Tianshu Wang

Yuyang Ye, Zhi Zheng, Yishan Shen et al.

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in the field of Recommendation Systems (RSs). Most existing studies have focused on converting user behavior logs into textual prompts and leveraging techniques such as prompt tuning to enable LLMs for recommendation tasks. Meanwhile, research interest has recently grown in multimodal recommendation systems that integrate data from images, text, and other sources using modality fusion techniques. This introduces new challenges to the existing LLM-based recommendation paradigm which relies solely on text modality information. Moreover, although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) capable of processing multi-modal inputs have emerged, how to equip MLLMs with multi-modal recommendation capabilities remains largely unexplored. To this end, in this paper, we propose the Multimodal Large Language Model-enhanced Multimodaln Sequential Recommendation (MLLM-MSR) model. To capture the dynamic user preference, we design a two-stage user preference summarization method. Specifically, we first utilize an MLLM-based item-summarizer to extract image feature given an item and convert the image into text. Then, we employ a recurrent user preference summarization generation paradigm to capture the dynamic changes in user preferences based on an LLM-based user-summarizer. Finally, to enable the MLLM for multi-modal recommendation task, we propose to fine-tune a MLLM-based recommender using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) techniques. Extensive evaluations across various datasets validate the effectiveness of MLLM-MSR, showcasing its superior ability to capture and adapt to the evolving dynamics of user preferences.

Tianshu Wang, Xiaoyang Chen, Hongyu Lin et al.

The development of Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs) has been greatly advanced by the advent of large language models (LLMs), which provide an intuitive way to translate natural language (NL) questions into Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. While significant progress has been made in LLM-based NL2SQL, existing approaches face several challenges in real-world scenarios of natural language querying over massive databases. In this paper, we present DBCopilot, a framework that addresses these challenges by employing a compact and flexible copilot model for routing over massive databases. Specifically, DBCopilot decouples schema-agnostic NL2SQL into schema routing and SQL generation. This framework utilizes a single lightweight differentiable search index to construct semantic mappings for massive database schemata, and navigates natural language questions to their target databases and tables in a relation-aware joint retrieval manner. The routed schemata and questions are then fed into LLMs for effective SQL generation. Furthermore, DBCopilot introduces a reverse schema-to-question generation paradigm that can automatically learn and adapt the router over massive databases without manual intervention. Experimental results verify that DBCopilot is a scalable and effective solution for schema-agnostic NL2SQL, providing a significant advance in handling natural language querying over massive databases for NLIDBs.

Zhuoqun Li, Hongyu Lin, Tianshu Wang et al.

Linking a claim to grounded references is a critical ability to fulfill human demands for authentic and reliable information. Current studies are limited to specific tasks like information retrieval or semantic matching, where the claim-reference relationships are unique and fixed, while the referential knowledge linking (RKL) in real-world can be much more diverse and complex. In this paper, we propose universal referential knowledge linking (URL), which aims to resolve diversified referential knowledge linking tasks by one unified model. To this end, we propose a LLM-driven task-instructed representation compression, as well as a multi-view learning approach, in order to effectively adapt the instruction following and semantic understanding abilities of LLMs to referential knowledge linking. Furthermore, we also construct a new benchmark to evaluate ability of models on referential knowledge linking tasks across different scenarios. Experiments demonstrate that universal RKL is challenging for existing approaches, while the proposed framework can effectively resolve the task across various scenarios, and therefore outperforms previous approaches by a large margin.

Boxi Cao, Qiaoyu Tang, Hongyu Lin et al.

Memory is one of the most essential cognitive functions serving as a repository of world knowledge and episodes of activities. In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memorizing ability. On the contrary, vanilla neural networks without pre-training have been long observed suffering from the catastrophic forgetting problem. To investigate such a retentive-forgetful contradiction and understand the memory mechanism of language models, we conduct thorough experiments by controlling the target knowledge types, the learning strategies and the learning schedules. We find that: 1) Vanilla language models are forgetful; 2) Pre-training leads to retentive language models; 3) Knowledge relevance and diversification significantly influence the memory formation. These conclusions are useful for understanding the abilities of pre-trained language models and shed light on designing and evaluating new learning and inference algorithms of language models.