Fan Zhou

Siqiao Xue, Xiaoming Shi, Zhixuan Chu et al.

Continuous-time event sequences play a vital role in real-world domains such as healthcare, finance, online shopping, social networks, and so on. To model such data, temporal point processes (TPPs) have emerged as the most natural and competitive models, making a significant impact in both academic and application communities. Despite the emergence of many powerful models in recent years, there hasn't been a central benchmark for these models and future research endeavors. This lack of standardization impedes researchers and practitioners from comparing methods and reproducing results, potentially slowing down progress in this field. In this paper, we present EasyTPP, the first central repository of research assets (e.g., data, models, evaluation programs, documentations) in the area of event sequence modeling. Our EasyTPP makes several unique contributions to this area: a unified interface of using existing datasets and adding new datasets; a wide range of evaluation programs that are easy to use and extend as well as facilitate reproducible research; implementations of popular neural TPPs, together with a rich library of modules by composing which one could quickly build complex models. All the data and implementation can be found at https://github.com/ant-research/EasyTemporalPointProcess. We will actively maintain this benchmark and welcome contributions from other researchers and practitioners. Our benchmark will help promote reproducible research in this field, thus accelerating research progress as well as making more significant real-world impacts.

Yiheng Xu, Hongjin Su, Chen Xing et al.

We introduce Lemur and Lemur-Chat, openly accessible language models optimized for both natural language and coding capabilities to serve as the backbone of versatile language agents. The evolution from language chat models to functional language agents demands that models not only master human interaction, reasoning, and planning but also ensure grounding in the relevant environments. This calls for a harmonious blend of language and coding capabilities in the models. Lemur and Lemur-Chat are proposed to address this necessity, demonstrating balanced proficiencies in both domains, unlike existing open-source models that tend to specialize in either. Through meticulous pre-training using a code-intensive corpus and instruction fine-tuning on text and code data, our models achieve state-of-the-art averaged performance across diverse text and coding benchmarks among open-source models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate Lemur's superiority over existing open-source models and its proficiency across various agent tasks involving human communication, tool usage, and interaction under fully- and partially- observable environments. The harmonization between natural and programming languages enables Lemur-Chat to significantly narrow the gap with proprietary models on agent abilities, providing key insights into developing advanced open-source agents adept at reasoning, planning, and operating seamlessly across environments. https://github.com/OpenLemur/Lemur

Kuo Wang, Lechao Cheng, Weikai Chen et al.

Learning from pseudo-labels that generated with VLMs~(Vision Language Models) has been shown as a promising solution to assist open vocabulary detection (OVD) in recent studies. However, due to the domain gap between VLM and vision-detection tasks, pseudo-labels produced by the VLMs are prone to be noisy, while the training design of the detector further amplifies the bias. In this work, we investigate the root cause of VLMs' biased prediction under the OVD context. Our observations lead to a simple yet effective paradigm, coded MarvelOVD, that generates significantly better training targets and optimizes the learning procedure in an online manner by marrying the capability of the detector with the vision-language model. Our key insight is that the detector itself can act as a strong auxiliary guidance to accommodate VLM's inability of understanding both the ``background'' and the context of a proposal within the image. Based on it, we greatly purify the noisy pseudo-labels via Online Mining and propose Adaptive Reweighting to effectively suppress the biased training boxes that are not well aligned with the target object. In addition, we also identify a neglected ``base-novel-conflict'' problem and introduce stratified label assignments to prevent it. Extensive experiments on COCO and LVIS datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the other state-of-the-arts by significant margins. Codes are available at https://github.com/wkfdb/MarvelOVD

Kuo Wang, Lingbo Liu, Yang Liu et al.

The prediction of traffic flow is a challenging yet crucial problem in spatial-temporal analysis, which has recently gained increasing interest. In addition to spatial-temporal correlations, the functionality of urban areas also plays a crucial role in traffic flow prediction. However, the exploration of regional functional attributes mainly focuses on adding additional topological structures, ignoring the influence of functional attributes on regional traffic patterns. Different from the existing works, we propose a novel module named POI-MetaBlock, which utilizes the functionality of each region (represented by Point of Interest distribution) as metadata to further mine different traffic characteristics in areas with different functions. Specifically, the proposed POI-MetaBlock employs a self-attention architecture and incorporates POI and time information to generate dynamic attention parameters for each region, which enables the model to fit different traffic patterns of various areas at different times. Furthermore, our lightweight POI-MetaBlock can be easily integrated into conventional traffic flow prediction models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our module significantly improves the performance of traffic flow prediction and outperforms state-of-the-art methods that use metadata.

Tianbao Xie, Fan Zhou, Zhoujun Cheng et al.

Language agents show potential in being capable of utilizing natural language for varied and intricate tasks in diverse environments, particularly when built upon large language models (LLMs). Current language agent frameworks aim to facilitate the construction of proof-of-concept language agents while neglecting the non-expert user access to agents and paying little attention to application-level designs. We present OpenAgents, an open platform for using and hosting language agents in the wild of everyday life. OpenAgents includes three agents: (1) Data Agent for data analysis with Python/SQL and data tools; (2) Plugins Agent with 200+ daily API tools; (3) Web Agent for autonomous web browsing. OpenAgents enables general users to interact with agent functionalities through a web user interface optimized for swift responses and common failures while offering developers and researchers a seamless deployment experience on local setups, providing a foundation for crafting innovative language agents and facilitating real-world evaluations. We elucidate the challenges and opportunities, aspiring to set a foundation for future research and development of real-world language agents.

Run Yang, Yuling Yang, Fan Zhou et al.

