Xiang Chen

Tian Li, Xiang Chen, Zhen Dong et al. · berkeley, pku

Domain adaptive text classification is a challenging problem for the large-scale pretrained language models because they often require expensive additional labeled data to adapt to new domains. Existing works usually fails to leverage the implicit relationships among words across domains. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called Domain Adaptation with Structured Knowledge (DASK), to enhance domain adaptation by exploiting word-level semantic relationships. DASK first builds a knowledge graph to capture the relationship between pivot terms (domain-independent words) and non-pivot terms in the target domain. Then during training, DASK injects pivot-related knowledge graph information into source domain texts. For the downstream task, these knowledge-injected texts are fed into a BERT variant capable of processing knowledge-injected textual data. Thanks to the knowledge injection, our model learns domain-invariant features for non-pivots according to their relationships with pivots. DASK ensures the pivots to have domain-invariant behaviors by dynamically inferring via the polarity scores of candidate pivots during training with pseudo-labels. We validate DASK on a wide range of cross-domain sentiment classification tasks and observe up to 2.9% absolute performance improvement over baselines for 20 different domain pairs. Code will be made available at https://github.com/hikaru-nara/DASK.

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 'Anthony' Chen, Jeff Burke, Ruofei Du et al. · microsoft-research, salesforce

Through iterative, cross-disciplinary discussions, we define and propose next-steps for Human-centered Generative AI (HGAI). We contribute a comprehensive research agenda that lays out future directions of Generative AI spanning three levels: aligning with human values; assimilating human intents; and augmenting human abilities. By identifying these next-steps, we intend to draw interdisciplinary research teams to pursue a coherent set of emergent ideas in HGAI, focusing on their interested topics while maintaining a coherent big picture of the future work landscape.

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.

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.

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.

Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Jerry Junyang Cheung et al. · gatech

We study the problem of extracting N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document. Our proposed method ReSel decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component. For the high-level retrieval stage, ReSel designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multi-level lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components. For the low-level selection stage, ReSel designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view architecture, which models both semantic and document-structural relations between entities. Our experiments on three scientific information extraction datasets show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly.

Guoqiang Sun, Yibin Shen, Sijin Zhou et al. · pku

Cross-domain recommendation has attracted increasing attention from industry and academia recently. However, most existing methods do not exploit the interest invariance between domains, which would yield sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a cross-domain recommendation method: Self-supervised Interest Transfer Network (SITN), which can effectively transfer invariant knowledge between domains via prototypical contrastive learning. Specifically, we perform two levels of cross-domain contrastive learning: 1) instance-to-instance contrastive learning, 2) instance-to-cluster contrastive learning. Not only that, we also take into account users' multi-granularity and multi-view interests. With this paradigm, SITN can explicitly learn the invariant knowledge of interest clusters between domains and accurately capture users' intents and preferences. We conducted extensive experiments on a public dataset and a large-scale industrial dataset collected from one of the world's leading e-commerce corporations. The experimental results indicate that SITN achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art recommendation methods. Additionally, SITN has been deployed on a micro-video recommendation platform, and the online A/B testing results further demonstrate its practical value. Supplement is available at: https://github.com/fanqieCoffee/SITN-Supplement.

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.

Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu, Lidiya Murakhovs'ka et al. · microsoft-research, salesforce

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging. We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity. The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences. To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set. We illustrate the framework's feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage.

Philippe Laban, Chien-Sheng Wu, Lidiya Murakhovs'ka et al. · microsoft-research, salesforce

Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing a large news stream, creating collections for a given news story with tens of source options. This paper shows that navigating large source collections for a news story can be challenging without further guidance. In this work, we design three interfaces -- the Annotated Article, the Recomposed Article, and the Question Grid -- aimed at accompanying news readers in discovering coverage diversity while they read. A first usability study with 10 journalism experts confirms the designed interfaces all reveal coverage diversity and determine each interface's potential use cases and audiences. In a second usability study, we developed and implemented a reading exercise with 95 novice news readers to measure exposure to coverage diversity. Results show that Annotated Article users are able to answer questions 34% more completely than with two existing interfaces while finding the interface equally easy to use.

Zirui Xu, Fuxun Yu, Jinjun Xiong et al.

