C. Gong

Wenbin Li, Di Yao, Chang Gong et al.

Trajectory anomaly detection, aiming to estimate the anomaly risk of trajectories given the Source-Destination (SD) pairs, has become a critical problem for many real-world applications. Existing solutions directly train a generative model for observed trajectories and calculate the conditional generative probability $P({T}|{C})$ as the anomaly risk, where ${T}$ and ${C}$ represent the trajectory and SD pair respectively. However, we argue that the observed trajectories are confounded by road network preference which is a common cause of both SD distribution and trajectories. Existing methods ignore this issue limiting their generalization ability on out-of-distribution trajectories. In this paper, we define the debiased trajectory anomaly detection problem and propose a causal implicit generative model, namely CausalTAD, to solve it. CausalTAD adopts do-calculus to eliminate the confounding bias of road network preference and estimates $P({T}|do({C}))$ as the anomaly criterion. Extensive experiments show that CausalTAD can not only achieve superior performance on trained trajectories but also generally improve the performance of out-of-distribution data, with improvements of $2.1\% \sim 5.7\%$ and $10.6\% \sim 32.7\%$ respectively.

Chang Gong, Wanrui Bian, Zhijie Zhang et al.

Graph computational tasks are inherently challenging and often demand the development of advanced algorithms for effective solutions. With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), researchers have begun investigating their potential to address these tasks. However, existing approaches are constrained by LLMs' limited capability to comprehend complex graph structures and their high inference costs, rendering them impractical for handling large-scale graphs. Inspired by human approaches to graph problems, we introduce a novel framework, PIE (Pseudocode-Injection-Enhanced LLM Reasoning for Graph Computational Tasks), which consists of three key steps: problem understanding, prompt design, and code generation. In this framework, LLMs are tasked with understanding the problem and extracting relevant information to generate correct code. The responsibility for analyzing the graph structure and executing the code is delegated to the interpreter. We inject task-related pseudocodes into the prompts to further assist the LLMs in generating efficient code. We also employ cost-effective trial-and-error techniques to ensure that the LLM-generated code executes correctly. Unlike other methods that require invoking LLMs for each individual test case, PIE only calls the LLM during the code generation phase, allowing the generated code to be reused and significantly reducing inference costs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PIE outperforms existing baselines in terms of both accuracy and computational efficiency.

Wenjie Chen, Wenbin Li, Di Yao et al.

Tool planning with large language models (LLMs), referring to selecting, organizing, and preparing the tools necessary to complete a user request, bridges the gap between natural language understanding and task execution. However, current works treat different tools as isolated components and fail to leverage the inherent dependencies of tools, leading to invalid planning results. Since tool dependencies are often incomplete, it becomes challenging for LLMs to accurately identify the appropriate tools required by a user request, especially when confronted with a large toolset. To solve this challenge, we propose \texttt{GTool}, which is the first work aiming to enhance the tool planning ability of LLMs under incomplete dependencies. \texttt{GTool} constructs a request-specific tool graph to select tools efficiently and generate the \texttt{<graph token>} which provides sufficient dependency information understandable by LLMs. Moreover, a missing dependency prediction task is designed to improve the reliability of \texttt{GTool} with incomplete dependencies. Without trimming LLMs, \texttt{GTool} can be seamlessly integrated with various LLM backbones without extensive retraining. Extensive experiments show that \texttt{GTool} achieves more than 29.6\% performance improvements compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines with a light-weight (7B) LLM backbone.

Chang Gong, Di Yao, Lei Zhang et al.

In online advertising, marketing mix modeling (MMM) is employed to predict the gross merchandise volume (GMV) of brand shops and help decision-makers to adjust the budget allocation of various advertising channels. Traditional MMM methods leveraging regression techniques can fail in handling the complexity of marketing. Although some efforts try to encode the causal structures for better prediction, they have the strict restriction that causal structures are prior-known and unchangeable. In this paper, we define a new causal MMM problem that automatically discovers the interpretable causal structures from data and yields better GMV predictions. To achieve causal MMM, two essential challenges should be addressed: (1) Causal Heterogeneity. The causal structures of different kinds of shops vary a lot. (2) Marketing Response Patterns. Various marketing response patterns i.e., carryover effect and shape effect, have been validated in practice. We argue that causal MMM needs dynamically discover specific causal structures for different shops and the predictions should comply with the prior known marketing response patterns. Thus, we propose CausalMMM that integrates Granger causality in a variational inference framework to measure the causal relationships between different channels and predict the GMV with the regularization of both temporal and saturation marketing response patterns. Extensive experiments show that CausalMMM can not only achieve superior performance of causal structure learning on synthetic datasets with improvements of 5.7%\sim 7.1%, but also enhance the GMV prediction results on a representative E-commerce platform.