In recent years, diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in various domains of artificial intelligence, such as image synthesis, super-resolution, and 3D molecule generation. However, the application of diffusion models in graph learning has received relatively little attention. In this paper, we address this gap by investigating the use of diffusion models for unsupervised graph representation learning. We begin by identifying the anisotropic structures of graphs and a crucial limitation of the vanilla forward diffusion process in learning anisotropic structures. This process relies on continuously adding an isotropic Gaussian noise to the data, which may convert the anisotropic signals to noise too quickly. This rapid conversion hampers the training of denoising neural networks and impedes the acquisition of semantically meaningful representations in the reverse process. To address this challenge, we propose a new class of models called {\it directional diffusion models}. These models incorporate data-dependent, anisotropic, and directional noises in the forward diffusion process. To assess the efficacy of our proposed models, we conduct extensive experiments on 12 publicly available datasets, focusing on two distinct graph representation learning tasks. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our models over state-of-the-art baselines, indicating their effectiveness in capturing meaningful graph representations. Our studies not only provide valuable insights into the forward process of diffusion models but also highlight the wide-ranging potential of these models for various graph-related tasks.

Ming Zhao, Yongpeng Wu, Shengda Pan et al.

The implementation of automatic image registration is still difficult in various applications. In this paper, an automatic image registration approach through line-support region segmentation and geometrical outlier removal (ALRS-GOR) is proposed. This new approach is designed to address the problems associated with the registration of images with affine deformations and inconsistent content, such as remote sensing images with different spectral content or noise interference, or map images with inconsistent annotations. To begin with, line-support regions, namely a straight region whose points share roughly the same image gradient angle, are extracted to address the issues of inconsistent content existing in images. To alleviate the incompleteness of line segments, an iterative strategy with multi-resolution is employed to preserve global structures that are masked at full resolution by image details or noise. Then, Geometrical Outlier Removal (GOR) is developed to provide reliable feature point matching, which is based on affineinvariant geometrical classifications for corresponding matches initialized by SIFT. The candidate outliers are selected by comparing the disparity of accumulated classifications among all matches, instead of conventional methods which only rely on local geometrical relations. Various image sets have been considered in this paper for the evaluation of the proposed approach, including aerial images with simulated affine deformations, remote sensing optical and synthetic aperture radar images taken at different situations (multispectral, multisensor, and multitemporal), and map images with inconsistent annotations. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method over the existing approaches for the whole data set.

Qiang Gao, Jinyu Hong, Xovee Xu et al.

Deep neural networks have recently achieved considerable improvements in learning human behavioral patterns and individual preferences from massive spatial-temporal trajectories data. However, most of the existing research concentrates on fusing different semantics underlying sequential trajectories for mobility pattern learning which, in turn, yields a narrow perspective on comprehending human intrinsic motions. In addition, the inherent sparsity and under-explored heterogeneous collaborative items pertaining to human check-ins hinder the potential exploitation of human diverse periodic regularities as well as common interests. Motivated by recent advances in disentanglement learning, in this study we propose a novel disentangled solution called SSDL for tackling the next POI prediction problem. SSDL primarily seeks to disentangle the potential time-invariant and time-varying factors into different latent spaces from massive trajectories data, providing an interpretable view to understand the intricate semantics underlying human diverse mobility representations. To address the data sparsity issue, we present two realistic trajectory augmentation approaches to enhance the understanding of both the human intrinsic periodicity and constantly-changing intents. In addition, we devise a POI-centric graph structure to explore heterogeneous collaborative signals underlying historical check-ins. Extensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate that our proposed SSDL significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches -- for example, it yields up to 8.57% improvements on ACC@1.

Runpeng Dai, Jianing Wang, Fan Zhou et al.

Off-policy evaluation (OPE) is widely applied in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and e-commerce to evaluate the efficacy of novel products or policies from offline datasets. This paper introduces a causal deepset framework that relaxes several key structural assumptions, primarily the mean-field assumption, prevalent in existing OPE methodologies that handle spatio-temporal interference. These traditional assumptions frequently prove inadequate in real-world settings, thereby restricting the capability of current OPE methods to effectively address complex interference effects. In response, we advocate for the implementation of the permutation invariance (PI) assumption. This innovative approach enables the data-driven, adaptive learning of the mean-field function, offering a more flexible estimation method beyond conventional averaging. Furthermore, we present novel algorithms that incorporate the PI assumption into OPE and thoroughly examine their theoretical foundations. Our numerical analyses demonstrate that this novel approach yields significantly more precise estimations than existing baseline algorithms, thereby substantially improving the practical applicability and effectiveness of OPE methodologies. A Python implementation of our proposed method is available at https://github.com/BIG-S2/Causal-Deepsets.

Chunjing Xiao, Shikang Pang, Xovee Xu et al.

A critical aspect of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is to enhance the node representations by aggregating node neighborhood information. However, when detecting anomalies, the representations of abnormal nodes are prone to be averaged by normal neighbors, making the learned anomaly representations less distinguishable. To tackle this issue, we propose CAGAD -- an unsupervised Counterfactual data Augmentation method for Graph Anomaly Detection -- which introduces a graph pointer neural network as the heterophilic node detector to identify potential anomalies whose neighborhoods are normal-node-dominant. For each identified potential anomaly, we design a graph-specific diffusion model to translate a part of its neighbors, which are probably normal, into anomalous ones. At last, we involve these translated neighbors in GNN neighborhood aggregation to produce counterfactual representations of anomalies. Through aggregating the translated anomalous neighbors, counterfactual representations become more distinguishable and further advocate detection performance. The experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that CAGAD significantly outperforms strong baselines, with an average improvement of 2.35% on F1, 2.53% on AUC-ROC, and 2.79% on AUC-PR.

Siqiao Xue, Fan Zhou, Yi Xu et al.

We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a result, our system possesses the capability to understand complex financial queries, such as "How should I manage my investments during inflation?", and provide informed responses. Furthermore, our system incorporates a local knowledge base and a search engine to retrieve relevant information. The final responses are conditioned on the search results and include proper citations to the sources, thus enjoying an enhanced credibility. Through a range of finance-related questions, we have demonstrated the superior performance of our system compared to other models. To experience our system firsthand, users can interact with our live demo at https://weaverbird.ttic.edu, as well as watch our 2-min video illustration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yofgeqnlrMc.