The significant success of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) is highly promoted by the multiple sophisticated DNN libraries. On the contrary, although some work have proved that Quadratic Deep Neuron Networks (QDNNs) show better non-linearity and learning capability than the first-order DNNs, their neuron design suffers certain drawbacks from theoretical performance to practical deployment. In this paper, we first proposed a new QDNN neuron architecture design, and further developed QuadraLib, a QDNN library to provide architecture optimization and design exploration for QDNNs. Extensive experiments show that our design has good performance regarding prediction accuracy and computation consumption on multiple learning tasks.

Haolin Deng, Yanan Zhang, Yangfan Zhang et al.

Event extraction (EE) is crucial to downstream tasks such as new aggregation and event knowledge graph construction. Most existing EE datasets manually define fixed event types and design specific schema for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. Moreover, news titles, an important source of event mentions, have not gained enough attention in current EE research. In this paper, We present Title2Event, a large-scale sentence-level dataset benchmarking Open Event Extraction without restricting event types. Title2Event contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics collected from Chinese web pages. To the best of our knowledge, it is currently the largest manually-annotated Chinese dataset for open event extraction. We further conduct experiments on Title2Event with different models and show that the characteristics of titles make it challenging for event extraction, addressing the significance of advanced study on this problem. The dataset and baseline codes are available at https://open-event-hub.github.io/title2event.

Xiang Chen, Xiaojun Wan

Advancements in natural language generation (NLG) and large language models (LLMs) have led to proficient text generation in various tasks. However, integrating intricate constraints into neural text generation, due to LLMs' opacity, remains challenging. This study investigates constrained text generation for LLMs, where predefined constraints are applied during LLM's generation process. Our research mainly focuses on mainstream open-source LLMs, categorizing constraints into lexical, structural, and relation-based types. We also present various benchmarks to facilitate fair evaluation. The study addresses some key research questions, including evaluating, understanding and improving constrained text generation for LLMs. Results illuminate LLMs' capacity and deficiency to incorporate constraints and provide insights for future developments in constrained text generation. Codes and datasets will be released upon acceptance.

Younghun Lee, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been achieving competent performance on a wide range of downstream tasks, yet existing work shows that inference on structured data is challenging for LLMs. This is because LLMs need to either understand long structured data or select the most relevant evidence before inference, and both approaches are not trivial. This paper proposes a framework, Learning to Reduce, that fine-tunes a language model with On-Policy Learning to generate a reduced version of an input structured data. When compared to state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4, Learning to Reduce not only achieves outstanding performance in reducing the input, but shows generalizability on different datasets. We further show that the model fine-tuned with our framework helps LLMs better perform on table QA tasks especially when the context is longer.

Shiwei Lyu, Chenfei Chi, Hongbo Cai et al.

We introduce RJUA-QA, a novel medical dataset for question answering (QA) and reasoning with clinical evidence, contributing to bridge the gap between general large language models (LLMs) and medical-specific LLM applications. RJUA-QA is derived from realistic clinical scenarios and aims to facilitate LLMs in generating reliable diagnostic and advice. The dataset contains 2,132 curated Question-Context-Answer pairs, corresponding about 25,000 diagnostic records and clinical cases. The dataset covers 67 common urological disease categories, where the disease coverage exceeds 97.6\% of the population seeking medical services in urology. Each data instance in RJUA-QA comprises: (1) a question mirroring real patient to inquiry about clinical symptoms and medical conditions, (2) a context including comprehensive expert knowledge, serving as a reference for medical examination and diagnosis, (3) a doctor response offering the diagnostic conclusion and suggested examination guidance, (4) a diagnosed clinical disease as the recommended diagnostic outcome, and (5) clinical advice providing recommendations for medical examination. RJUA-QA is the first medical QA dataset for clinical reasoning over the patient inquiries, where expert-level knowledge and experience are required for yielding diagnostic conclusions and medical examination advice. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted to evaluate the performance of both medical-specific and general LLMs on the RJUA-QA dataset. Our data is are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/alipay/RJU_Ant_QA}.

Guang Yang, Yu Zhou, Xiang Chen et al.

