Yin Zhang

Qianglong Chen, Feng-Lin Li, Guohai Xu et al.

Although pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, they are shown to be lacking in knowledge when dealing with knowledge driven tasks. Despite the many efforts made for injecting knowledge into PLMs, this problem remains open. To address the challenge, we propose \textbf{DictBERT}, a novel approach that enhances PLMs with dictionary knowledge which is easier to acquire than knowledge graph (KG). During pre-training, we present two novel pre-training tasks to inject dictionary knowledge into PLMs via contrastive learning: \textit{dictionary entry prediction} and \textit{entry description discrimination}. In fine-tuning, we use the pre-trained DictBERT as a plugin knowledge base (KB) to retrieve implicit knowledge for identified entries in an input sequence, and infuse the retrieved knowledge into the input to enhance its representation via a novel extra-hop attention mechanism. We evaluate our approach on a variety of knowledge driven and language understanding tasks, including NER, relation extraction, CommonsenseQA, OpenBookQA and GLUE. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can significantly improve typical PLMs: it gains a substantial improvement of 0.5\%, 2.9\%, 9.0\%, 7.1\% and 3.3\% on BERT-large respectively, and is also effective on RoBERTa-large.

Qianglong Chen, Xiangji Zeng, Jiangang Zhu et al.

Gazetteer is widely used in Chinese named entity recognition (NER) to enhance span boundary detection and type classification. However, to further understand the generalizability and effectiveness of gazetteers, the NLP community still lacks a systematic analysis of the gazetteer-enhanced NER model. In this paper, we first re-examine the effectiveness several common practices of the gazetteer-enhanced NER models and carry out a series of detailed analysis to evaluate the relationship between the model performance and the gazetteer characteristics, which can guide us to build a more suitable gazetteer. The findings of this paper are as follows: (1) the gazetteer improves most of the situations that the traditional NER model datasets are difficult to learn. (2) the performance of model greatly benefits from the high-quality pre-trained lexeme embeddings. (3) a good gazetteer should cover more entities that can be matched in both the training set and testing set.

Taiji Li, Zhi Li, Yin Zhang

Despite large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks, they are still suffering from the factual inconsistency problem called hallucinations. For instance, LLMs occasionally generate content that diverges from source article, and prefer to extract information that appears at the beginning and end of the context, especially in long document summarization. Inspired by these findings, we propose to improve the faithfulness of LLMs in summarization by impelling them to process the entire article more fairly and faithfully. We present a novel summary generation strategy, namely SliSum, which exploits the ideas of sliding windows and self-consistency. Specifically, SliSum divides the source article into overlapping windows, and utilizes LLM to generate local summaries for the content in the windows. Finally, SliSum aggregates all local summaries using clustering and majority voting algorithm to produce more faithful summary of entire article. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SliSum significantly improves the faithfulness of diverse LLMs including LLaMA-2, Claude-2 and GPT-3.5 in both short and long text summarization, while maintaining their fluency and informativeness and without additional fine-tuning and resources. We further conduct qualitative and quantitative studies to investigate why SliSum works and impacts of hyperparameters in SliSum on performance.

Zhongjiang He, Zihan Wang, Xinzhang Liu et al.

In this technical report, we present TeleChat, a collection of large language models (LLMs) with parameters of 3 billion, 7 billion and 12 billion. It includes pretrained language models as well as fine-tuned chat models that is aligned with human preferences. TeleChat is initially pretrained on an extensive corpus containing a diverse collection of texts from both English and Chinese languages, including trillions of tokens. Subsequently, the model undergoes fine-tuning to align with human preferences, following a detailed methodology that we describe. We evaluate the performance of TeleChat on various tasks, including language understanding, mathematics, reasoning, code generation, and knowledge-based question answering. Our findings indicate that TeleChat achieves comparable performance to other open-source models of similar size across a wide range of public benchmarks. To support future research and applications utilizing LLMs, we release the fine-tuned model checkpoints of TeleChat's 7B and 12B variant, along with code and a portion of our pretraining data, to the public community.

Bo Zhou, Qianglong Chen, Tianyu Wang et al.

To fully evaluate the overall performance of different NLP models in a given domain, many evaluation benchmarks are proposed, such as GLUE, SuperGLUE and CLUE. The fi eld of natural language understanding has traditionally focused on benchmarks for various tasks in languages such as Chinese, English, and multilingua, however, there has been a lack of attention given to the area of classical Chinese, also known as "wen yan wen", which has a rich history spanning thousands of years and holds signifi cant cultural and academic value. For the prosperity of the NLP community, in this paper, we introduce the WYWEB evaluation benchmark, which consists of nine NLP tasks in classical Chinese, implementing sentence classifi cation, sequence labeling, reading comprehension, and machine translation. We evaluate the existing pre-trained language models, which are all struggling with this benchmark. We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on classical Chinese NLU. The github repository is https://github.com/baudzhou/WYWEB.