Qian Liu, Fan Zhou, Zhengbao Jiang et al.

Fine-tuning language models on tasks with instructions has demonstrated potential in facilitating zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks. In this paper, we introduce a straightforward yet effective method for enhancing instruction tuning by employing symbolic tasks. Compared to crowdsourced human tasks or model-generated tasks, symbolic tasks present a unique advantage as they can be easily generated in vast quantities, theoretically providing an infinite supply of high-quality training instances. To explore the potential of symbolic tasks, we carry out an extensive case study on the representative symbolic task of SQL execution. Empirical results on various benchmarks validate that the integration of SQL execution leads to significant improvements in zero-shot scenarios, particularly in table reasoning. Notably, our 3B model surpasses both the 175B GPT-3 and ChatGPT in zero-shot table reasoning across four benchmarks. Furthermore, experimental results on BBH (27 tasks) and MMLU (57 tasks) reveal that language models can be enhanced through symbolic tasks without compromising their generality. We hope that our paper serves as a catalyst, inspiring increased efforts to incorporate symbolic tasks in instruction tuning.

Ruiting Dai, Jiayi Luo, Xucheng Luo et al.

Inferring geographic locations via social posts is essential for many practical location-based applications such as product marketing, point-of-interest recommendation, and infector tracking for COVID-19. Unlike image-based location retrieval or social-post text embedding-based location inference, the combined effect of multi-modal information (i.e., post images, text, and hashtags) for social post positioning receives less attention. In this work, we collect real datasets of social posts with images, texts, and hashtags from Instagram and propose a novel Multi-modal Representation Learning Framework (MRLF) capable of fusing different modalities of social posts for location inference. MRLF integrates a multi-head attention mechanism to enhance location-salient information extraction while significantly improving location inference compared with single domain-based methods. To overcome the noisy user-generated textual content, we introduce a novel attention-based character-aware module that considers the relative dependencies between characters of social post texts and hashtags for flexible multi-model information fusion. The experimental results show that MRLF can make accurate location predictions and open a new door to understanding the multi-modal data of social posts for online inference tasks.

Chunjing Xiao, Shikang Pang, Wenxin Tai et al.

Graph-level anomaly detection is significant in diverse domains. To improve detection performance, counterfactual graphs have been exploited to benefit the generalization capacity by learning causal relations. Most existing studies directly introduce perturbations (e.g., flipping edges) to generate counterfactual graphs, which are prone to alter the semantics of generated examples and make them off the data manifold, resulting in sub-optimal performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach, Motif-consistent Counterfactuals with Adversarial Refinement (MotifCAR), for graph-level anomaly detection. The model combines the motif of one graph, the core subgraph containing the identification (category) information, and the contextual subgraph (non-motif) of another graph to produce a raw counterfactual graph. However, the produced raw graph might be distorted and cannot satisfy the important counterfactual properties: Realism, Validity, Proximity and Sparsity. Towards that, we present a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based graph optimizer to refine the raw counterfactual graphs. It adopts the discriminator to guide the generator to generate graphs close to realistic data, i.e., meet the property Realism. Further, we design the motif consistency to force the motif of the generated graphs to be consistent with the realistic graphs, meeting the property Validity. Also, we devise the contextual loss and connection loss to control the contextual subgraph and the newly added links to meet the properties Proximity and Sparsity. As a result, the model can generate high-quality counterfactual graphs. Experiments demonstrate the superiority of MotifCAR.

Yong Lin, Fan Zhou, Lu Tan et al.

Invariance learning methods aim to learn invariant features in the hope that they generalize under distributional shifts. Although many tasks are naturally characterized by continuous domains, current invariance learning techniques generally assume categorically indexed domains. For example, auto-scaling in cloud computing often needs a CPU utilization prediction model that generalizes across different times (e.g., time of a day and date of a year), where `time' is a continuous domain index. In this paper, we start by theoretically showing that existing invariance learning methods can fail for continuous domain problems. Specifically, the naive solution of splitting continuous domains into discrete ones ignores the underlying relationship among domains, and therefore potentially leads to suboptimal performance. To address this challenge, we then propose Continuous Invariance Learning (CIL), which extracts invariant features across continuously indexed domains. CIL is a novel adversarial procedure that measures and controls the conditional independence between the labels and continuous domain indices given the extracted features. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates the superiority of CIL over existing invariance learning methods. Empirical results on both synthetic and real-world datasets (including data collected from production systems) show that CIL consistently outperforms strong baselines among all the tasks.

Shiyu Wang, Fan Zhou, Yinbo Sun et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting with hierarchical structure is pervasive in real-world applications, demanding not only predicting each level of the hierarchy, but also reconciling all forecasts to ensure coherency, i.e., the forecasts should satisfy the hierarchical aggregation constraints. Moreover, the disparities of statistical characteristics between levels can be huge, worsened by non-Gaussian distributions and non-linear correlations. To this extent, we propose a novel end-to-end hierarchical time series forecasting model, based on conditioned normalizing flow-based autoregressive transformer reconciliation, to represent complex data distribution while simultaneously reconciling the forecasts to ensure coherency. Unlike other state-of-the-art methods, we achieve the forecasting and reconciliation simultaneously without requiring any explicit post-processing step. In addition, by harnessing the power of deep model, we do not rely on any assumption such as unbiased estimates or Gaussian distribution. Our evaluation experiments are conducted on four real-world hierarchical datasets from different industrial domains (three public ones and a dataset from the application servers of Alipay's data center) and the preliminary results demonstrate efficacy of our proposed method.

Fan Zhou, Haoyu Dong, Qian Liu et al.

