Javed A. Aslam

Debjyoti Saha Roy, Byron C. Wallace, Javed A. Aslam

State-of-the-art Extreme Multi-Label Text Classification models rely on multi-label attention to focus on key tokens in input text, but learning good attention weights is challenging. We introduce PLANT - Pretrained and Leveraged Attention - a plug-and-play strategy for initializing attention. PLANT works by planting label-specific attention using a pretrained Learning-to-Rank model guided by mutual information gain. This architecture-agnostic approach integrates seamlessly with large language model backbones such as Mistral-7B, LLaMA3-8B, DeepSeek-V3, and Phi-3. PLANT outperforms state-of-the-art methods across tasks including ICD coding, legal topic classification, and content recommendation. Gains are especially pronounced in few-shot settings, with substantial improvements on rare labels. Ablation studies confirm that attention initialization is a key driver of these gains. For code and trained models, see https://github.com/debjyotiSRoy/xcube/tree/plant

Kechen Qin, Yu Wang, Cheng Li et al.

Multi-hop knowledge based question answering (KBQA) is a complex task for natural language understanding. Many KBQA approaches have been proposed in recent years, and most of them are trained based on labeled reasoning path. This hinders the system's performance as many correct reasoning paths are not labeled as ground truth, and thus they cannot be learned. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end KBQA system which can leverage multiple reasoning paths' information and only requires labeled answer as supervision. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets containing both single-hop simple questions as well as muti-hop complex questions, including WebQuestionSP (WQSP), ComplexWebQuestion-1.1 (CWQ), and PathQuestion-Large (PQL), and demonstrate strong performance.

Kechen Qin, Cheng Li, Virgil Pavlu et al.

We present an adaptation of RNN sequence models to the problem of multi-label classification for text, where the target is a set of labels, not a sequence. Previous such RNN models define probabilities for sequences but not for sets; attempts to obtain a set probability are after-thoughts of the network design, including pre-specifying the label order, or relating the sequence probability to the set probability in ad hoc ways. Our formulation is derived from a principled notion of set probability, as the sum of probabilities of corresponding permutation sequences for the set. We provide a new training objective that maximizes this set probability, and a new prediction objective that finds the most probable set on a test document. These new objectives are theoretically appealing because they give the RNN model freedom to discover the best label order, which often is the natural one (but different among documents). We develop efficient procedures to tackle the computation difficulties involved in training and prediction. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that we outperform state-of-the-art methods for this task.