Rong Pan

Joao Araujo, Alex Chow, Mark Handley et al.

Tail latency dominates the performance of synchronous pretraining jobs when running at very large scales. We describe a three-pronged approach: (1) a new RDMA-based transport protocol, MRC, sprays across many paths and actively load-balances between them, eliminating the issue of flow collisions (2) the use of multi-plane Clos topologies to get the benefits of high switch radix and redundancy, allowing training clusters well over 100K GPUs to be built as two-tier topologies while increasing physical redundancy, and (3) the use of static source-routing using SRv6 to allow MRC the freedom to bypass failures by itself. We describe our experiences running MRC and static SRv6 routing in production in OpenAI and Microsoft's largest training clusters, where it has been used to train the latest frontier models. We demonstrate how MRC allows AI training jobs to ride out many network failures that previously would have interrupted training.

Dongjin Lee, Rong Pan

Predictive Maintenance (PdM) can only be implemented when the online knowledge of system condition is available, and this has become available with deployment of on-equipment sensors. To date, most studies on predicting the remaining useful lifetime of a system have been focusing on either single-component systems or systems with deterministic reliability structures. This assumption is not applicable on some realistic problems, where there exist uncertainties in reliability structures of complex systems. In this paper, a PdM scheme is developed by employing a Discrete Time Markov Chain (DTMC) for forecasting the health of monitored components and a Bayesian Network (BN) for modeling the multi-component system reliability. Therefore, probabilistic inferences on both the system and its components status can be made and PdM can be scheduled on both levels.

Hejin Huang, Jusheng Zhang, Kaitong Cai et al.

Preference-based alignment objectives have been widely adopted, from RLHF-style pairwise learning in large language models to emerging applications in recommender systems. Yet, existing work rarely examines how Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) behaves under implicit feedback, where unobserved items are not reliable negatives. We conduct systematic experiments on multimodal sequential recommendation to compare common negative-selection strategies and their interaction with DPO training. Our central finding is that a simple modification, replacing deterministic hard negatives with stochastic sampling from a dynamic top-K candidate pool, consistently improves ranking performance. We attribute its effectiveness to two factors: (1) reducing erroneous suppressive gradients caused by false negatives, and (2) retaining informative hard signals while smoothing optimization via controlled stochasticity. With an optional sparse Mixture-of-Experts encoder for efficient capacity scaling, RoDPO achieves up to 5.25% NDCG@5 on three Amazon benchmarks, with nearly unchanged inference cost.

Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Yang Ba, Yixuan He et al.

Knowledge graph construction typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a multimodal framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

Lingavasan Suresh Kumar, Yang Ba, Rong Pan

Persistent Large Language Model (LLM) agents expose a critical governance gap in memory management. Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks treat memory as passive storage, lacking mechanisms to resolve contradictions, enforce privacy, or prevent outdated information ("zombie memories") from contaminating the context window. We introduce MemArchitect, a governance layer that decouples memory lifecycle management from model weights. MemArchitect enforces explicit, rule-based policies, including memory decay, conflict resolution, and privacy controls. We demonstrate that governed memory consistently outperforms unmanaged memory in agentic settings, highlighting the necessity of structured memory governance for reliable and safe autonomous systems.

Ruiyang Wang, Rong Pan, Zhengan Yao

Federated learning (FL) enables distributed clients to collaboratively train a global model using local private data. Nevertheless, recent studies show that conventional FL algorithms still exhibit deficiencies in privacy protection, and the server lacks a reliable and stable aggregation rule for updating the global model. This situation creates opportunities for adversaries: on the one hand, they may eavesdrop on uploaded gradients or model parameters, potentially leaking benign clients' private data; on the other hand, they may compromise clients to launch poisoning attacks that corrupt the global model. To balance accuracy and security, we propose FedFG, a robust FL framework based on flow-matching generation that simultaneously preserves client privacy and resists sophisticated poisoning attacks. On the client side, each local network is decoupled into a private feature extractor and a public classifier. Each client is further equipped with a flow-matching generator that replaces the extractor when interacting with the server, thereby protecting private features while learning an approximation of the underlying data distribution. Complementing the client-side design, the server employs a client-update verification scheme and a novel robust aggregation mechanism driven by synthetic samples produced by the flow-matching generator. Experiments on MNIST, FMNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrate that, compared with prior work, our approach adapts to multiple attack strategies and achieves higher accuracy while maintaining strong privacy protection.