Numerical reasoning over natural language has been a long-standing goal for the research community. However, cutting-edge language models have proven difficult to reliably generalize to a broad range of numbers, although they have shown proficiency in reasoning over common and simple numbers. In this paper, we propose a novel method to elicit and exploit the numerical reasoning knowledge hidden in pre-trained language models using simple anchor numbers. Concretely, we first leverage simple numbers as anchors to probe the implicitly inferred arithmetic expressions from language models, and then explicitly apply the expressions on complex numbers to get corresponding answers. To inversely elicit arithmetic expressions, we transform and formulate the task as an analytically solvable linear system. Experimental results on several numerical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly improves numerical reasoning capabilities of existing LMs. More importantly, our approach is training-free and simply works in the inference phase, making it highly portable and achieving consistent performance benefits across a variety of language models (GPT-3, T5, BART, etc) in all zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning scenarios.

Fan Zhou, Chen Pan, Lintao Ma et al.

Multivariate time series forecasting with hierarchical structure is widely used in real-world applications, e.g., sales predictions for the geographical hierarchy formed by cities, states, and countries. The hierarchical time series (HTS) forecasting includes two sub-tasks, i.e., forecasting and reconciliation. In the previous works, hierarchical information is only integrated in the reconciliation step to maintain coherency, but not in forecasting step for accuracy improvement. In this paper, we propose two novel tree-based feature integration mechanisms, i.e., top-down convolution and bottom-up attention to leverage the information of the hierarchical structure to improve the forecasting performance. Moreover, unlike most previous reconciliation methods which either rely on strong assumptions or focus on coherent constraints only,we utilize deep neural optimization networks, which not only achieve coherency without any assumptions, but also allow more flexible and realistic constraints to achieve task-based targets, e.g., lower under-estimation penalty and meaningful decision-making loss to facilitate the subsequent downstream tasks. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our tree-based feature integration mechanism achieves superior performances on hierarchical forecasting tasks compared to the state-of-the-art methods, and our neural optimization networks can be applied to real-world tasks effectively without any additional effort under coherence and task-based constraints

Chengchun Shi, Zhengling Qi, Jianing Wang et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful machine learning technique that enables an intelligent agent to learn an optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative rewards in sequential decision making. Most of methods in the existing literature are developed in \textit{online} settings where the data are easy to collect or simulate. Motivated by high stake domains such as mobile health studies with limited and pre-collected data, in this paper, we study \textit{offline} reinforcement learning methods. To efficiently use these datasets for policy optimization, we propose a novel value enhancement method to improve the performance of a given initial policy computed by existing state-of-the-art RL algorithms. Specifically, when the initial policy is not consistent, our method will output a policy whose value is no worse and often better than that of the initial policy. When the initial policy is consistent, under some mild conditions, our method will yield a policy whose value converges to the optimal one at a faster rate than the initial policy, achieving the desired ``value enhancement" property. The proposed method is generally applicable to any parametrized policy that belongs to certain pre-specified function class (e.g., deep neural networks). Extensive numerical studies are conducted to demonstrate the superior performance of our method.

Qiang Gao, Xinzhu Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang et al.

Stock selection attempts to rank a list of stocks for optimizing investment decision making, aiming at minimizing investment risks while maximizing profit returns. Recently, researchers have developed various (recurrent) neural network-based methods to tackle this problem. Without exceptions, they primarily leverage historical market volatility to enhance the selection performance. However, these approaches greatly rely on discrete sampled market observations, which either fail to consider the uncertainty of stock fluctuations or predict continuous stock dynamics in the future. Besides, some studies have considered the explicit stock interdependence derived from multiple domains (e.g., industry and shareholder). Nevertheless, the implicit cross-dependencies among different domains are under-explored. To address such limitations, we present a novel stock selection solution -- StockODE, a latent variable model with Gaussian prior. Specifically, we devise a Movement Trend Correlation module to expose the time-varying relationships regarding stock movements. We design Neural Recursive Ordinary Differential Equation Networks (NRODEs) to capture the temporal evolution of stock volatility in a continuous dynamic manner. Moreover, we build a hierarchical hypergraph to incorporate the domain-aware dependencies among the stocks. Experiments conducted on two real-world stock market datasets demonstrate that StockODE significantly outperforms several baselines, such as up to 18.57% average improvement regarding Sharpe Ratio.

Chengtai Cao, Fan Zhou, Yurou Dai et al.

Data augmentation (DA) is indispensable in modern machine learning and deep neural networks. The basic idea of DA is to construct new training data to improve the model's generalization by adding slightly disturbed versions of existing data or synthesizing new data. This survey comprehensively reviews a crucial subset of DA techniques, namely Mix-based Data Augmentation (MixDA), which generates novel samples by combining multiple examples. In contrast to traditional DA approaches that operate on single samples or entire datasets, MixDA stands out due to its effectiveness, simplicity, flexibility, computational efficiency, theoretical foundation, and broad applicability. We begin by introducing a novel taxonomy that categorizes MixDA into Mixup-based, Cutmix-based, and mixture approaches based on a hierarchical perspective of the data mixing operation. Subsequently, we provide an in-depth review of various MixDA techniques, focusing on their underlying motivations. Owing to its versatility, MixDA has penetrated a wide range of applications, which we also thoroughly investigate in this survey. Moreover, we delve into the underlying mechanisms of MixDA's effectiveness by examining its impact on model generalization and calibration while providing insights into the model's behavior by analyzing the inherent properties of MixDA. Finally, we recapitulate the critical findings and fundamental challenges of current MixDA studies while outlining the potential directions for future works. Different from previous related surveys that focus on DA approaches in specific domains (e.g., CV and NLP) or only review a limited subset of MixDA studies, we are the first to provide a systematical survey of MixDA, covering its taxonomy, methodology, application, and explainability. Furthermore, we provide promising directions for researchers interested in this exciting area.

