Ningyu Zhang

Kewei Xu, Xiaoben Lu, Shuofei Qiao et al.

Real-world data analysis is inherently iterative, yet existing benchmarks mostly evaluate isolated or short interactive tasks, leaving agents' ability to track evolving analytical context over long horizons untested. We introduce LongDS, a benchmark for long-horizon, multi-turn data analysis where agents must maintain, update, restore, and compose evolving analytical states. LongDS comprises 68 tasks constructed from real-world Kaggle notebooks, spanning 2,225 turns across six domains including Geoscience, Business, and Education. Tasks are designed around state-evolution patterns (e.g., counterfactual perturbation, rollback, multi-state composition), with an average dependency span of 11.3 turns. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models, we find that the best model reaches only 48.45% average accuracy, performance drops nearly 47 points from early to late turns, and long-horizon errors account for 52%--69% of failures. Further analysis shows that additional agent steps do not necessarily improve performance, suggesting that the key bottleneck is maintaining a correct analytical state rather than increasing interaction budget. We release LongDS to support research on reliable long-horizon agentic data analysis. Code and data will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/DataMind.

Jintian Zhang, Xin Xu, Ningyu Zhang et al. · deepmind

As Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems are increasingly employed in intricate social environments, a pressing query emerges: Can these NLP systems mirror human-esque collaborative intelligence, in a multi-agent society consisting of multiple large language models (LLMs)? This paper probes the collaboration mechanisms among contemporary NLP systems by melding practical experiments with theoretical insights. We fabricate four unique `societies' comprised of LLM agents, where each agent is characterized by a specific `trait' (easy-going or overconfident) and engages in collaboration with a distinct `thinking pattern' (debate or reflection). Through evaluating these multi-agent societies on three benchmark datasets, we discern that certain collaborative strategies not only outshine previous top-tier approaches, but also optimize efficiency (using fewer API tokens). Moreover, our results further illustrate that LLM agents manifest human-like social behaviors, such as conformity and consensus reaching, mirroring foundational social psychology theories. In conclusion, we integrate insights from social psychology to contextualize the collaboration of LLM agents, inspiring further investigations into the collaboration mechanism for LLMs. We commit to sharing our code and datasets\footnote{\url{https://github.com/zjunlp/MachineSoM}.}, hoping to catalyze further research in this promising avenue.

Shuofei Qiao, Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang et al.

Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting. We introduce research works with comparisons and summaries and provide systematic resources to help beginners. We also discuss the potential reasons for emerging such reasoning abilities and highlight future research directions. Resources are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Prompt4ReasoningPapers (updated periodically).

Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li et al.

Multimodal Knowledge Graphs (MKGs), which organize visual-text factual knowledge, have recently been successfully applied to tasks such as information retrieval, question answering, and recommendation system. Since most MKGs are far from complete, extensive knowledge graph completion studies have been proposed focusing on the multimodal entity, relation extraction and link prediction. However, different tasks and modalities require changes to the model architecture, and not all images/objects are relevant to text input, which hinders the applicability to diverse real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a hybrid transformer with multi-level fusion to address those issues. Specifically, we leverage a hybrid transformer architecture with unified input-output for diverse multimodal knowledge graph completion tasks. Moreover, we propose multi-level fusion, which integrates visual and text representation via coarse-grained prefix-guided interaction and fine-grained correlation-aware fusion modules. We conduct extensive experiments to validate that our MKGformer can obtain SOTA performance on four datasets of multimodal link prediction, multimodal RE, and multimodal NER. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/MKGformer.

Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Long Li et al.

Recent advances on large language models (LLMs) enable researchers and developers to build autonomous language agents that can automatically solve various tasks and interact with environments, humans, and other agents using natural language interfaces. We consider language agents as a promising direction towards artificial general intelligence and release Agents, an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to a wider non-specialist audience. Agents is carefully engineered to support important features including planning, memory, tool usage, multi-agent communication, and fine-grained symbolic control. Agents is user-friendly as it enables non-specialists to build, customize, test, tune, and deploy state-of-the-art autonomous language agents without much coding. The library is also research-friendly as its modularized design makes it easily extensible for researchers. Agents is available at https://github.com/aiwaves-cn/agents.

Tianyu Yu, Chengyue Jiang, Chao Lou et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive ability for open-domain NLP tasks. However, LLMs are sometimes too footloose for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks which always have restricted output and input format. Their performances on NLU tasks are highly related to prompts or demonstrations and are shown to be poor at performing several representative NLU tasks, such as event extraction and entity typing. To this end, we present SeqGPT, a bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) open-source autoregressive model specially enhanced for open-domain natural language understanding. We express all NLU tasks with two atomic tasks, which define fixed instructions to restrict the input and output format but still ``open'' for arbitrarily varied label sets. The model is first instruction-tuned with extremely fine-grained labeled data synthesized by ChatGPT and then further fine-tuned by 233 different atomic tasks from 152 datasets across various domains. The experimental results show that SeqGPT has decent classification and extraction ability, and is capable of performing language understanding tasks on unseen domains. We also conduct empirical studies on the scaling of data and model size as well as on the transfer across tasks. Our model is accessible at https://github.com/Alibaba-NLP/SeqGPT.

Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Ningyu Zhang et al.