Zehao Chen, Rong Pan

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in simulating diverse human behaviors and personalities. However, existing methods for personality control, which include prompt engineering and standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), typically treat personality traits as discrete categories (e.g., "Extroverted" vs. "Introverted"), lacking the ability to precisely control the intensity of a trait on a continuous spectrum. In this paper, we introduce Fusian, a novel framework for fine-grained, continuous personality control in LLMs. Fusian operates in two stages: (1) Trajectory Collection, where we capture the dynamic evolution of personality adoption during SFT by saving a sequence of LoRA adapters, effectively mapping the continuous manifold of a trait; and (2) RL-based Dynamic Fusion, where we train a policy network using Reinforcement Learning to dynamically compute mixing weights for these frozen adapters. By sampling from a Dirichlet distribution parameterized by the policy network, Fusian fuses multiple adapters to align the model's output with a specific numerical target intensity. Experiments on the Qwen3-14B model demonstrate that Fusian achieves high precision in personality control, significantly outperforming baseline methods in aligning with user-specified trait intensities.

Yang Ba, Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Michelle V Mancenido et al.

Diversity can be broadly defined as the presence of meaningful variation across elements, which can be viewed from multiple perspectives, including statistical variation and geometric structural richness in the dataset. Existing diversity metrics, such as feature-space dispersion and metric-space magnitude, primarily capture distributional variation or entropy, while largely neglecting the geometric structure of datasets. To address this gap, we introduce a framework based on topological data analysis (TDA) and persistence landscapes (PLs) to extract and quantify geometric features from data. This approach provides a theoretically grounded means of measuring diversity beyond entropy, capturing the rich geometric and structural properties of datasets. Through extensive experiments across diverse modalities, we demonstrate that our proposed PLs-based diversity metric (PLDiv) is powerful, reliable, and interpretable, directly linking data diversity to its underlying geometry and offering a foundational tool for dataset construction, augmentation, and evaluation.

Zehao Chen, Rong Pan

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are essential XML-based formats for versatile graphics, offering resolution independence and scalability. Unlike raster images, SVGs use geometric shapes and support interactivity, animation, and manipulation via CSS and JavaScript. Current SVG generation methods face challenges related to high computational costs and complexity. In contrast, human designers use component-based tools for efficient SVG creation. Inspired by this, SVGBuilder introduces a component-based, autoregressive model for generating high-quality colored SVGs from textual input. It significantly reduces computational overhead and improves efficiency compared to traditional methods. Our model generates SVGs up to 604 times faster than optimization-based approaches. To address the limitations of existing SVG datasets and support our research, we introduce ColorSVG-100K, the first large-scale dataset of colored SVGs, comprising 100,000 graphics. This dataset fills the gap in color information for SVG generation models and enhances diversity in model training. Evaluation against state-of-the-art models demonstrates SVGBuilder's superior performance in practical applications, highlighting its efficiency and quality in generating complex SVG graphics.

Hao Zhao, Rong Pan

An early warning of future system failure is essential for conducting predictive maintenance and enhancing system availability. This paper introduces a three-step framework for assessing system health to predict imminent system breakdowns. First, the Gaussian Derivative Change-Point Detection (GDCPD) algorithm is proposed for detecting changes in the high-dimensional feature space. GDCPD conducts a multivariate Change-Point Detection (CPD) by implementing Gaussian derivative processes for identifying change locations on critical system features, as these changes eventually will lead to system failure. To assess the significance of these changes, Weighted Mahalanobis Distance (WMD) is applied in both offline and online analyses. In the offline setting, WMD helps establish a threshold that determines significant system variations, while in the online setting, it facilitates real-time monitoring, issuing alarms for potential future system breakdowns. Utilizing the insights gained from the GDCPD and monitoring scheme, Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is then employed to estimate the Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the system. The experimental study of a real-world system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in accurately forecasting system failures well before they occur. By integrating CPD with real-time monitoring and RUL prediction, this methodology significantly advances system health monitoring and early warning capabilities.

Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Rong Pan

Extracting relevant and structured knowledge from large, complex technical documents within the Reliability and Maintainability (RAM) domain is labor-intensive and prone to errors. Our work addresses this challenge by presenting OntoKGen, a genuine pipeline for ontology extraction and Knowledge Graph (KG) generation. OntoKGen leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) through an interactive user interface guided by our adaptive iterative Chain of Thought (CoT) algorithm to ensure that the ontology extraction process and, thus, KG generation align with user-specific requirements. Although KG generation follows a clear, structured path based on the confirmed ontology, there is no universally correct ontology as it is inherently based on the user's preferences. OntoKGen recommends an ontology grounded in best practices, minimizing user effort and providing valuable insights that may have been overlooked, all while giving the user complete control over the final ontology. Having generated the KG based on the confirmed ontology, OntoKGen enables seamless integration into schemeless, non-relational databases like Neo4j. This integration allows for flexible storage and retrieval of knowledge from diverse, unstructured sources, facilitating advanced querying, analysis, and decision-making. Moreover, the generated KG serves as a robust foundation for future integration into Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, offering enhanced capabilities for developing domain-specific intelligent applications.

Hankz Hankui Zhuo, Xin Chen, Rong Pan

Plan synthesis aims to generate a course of actions or policies to transit given initial states to goal states, provided domain models that could be designed by experts or learnt from training data or interactions with the world. Intrigued by the claims of emergent planning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), works have been proposed to investigate the planning effectiveness of LLMs, without considering any utilization of off-the-shelf planning techniques in LLMs. In this paper, we aim to further study the insight of the planning capability of LLMs by investigating the roles of LLMs in off-the-shelf planning frameworks. To do this, we investigate the effectiveness of embedding LLMs into one of the well-known planning frameworks, graph-based planning, proposing a novel LLMs-based planning framework with LLMs embedded in two levels of planning graphs, i.e., mutual constraints generation level and constraints solving level. We empirically exhibit the effectiveness of our proposed framework in various planning domains.

Yang Ba, Michelle V. Mancenido, Erin K. Chiou et al.

As crowdsourcing emerges as an efficient and cost-effective method for obtaining labels for machine learning datasets, it is important to assess the quality of crowd-provided data, so as to improve analysis performance and reduce biases in subsequent machine learning tasks. Given the lack of ground truth in most cases of crowdsourcing, we refer to data quality as annotators' consistency and credibility. Unlike the simple scenarios where Kappa coefficient and intraclass correlation coefficient usually can apply, online crowdsourcing requires dealing with more complex situations. We introduce a systematic method for evaluating data quality and detecting spamming threats via variance decomposition, and we classify spammers into three categories based on their different behavioral patterns. A spammer index is proposed to assess entire data consistency, and two metrics are developed to measure crowd workers' credibility by utilizing the Markov chain and generalized random effects models. Furthermore, we showcase the practicality of our techniques and their advantages by applying them on a face verification task with both simulation and real-world data collected from two crowdsourcing platforms.

Hao Zhao, Rong Pan

Change-point detection (CPD) is crucial for identifying abrupt shifts in data, which influence decision-making and efficient resource allocation across various domains. To address the challenges posed by the costly and time-intensive data acquisition in CPD, we introduce the Derivative-Aware Change Detection (DACD) method. It leverages the derivative process of a Gaussian process (GP) for Active Learning (AL), aiming to pinpoint change-point locations effectively. DACD balances the exploitation and exploration of derivative processes through multiple data acquisition functions (AFs). By utilizing GP derivative mean and variance as criteria, DACD sequentially selects the next sampling data point, thus enhancing algorithmic efficiency and ensuring reliable and accurate results. We investigate the effectiveness of DACD method in diverse scenarios and show it outperforms other active learning change-point detection approaches.