Zhoujun Cheng, Shibo Hao, Tianyang Liu et al.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach to improve large language model (LLM) reasoning, yet most open efforts focus narrowly on math and code, limiting our understanding of its broader applicability to general reasoning. A key challenge lies in the lack of reliable, scalable RL reward signals across diverse reasoning domains. We introduce Guru, a curated RL reasoning corpus of 92K verifiable examples spanning six reasoning domains--Math, Code, Science, Logic, Simulation, and Tabular--each built through domain-specific reward design, deduplication, and filtering to ensure reliability and effectiveness for RL training. Based on Guru, we systematically revisit established findings in RL for LLM reasoning and observe significant variation across domains. For example, while prior work suggests that RL primarily elicits existing knowledge from pretrained models, our results reveal a more nuanced pattern: domains frequently seen during pretraining (Math, Code, Science) easily benefit from cross-domain RL training, while domains with limited pretraining exposure (Logic, Simulation, and Tabular) require in-domain training to achieve meaningful performance gains, suggesting that RL is likely to facilitate genuine skill acquisition. Finally, we present Guru-7B and Guru-32B, two models that achieve state-of-the-art performance among open models RL-trained with publicly available data, outperforming best baselines by 7.9% and 6.7% on our 17-task evaluation suite across six reasoning domains. We also show that our models effectively improve the Pass@k performance of their base models, particularly on complex tasks less likely to appear in pretraining data. We release data, models, training and evaluation code to facilitate general-purpose reasoning at: https://github.com/LLM360/Reasoning360

Jian Lang, Zhangtao Cheng, Ting Zhong et al.

Multimodal learning with incomplete modality is practical and challenging. Recently, researchers have focused on enhancing the robustness of pre-trained MultiModal Transformers (MMTs) under missing modality conditions by applying learnable prompts. However, these prompt-based methods face several limitations: (1) incomplete modalities provide restricted modal cues for task-specific inference, (2) dummy imputation for missing content causes information loss and introduces noise, and (3) static prompts are instance-agnostic, offering limited knowledge for instances with various missing conditions. To address these issues, we propose RAGPT, a novel Retrieval-AuGmented dynamic Prompt Tuning framework. RAGPT comprises three modules: (I) the multi-channel retriever, which identifies similar instances through a within-modality retrieval strategy, (II) the missing modality generator, which recovers missing information using retrieved contexts, and (III) the context-aware prompter, which captures contextual knowledge from relevant instances and generates dynamic prompts to largely enhance the MMT's robustness. Extensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets show that RAGPT consistently outperforms all competitive baselines in handling incomplete modality problems. The code of our work and prompt-based baselines is available at https://github.com/Jian-Lang/RAGPT.

An Yang, Anfeng Li, Baosong Yang et al. · tsinghua

In this work, we present Qwen3, the latest version of the Qwen model family. Qwen3 comprises a series of large language models (LLMs) designed to advance performance, efficiency, and multilingual capabilities. The Qwen3 series includes models of both dense and Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) architectures, with parameter scales ranging from 0.6 to 235 billion. A key innovation in Qwen3 is the integration of thinking mode (for complex, multi-step reasoning) and non-thinking mode (for rapid, context-driven responses) into a unified framework. This eliminates the need to switch between different models--such as chat-optimized models (e.g., GPT-4o) and dedicated reasoning models (e.g., QwQ-32B)--and enables dynamic mode switching based on user queries or chat templates. Meanwhile, Qwen3 introduces a thinking budget mechanism, allowing users to allocate computational resources adaptively during inference, thereby balancing latency and performance based on task complexity. Moreover, by leveraging the knowledge from the flagship models, we significantly reduce the computational resources required to build smaller-scale models, while ensuring their highly competitive performance. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that Qwen3 achieves state-of-the-art results across diverse benchmarks, including tasks in code generation, mathematical reasoning, agent tasks, etc., competitive against larger MoE models and proprietary models. Compared to its predecessor Qwen2.5, Qwen3 expands multilingual support from 29 to 119 languages and dialects, enhancing global accessibility through improved cross-lingual understanding and generation capabilities. To facilitate reproducibility and community-driven research and development, all Qwen3 models are publicly accessible under Apache 2.0.

Siqiao Xue, Danrui Qi, Caigao Jiang et al.

The recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) are positioned to transition many areas of software. The technologies of interacting with data particularly have an important entanglement with LLMs as efficient and intuitive data interactions are paramount. In this paper, we present DB-GPT, a revolutionary and product-ready Python library that integrates LLMs into traditional data interaction tasks to enhance user experience and accessibility. DB-GPT is designed to understand data interaction tasks described by natural language and provide context-aware responses powered by LLMs, making it an indispensable tool for users ranging from novice to expert. Its system design supports deployment across local, distributed, and cloud environments. Beyond handling basic data interaction tasks like Text-to-SQL with LLMs, it can handle complex tasks like generative data analysis through a Multi-Agents framework and the Agentic Workflow Expression Language (AWEL). The Service-oriented Multi-model Management Framework (SMMF) ensures data privacy and security, enabling users to employ DB-GPT with private LLMs. Additionally, DB-GPT offers a series of product-ready features designed to enable users to integrate DB-GPT within their product environments easily. The code of DB-GPT is available at Github(https://github.com/eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT) which already has over 10.7k stars. Please install DB-GPT for your own usage with the instructions(https://github.com/eosphoros-ai/DB-GPT#install) and watch a 5-minute introduction video on Youtube(https://youtu.be/n_8RI1ENyl4) to further investigate DB-GPT.

Qi Kuang, Zhoufan Zhu, Liwen Zhang et al.

Although distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely examined in the past few years, very few studies investigate the validity of the obtained Q-function estimator in the distributional setting. To fully understand how the approximation errors of the Q-function affect the whole training process, we do some error analysis and theoretically show how to reduce both the bias and the variance of the error terms. With this new understanding, we construct a new estimator \emph{Quantiled Expansion Mean} (QEM) and introduce a new DRL algorithm (QEMRL) from the statistical perspective. We extensively evaluate our QEMRL algorithm on a variety of Atari and Mujoco benchmark tasks and demonstrate that QEMRL achieves significant improvement over baseline algorithms in terms of sample efficiency and convergence performance.

Pengcheng Zhao, Zhixian He, Fuwei Zhang et al.

Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection aim to find corresponding content in the video based on a text query. Existing models usually first use contrastive learning methods to align video and text features, then fuse and extract multimodal information, and finally use a Transformer Decoder to decode multimodal information. However, existing methods face several issues: (1) Overlapping semantic information between different samples in the dataset hinders the model's multimodal aligning performance; (2) Existing models are not able to efficiently extract local features of the video; (3) The Transformer Decoder used by the existing model cannot adequately decode multimodal features. To address the above issues, we proposed the LD-DETR model for Video Moment Retrieval and Highlight Detection tasks. Specifically, we first distilled the similarity matrix into the identity matrix to mitigate the impact of overlapping semantic information. Then, we designed a method that enables convolutional layers to extract multimodal local features more efficiently. Finally, we fed the output of the Transformer Decoder back into itself to adequately decode multimodal information. We evaluated LD-DETR on four public benchmarks and conducted extensive experiments to demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of our approach. Our model outperforms the State-Of-The-Art models on QVHighlight, Charades-STA and TACoS datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/qingchen239/ld-detr.

Fan Zhou, Chang Tian, Tim Van de Cruys

Generating stylistic text with specific attributes is a key problem in controllable text generation. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for both visual and textual generation. Existing approaches can be broadly categorized into classifier-free guidance (CFG) and classifier guidance (CG) methods. While CFG effectively preserves semantic content, it often fails to provide effective attribute control. In contrast, CG modifies the denoising trajectory using classifier gradients, enabling better attribute alignment but incurring high computational costs during sampling and suffering from classifier generalization issues. In this work, we propose RegDiff, a regularized diffusion framework that leverages attribute features without requiring a pretrained classifier during sampling, thereby achieving controllable generation with reduced computational costs. Specifically, RegDiff employs a VAE-based encoder--decoder architecture to ensure reconstruction fidelity and a latent diffusion model trained with attribute supervision to enable controllable text generation. Attribute information is injected only during training. Experiments on five datasets spanning multiple stylistic attributes demonstrate that RegDiff outperforms strong baselines in generating stylistic texts. These results validate the effectiveness of RegDiff as an efficient solution for attribute-controllable text diffusion. Our code, datasets, and resources will be released upon publication at https://github.com/xxxx.

Gang Yang, Yue Lei, Wenxin Tai et al.

Diffusion and flow matching (FM) models have achieved remarkable progress in speech enhancement (SE), yet their dependence on multi-step generation is computationally expensive and vulnerable to discretization errors. Recent advances in one-step generative modeling, particularly MeanFlow, provide a promising alternative by reformulating dynamics through average velocity fields. In this work, we present COSE, a one-step FM framework tailored for SE. To address the high training overhead of Jacobian-vector product (JVP) computations in MeanFlow, we introduce a velocity composition identity to compute average velocity efficiently, eliminating expensive computation while preserving theoretical consistency and achieving competitive enhancement quality. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that COSE delivers up to 5x faster sampling and reduces training cost by 40%, all without compromising speech quality. Code is available at https://github.com/ICDM-UESTC/COSE.

Wenzheng Shu, Kangqi Xu, Wenxin Tai et al.

Trip recommendation has emerged as a highly sought-after service over the past decade. Although current studies significantly understand human intention consistency, they struggle with undesired repetitive outcomes that need resolution. We make two pivotal discoveries using statistical analyses and experimental designs: (1) The occurrence of repetitions is intricately linked to the models and decoding strategies. (2) During training and decoding, adding perturbations to logits can reduce repetition. Motivated by these observations, we introduce AR-Trip (Anti Repetition for Trip Recommendation), which incorporates a cycle-aware predictor comprising three mechanisms to avoid duplicate Points-of-Interest (POIs) and demonstrates their effectiveness in alleviating repetition. Experiments on four public datasets illustrate that AR-Trip successfully mitigates repetition issues while enhancing precision.

Liu Yu, Ludie Guo, Ping Kuang et al.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are trained on data that inherently contains gender biases, leading to undesirable impacts. Traditional debiasing methods often rely on external corpora, which may lack quality, diversity, or demographic balance, affecting the effectiveness of debiasing. With the rise of large language models and their extensive knowledge, we propose enhancing fairness (Fair-Gender) in PLMs by absorbing coherent, attribute-balanced, and semantically rich sentences. However, these sentences cannot be directly used for debiasing due to alignment issues and the risk of negative transfer. We address this by applying causal analysis to estimate causal effects, filtering out unaligned sentences, and identifying aligned ones for incorporation into PLMs, thereby ensuring positive transfer. Experiments show that our approach significantly reduces gender biases in PLMs while preserving their language expressiveness.

Chunjing Xiao, Jiahui Lu, Xovee Xu et al.

Graph anomaly detection is critical in domains such as healthcare and economics, where identifying deviations can prevent substantial losses. Existing unsupervised approaches strive to learn a single model capable of detecting both attribute and structural anomalies. However, they confront the tug-of-war problem between two distinct types of anomalies, resulting in suboptimal performance. This work presents TripleAD, a mutual distillation-based triple-channel graph anomaly detection framework. It includes three estimation modules to identify the attribute, structural, and mixed anomalies while mitigating the interference between different types of anomalies. In the first channel, we design a multiscale attribute estimation module to capture extensive node interactions and ameliorate the over-smoothing issue. To better identify structural anomalies, we introduce a link-enhanced structure estimation module in the second channel that facilitates information flow to topologically isolated nodes. The third channel is powered by an attribute-mixed curvature, a new indicator that encapsulates both attribute and structural information for discriminating mixed anomalies. Moreover, a mutual distillation strategy is introduced to encourage communication and collaboration between the three channels. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed TripleAD model against strong baselines.

Israt Zarin Era, Fan Zhou, Ahmed Shoyeb Raihan et al.