Junwen Zhang, Yin Zhang

In task-oriented dialogue scenarios, cross-domain zero-shot slot filling plays a vital role in leveraging source domain knowledge to learn a model with high generalization ability in unknown target domain where annotated data is unavailable. However, the existing state-of-the-art zero-shot slot filling methods have limited generalization ability in target domain, they only show effective knowledge transfer on seen slots and perform poorly on unseen slots. To alleviate this issue, we present a novel Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework (HiCL) for zero-shot slot filling. Specifically, we propose a coarse- to fine-grained contrastive learning based on Gaussian-distributed embedding to learn the generalized deep semantic relations between utterance-tokens, by optimizing inter- and intra-token distribution distance. This encourages HiCL to generalize to the slot types unseen at training phase. Furthermore, we present a new iterative label set semantics inference method to unbiasedly and separately evaluate the performance of unseen slot types which entangled with their counterparts (i.e., seen slot types) in the previous zero-shot slot filling evaluation methods. The extensive empirical experiments on four datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves comparable or even better performance than the current state-of-the-art zero-shot slot filling approaches.

Yin Zhang, Jinhong Deng, Peidong Liu et al.

Visual detection of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) has attracted increasing attention in recent years due to its important application in various tasks. The existing methods for MAV detection assume that the training set and testing set have the same distribution. As a result, when deployed in new domains, the detectors would have a significant performance degradation due to domain discrepancy. In this paper, we study the problem of cross-domain MAV detection. The contributions of this paper are threefold. 1) We propose a Multi-MAV-Multi-Domain (M3D) dataset consisting of both simulation and realistic images. Compared to other existing datasets, the proposed one is more comprehensive in the sense that it covers rich scenes, diverse MAV types, and various viewing angles. A new benchmark for cross-domain MAV detection is proposed based on the proposed dataset. 2) We propose a Noise Suppression Network (NSN) based on the framework of pseudo-labeling and a large-to-small training procedure. To reduce the challenging pseudo-label noises, two novel modules are designed in this network. The first is a prior-based curriculum learning module for allocating adaptive thresholds for pseudo labels with different difficulties. The second is a masked copy-paste augmentation module for pasting truly-labeled MAVs on unlabeled target images and thus decreasing pseudo-label noises. 3) Extensive experimental results verify the superior performance of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art ones. In particular, it achieves mAP of 46.9%(+5.8%), 50.5%(+3.7%), and 61.5%(+11.3%) on the tasks of simulation-to-real adaptation, cross-scene adaptation, and cross-camera adaptation, respectively.

Junwen Zhang, Pu Chen, Yin Zhang

Multimodal understanding of tables in real-world contexts is challenging due to the complexity of structure, symbolic density, and visual degradation (blur, skew, watermarking, incomplete structures or fonts, multi-span or hierarchically nested layouts). Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with such WildStruct conditions, resulting in limited performance and poor generalization. To address these challenges, we propose TableMoE, a neuro-symbolic Mixture-of-Connector-Experts (MoCE) architecture specifically designed for robust, structured reasoning over multimodal table data. TableMoE features an innovative Neuro-Symbolic Routing mechanism, which predicts latent semantic token roles (e.g., header, data cell, axis, formula) and dynamically routes table elements to specialized experts (Table-to-HTML, Table-to-JSON, Table-to-Code) using a confidence-aware gating strategy informed by symbolic reasoning graphs. To facilitate effective alignment-driven pretraining, we introduce the large-scale TableMoE-Align dataset, consisting of 1.2M table-HTML-JSON-code quadruples across finance, science, biomedicine and industry, utilized exclusively for model pretraining. For evaluation, we curate and release four challenging WildStruct benchmarks: WMMFinQA, WMMTatQA, WMMTabDialog, and WMMFinanceMath, designed specifically to stress-test models under real-world multimodal degradation and structural complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that TableMoE significantly surpasses existing state-of-the-art models. Extensive ablation studies validate each core component, emphasizing the critical role of Neuro-Symbolic Routing and structured expert alignment. Through qualitative analyses, we further showcase TableMoE's interpretability and enhanced robustness, underscoring the effectiveness of integrating neuro-symbolic reasoning for multimodal table understanding.

