in each round of training. As a result, client sampling plays an important role in FL systems as it affects the convergence rate of optimization algorithms used to train machine learning models. Despite its importance, there is limited work on how to sample clients effectively. In this paper, we cast client sampling as an online learning task with bandit feedback, which we solve with an online stochastic mirror descent (OSMD) algorithm designed to minimize the sampling variance. We then theoretically show how our sampling method can improve the convergence speed of federated optimization algorithms over the widely used uniform sampling. Through both simulated and real data experiments, we empirically illustrate the advantages of the proposed client sampling algorithm over uniform sampling and existing online learning-based sampling strategies. The proposed adaptive sampling procedure is applicable beyond the FL problem studied here and can be used to improve the performance of stochastic optimization procedures such as stochastic gradient descent and stochastic coordinate descent.