Pre-trained language models have contributed significantly to relation extraction by demonstrating remarkable few-shot learning abilities. However, prompt tuning methods for relation extraction may still fail to generalize to those rare or hard patterns. Note that the previous parametric learning paradigm can be viewed as memorization regarding training data as a book and inference as the close-book test. Those long-tailed or hard patterns can hardly be memorized in parameters given few-shot instances. To this end, we regard RE as an open-book examination and propose a new semiparametric paradigm of retrieval-enhanced prompt tuning for relation extraction. We construct an open-book datastore for retrieval regarding prompt-based instance representations and corresponding relation labels as memorized key-value pairs. During inference, the model can infer relations by linearly interpolating the base output of PLM with the non-parametric nearest neighbor distribution over the datastore. In this way, our model not only infers relation through knowledge stored in the weights during training but also assists decision-making by unwinding and querying examples in the open-book datastore. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art in both standard supervised and few-shot settings. Code are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/RetrievalRE.

Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Xiang Chen et al.

Analogical reasoning is fundamental to human cognition and holds an important place in various fields. However, previous studies mainly focus on single-modal analogical reasoning and ignore taking advantage of structure knowledge. Notably, the research in cognitive psychology has demonstrated that information from multimodal sources always brings more powerful cognitive transfer than single modality sources. To this end, we introduce the new task of multimodal analogical reasoning over knowledge graphs, which requires multimodal reasoning ability with the help of background knowledge. Specifically, we construct a Multimodal Analogical Reasoning dataSet (MARS) and a multimodal knowledge graph MarKG. We evaluate with multimodal knowledge graph embedding and pre-trained Transformer baselines, illustrating the potential challenges of the proposed task. We further propose a novel model-agnostic Multimodal analogical reasoning framework with Transformer (MarT) motivated by the structure mapping theory, which can obtain better performance. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/MKG_Analogy.

Zhen Bi, Jing Chen, Yinuo Jiang et al.

Current generative knowledge graph construction approaches usually fail to capture structural knowledge by simply flattening natural language into serialized texts or a specification language. However, large generative language model trained on structured data such as code has demonstrated impressive capability in understanding natural language for structural prediction and reasoning tasks. Intuitively, we address the task of generative knowledge graph construction with code language model: given a code-format natural language input, the target is to generate triples which can be represented as code completion tasks. Specifically, we develop schema-aware prompts that effectively utilize the semantic structure within the knowledge graph. As code inherently possesses structure, such as class and function definitions, it serves as a useful model for prior semantic structural knowledge. Furthermore, we employ a rationale-enhanced generation method to boost the performance. Rationales provide intermediate steps, thereby improving knowledge extraction abilities. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach can obtain better performance on benchmark datasets compared with baselines. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/llm.

Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Ningyu Zhang et al.

Prompt learning approaches have made waves in natural language processing by inducing better few-shot performance while they still follow a parametric-based learning paradigm; the oblivion and rote memorization problems in learning may encounter unstable generalization issues. Specifically, vanilla prompt learning may struggle to utilize atypical instances by rote during fully-supervised training or overfit shallow patterns with low-shot data. To alleviate such limitations, we develop RetroPrompt with the motivation of decoupling knowledge from memorization to help the model strike a balance between generalization and memorization. In contrast with vanilla prompt learning, RetroPrompt constructs an open-book knowledge-store from training instances and implements a retrieval mechanism during the process of input, training and inference, thus equipping the model with the ability to retrieve related contexts from the training corpus as cues for enhancement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RetroPrompt can obtain better performance in both few-shot and zero-shot settings. Besides, we further illustrate that our proposed RetroPrompt can yield better generalization abilities with new datasets. Detailed analysis of memorization indeed reveals RetroPrompt can reduce the reliance of language models on memorization; thus, improving generalization for downstream tasks. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/RetroPrompt.

Shumin Deng, Chengming Wang, Zhoubo Li et al.

Business Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are important to many enterprises today, providing factual knowledge and structured data that steer many products and make them more intelligent. Despite their promising benefits, building business KG necessitates solving prohibitive issues of deficient structure and multiple modalities. In this paper, we advance the understanding of the practical challenges related to building KG in non-trivial real-world systems. We introduce the process of building an open business knowledge graph (OpenBG) derived from a well-known enterprise, Alibaba Group. Specifically, we define a core ontology to cover various abstract products and consumption demands, with fine-grained taxonomy and multimodal facts in deployed applications. OpenBG is an open business KG of unprecedented scale: 2.6 billion triples with more than 88 million entities covering over 1 million core classes/concepts and 2,681 types of relations. We release all the open resources (OpenBG benchmarks) derived from it for the community and report experimental results of KG-centric tasks. We also run up an online competition based on OpenBG benchmarks, and has attracted thousands of teams. We further pre-train OpenBG and apply it to many KG- enhanced downstream tasks in business scenarios, demonstrating the effectiveness of billion-scale multimodal knowledge for e-commerce. All the resources with codes have been released at \url{https://github.com/OpenBGBenchmark/OpenBG}.

Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shuofei Qiao et al.

Cross-domain NER is a challenging task to address the low-resource problem in practical scenarios. Previous typical solutions mainly obtain a NER model by pre-trained language models (PLMs) with data from a rich-resource domain and adapt it to the target domain. Owing to the mismatch issue among entity types in different domains, previous approaches normally tune all parameters of PLMs, ending up with an entirely new NER model for each domain. Moreover, current models only focus on leveraging knowledge in one general source domain while failing to successfully transfer knowledge from multiple sources to the target. To address these issues, we introduce Collaborative Domain-Prefix Tuning for cross-domain NER (CP-NER) based on text-to-text generative PLMs. Specifically, we present text-to-text generation grounding domain-related instructors to transfer knowledge to new domain NER tasks without structural modifications. We utilize frozen PLMs and conduct collaborative domain-prefix tuning to stimulate the potential of PLMs to handle NER tasks across various domains. Experimental results on the Cross-NER benchmark show that the proposed approach has flexible transfer ability and performs better on both one-source and multiple-source cross-domain NER tasks. Codes are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/ner/cross.

Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li et al.

Multimodal named entity recognition and relation extraction (MNER and MRE) is a fundamental and crucial branch in information extraction. However, existing approaches for MNER and MRE usually suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images incorporated in texts. To deal with these issues, we propose a novel Hierarchical Visual Prefix fusion NeTwork (HVPNeT) for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction, aiming to achieve more effective and robust performance. Specifically, we regard visual representation as pluggable visual prefix to guide the textual representation for error insensitive forecasting decision. We further propose a dynamic gated aggregation strategy to achieve hierarchical multi-scaled visual features as visual prefix for fusion. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/HVPNeT.

Lei Li, Xiang Chen, Shuofei Qiao et al.

Multimodal relation extraction is an essential task for knowledge graph construction. In this paper, we take an in-depth empirical analysis that indicates the inaccurate information in the visual scene graph leads to poor modal alignment weights, further degrading performance. Moreover, the visual shuffle experiments illustrate that the current approaches may not take full advantage of visual information. Based on the above observation, we further propose a strong baseline with an implicit fine-grained multimodal alignment based on Transformer for multimodal relation extraction. Experimental results demonstrate the better performance of our method. Codes are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/re/multimodal.

Siyuan Cheng, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian et al.

Recently decades have witnessed the empirical success of framing Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings via language models. However, language model-based KG embeddings are usually deployed as static artifacts, making them difficult to modify post-deployment without re-training after deployment. To address this issue, we propose a new task of editing language model-based KG embeddings in this paper. This task is designed to facilitate rapid, data-efficient updates to KG embeddings without compromising the performance of other aspects. We build four new datasets: E-FB15k237, A-FB15k237, E-WN18RR, and A-WN18RR, and evaluate several knowledge editing baselines demonstrating the limited ability of previous models to handle the proposed challenging task. We further propose a simple yet strong baseline dubbed KGEditor, which utilizes additional parametric layers of the hypernetwork to edit/add facts. Our comprehensive experimental results reveal that KGEditor excels in updating specific facts without impacting the overall performance, even when faced with limited training resources. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/deltaKG.

Zhen Bi, Siyuan Cheng, Jing Chen et al.

Transformers have achieved remarkable performance in widespread fields, including natural language processing, computer vision and graph mining. However, vanilla Transformer architectures have not yielded promising improvements in the Knowledge Graph (KG) representations, where the translational distance paradigm dominates this area. Note that vanilla Transformer architectures struggle to capture the intrinsically heterogeneous structural and semantic information of knowledge graphs. To this end, we propose a new variant of Transformer for knowledge graph representations dubbed Relphormer. Specifically, we introduce Triple2Seq which can dynamically sample contextualized sub-graph sequences as the input to alleviate the heterogeneity issue. We propose a novel structure-enhanced self-attention mechanism to encode the relational information and keep the semantic information within entities and relations. Moreover, we utilize masked knowledge modeling for general knowledge graph representation learning, which can be applied to various KG-based tasks including knowledge graph completion, question answering, and recommendation. Experimental results on six datasets show that Relphormer can obtain better performance compared with baselines. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/Relphormer.

Zhoubo Li, Ningyu Zhang, Yunzhi Yao et al.

As the cost associated with fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to rise, recent research efforts have pivoted towards developing methodologies to edit implicit knowledge embedded within LLMs. Yet, there's still a dark cloud lingering overhead -- will knowledge editing trigger butterfly effect? since it is still unclear whether knowledge editing might introduce side effects that pose potential risks or not. This paper pioneers the investigation into the potential pitfalls associated with knowledge editing for LLMs. To achieve this, we introduce new benchmark datasets and propose innovative evaluation metrics. Our results underline two pivotal concerns: (1) Knowledge Conflict: Editing groups of facts that logically clash can magnify the inherent inconsistencies in LLMs-a facet neglected by previous methods. (2) Knowledge Distortion: Altering parameters with the aim of editing factual knowledge can irrevocably warp the innate knowledge structure of LLMs. Experimental results vividly demonstrate that knowledge editing might inadvertently cast a shadow of unintended consequences on LLMs, which warrant attention and efforts for future works. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/PitfallsKnowledgeEditing.

Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian, Qingbin Liu et al.

In this paper, we focus on editing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Compared to editing single-modal LLMs, multimodal model editing is more challenging, which demands a higher level of scrutiny and careful consideration in the editing process. To facilitate research in this area, we construct a new benchmark, dubbed MMEdit, for editing multimodal LLMs and establishing a suite of innovative metrics for evaluation. We conduct comprehensive experiments involving various model editing baselines and analyze the impact of editing different components for multimodal LLMs. Empirically, we notice that previous baselines can implement editing multimodal LLMs to some extent, but the effect is still barely satisfactory, indicating the potential difficulty of this task. We hope that our work can provide the NLP community with insights. Code and dataset are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

Zhen Bi, Ningyu Zhang, Yinuo Jiang et al.

In the realm of embodied artificial intelligence, the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) play a pivotal role. Although there are effective methods like program-of-thought prompting for LLMs which uses programming language to tackle complex reasoning tasks, the specific impact of code data on the improvement of reasoning capabilities remains under-explored. To address this gap, we propose complexity-impacted reasoning score (CIRS), which combines structural and logical attributes, to measure the correlation between code and reasoning abilities. Specifically, we use the abstract syntax tree to encode the structural information and calculate logical complexity by considering the difficulty and the cyclomatic complexity. Through an empirical analysis, we find not all code data of complexity can be learned or understood by LLMs. Optimal level of complexity is critical to the improvement of reasoning abilities by program-aided prompting. Then we design an auto-synthesizing and stratifying algorithm, and apply it to instruction generation for mathematical reasoning and code data filtering for code generation tasks. Extensive results demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Code will be integrated into the EasyInstruct framework at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyInstruct.