Trustworthy evaluation methods for code snippets play a crucial role in neural code generation. Traditional methods, which either rely on reference solutions or require executable test cases, have inherent limitation in flexibility and scalability. The recent LLM-as-Judge methodology offers a promising alternative by directly evaluating functional consistency between the problem description and the generated code. To systematically understand the landscape of these LLM-as-Judge methods, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across three diverse datasets. Our investigation reveals the pros and cons of two categories of LLM-as-Judge methods: the methods based on general foundation models can achieve good performance but require complex prompts and lack explainability, while the methods based on reasoning foundation models provide better explainability with simpler prompts but demand substantial computational resources due to their large parameter sizes. To address these limitations, we propose CODE-DITING, a novel code evaluation method that balances accuracy, efficiency and explainability. We develop a data distillation framework that effectively transfers reasoning capabilities from DeepSeek-R1671B to our CODE-DITING 1.5B and 7B models, significantly enhancing evaluation explainability and reducing the computational cost. With the majority vote strategy in the inference process, CODE-DITING 1.5B outperforms all models with the same magnitude of parameters and achieves performance which would normally exhibit in a model with 5 times of parameter scale. CODE-DITING 7B surpasses GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 671B, even though it only uses 1% of the parameter volume of these large models. Further experiments show that CODEDITING is robust to preference leakage and can serve as a promising alternative for code evaluation.

Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao et al.

We present an open-source and extensible knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE, supporting complicated low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. DeepKE implements various information extraction tasks, including named entity recognition, relation extraction and attribute extraction. With a unified framework, DeepKE allows developers and researchers to customize datasets and models to extract information from unstructured data according to their requirements. Specifically, DeepKE not only provides various functional modules and model implementation for different tasks and scenarios but also organizes all components by consistent frameworks to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility. We release the source code at GitHub in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE with Google Colab tutorials and comprehensive documents for beginners. Besides, we present an online system in http://deepke.openkg.cn/EN/re_doc_show.html for real-time extraction of various tasks, and a demo video.

Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng et al.

Most NER methods rely on extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in the low-resource scenarios with limited training data. Existing dominant approaches usually suffer from the challenge that the target domain has different label sets compared with a resource-rich source domain, which can be concluded as class transfer and domain transfer. In this paper, we propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting (LightNER). Specifically, we construct the unified learnable verbalizer of entity categories to generate the entity span sequence and entity categories without any label-specific classifiers, thus addressing the class transfer issue. We further propose a pluggable guidance module by incorporating learnable parameters into the self-attention layer as guidance, which can re-modulate the attention and adapt pre-trained weights. Note that we only tune those inserted module with the whole parameter of the pre-trained language model fixed, thus, making our approach lightweight and flexible for low-resource scenarios and can better transfer knowledge across domains. Experimental results show that LightNER can obtain comparable performance in the standard supervised setting and outperform strong baselines in low-resource settings. Code is in https://github.com/zjunlp/DeepKE/tree/main/example/ner/few-shot.

Ningyu Zhang, Luoqiu Li, Xiang Chen et al.

Large-scale pre-trained language models have contributed significantly to natural language processing by demonstrating remarkable abilities as few-shot learners. However, their effectiveness depends mainly on scaling the model parameters and prompt design, hindering their implementation in most real-world applications. This study proposes a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named DifferentiAble pRompT (DART), which can convert small language models into better few-shot learners without any prompt engineering. The main principle behind this approach involves reformulating potential natural language processing tasks into the task of a pre-trained language model and differentially optimizing the prompt template as well as the target label with backpropagation. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged to any pre-trained language models; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks. A comprehensive evaluation of standard NLP tasks demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves a better few-shot performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/DART.

Xiang Chen, Xin Xie, Zhen Bi et al.

Although the self-supervised pre-training of transformer models has resulted in the revolutionizing of natural language processing (NLP) applications and the achievement of state-of-the-art results with regard to various benchmarks, this process is still vulnerable to small and imperceptible permutations originating from legitimate inputs. Intuitively, the representations should be similar in the feature space with subtle input permutations, while large variations occur with different meanings. This motivates us to investigate the learning of robust textual representation in a contrastive manner. However, it is non-trivial to obtain opposing semantic instances for textual samples. In this study, we propose a disentangled contrastive learning method that separately optimizes the uniformity and alignment of representations without negative sampling. Specifically, we introduce the concept of momentum representation consistency to align features and leverage power normalization while conforming the uniformity. Our experimental results for the NLP benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can obtain better results compared with the baselines, as well as achieve promising improvements with invariance tests and adversarial attacks. The code is available in https://github.com/zxlzr/DCL.

Xiang Chen, Chenxi Wang, Yida Xue et al.