Xingxi Yin, Jingfeng Zhang, Yue Deng et al.

Text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models are widely used in image editing due to their powerful generative capabilities. However, achieving fine-grained control over specific object attributes, such as color and material, remains a considerable challenge. Existing methods often fail to accurately modify these attributes or compromise structural integrity and overall image consistency. To fill this gap, we introduce Structure Preservation and Attribute Amplification (SPAA), a novel training-free framework that enables precise generation of color and material attributes for the same object by intelligently manipulating self-attention maps and cross-attention values within diffusion models. Building on SPAA, we integrate multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to automate data curation and instruction generation. Leveraging this object attribute data collection engine, we construct the Attribute Dataset, encompassing a comprehensive range of colors and materials across diverse object categories. Using this generated dataset, we propose InstructAttribute, an instruction-tuned model that enables fine-grained and object-level attribute editing through natural language prompts. This capability holds significant practical implications for diverse fields, from accelerating product design and e-commerce visualization to enhancing virtual try-on experiences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InstructAttribute outperforms existing instruction-based baselines, achieving a superior balance between attribute modification accuracy and structural preservation.

Qianglong Chen, Guohai Xu, Ming Yan et al.

Existing knowledge-enhanced methods have achieved remarkable results in certain QA tasks via obtaining diverse knowledge from different knowledge bases. However, limited by the properties of retrieved knowledge, they still have trouble benefiting from both the knowledge relevance and distinguishment simultaneously. To address the challenge, we propose CPACE, a Concept-centric Prompt-bAsed Contrastive Explanation Generation model, which aims to convert obtained symbolic knowledge into a contrastive explanation for better distinguishing the differences among given candidates. Firstly, following previous works, we retrieve different types of symbolic knowledge with a concept-centric knowledge extraction module. After that, we generate corresponding contrastive explanations using acquired symbolic knowledge and explanation prompts as guidance for better modeling the knowledge distinguishment and interpretability. Finally, we regard the generated contrastive explanation as external knowledge for downstream task enhancement. We conduct a series of experiments on three widely-used question-answering datasets: CSQA, QASC, and OBQA. Experimental results demonstrate that with the help of generated contrastive explanation, our CPACE model achieves new SOTA on CSQA (89.8% on the testing set, 0.9% higher than human performance), and gains impressive improvement on QASC and OBQA (4.2% and 3.5%, respectively).

Qianglong Chen, Feng Ji, Feng-Lin Li et al.

Knowledge distillation is of key importance to launching multilingual pre-trained language models for real applications. To support cost-effective language inference in multilingual settings, we propose AMTSS, an adaptive multi-teacher single-student distillation framework, which allows distilling knowledge from multiple teachers to a single student. We first introduce an adaptive learning strategy and teacher importance weight, which enables a student to effectively learn from max-margin teachers and easily adapt to new languages. Moreover, we present a shared student encoder with different projection layers in support of multiple languages, which contributes to largely reducing development and machine cost. Experimental results show that AMTSS gains competitive results on the public XNLI dataset and the realistic industrial dataset AliExpress (AE) in the E-commerce scenario.

Qianglong Chen, Feng Ji, Haiqing Chen et al.

In order to facilitate natural language understanding, the key is to engage commonsense or background knowledge. However, how to engage commonsense effectively in question answering systems is still under exploration in both research academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel question-answering method by integrating multiple knowledge sources, i.e. ConceptNet, Wikipedia, and the Cambridge Dictionary, to boost the performance. More concretely, we first introduce a novel graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module, which iteratively retrieves concepts and entities related to the given question and its choices from multiple knowledge sources. Afterward, we use a pre-trained language model to encode the question, retrieved knowledge and choices, and propose an answer choice-aware attention mechanism to fuse all hidden representations of the previous modules. Finally, the linear classifier for specific tasks is used to predict the answer. Experimental results on the CommonsenseQA dataset show that our method significantly outperforms other competitive methods and achieves the new state-of-the-art. In addition, further ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module and the answer choice-aware attention module in retrieving and synthesizing background knowledge from multiple knowledge sources.

Yun He, Ziwei Zhu, Yin Zhang et al.