Directed Energy Deposition (DED) offers significant potential for manufacturing complex and multi-material parts. However, internal defects such as porosity and cracks can compromise mechanical properties and overall performance. This study focuses on in-situ monitoring and characterization of melt pools associated with porosity, aiming to improve defect detection and quality control in DED-printed parts. Traditional machine learning approaches for defect identification rely on extensive labeled datasets, often scarce and expensive to generate in real-world manufacturing. To address this, our framework employs self-supervised learning on unlabeled melt pool data using a Vision Transformer-based Masked Autoencoder (MAE) to produce highly representative embeddings. These fine-tuned embeddings are leveraged via transfer learning to train classifiers on a limited labeled dataset, enabling the effective identification of melt pool anomalies. We evaluate two classifiers: (1) a Vision Transformer (ViT) classifier utilizing the fine-tuned MAE Encoder's parameters and (2) the fine-tuned MAE Encoder combined with an MLP classifier head. Our framework achieves overall accuracy ranging from 95.44% to 99.17% and an average F1 score exceeding 80%, with the ViT Classifier slightly outperforming the MAE Encoder Classifier. This demonstrates the scalability and cost-effectiveness of our approach for automated quality control in DED, effectively detecting defects with minimal labeled data.

Xiaohan Wang, Zhangtao Cheng, Ting Zhong et al.

Weight Averaging (WA) has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing generalization by promoting convergence to a flat loss landscape, which correlates with stronger out-of-distribution performance. However, applying WA directly to multi-modal domain generalization (MMDG) is challenging: differences in optimization speed across modalities lead WA to overfit to faster-converging ones in early stages, suppressing the contribution of slower yet complementary modalities, thereby hindering effective modality fusion and skewing the loss surface toward sharper, less generalizable minima. To address this issue, we propose MBCD, a unified collaborative distillation framework that retains WA's flatness-inducing advantages while overcoming its shortcomings in multi-modal contexts. MBCD begins with adaptive modality dropout in the student model to curb early-stage bias toward dominant modalities. A gradient consistency constraint then aligns learning signals between uni-modal branches and the fused representation, encouraging coordinated and smoother optimization. Finally, a WA-based teacher conducts cross-modal distillation by transferring fused knowledge to each uni-modal branch, which strengthens cross-modal interactions and steer convergence toward flatter solutions. Extensive experiments on MMDG benchmarks show that MBCD consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving superior accuracy and robustness across diverse unseen domains.

Fan Zhou, Chen Pan, Lintao Ma et al.

Time series forecasts of different temporal granularity are widely used in real-world applications, e.g., sales prediction in days and weeks for making different inventory plans. However, these tasks are usually solved separately without ensuring coherence, which is crucial for aligning downstream decisions. Previous works mainly focus on ensuring coherence with some straightforward methods, e.g., aggregation from the forecasts of fine granularity to the coarse ones, and allocation from the coarse granularity to the fine ones. These methods merely take the temporal hierarchical structure to maintain coherence without improving the forecasting accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel granularity message-passing mechanism (GMP) that leverages temporal hierarchy information to improve forecasting performance and also utilizes an adaptive reconciliation (AR) strategy to maintain coherence without performance loss. Furthermore, we introduce an optimization module to achieve task-based targets while adhering to more real-world constraints. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework (GMP-AR) achieves superior performances on temporal hierarchical forecasting tasks compared to state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our framework has been successfully applied to a real-world task of payment traffic management in Alipay by integrating with the task-based optimization module.

Fan Zhou, Vincent Vandeghinste

Machine translation (MT) encompasses a variety of methodologies aimed at enhancing the accuracy of translations. In contrast, the process of human-generated translation relies on a wide range of translation techniques, which are crucial for ensuring linguistic adequacy and fluency. This study suggests that these translation techniques could further optimize machine translation if they are automatically identified before being applied to guide the translation process effectively. The study differentiates between two scenarios of the translation process: from-scratch translation and post-editing. For each scenario, a specific set of experiments has been designed to forecast the most appropriate translation techniques. The findings indicate that the predictive accuracy for from-scratch translation reaches 82%, while the post-editing process exhibits even greater potential, achieving an accuracy rate of 93%.

Xiaoming Shi, Siqiao Xue, Kangrui Wang et al.

Large language models have shown astonishing performance on a wide range of reasoning tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether they could reason about real-world events and help improve the prediction performance of event sequence models. We design LAMP, a framework that integrates a large language model in event prediction. Particularly, the language model performs abductive reasoning to assist an event sequence model: the event model proposes predictions on future events given the past; instructed by a few expert-annotated demonstrations, the language model learns to suggest possible causes for each proposal; a search module finds out the previous events that match the causes; a scoring function learns to examine whether the retrieved events could actually cause the proposal. Through extensive experiments on several challenging real-world datasets, we demonstrate that our framework -- thanks to the reasoning capabilities of large language models -- could significantly outperform the state-of-the-art event sequence models.

Haoyu Dong, Zhoujun Cheng, Xinyi He et al.

Since a vast number of tables can be easily collected from web pages, spreadsheets, PDFs, and various other document types, a flurry of table pre-training frameworks have been proposed following the success of text and images, and they have achieved new state-of-the-arts on various tasks such as table question answering, table type recognition, column relation classification, table search, formula prediction, etc. To fully use the supervision signals in unlabeled tables, a variety of pre-training objectives have been designed and evaluated, for example, denoising cell values, predicting numerical relationships, and implicitly executing SQLs. And to best leverage the characteristics of (semi-)structured tables, various tabular language models, particularly with specially-designed attention mechanisms, have been explored. Since tables usually appear and interact with free-form text, table pre-training usually takes the form of table-text joint pre-training, which attracts significant research interests from multiple domains. This survey aims to provide a comprehensive review of different model designs, pre-training objectives, and downstream tasks for table pre-training, and we further share our thoughts and vision on existing challenges and future opportunities.

Xovee Xu, Fan Zhou, Kunpeng Zhang et al.