Yin Fang, Ningyu Zhang, Zhuo Chen et al.

The generation of molecules with desired properties has become increasingly popular, revolutionizing the way scientists design molecular structures and providing valuable support for chemical and drug design. However, despite the potential of language models in molecule generation, they face challenges such as generating syntactically or chemically flawed molecules, having narrow domain focus, and struggling to create diverse and feasible molecules due to limited annotated data or external molecular databases. To tackle these challenges, we introduce MolGen, a pre-trained molecular language model tailored specifically for molecule generation. Through the reconstruction of over 100 million molecular SELFIES, MolGen internalizes structural and grammatical insights. This is further enhanced by domain-agnostic molecular prefix tuning, fostering robust knowledge transfer across diverse domains. Importantly, our chemical feedback paradigm steers the model away from molecular hallucinations, ensuring alignment between the model's estimated probabilities and real-world chemical preferences. Extensive experiments on well-known benchmarks underscore MolGen's optimization capabilities in properties such as penalized logP, QED, and molecular docking. Additional analyses confirm its proficiency in accurately capturing molecule distributions, discerning intricate structural patterns, and efficiently exploring the chemical space. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/MolGen.

Xiang Chen, Duanzheng Song, Honghao Gui et al.

Despite their impressive generative capabilities, LLMs are hindered by fact-conflicting hallucinations in real-world applications. The accurate identification of hallucinations in texts generated by LLMs, especially in complex inferential scenarios, is a relatively unexplored area. To address this gap, we present FactCHD, a dedicated benchmark designed for the detection of fact-conflicting hallucinations from LLMs. FactCHD features a diverse dataset that spans various factuality patterns, including vanilla, multi-hop, comparison, and set operation. A distinctive element of FactCHD is its integration of fact-based evidence chains, significantly enhancing the depth of evaluating the detectors' explanations. Experiments on different LLMs expose the shortcomings of current approaches in detecting factual errors accurately. Furthermore, we introduce Truth-Triangulator that synthesizes reflective considerations by tool-enhanced ChatGPT and LoRA-tuning based on Llama2, aiming to yield more credible detection through the amalgamation of predictive results and evidence. The benchmark dataset is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/FactCHD.

Xiaozhuan Liang, Ningyu Zhang, Siyuan Cheng et al.

Pretrained language models can be effectively stimulated by textual prompts or demonstrations, especially in low-data scenarios. Recent works have focused on automatically searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet studies for the demonstration are still limited. Concretely, the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named contrastive demonstration tuning, which is free of demonstration sampling. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged into any previous prompt-tuning approaches; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks with a large number of categories. Experimental results on 16 datasets illustrate that our method integrated with previous approaches LM-BFF and P-tuning can yield better performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/Demo-Tuning.

Xin Xie, Zhoubo Li, Xiaohan Wang et al.

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often have two characteristics: heterogeneous graph structure and text-rich entity/relation information. Text-based KG embeddings can represent entities by encoding descriptions with pre-trained language models, but no open-sourced library is specifically designed for KGs with PLMs at present. In this paper, we present LambdaKG, a library for KGE that equips with many pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT, BART, T5, GPT-3), and supports various tasks (e.g., knowledge graph completion, question answering, recommendation, and knowledge probing). LambdaKG is publicly open-sourced at https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/lambdaKG, with a demo video at http://deepke.zjukg.cn/lambdakg.mp4 and long-term maintenance.

Bozhong Tian, Xiaozhuan Liang, Siyuan Cheng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on extensive corpora inevitably retain sensitive data, such as personal privacy information and copyrighted material. Recent advancements in knowledge unlearning involve updating LLM parameters to erase specific knowledge. However, current unlearning paradigms are mired in vague forgetting boundaries, often erasing knowledge indiscriminately. In this work, we introduce KnowUnDo, a benchmark containing copyrighted content and user privacy domains to evaluate if the unlearning process inadvertently erases essential knowledge. Our findings indicate that existing unlearning methods often suffer from excessive unlearning. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective method, MemFlex, which utilizes gradient information to precisely target and unlearn sensitive parameters. Experimental results show that MemFlex is superior to existing methods in both precise knowledge unlearning and general knowledge retaining of LLMs. Code and dataset are released at https://github.com/zjunlp/KnowUnDo.

Xin Xu, Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang et al.

This paper presents an empirical study to build relation extraction systems in low-resource settings. Based upon recent pre-trained language models, we comprehensively investigate three schemes to evaluate the performance in low-resource settings: (i) different types of prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data; (ii) diverse balancing methods to address the long-tailed distribution issue; (iii) data augmentation technologies and self-training to generate more labeled in-domain data. We create a benchmark with 8 relation extraction (RE) datasets covering different languages, domains and contexts and perform extensive comparisons over the proposed schemes with combinations. Our experiments illustrate: (i) Though prompt-based tuning is beneficial in low-resource RE, there is still much potential for improvement, especially in extracting relations from cross-sentence contexts with multiple relational triples; (ii) Balancing methods are not always helpful for RE with long-tailed distribution; (iii) Data augmentation complements existing baselines and can bring much performance gain, while self-training may not consistently achieve advancement to low-resource RE. Code and datasets are in https://github.com/zjunlp/LREBench.

Yunzhi Yao, Shengyu Mao, Ningyu Zhang et al.