Despite significant strides in multimodal tasks, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are plagued by the critical issue of hallucination. The reliable detection of such hallucinations in MLLMs has, therefore, become a vital aspect of model evaluation and the safeguarding of practical application deployment. Prior research in this domain has been constrained by a narrow focus on singular tasks, an inadequate range of hallucination categories addressed, and a lack of detailed granularity. In response to these challenges, our work expands the investigative horizons of hallucination detection. We present a novel meta-evaluation benchmark, MHaluBench, meticulously crafted to facilitate the evaluation of advancements in hallucination detection methods. Additionally, we unveil a novel unified multimodal hallucination detection framework, UNIHD, which leverages a suite of auxiliary tools to validate the occurrence of hallucinations robustly. We demonstrate the effectiveness of UNIHD through meticulous evaluation and comprehensive analysis. We also provide strategic insights on the application of specific tools for addressing various categories of hallucinations.

Yu Xia, Rui Wang, Xu Liu et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been a widely adopted prompting method, eliciting impressive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Inspired by the sequential thought structure of CoT, a number of Chain-of-X (CoX) methods have been developed to address various challenges across diverse domains and tasks involving LLMs. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of Chain-of-X methods for LLMs in different contexts. Specifically, we categorize them by taxonomies of nodes, i.e., the X in CoX, and application tasks. We also discuss the findings and implications of existing CoX methods, as well as potential future directions. Our survey aims to serve as a detailed and up-to-date resource for researchers seeking to apply the idea of CoT to broader scenarios.

Junda Wu, Hanjia Lyu, Yu Xia et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have become increasingly important due to their state-of-the-art performance and ability to integrate multiple data modalities, such as text, images, and audio, to perform complex tasks with high accuracy. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on personalized multimodal large language models, focusing on their architecture, training methods, and applications. We propose an intuitive taxonomy for categorizing the techniques used to personalize MLLMs to individual users, and discuss the techniques accordingly. Furthermore, we discuss how such techniques can be combined or adapted when appropriate, highlighting their advantages and underlying rationale. We also provide a succinct summary of personalization tasks investigated in existing research, along with the evaluation metrics commonly used. Additionally, we summarize the datasets that are useful for benchmarking personalized MLLMs. Finally, we outline critical open challenges. This survey aims to serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand and advance the development of personalized multimodal large language models.

Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ruoyu Wang et al.

Offline evaluation of LLMs is crucial in understanding their capacities, though current methods remain underexplored in existing research. In this work, we focus on the offline evaluation of the chain-of-thought capabilities and show how to optimize LLMs based on the proposed evaluation method. To enable offline feedback with rich knowledge and reasoning paths, we use knowledge graphs (e.g., Wikidata5m) to provide feedback on the generated chain of thoughts. Due to the heterogeneity between LLM reasoning and KG structures, direct interaction and feedback from KGs on LLM behavior are challenging, as they require accurate entity linking and grounding of LLM-generated chains of thought in the KG. To address the above challenge, we propose an offline chain-of-thought evaluation framework, OCEAN, which models chain-of-thought reasoning in LLMs as an MDP and evaluate the policy's alignment with KG preference modeling. To overcome the reasoning heterogeneity and grounding problems, we leverage on-policy KG exploration and RL to model a KG policy that generates token-level likelihood distributions for LLM-generated chain-of-thought reasoning paths, simulating KG reasoning preference. Then we incorporate the knowledge-graph feedback on the validity and alignment of the generated reasoning paths into inverse propensity scores and propose KG-IPS estimator. Theoretically, we prove the unbiasedness of the proposed KG-IPS estimator and provide a lower bound on its variance. With the off-policy evaluated value function, we can directly enable off-policy optimization to further enhance chain-of-thought alignment. Our empirical study shows that OCEAN can be efficiently optimized for generating chain-of-thought reasoning paths with higher estimated values without affecting LLMs' general abilities in downstream tasks or their internal knowledge.

Sheldon Yu, Yuxin Xiong, Junda Wu et al.

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local token-level attribution, such that the high-level semantic roles of reasoning steps and their transitions remain underexplored. In this paper, we introduce a state-aware transition framework that abstracts CoT trajectories into structured latent dynamics. Specifically, to capture the evolving semantics of CoT reasoning, each reasoning step is represented via spectral analysis of token-level embeddings and clustered into semantically coherent latent states. To characterize the global structure of reasoning, we model their progression as a Markov chain, yielding a structured and interpretable view of the reasoning process. This abstraction supports a range of analyses, including semantic role identification, temporal pattern visualization, and consistency evaluation.