Supervised learning, while prevalent for information cascade modeling, often requires abundant labeled data in training, and the trained model is not easy to generalize across tasks and datasets. It often learns task-specific representations, which can easily result in overfitting for downstream tasks. Recently, self-supervised learning is designed to alleviate these two fundamental issues in linguistic and visual tasks. However, its direct applicability for information cascade modeling, especially graph cascade related tasks, remains underexplored. In this work, we present Contrastive Cascade Graph Learning (CCGL), a novel framework for information cascade graph learning in a contrastive, self-supervised, and task-agnostic way. In particular, CCGL first designs an effective data augmentation strategy to capture variation and uncertainty by simulating the information diffusion in graphs. Second, it learns a generic model for graph cascade tasks via self-supervised contrastive pre-training using both unlabeled and labeled data. Third, CCGL learns a task-specific cascade model via fine-tuning using labeled data. Finally, to make the model transferable across datasets and cascade applications, CCGL further enhances the model via distillation using a teacher-student architecture. We demonstrate that CCGL significantly outperforms its supervised and semi-supervised counterparts for several downstream tasks.

Fan Zhou, Xovee Xu, Goce Trajcevski et al.

The deluge of digital information in our daily life -- from user-generated content, such as microblogs and scientific papers, to online business, such as viral marketing and advertising -- offers unprecedented opportunities to explore and exploit the trajectories and structures of the evolution of information cascades. Abundant research efforts, both academic and industrial, have aimed to reach a better understanding of the mechanisms driving the spread of information and quantifying the outcome of information diffusion. This article presents a comprehensive review and categorization of information popularity prediction methods, from feature engineering and stochastic processes, through graph representation, to deep learning-based approaches. Specifically, we first formally define different types of information cascades and summarize the perspectives of existing studies. We then present a taxonomy that categorizes existing works into the aforementioned three main groups as well as the main subclasses in each group, and we systematically review cutting-edge research work. Finally, we summarize the pros and cons of existing research efforts and outline the open challenges and opportunities in this field.

Fan Zhou, Xovee Xu, Ce Li et al.

Quantifying and predicting the long-term impact of scientific writings or individual scholars has important implications for many policy decisions, such as funding proposal evaluation and identifying emerging research fields. In this work, we propose an approach based on Heterogeneous Dynamical Graph Neural Network (HDGNN) to explicitly model and predict the cumulative impact of papers and authors. HDGNN extends heterogeneous GNNs by incorporating temporally evolving characteristics and capturing both structural properties of attributed graph and the growing sequence of citation behavior. HDGNN is significantly different from previous models in its capability of modeling the node impact in a dynamic manner while taking into account the complex relations among nodes. Experiments conducted on a real citation dataset demonstrate its superior performance of predicting the impact of both papers and authors.

Fan Zhou, Chengtai Cao

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently received significant research attention due to their superior performance on a variety of graph-related learning tasks. Most of the current works focus on either static or dynamic graph settings, addressing a single particular task, e.g., node/graph classification, link prediction. In this work, we investigate the question: can GNNs be applied to continuously learning a sequence of tasks? Towards that, we explore the Continual Graph Learning (CGL) paradigm and present the Experience Replay based framework ER-GNN for CGL to alleviate the catastrophic forgetting problem in existing GNNs. ER-GNN stores knowledge from previous tasks as experiences and replays them when learning new tasks to mitigate the catastrophic forgetting issue. We propose three experience node selection strategies: mean of feature, coverage maximization, and influence maximization, to guide the process of selecting experience nodes. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our ER-GNN and shed light on the incremental graph (non-Euclidean) structure learning.

Fan Yang, Ling Chen, Fan Zhou et al.

Real-world dynamical systems often consist of multiple stochastic subsystems that interact with each other. Modeling and forecasting the behavior of such dynamics are generally not easy, due to the inherent hardness in understanding the complicated interactions and evolutions of their constituents. This paper introduces the relational state-space model (R-SSM), a sequential hierarchical latent variable model that makes use of graph neural networks (GNNs) to simulate the joint state transitions of multiple correlated objects. By letting GNNs cooperate with SSM, R-SSM provides a flexible way to incorporate relational information into the modeling of multi-object dynamics. We further suggest augmenting the model with normalizing flows instantiated for vertex-indexed random variables and propose two auxiliary contrastive objectives to facilitate the learning. The utility of R-SSM is empirically evaluated on synthetic and real time-series datasets.

Haotian Ma, Hao Zhang, Fan Zhou et al.

This paper presents a method to explain how the information of each input variable is gradually discarded during the forward propagation in a deep neural network (DNN), which provides new perspectives to explain DNNs. We define two types of entropy-based metrics, i.e. (1) the discarding of pixel-wise information used in the forward propagation, and (2) the uncertainty of the input reconstruction, to measure input information contained by a specific layer from two perspectives. Unlike previous attribution metrics, the proposed metrics ensure the fairness of comparisons between different layers of different DNNs. We can use these metrics to analyze the efficiency of information processing in DNNs, which exhibits strong connections to the performance of DNNs. We analyze information discarding in a pixel-wise manner, which is different from the information bottleneck theory measuring feature information w.r.t. the sample distribution. Experiments have shown the effectiveness of our metrics in analyzing classic DNNs and explaining existing deep-learning techniques.

Fan Zhou, Chengtai Cao, Kunpeng Zhang et al.

Meta-learning has received a tremendous recent attention as a possible approach for mimicking human intelligence, i.e., acquiring new knowledge and skills with little or even no demonstration. Most of the existing meta-learning methods are proposed to tackle few-shot learning problems such as image and text, in rather Euclidean domain. However, there are very few works applying meta-learning to non-Euclidean domains, and the recently proposed graph neural networks (GNNs) models do not perform effectively on graph few-shot learning problems. Towards this, we propose a novel graph meta-learning framework -- Meta-GNN -- to tackle the few-shot node classification problem in graph meta-learning settings. It obtains the prior knowledge of classifiers by training on many similar few-shot learning tasks and then classifies the nodes from new classes with only few labeled samples. Additionally, Meta-GNN is a general model that can be straightforwardly incorporated into any existing state-of-the-art GNN. Our experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach not only improves the node classification performance by a large margin on few-shot learning problems in meta-learning paradigm, but also learns a more general and flexible model for task adaption.