With the development of pre-trained language models, many prompt-based approaches to data-efficient knowledge graph construction have been proposed and achieved impressive performance. However, existing prompt-based learning methods for knowledge graph construction are still susceptible to several potential limitations: (i) semantic gap between natural language and output structured knowledge with pre-defined schema, which means model cannot fully exploit semantic knowledge with the constrained templates; (ii) representation learning with locally individual instances limits the performance given the insufficient features, which are unable to unleash the potential analogical capability of pre-trained language models. Motivated by these observations, we propose a retrieval-augmented approach, which retrieves schema-aware Reference As Prompt (RAP), for data-efficient knowledge graph construction. It can dynamically leverage schema and knowledge inherited from human-annotated and weak-supervised data as a prompt for each sample, which is model-agnostic and can be plugged into widespread existing approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that previous methods integrated with RAP can achieve impressive performance gains in low-resource settings on five datasets of relational triple extraction and event extraction for knowledge graph construction. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/RAP.

Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Mengru Wang et al.

This paper introduces an innovative task focused on editing the personality traits of Large Language Models (LLMs). This task seeks to adjust the models' responses to opinion-related questions on specified topics since an individual's personality often manifests in the form of their expressed opinions, thereby showcasing different personality traits. Specifically, we construct PersonalityEdit, a new benchmark dataset to address this task. Drawing on the theory in Social Psychology, we isolate three representative traits, namely Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Agreeableness, as the foundation for our benchmark. We then gather data using GPT-4, generating responses that align with a specified topic and embody the targeted personality trait. We conduct comprehensive experiments involving various baselines and discuss the representation of personality behavior in LLMs. Our findings uncover potential challenges of the proposed task, illustrating several remaining issues. We anticipate that our work can stimulate further annotation in model editing and personality-related research. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

Ziwen Xu, Haiwen Hong, Linsong Yu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) must continuously learn and update knowledge to remain effective in dynamic real-world environments. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is widely used for such memory updates, existing studies mainly rely on qualitative downstream evaluations, leaving the quantitative capacity limits and underlying dynamics of exact parametric memory largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we employ LoRA as a controlled memory capacity probe within the latent space to systematically quantify exact parametric memory. We introduce the Parametric Memory Law, a robust power law linking loss reduction Delta L to effective parameters and sequence length. At the token level, fine-grained analysis reveals a deterministic phase transition, demonstrating that a prediction probability of p > 0.5 constitutes a sufficient condition for verbatim recall under greedy decoding. Driven by these insights, we introduce MemFT, a threshold-guided optimization strategy that dynamically redistributes the training budget toward sub-threshold tokens. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that MemFT can enhance memory fidelity and efficiency. Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/ParametricMemoryLaw.

Lei Li, Yekun Chai, Shuohuan Wang et al.

Reward modeling (a.k.a., preference modeling) is instrumental for aligning large language models with human preferences, particularly within the context of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). While conventional reward models (RMs) have exhibited remarkable scalability, they oft struggle with fundamental functionality such as arithmetic computation, code execution, and factual lookup. In this paper, we propose a tool-augmented preference modeling approach, named Themis, to address these limitations by empowering RMs with access to external environments, including calculators and search engines. This approach not only fosters synergy between tool utilization and reward grading but also enhances interpretive capacity and scoring reliability. Our study delves into the integration of external tools into RMs, enabling them to interact with diverse external sources and construct task-specific tool engagement and reasoning traces in an autoregressive manner. We validate our approach across a wide range of domains, incorporating seven distinct external tools. Our experimental results demonstrate a noteworthy overall improvement of 17.7% across eight tasks in preference ranking. Furthermore, our approach outperforms Gopher 280B by 7.3% on TruthfulQA task in zero-shot evaluation. In human evaluations, RLHF trained with Themis attains an average win rate of 32% when compared to baselines across four distinct tasks. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive collection of tool-related RM datasets, incorporating data from seven distinct tool APIs, totaling 15,000 instances. We have made the code, data, and model checkpoints publicly available to facilitate and inspire further research advancements\footnote{\url{https://github.com/ernie-research/Tool-Augmented-Reward-Model}}.

Xinle Deng, Ruobin Zhong, Hujin Peng et al.

Memory is essential for enabling large language models to support long-horizon reasoning, yet existing memory systems remain unreliable and difficult to debug. Tracing memory's dynamic evolution is crucial to understand how information is synthesized, propagated, or corrupted over time. In this work, we study the new problem of error tracing and attribution in LLM memory systems. We propose a novel framework that transforms memory pipelines into executable memory evolution graphs, enabling fine-grained tracing of operational information flow. We then construct MemTraceBench, a benchmark collected from representative memory systems such as Long-Context, RAG, Mem0, and EverMemOS, to systematically study memory failure modes. We further introduce an automatic attribution method that iteratively traces operation subgraphs to pinpoint the root cause of any failed case. Our analysis reveals that memory failures are systematic, stemming from operation-level issues like information loss and retrieval misalignment. Crucially, we leverage these fine-grained attribution signals to guide downstream prompt optimization, establishing a closed-loop system that automatically corrects faults and boosts end-task performance by up to 7.62%. Code will be released at https://github.com/zjunlp/MemTrace.

Jizhan Fang, Buqiang Xu, Zhixian Wang et al.

Existing memory-augmented LLM agents often treat memory as a static repository with pre-defined representations and fixed retrieval pipelines, which is brittle in dynamic agentic environments where feedback, task variation, and heterogeneous signals continuously reshape what should be remembered and how it should be connected. To address this, we propose FluxMem, a connectivity-evolving memory framework that models memory as a heterogeneous graph and progressively refines its topology through three stages: initial connection formation, feedback-driven refinement, and long-term consolidation. During execution, FluxMem repairs missing links, prunes interference, aligns abstraction granularity, and distills recurrent successful trajectories into reusable procedural circuits, guided by one metric for memory generalizability and evolutionary maturity. Across three fundamentally distinct benchmarks including LoCoMo, Mind2Web, and GAIA, FluxMem achieves consistent state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating strong adaptation and generalization in complex agentic environments. The code will be open-sourced in https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem.