Guo Chen, Qiuyuan Li, Qiuxian Li et al.

In retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) question answering systems, generating citations for large language model (LLM) outputs enhances verifiability and helps users identify potential hallucinations. However, we observe two problems in the citations produced by existing attribution methods. First, the citations are typically provided at the sentence or even paragraph level. Long sentences or paragraphs may include a substantial amount of irrelevant content. Second, sentence-level citations may omit information that is essential for verifying the output, forcing users to read the surrounding context. In this paper, we propose generating sub-sentence citations that are both concise and sufficient, thereby reducing the effort required by users to confirm the correctness of the generated output. To this end, we first develop annotation guidelines for such citations and construct a corresponding dataset. Then, we propose an attribution framework for generating citations that adhere to our standards. This framework leverages LLMs to automatically generate fine-tuning data for our task and employs a credit model to filter out low-quality examples. Our experiments on the constructed dataset demonstrate that the propose approach can generate high-quality and more readable citations.

Chaoyang Gao, Xiang Chen, Jiyu Wang et al.

The increasing complexity of software systems has led to a surge in cybersecurity vulnerabilities, necessitating efficient and scalable solutions for vulnerability assessment. However, the deployment of large pre-trained models in real-world scenarios is hindered by their substantial computational and storage demands. To address this challenge, we propose a novel resource-efficient framework that integrates knowledge distillation and particle swarm optimization to enable automated vulnerability assessment. Our framework employs a two-stage approach: First, particle swarm optimization is utilized to optimize the architecture of a compact student model, balancing computational efficiency and model capacity. Second, knowledge distillation is applied to transfer critical vulnerability assessment knowledge from a large teacher model to the optimized student model. This process significantly reduces the model size while maintaining high performance. Experimental results on an enhanced MegaVul dataset, comprising 12,071 CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) v3 annotated vulnerabilities, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our approach achieves a 99.4% reduction in model size while retaining 89.3% of the original model's accuracy. Furthermore, it outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 1.7% in accuracy with 60% fewer parameters. The framework also reduces training time by 72.1% and architecture search time by 34.88% compared to traditional genetic algorithms.

Jiho Kim, Philippe Laban, Xiang 'Anthony' Chen et al.

Writing well requires not only expressing ideas but also refining them through revision, a process facilitated by reflection. Prior research suggests that feedback delivered through dialogues, such as those in writing center tutoring sessions, can help writers reflect more thoughtfully on their work compared to static feedback. Recent advancements in multi-modal large language models (LLMs) now offer new possibilities for supporting interactive and expressive voice-based reflection in writing. In particular, we propose that LLM-generated static feedback can be repurposed as conversation starters, allowing writers to seek clarification, request examples, and ask follow-up questions, thereby fostering deeper reflection on their writing. We argue that voice-based interaction can naturally facilitate this conversational exchange, encouraging writers' engagement with higher-order concerns, facilitating iterative refinement of their reflections, and reduce cognitive load compared to text-based interactions. To investigate these effects, we propose a formative study exploring how text vs. voice input influence writers' reflection and subsequent revisions. Findings from this study will inform the design of intelligent and interactive writing tools, offering insights into how voice-based interactions with LLM-powered conversational agents can support reflection and revision.

Guang Yang, Yu Zhou, Xiangyu Zhang et al.

The extensive application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generative coding tasks has raised concerns due to their high computational demands and energy consumption. Unlike previous structural pruning methods designed for classification models that deal with lowdimensional classification logits, generative Code LLMs produce high-dimensional token logit sequences, making traditional pruning objectives inherently limited. Moreover, existing single component pruning approaches further constrain the effectiveness when applied to generative Code LLMs. In response, we propose Flab-Pruner, an innovative unified structural pruning method that combines vocabulary, layer, and Feed-Forward Network (FFN) pruning. This approach effectively reduces model parameters while maintaining performance. Additionally, we introduce a customized code instruction data strategy for coding tasks to enhance the performance recovery efficiency of the pruned model. Through extensive evaluations on three state-of-the-art Code LLMs across multiple generative coding tasks, the results demonstrate that Flab-Pruner retains 97% of the original performance after pruning 22% of the parameters and achieves the same or even better performance after post-training. The pruned models exhibit significant improvements in storage, GPU usage, computational efficiency, and environmental impact, while maintaining well robustness. Our research provides a sustainable solution for green software engineering and promotes the efficient deployment of LLMs in real-world generative coding intelligence applications.

