Hanfang Yang

Han Zhang, Zihao Tang, Xin Yu et al.

In existing memory benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs), the evaluated dialogue sessions often lack long-term semantic consistency, and the underlying personas tend to be flat and static. Furthermore, in real-world scenarios, interactions between users and assistants involve more diverse, heterogeneous data streams, such as documents and emails. These shortcomings significantly limit the realism and effectiveness of current evaluations. To address these limitations, we introduce RHELM (Realistic, Heterogeneous, and Evolving Long-term Memory). Driven by meticulously crafted user profiles and a novel LOOP (pLan-rOllout-evOlve-Prune) module, we construct realistic dialogues across diverse interaction scenarios that exhibit dynamic temporal evolution and long-term coherence. Crucially, these dialogues are deeply integrated with heterogeneous external sources synchronized with the user's temporal event trajectory. The resulting benchmark encompasses challenging question-answer pairs spanning seven inquiry types, with each question mapping to at least one of 27 critical memory characteristics that we identify as essential yet underexplored in current research. Comprehensive experiments across full-context models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods, and representative memory frameworks reveal that contemporary approaches still expose critical weaknesses in complex, real-world settings, particularly in resolving multi-source aggregation and real-world contextual reasoning.

Han Zhang, Yuheng Ma, Hanfang Yang

While extensive research has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for table-based reasoning, most approaches struggle with scalability when applied to large tables. To maintain the superior comprehension abilities of LLMs in these scenarios, we introduce ALTER(Augmentation for Large-Table-Based Reasoning)-a framework designed to harness the latent augmentation potential in both free-form natural language (NL) questions, via the query augmentor, and semi-structured tabular data, through the table augmentor. By utilizing only a small subset of relevant data from the table and supplementing it with pre-augmented schema, semantic, and literal information, ALTER achieves outstanding performance on table-based reasoning benchmarks. We also provide a detailed analysis of large-table scenarios, comparing different methods and various partitioning principles. In these scenarios, our method outperforms all other approaches and exhibits robustness and efficiency against perturbations.

Yuheng Ma, Hanfang Yang

In this work, we investigate the problem of public data assisted non-interactive Local Differentially Private (LDP) learning with a focus on non-parametric classification. Under the posterior drift assumption, we for the first time derive the mini-max optimal convergence rate with LDP constraint. Then, we present a novel approach, the locally differentially private classification tree, which attains the mini-max optimal convergence rate. Furthermore, we design a data-driven pruning procedure that avoids parameter tuning and provides a fast converging estimator. Comprehensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real data sets show the superior performance of our proposed methods. Both our theoretical and experimental findings demonstrate the effectiveness of public data compared to private data, which leads to practical suggestions for prioritizing non-private data collection.

Yiwei Dong, Shaoxin Ye, Yuwen Cao et al.

Asynchronous event sequence clustering aims to group similar event sequences in an unsupervised manner. Mixture models of temporal point processes have been proposed to solve this problem, but they often suffer from overfitting, leading to excessive cluster generation with a lack of diversity. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Bayesian mixture model of Temporal Point Processes with Determinantal Point Process prior (TP$^2$DP$^2$) and accordingly an efficient posterior inference algorithm based on conditional Gibbs sampling. Our work provides a flexible learning framework for event sequence clustering, enabling automatic identification of the potential number of clusters and accurate grouping of sequences with similar features. It is applicable to a wide range of parametric temporal point processes, including neural network-based models. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data suggest that our framework could produce moderately fewer yet more diverse mixture components, and achieve outstanding results across multiple evaluation metrics.

Qiwei Bi, Haoyuan Li, Kun Lu et al.

Previous abstractive methods apply sequence-to-sequence structures to generate summary without a module to assist the system to detect vital mentions and relationships within a document. To address this problem, we utilize semantic graph to boost the generation performance. Firstly, we extract important entities from each document and then establish a graph inspired by the idea of distant supervision \citep{mintz-etal-2009-distant}. Then, we combine a Bi-LSTM with a graph encoder to obtain the representation of each graph node. A novel neural decoder is presented to leverage the information of such entity graphs. Automatic and human evaluations show the effectiveness of our technique.

Hanyuan Hang, Yuchao Cai, Hanfang Yang et al.

In this paper, we propose an ensemble learning algorithm called \textit{under-bagging $k$-nearest neighbors} (\textit{under-bagging $k$-NN}) for imbalanced classification problems. On the theoretical side, by developing a new learning theory analysis, we show that with properly chosen parameters, i.e., the number of nearest neighbors $k$, the expected sub-sample size $s$, and the bagging rounds $B$, optimal convergence rates for under-bagging $k$-NN can be achieved under mild assumptions w.r.t.~the arithmetic mean (AM) of recalls. Moreover, we show that with a relatively small $B$, the expected sub-sample size $s$ can be much smaller than the number of training data $n$ at each bagging round, and the number of nearest neighbors $k$ can be reduced simultaneously, especially when the data are highly imbalanced, which leads to substantially lower time complexity and roughly the same space complexity. On the practical side, we conduct numerical experiments to verify the theoretical results on the benefits of the under-bagging technique by the promising AM performance and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

Hanyuan Hang, Tao Huang, Yuchao Cai et al.

In this paper, we propose a gradient boosting algorithm for large-scale regression problems called \textit{Gradient Boosted Binary Histogram Ensemble} (GBBHE) based on binary histogram partition and ensemble learning. From the theoretical perspective, by assuming the Hölder continuity of the target function, we establish the statistical convergence rate of GBBHE in the space $C^{0,α}$ and $C^{1,0}$, where a lower bound of the convergence rate for the base learner demonstrates the advantage of boosting. Moreover, in the space $C^{1,0}$, we prove that the number of iterations to achieve the fast convergence rate can be reduced by using ensemble regressor as the base learner, which improves the computational efficiency. In the experiments, compared with other state-of-the-art algorithms such as gradient boosted regression tree (GBRT), Breiman's forest, and kernel-based methods, our GBBHE algorithm shows promising performance with less running time on large-scale datasets.

Hanyuan Hang, Yuchao Cai, Hanfang Yang

Single-level density-based approach has long been widely acknowledged to be a conceptually and mathematically convincing clustering method. In this paper, we propose an algorithm called "best-scored clustering forest" that can obtain the optimal level and determine corresponding clusters. The terminology "best-scored" means to select one random tree with the best empirical performance out of a certain number of purely random tree candidates. From the theoretical perspective, we first show that consistency of our proposed algorithm can be guaranteed. Moreover, under certain mild restrictions on the underlying density functions and target clusters, even fast convergence rates can be achieved. Last but not least, comparisons with other state-of-the-art clustering methods in the numerical experiments demonstrate accuracy of our algorithm on both synthetic data and several benchmark real data sets.