Yincen Qu, Ningyu Zhang, Hui Chen et al.

In e-commerce, the salience of commonsense knowledge (CSK) is beneficial for widespread applications such as product search and recommendation. For example, when users search for ``running'' in e-commerce, they would like to find products highly related to running, such as ``running shoes'' rather than ``shoes''. Nevertheless, many existing CSK collections rank statements solely by confidence scores, and there is no information about which ones are salient from a human perspective. In this work, we define the task of supervised salience evaluation, where given a CSK triple, the model is required to learn whether the triple is salient or not. In addition to formulating the new task, we also release a new Benchmark dataset of Salience Evaluation in E-commerce (BSEE) and hope to promote related research on commonsense knowledge salience evaluation. We conduct experiments in the dataset with several representative baseline models. The experimental results show that salience evaluation is a challenging task where models perform poorly on our evaluation set. We further propose a simple but effective approach, PMI-tuning, which shows promise for solving this novel problem. Code is available in \url{https://github.com/OpenBGBenchmark/OpenBG-CSK.

Lei Li, Jing Chen, Bozhong Tian et al.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), as parametric-based eager learners, have become the de-facto choice for current paradigms of Natural Language Processing (NLP). In contrast, k-Nearest-Neighbor (kNN) classifiers, as the lazy learning paradigm, tend to mitigate over-fitting and isolated noise. In this paper, we revisit kNN classifiers for augmenting the PLMs-based classifiers. From the methodological level, we propose to adopt kNN with textual representations of PLMs in two steps: (1) Utilize kNN as prior knowledge to calibrate the training process. (2) Linearly interpolate the probability distribution predicted by kNN with that of the PLMs' classifier. At the heart of our approach is the implementation of kNN-calibrated training, which treats predicted results as indicators for easy versus hard examples during the training process. From the perspective of the diversity of application scenarios, we conduct extensive experiments on fine-tuning, prompt-tuning paradigms and zero-shot, few-shot and fully-supervised settings, respectively, across eight diverse end-tasks. We hope our exploration will encourage the community to revisit the power of classical methods for efficient NLP. Code and datasets are available in https://github.com/zjunlp/Revisit-KNN.

Ruijie Hou, Yanran Li, Ningyu Zhang et al.

Skeleton-based human action recognition is a longstanding challenge due to its complex dynamics. Some fine-grain details of the dynamics play a vital role in classification. The existing work largely focuses on designing incremental neural networks with more complicated adjacent matrices to capture the details of joints relationships. However, they still have difficulties distinguishing actions that have broadly similar motion patterns but belong to different categories. Interestingly, we found that the subtle differences in motion patterns can be significantly amplified and become easy for audience to distinct through specified view directions, where this property haven't been fully explored before. Drastically different from previous work, we boost the performance by proposing a conceptually simple yet effective Multi-view strategy that recognizes actions from a collection of dynamic view features. Specifically, we design a novel Skeleton-Anchor Proposal (SAP) module which contains a Multi-head structure to learn a set of views. For feature learning of different views, we introduce a novel Angle Representation to transform the actions under different views and feed the transformations into the baseline model. Our module can work seamlessly with the existing action classification model. Incorporated with baseline models, our SAP module exhibits clear performance gains on many challenging benchmarks. Moreover, comprehensive experiments show that our model consistently beats down the state-of-the-art and remains effective and robust especially when dealing with corrupted data. Related code will be available on https://github.com/ideal-idea/SAP .

Jizhan Fang, Tianhe Lu, Yunzhi Yao et al.

Chinese, as a linguistic system rich in depth and complexity, is characterized by distinctive elements such as ancient poetry, proverbs, idioms, and other cultural constructs. However, current Large Language Models (LLMs) face limitations in these specialized domains, highlighting the need for the development of comprehensive datasets that can assess, continuously update, and progressively improve these culturally-grounded linguistic competencies through targeted training optimizations. To address this gap, we introduce CKnowEdit, the first-ever Chinese knowledge editing dataset designed to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in LLMs. We collect seven types of knowledge from a wide range of sources, including classical texts, idioms, and content from Baidu Tieba Ruozhiba, taking into account the unique polyphony, antithesis, and logical structures inherent in the Chinese language. By analyzing this dataset, we highlight the challenges current LLMs face in mastering Chinese. Furthermore, our evaluation of state-of-the-art knowledge editing techniques reveals opportunities to advance the correction of Chinese knowledge. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit.

Zhuo Chen, Yufeng Huang, Jiaoyan Chen et al.

Visual question answering (VQA) often requires an understanding of visual concepts and language semantics, which relies on external knowledge. Most existing methods exploit pre-trained language models or/and unstructured text, but the knowledge in these resources are often incomplete and noisy. Some other methods prefer to use knowledge graphs (KGs) which often have intensive structured knowledge, but the research is still quite preliminary. In this paper, we propose LaKo, a knowledge-driven VQA method via Late Knowledge-to-text Injection. To effectively incorporate an external KG, we transfer triples into textual format and propose a late injection mechanism for knowledge fusion. Finally we address VQA as a text generation task with an effective encoder-decoder paradigm, which achieves state-of-the-art results on OKVQA dataset.

Ziwen Xu, Chenyan Wu, Hengyu Sun et al.

Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs), including local weight fine-tuning, LoRA-based adaptation, and activation-based interventions, are often studied in isolation, obscuring their connections and making comparison difficult. In this work, we present a unified view that frames these interventions as dynamic weight updates induced by a control signal, placing them within a single conceptual framework. Building on this view, we propose a unified preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference, defined as the tendency toward a target concept, and utility, defined as coherent and task-valid generation, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. Across methods, we observe a consistent trade-off between preference and utility: stronger control increases preference while predictably reducing utility. We further explain this behavior through an activation manifold perspective, in which control shifts representations along target-concept directions to enhance preference, while utility declines primarily when interventions push representations off the model's valid-generation manifold. Finally, we introduce a new steering approach SPLIT guided by this analysis that improves preference while better preserving utility. Code is available at https://github.com/zjunlp/EasyEdit/blob/main/examples/SPLIT.md.

Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, correctness alone is insufficient. Reliable deployment requires maintaining truthful beliefs under contextual perturbations. Existing evaluations largely rely on point-wise confidence like Self-Consistency, which can mask brittle belief. We show that even facts answered with perfect self-consistency can rapidly collapse under mild contextual interference. To address this gap, we propose Neighbor-Consistency Belief (NCB), a structural measure of belief robustness that evaluates response coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. To validate the efficiency of NCB, we introduce a new cognitive stress-testing protocol that probes outputs stability under contextual interference. Experiments across multiple LLMs show that the performance of high-NCB data is relatively more resistant to interference. Finally, we present Structure-Aware Training (SAT), which optimizes context-invariant belief structure and reduces long-tail knowledge brittleness by approximately 30%. Code will be available at https://github.com/zjunlp/belief.

Yin Fang, Xiaozhuan Liang, Ningyu Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs), with their remarkable task-handling capabilities and innovative outputs, have catalyzed significant advancements across a spectrum of fields. However, their proficiency within specialized domains such as biomolecular studies remains limited. To address this challenge, we introduce Mol-Instructions, a comprehensive instruction dataset designed for the biomolecular domain. Mol-Instructions encompasses three key components: molecule-oriented instructions, protein-oriented instructions, and biomolecular text instructions. Each component aims to improve the understanding and prediction capabilities of LLMs concerning biomolecular features and behaviors. Through extensive instruction tuning experiments on LLMs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Mol-Instructions in enhancing large models' performance in the intricate realm of biomolecular studies, thus fostering progress in the biomolecular research community. Mol-Instructions is publicly available for ongoing research and will undergo regular updates to enhance its applicability.

Jingsheng Zheng, Jintian Zhang, Yujie Luo et al.

Autonomous machine learning agents have revolutionized scientific discovery, yet they remain constrained by a Generate-Execute-Feedback paradigm. Previous approaches suffer from a severe Execution Bottleneck, as hypothesis evaluation relies strictly on expensive physical execution. To bypass these physical constraints, we internalize execution priors to substitute costly runtime checks with instantaneous predictive reasoning, drawing inspiration from World Models. In this work, we formalize the task of Data-centric Solution Preference and construct a comprehensive corpus of 18,438 pairwise comparisons. We demonstrate that LLMs exhibit significant predictive capabilities when primed with a Verified Data Analysis Report, achieving 61.5% accuracy and robust confidence calibration. Finally, we instantiate this framework in FOREAGENT, an agent that employs a Predict-then-Verify loop, achieving a 6x acceleration in convergence while surpassing execution-based baselines by +6%. Our code and dataset will be publicly available soon at https://github.com/zjunlp/predict-before-execute.

Hongbin Ye, Ningyu Zhang, Hui Chen et al.

Generative Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) refers to those methods that leverage the sequence-to-sequence framework for building knowledge graphs, which is flexible and can be adapted to widespread tasks. In this study, we summarize the recent compelling progress in generative knowledge graph construction. We present the advantages and weaknesses of each paradigm in terms of different generation targets and provide theoretical insight and empirical analysis. Based on the review, we suggest promising research directions for the future. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We present a detailed, complete taxonomy for the generative KGC methods; (2) We provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the generative KGC methods; (3) We propose several research directions that can be developed in the future.

Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu et al.

Understanding knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing towards trustworthy AGI. This paper reviews knowledge mechanism analysis from a novel taxonomy including knowledge utilization and evolution. Knowledge utilization delves into the mechanism of memorization, comprehension and application, and creation. Knowledge evolution focuses on the dynamic progression of knowledge within individual and group LLMs. Moreover, we discuss what knowledge LLMs have learned, the reasons for the fragility of parametric knowledge, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) that will be challenging to address. We hope this work can help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research.

Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. To this end, many knowledge editing approaches for LLMs have emerged -- aiming to subtly inject/edit updated knowledge or adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. Nevertheless, due to significant differences among various knowledge editing methods and the variations in task setups, there is no standard implementation framework available for the community, which hinders practitioners from applying knowledge editing to applications. To address these issues, we propose EasyEdit, an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for LLMs. It supports various cutting-edge knowledge editing approaches and can be readily applied to many well-known LLMs such as T5, GPT-J, LlaMA, etc. Empirically, we report the knowledge editing results on LlaMA-2 with EasyEdit, demonstrating that knowledge editing surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. We have released the source code on GitHub, along with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documentation for beginners to get started. Besides, we present an online system for real-time knowledge editing, and a demo video.

Zhen Bi, Ningyu Zhang, Yida Xue et al.