Ke Liu, Guang Yang, Xiang Chen et al.

On Stack Overflow, developers can not only browse question posts to solve their programming problems but also gain expertise from the question posts to help improve their programming skills. Therefore, improving the quality of question posts in Stack Overflow has attracted the wide attention of researchers. A concise and precise title can play an important role in helping developers understand the key information of the question post, which can improve the post quality. However, the quality of the generated title is not high due to the lack of professional knowledge related to their questions or the poor presentation ability of developers. A previous study aimed to automatically generate the title by analyzing the code snippets in the question post. However, this study ignored the useful information in the corresponding problem description. Therefore, we propose an approach SOTitle for automatic post title generation by leveraging the code snippets and the problem description in the question post (i.e., the multi-modal input). SOTitle follows the Transformer structure, which can effectively capture long-term dependencies through a multi-head attention mechanism. To verify the effectiveness of SOTitle, we construct a large-scale high-quality corpus from Stack Overflow, which includes 1,168,257 high-quality question posts for four popular programming languages. Experimental results show that SOTitle can significantly outperform six state-of-the-art baselines in both automatic evaluation and human evaluation. To encourage follow-up studies, we make our corpus and approach publicly available

Guang Yang, Xiang Chen, Yanlin Zhou et al.

A shellcode is a small piece of code and it is executed to exploit a software vulnerability, which allows the target computer to execute arbitrary commands from the attacker through a code injection attack. Similar to the purpose of automated vulnerability generation techniques, the automated generation of shellcode can generate attack instructions, which can be used to detect vulnerabilities and implement defensive measures. While the automated summarization of shellcode can help users unfamiliar with shellcode and network information security understand the intent of shellcode attacks. In this study, we propose a novel approach DualSC to solve the automatic shellcode generation and summarization tasks. Specifically, we formalize automatic shellcode generation and summarization as dual tasks, use a shallow Transformer for model construction, and design a normalization method Adjust QKNorm to adapt these low-resource tasks (i.e., insufficient training data). Finally, to alleviate the out-of-vocabulary problem, we propose a rulebased repair component to improve the performance of automatic shellcode generation. In our empirical study, we select a highquality corpus Shellcode IA32 as our empirical subject. This corpus was gathered from two real-world projects based on the line-by-line granularity. We first compare DualSC with six state-of-the-art baselines from the code generation and code summarization domains in terms of four performance measures. The comparison results show the competitiveness of DualSC. Then, we verify the effectiveness of the component setting in DualSC. Finally, we conduct a human study to further verify the effectiveness of DualSC.

Xiang Chen, Xiaojun Wan

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a fine-grained sentiment analysis task which aims to extract the aspects from sentences and identify their corresponding sentiments. Aspect term extraction (ATE) is the crucial step for ABSA. Due to the expensive annotation for aspect terms, we often lack labeled target domain data for fine-tuning. To address this problem, many approaches have been proposed recently to transfer common knowledge in an unsupervised way, but such methods have too many modules and require expensive multi-stage preprocessing. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective technique based on mutual information maximization, which can serve as an additional component to enhance any kind of model for cross-domain ABSA and ATE. Furthermore, we provide some analysis of this approach. Experiment results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for cross-domain ABSA by 4.32% Micro-F1 on average over 10 different domain pairs. Apart from that, our method can be extended to other sequence labeling tasks, such as named entity recognition (NER).

Guang Yang, Yanlin Zhou, Chi Yu et al.

In software engineering-related tasks (such as programming language tag prediction based on code snippets from Stack Overflow), the programming language classification for code snippets is a common task. In this study, we propose a novel method DeepSCC, which uses a fine-tuned RoBERTa model to classify the programming language type of the source code. In our empirical study, we choose a corpus collected from Stack Overflow, which contains 224,445 pairs of code snippets and corresponding language types. After comparing nine state-of-the-art baselines from the fields of source code classification and neural text classification in terms of four performance measures (i.e., Accuracy, Precision, Recall, and F1), we show the competitiveness of our proposed method DeepSCC

Guang Yang, Xiang Chen, Jinxin Cao et al.