Knowledge of a disease includes information of various aspects of the disease, such as signs and symptoms, diagnosis and treatment. This disease knowledge is critical for many health-related and biomedical tasks, including consumer health question answering, medical language inference and disease name recognition. While pre-trained language models like BERT have shown success in capturing syntactic, semantic, and world knowledge from text, we find they can be further complemented by specific information like knowledge of symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and other disease aspects. Hence, we integrate BERT with disease knowledge for improving these important tasks. Specifically, we propose a new disease knowledge infusion training procedure and evaluate it on a suite of BERT models including BERT, BioBERT, SciBERT, ClinicalBERT, BlueBERT, and ALBERT. Experiments over the three tasks show that these models can be enhanced in nearly all cases, demonstrating the viability of disease knowledge infusion. For example, accuracy of BioBERT on consumer health question answering is improved from 68.29% to 72.09%, while new SOTA results are observed in two datasets. We make our data and code freely available.

Yun He, Zhuoer Wang, Yin Zhang et al.

We present a new benchmark dataset called PARADE for paraphrase identification that requires specialized domain knowledge. PARADE contains paraphrases that overlap very little at the lexical and syntactic level but are semantically equivalent based on computer science domain knowledge, as well as non-paraphrases that overlap greatly at the lexical and syntactic level but are not semantically equivalent based on this domain knowledge. Experiments show that both state-of-the-art neural models and non-expert human annotators have poor performance on PARADE. For example, BERT after fine-tuning achieves an F1 score of 0.709, which is much lower than its performance on other paraphrase identification datasets. PARADE can serve as a resource for researchers interested in testing models that incorporate domain knowledge. We make our data and code freely available.

Zehao Lin, Shaobo Cui, Guodun Li et al.

Different people have different habits of describing their intents in conversations. Some people tend to deliberate their intents in several successive utterances, i.e., they use several consistent messages for readability instead of a long sentence to express their question. This creates a predicament faced by the application of dialogue systems, especially in real-world industry scenarios, in which the dialogue system is unsure whether it should answer the query of user immediately or wait for further supplementary input. Motivated by such an interesting predicament, we define a novel Wait-or-Answer task for dialogue systems. We shed light on a new research topic about how the dialogue system can be more intelligent to behave in this Wait-or-Answer quandary. Further, we propose a predictive approach named Predict-then-Decide (PTD) to tackle this Wait-or-Answer task. More specifically, we take advantage of a decision model to help the dialogue system decide whether to wait or answer. The decision of decision model is made with the assistance of two ancillary prediction models: a user prediction and an agent prediction. The user prediction model tries to predict what the user would supplement and uses its prediction to persuade the decision model that the user has some information to add, so the dialogue system should wait. The agent prediction model tries to predict the answer of the dialogue system and convince the decision model that it is a superior choice to answer the query of user immediately since the input of user has come to an end. We conduct our experiments on two real-life scenarios and three public datasets. Experimental results on five datasets show our proposed PTD approach significantly outperforms the existing models in solving this Wait-or-Answer problem.

Shuke Peng, Feng Ji, Zehao Lin et al.

How to build a high-quality multi-domain dialogue system is a challenging work due to its complicated and entangled dialogue state space among each domain, which seriously limits the quality of dialogue policy, and further affects the generated response. In this paper, we propose a novel method to acquire a satisfying policy and subtly circumvent the knotty dialogue state representation problem in the multi-domain setting. Inspired by real school teaching scenarios, our method is composed of multiple domain-specific teachers and a universal student. Each individual teacher only focuses on one specific domain and learns its corresponding domain knowledge and dialogue policy based on a precisely extracted single domain dialogue state representation. Then, these domain-specific teachers impart their domain knowledge and policies to a universal student model and collectively make this student model a multi-domain dialogue expert. Experiment results show that our method reaches competitive results with SOTAs in both multi-domain and single domain setting.

Zehao Lin, Shaobo Cui, Guodun Li et al.

Producing natural and accurate responses like human beings is the ultimate goal of intelligent dialogue agents. So far, most of the past works concentrate on selecting or generating one pertinent and fluent response according to current query and its context. These models work on a one-to-one environment, making one response to one utterance each round. However, in real human-human conversations, human often sequentially sends several short messages for readability instead of a long message in one turn. Thus messages will not end with an explicit ending signal, which is crucial for agents to decide when to reply. So the first step for an intelligent dialogue agent is not replying but deciding if it should reply at the moment. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel Imagine-then-Arbitrate (ITA) neural dialogue model to help the agent decide whether to wait or to make a response directly. Our method has two imaginator modules and an arbitrator module. The two imaginators will learn the agent's and user's speaking style respectively, generate possible utterances as the input of the arbitrator, combining with dialogue history. And the arbitrator decides whether to wait or to make a response to the user directly. To verify the performance and effectiveness of our method, we prepared two dialogue datasets and compared our approach with several popular models. Experimental results show that our model performs well on addressing ending prediction issue and outperforms baseline models.