Ocean science, which delves into the oceans that are reservoirs of life and biodiversity, is of great significance given that oceans cover over 70% of our planet's surface. Recently, advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the paradigm in science. Despite the success in other domains, current LLMs often fall short in catering to the needs of domain experts like oceanographers, and the potential of LLMs for ocean science is under-explored. The intrinsic reasons are the immense and intricate nature of ocean data as well as the necessity for higher granularity and richness in knowledge. To alleviate these issues, we introduce OceanGPT, the first-ever large language model in the ocean domain, which is expert in various ocean science tasks. We also propose OceanGPT, a novel framework to automatically obtain a large volume of ocean domain instruction data, which generates instructions based on multi-agent collaboration. Additionally, we construct the first oceanography benchmark, OceanBench, to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in the ocean domain. Though comprehensive experiments, OceanGPT not only shows a higher level of knowledge expertise for oceans science tasks but also gains preliminary embodied intelligence capabilities in ocean technology.

Yan Wang, Zhixuan Chu, Zihao Xue et al.

Reasoning-based LLM guardrails improve safety moderation by generating explicit rationales before issuing final decisions. However, their rationales do not always lead to faithful enforcement: a model may recognize a harmful intent in its reasoning but still predict a safe label, or issue an unsafe decision without policy-grounded justification. We identify this safety-critical failure mode as the deliberation-to-enforcement gap. Unlike general chain-of-thought faithfulness, guardrail reliability requires policy execution consistency: the generated reasoning should be grounded in the safety policy, and the final decision should be entailed by that reasoning. We propose ConsisGuard, a consistency-aware framework for reasoning-based LLM guardrails. ConsisGuard performs Policy-to-Decision Trajectory Distillation and Functional Coupling Alignment, aligning the internal coupling between safety deliberation and decision enforcement. Experiments on prompt and response harmfulness detection benchmarks show that ConsisGuard improves detection performance while reducing policy execution failures. These results suggest that reliable reasoning-based guardrails require accurate faithful execution of safety policies.

Ningyu Zhang, Zekun Xi, Yujie Luo et al.

Knowledge representation has been a central aim of AI since its inception. Symbolic Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and neural Large Language Models (LLMs) can both represent knowledge. KGs provide highly accurate and explicit knowledge representation, but face scalability issue; while LLMs offer expansive coverage of knowledge, but incur significant training costs and struggle with precise and reliable knowledge manipulation. To this end, we introduce OneEdit, a neural-symbolic prototype system for collaborative knowledge editing using natural language, which facilitates easy-to-use knowledge management with KG and LLM. OneEdit consists of three modules: 1) The Interpreter serves for user interaction with natural language; 2) The Controller manages editing requests from various users, leveraging the KG with rollbacks to handle knowledge conflicts and prevent toxic knowledge attacks; 3) The Editor utilizes the knowledge from the Controller to edit KG and LLM. We conduct experiments on two new datasets with KGs which demonstrate that OneEdit can achieve superior performance.

Jintian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Mengshu Sun et al.

Despite the recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), which have significantly enhanced the generative capabilities for various NLP tasks, LLMs still face limitations in directly handling retrieval tasks. However, many practical applications demand the seamless integration of both retrieval and generation. This paper introduces a novel and efficient One-pass Generation and retrieval framework (OneGen), designed to improve LLMs' performance on tasks that require both generation and retrieval. The proposed framework bridges the traditionally separate training approaches for generation and retrieval by incorporating retrieval tokens generated autoregressively. This enables a single LLM to handle both tasks simultaneously in a unified forward pass. We conduct experiments on two distinct types of composite tasks, RAG and Entity Linking, to validate the pluggability, effectiveness, and efficiency of OneGen in training and inference. Furthermore, our results show that integrating generation and retrieval within the same context preserves the generative capabilities of LLMs while improving retrieval performance. To the best of our knowledge, OneGen is the first to enable LLMs to conduct vector retrieval during the generation.

Shumin Deng, Ningyu Zhang, Nay Oo et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) employing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have broadened the scope for improving multi-step reasoning capabilities. We generally divide multi-step reasoning into two phases: path generation to generate the reasoning path(s); and answer calibration post-processing the reasoning path(s) to obtain a final answer. However, the existing literature lacks systematic analysis on different answer calibration approaches. In this paper, we summarize the taxonomy of recent answer calibration techniques and break them down into step-level and path-level strategies. We then conduct a thorough evaluation on these strategies from a unified view, systematically scrutinizing step-level and path-level answer calibration across multiple paths. Experimental results reveal that integrating the dominance of both strategies tends to derive optimal outcomes. Our study holds the potential to illuminate key insights for optimizing multi-step reasoning with answer calibration.

Yacheng He, Qianghuai Jia, Lin Yuan et al.

This paper illustrates the technologies of user next intent prediction with a concept knowledge graph. The system has been deployed on the Web at Alipay, serving more than 100 million daily active users. To explicitly characterize user intent, we propose AlipayKG, which is an offline concept knowledge graph in the Life-Service domain modeling the historical behaviors of users, the rich content interacted by users and the relations between them. We further introduce a Transformer-based model which integrates expert rules from the knowledge graph to infer the online user's next intent. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can effectively enhance the performance of the downstream tasks while retaining explainability.

Xiaohan Wang, Xiaoyan Yang, Yuqi Zhu et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, MedPaLM-2, and Med-Gemini achieve performance competitively with human experts across various medical benchmarks. However, they still face challenges in making professional diagnoses akin to physicians, particularly in efficiently gathering patient information and reasoning the final diagnosis. To this end, we introduce the RuleAlign framework, designed to align LLMs with specific diagnostic rules. We develop a medical dialogue dataset comprising rule-based communications between patients and physicians and design an alignment learning approach through preference learning. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We hope that our work can serve as an inspiration for exploring the potential of LLMs as AI physicians.