Dhruv D. Modi, Rong Pan

Time series foundation models (TSFMs) such as Lag-Llama, TimeGPT, Chronos, MOMENT, UniTS, and TimesFM have shown strong generalization and zero-shot capabilities for time series forecasting, anomaly detection, classification, and imputation. Despite these advantages, their predictions still suffer from variance, domain-specific bias, and limited uncertainty quantification when deployed on real operational data. This paper investigates a suite of statistical and ensemble-based enhancement techniques, including bootstrap-based bagging, regression-based stacking, prediction interval construction, statistical residual modeling, and iterative error feedback, to improve robustness and accuracy. Using the Belgium Electricity Short-Term Load Forecasting dataset as a case study, we demonstrate that the proposed hybrids consistently outperform standalone foundation models across multiple horizons. Regression-based ensembles achieve the lowest mean squared error; bootstrap aggregation markedly reduces long-context errors; residual modeling corrects systematic bias; and the resulting prediction intervals achieve near nominal coverage with widths shrinking as context length increases. The results indicate that integrating statistical reasoning with modern foundation models yields measurable gains in accuracy, reliability, and interpretability for real-world time series applications.

Abdelmonem Elrefaey, Rong Pan

Causal discovery is essential across various scientific fields to uncover causal structures within data. Traditional methods relying on observational data have limitations due to confounding variables. This paper presents an optimization-based approach using integer programming (IP) to design minimal intervention sets that ensure causal structure identifiability. Our method provides exact and modular solutions that can be adjusted to different experimental settings and constraints. We demonstrate its effectiveness through comparative analysis across different settings, demonstrating its applicability and robustness.

Zehao Chen, Rong Pan, Haoran Li

Human writers often begin their stories with an overarching mental scene, where they envision the interactions between characters and their environment. Inspired by this creative process, we propose a novel approach to long-form story generation, termed hybrid bottom-up long-form story generation, using multi-agent simulations. In our method, agents interact within a dynamic sandbox environment, where their behaviors and interactions with one another and the environment generate emergent events. These events form the foundation for the story, enabling organic character development and plot progression. Unlike traditional top-down approaches that impose rigid structures, our hybrid bottom-up approach allows for the natural unfolding of events, fostering more spontaneous and engaging storytelling. The system is capable of generating stories exceeding 10,000 words while maintaining coherence and consistency, addressing some of the key challenges faced by current story generation models. We achieve state-of-the-art performance across several metrics. This approach offers a scalable and innovative solution for creating dynamic, immersive long-form stories that evolve organically from agent-driven interactions.

Yang Ba, Mohammad Sadeq Abolhasani, Rong Pan

High-quality training data is the foundation of machine learning and artificial intelligence, shaping how models learn and perform. Although much is known about what types of data are effective for training, the impact of the data's geometric structure on model performance remains largely underexplored. We propose that both the richness of representation and the elimination of redundancy within training data critically influence learning outcomes. To investigate this, we employ persistent homology to extract topological features from data within a metric space, thereby offering a principled way to quantify diversity beyond entropy-based measures. Our findings highlight persistent homology as a powerful tool for analyzing and enhancing the training data that drives AI systems.

Abdelmonem Elrefaey, Rong Pan

Using both observational and experimental data, a causal discovery process can identify the causal relationships between variables. A unique adaptive intervention design paradigm is presented in this work, where causal directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are for effectively recovered with practical budgetary considerations. In order to choose treatments that optimize information gain under these considerations, an iterative integer programming (IP) approach is proposed, which drastically reduces the number of experiments required. Simulations over a broad range of graph sizes and edge densities are used to assess the effectiveness of the suggested approach. Results show that the proposed adaptive IP approach achieves full causal graph recovery with fewer intervention iterations and variable manipulations than random intervention baselines, and it is also flexible enough to accommodate a variety of practical constraints.

Abdelmonem Elrefaey, Rong Pan

This paper presents a novel Integer Programming (IP) approach for discovering the Markov Equivalent Class (MEC) of Bayesian Networks (BNs) through observational data. The MEC-IP algorithm utilizes a unique clique-focusing strategy and Extended Maximal Spanning Graphs (EMSG) to streamline the search for MEC, thus overcoming the computational limitations inherent in other existing algorithms. Our numerical results show that not only a remarkable reduction in computational time is achieved by our algorithm but also an improvement in causal discovery accuracy is seen across diverse datasets. These findings underscore this new algorithm's potential as a powerful tool for researchers and practitioners in causal discovery and BNSL, offering a significant leap forward toward the efficient and accurate analysis of complex data structures.