Developers often write low-quality code comments due to the lack of programming experience, which can reduce the efficiency of developers program comprehension. Therefore, developers hope that code comment generation tools can be developed to illustrate the functionality and purpose of the code. Recently, researchers mainly model this problem as the neural machine translation problem and tend to use deep learning-based methods. In this study, we propose a novel method ComFormer based on Transformer and fusion method-based hybrid code presentation. Moreover, to alleviate OOV (out-of-vocabulary) problem and speed up model training, we further utilize the Byte-BPE algorithm to split identifiers and Sim_SBT method to perform AST Traversal. We compare ComFormer with seven state-of-the-art baselines from code comment generation and neural machine translation domains. Comparison results show the competitiveness of ComFormer in terms of three performance measures. Moreover, we perform a human study to verify that ComFormer can generate high-quality comments.

Ningyu Zhang, Xiang Chen, Xin Xie et al.

Document-level relation extraction aims to extract relations among multiple entity pairs from a document. Previously proposed graph-based or transformer-based models utilize the entities independently, regardless of global information among relational triples. This paper approaches the problem by predicting an entity-level relation matrix to capture local and global information, parallel to the semantic segmentation task in computer vision. Herein, we propose a Document U-shaped Network for document-level relation extraction. Specifically, we leverage an encoder module to capture the context information of entities and a U-shaped segmentation module over the image-style feature map to capture global interdependency among triples. Experimental results show that our approach can obtain state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets DocRED, CDR, and GDA.

Xin Xie, Xiangnan Chen, Xiang Chen et al.

This paper presents our systems for the three Subtasks of SemEval Task4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning (ReCAM). We explain the algorithms used to learn our models and the process of tuning the algorithms and selecting the best model. Inspired by the similarity of the ReCAM task and the language pre-training, we propose a simple yet effective technology, namely, negative augmentation with language model. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Our models achieve the 4th rank on both official test sets of Subtask 1 and Subtask 2 with an accuracy of 87.9% and an accuracy of 92.8%, respectively. We further conduct comprehensive model analysis and observe interesting error cases, which may promote future researches.

Guang Yang, Yanlin Zhou, Xiang Chen et al.

Pseudo-code written by natural language is helpful for novice developers' program comprehension. However, writing such pseudo-code is time-consuming and laborious. Motivated by the research advancements of sequence-to-sequence learning and code semantic learning, we propose a novel deep pseudo-code generation method DeepPseudo via code feature extraction and Transformer. In particular, DeepPseudo utilizes a Transformer encoder to perform encoding for source code and then use a code feature extractor to learn the knowledge of local features. Finally, it uses a pseudo-code generator to perform decoding, which can generate the corresponding pseudo-code. We choose two corpora (i.e., Django and SPoC) from real-world large-scale projects as our empirical subjects. We first compare DeepPseudo with seven state-of-the-art baselines from pseudo-code generation and neural machine translation domains in terms of four performance measures. Results show the competitiveness of DeepPseudo. Moreover, we also analyze the rationality of the component settings in DeepPseudo.

Kaibo Cao, Chunyang Chen, Sebastian Baltes et al.

As a popular Q&A site for programming, Stack Overflow is a treasure for developers. However, the amount of questions and answers on Stack Overflow make it difficult for developers to efficiently locate the information they are looking for. There are two gaps leading to poor search results: the gap between the user's intention and the textual query, and the semantic gap between the query and the post content. Therefore, developers have to constantly reformulate their queries by correcting misspelled words, adding limitations to certain programming languages or platforms, etc. As query reformulation is tedious for developers, especially for novices, we propose an automated software-specific query reformulation approach based on deep learning. With query logs provided by Stack Overflow, we construct a large-scale query reformulation corpus, including the original queries and corresponding reformulated ones. Our approach trains a Transformer model that can automatically generate candidate reformulated queries when given the user's original query. The evaluation results show that our approach outperforms five state-of-the-art baselines, and achieves a 5.6% to 33.5% boost in terms of $\mathit{ExactMatch}$ and a 4.8% to 14.4% boost in terms of $\mathit{GLEU}$.

Tian Li, Xiang Chen, Shanghang Zhang et al.

Contrastive learning (CL) has been successful as a powerful representation learning method. In this work we propose CLIM: Contrastive Learning with mutual Information Maximization, to explore the potential of CL on cross-domain sentiment classification. To the best of our knowledge, CLIM is the first to adopt contrastive learning for natural language processing (NLP) tasks across domains. Due to scarcity of labels on the target domain, we introduce mutual information maximization (MIM) apart from CL to exploit the features that best support the final prediction. Furthermore, MIM is able to maintain a relatively balanced distribution of the model's prediction, and enlarges the margin between classes on the target domain. The larger margin increases our model's robustness and enables the same classifier to be optimal across domains. Consequently, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on the Amazon-review dataset as well as the airlines dataset, showing the efficacy of our proposed method CLIM.

Juan Rebanal, Yuqi Tang, Jordan Combitsis et al.

Algorithms often appear as 'black boxes' to non-expert users. While prior work focuses on explainable representations and expert-oriented exploration, we propose and study an interactive approach using question answering to explain deterministic algorithms to non-expert users who need to understand the algorithms' internal states (e.g., students learning algorithms, operators monitoring robots, admins troubleshooting network routing). We construct XAlgo -- a formal model that first classifies the type of question based on a taxonomy and generates an answer based on a set of rules that extract information from representations of an algorithm's internal states, e.g., the pseudocode. A design probe in an algorithm learning scenario with 18 participants (9 for a Wizard-of-Oz XAlgo and 9 as a control group) reports findings and design implications based on what kinds of questions people ask, how well XAlgo responds, and what remain as challenges to bridge users' gulf of understanding algorithms.

Xiang Chen, Yanzhou Mu, Chao Ni et al.

Until now, researchers have proposed several novel heterogeneous defect prediction HDP methods with promising performance. To the best of our knowledge, whether HDP methods can perform significantly better than unsupervised methods has not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this article, we perform a replication study to have a holistic look in this issue. In particular, we compare state-of-the-art five HDP methods with five unsupervised methods. Final results surprisingly show that these HDP methods do not perform significantly better than some of unsupervised methods (especially the simple unsupervised methods proposed by Zhou et al.) in terms of two non-effort-aware performance measures and four effort-aware performance measures. Then, we perform diversity analysis on defective modules via McNemar's test and find the prediction diversity is more obvious when the comparison is performed between the HDP methods and the unsupervised methods than the comparisons only between the HDP methods or between the unsupervised methods. This shows the HDP methods and the unsupervised methods are complementary to each other in identifying defective models to some extent. Finally, we investigate the feasibility of five HDP methods by considering two satisfactory criteria recommended by previous CPDP studies and find the satisfactory ratio of these HDP methods is still pessimistic. The above empirical results implicate there is still a long way for heterogeneous defect prediction to go. More effective HDP methods need to be designed and the unsupervised methods should be considered as baselines.

Fuxun Yu, Zirui Xu, Yanzhi Wang et al.

In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated outstanding effectiveness in a large amount of applications.However, recent works have shown that neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples, indicating possible flaws intrinsic to the network structures. To address this problem and improve the robustness of neural networks, we investigate the fundamental mechanisms behind adversarial examples and propose a novel robust training method via regulating adversarial gradients. The regulation effectively squeezes the adversarial gradients of neural networks and significantly increases the difficulty of adversarial example generation.Without any adversarial example involved, the robust training method could generate naturally robust networks, which are near-immune to various types of adversarial examples. Experiments show the naturally robust networks can achieve optimal accuracy against Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM) and C\&W attacks on MNIST, Cifar10, and Google Speech Command dataset. Moreover, our proposed method also provides neural networks with consistent robustness against transferable attacks.

Zhuwei Qin, Fuxun Yu, Chenchen Liu et al.

Nowadays, the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved impressive performance on many computer vision related tasks, such as object detection, image recognition, image retrieval, etc. These achievements benefit from the CNNs outstanding capability to learn the input features with deep layers of neuron structures and iterative training process. However, these learned features are hard to identify and interpret from a human vision perspective, causing a lack of understanding of the CNNs internal working mechanism. To improve the CNN interpretability, the CNN visualization is well utilized as a qualitative analysis method, which translates the internal features into visually perceptible patterns. And many CNN visualization works have been proposed in the literature to interpret the CNN in perspectives of network structure, operation, and semantic concept. In this paper, we expect to provide a comprehensive survey of several representative CNN visualization methods, including Activation Maximization, Network Inversion, Deconvolutional Neural Networks (DeconvNet), and Network Dissection based visualization. These methods are presented in terms of motivations, algorithms, and experiment results. Based on these visualization methods, we also discuss their practical applications to demonstrate the significance of the CNN interpretability in areas of network design, optimization, security enhancement, etc.