Yang Ba, Michelle V. Mancenido, Rong Pan

Data augmentation that introduces diversity into the input data has long been used in training deep learning models. It has demonstrated benefits in improving robustness and generalization, practically aligning well with other regularization strategies such as dropout and weight decay. However, the underlying mechanism of how diverse training data contributes to model improvements remains unknown. In this paper, we investigate the impact of data diversity on the weight space of deep neural networks using Random Matrix Theory. Through spectral analysis and comparing models trained with data augmentation, dropout, and weight decay, we reveal that increasing data diversity alters the weight spectral distribution similarly to other regularization techniques, while displaying a pattern more closely aligned with dropout than with weight decay. Building on these insights, we propose a metric to explain and compare the benefits of diversity introduced by traditional data augmentations and those achieved through synthetic data.

Jingwen Zhang, Yuezhou Wu, Rong Pan

Federated learning makes it possible for all parties with data isolation to train the model collaboratively and efficiently while satisfying privacy protection. To obtain a high-quality model, an incentive mechanism is necessary to motivate more high-quality workers with data and computing power. The existing incentive mechanisms are applied in offline scenarios, where the task publisher collects all bids and selects workers before the task. However, it is practical that different workers arrive online in different orders before or during the task. Therefore, we propose a reverse auction-based online incentive mechanism for horizontal federated learning with budget constraint. Workers submit bids when they arrive online. The task publisher with a limited budget leverages the information of the arrived workers to decide on whether to select the new worker. Theoretical analysis proves that our mechanism satisfies budget feasibility, computational efficiency, individual rationality, consumer sovereignty, time truthfulness, and cost truthfulness with a sufficient budget. The experimental results show that our online mechanism is efficient and can obtain high-quality models.

Jingwen Zhang, Yuezhou Wu, Rong Pan

Federated learning trains models across devices with distributed data, while protecting the privacy and obtaining a model similar to that of centralized ML. A large number of workers with data and computing power are the foundation of federal learning. However, the inevitable costs prevent self-interested workers from serving for free. Moreover, due to data isolation, task publishers lack effective methods to select, evaluate and pay reliable workers with high-quality data. Therefore, we design an auction-based incentive mechanism for horizontal federated learning with reputation and contribution measurement. By designing a reasonable method of measuring contribution, we establish the reputation of workers, which is easy to decline and difficult to improve. Through reverse auctions, workers bid for tasks, and the task publisher selects workers combining reputation and bid price. With the budget constraint, winning workers are paid based on performance. We proved that our mechanism satisfies the individual rationality of the honest worker, budget feasibility, truthfulness, and computational efficiency.

Xiao Liu, Rong Pan

Recurrence data arise from multi-disciplinary domains spanning reliability, cyber security, healthcare, online retailing, etc. This paper investigates an additive-tree-based approach, known as Boost-R (Boosting for Recurrence Data), for recurrent event data with both static and dynamic features. Boost-R constructs an ensemble of gradient boosted additive trees to estimate the cumulative intensity function of the recurrent event process, where a new tree is added to the ensemble by minimizing the regularized L2 distance between the observed and predicted cumulative intensity. Unlike conventional regression trees, a time-dependent function is constructed by Boost-R on each tree leaf. The sum of these functions, from multiple trees, yields the ensemble estimator of the cumulative intensity. The divide-and-conquer nature of tree-based methods is appealing when hidden sub-populations exist within a heterogeneous population. The non-parametric nature of regression trees helps to avoid parametric assumptions on the complex interactions between event processes and features. Critical insights and advantages of Boost-R are investigated through comprehensive numerical examples. Datasets and computer code of Boost-R are made available on GitHub. To our best knowledge, Boost-R is the first gradient boosted additive-tree-based approach for modeling large-scale recurrent event data with both static and dynamic feature information.

Huijuan Wang, Shuangyin Li, Rong Pan

Knowledge representation learning has received a lot of attention in the past few years. The success of existing methods heavily relies on the quality of knowledge graphs. The entities with few triplets tend to be learned with less expressive power. Fortunately, there are many knowledge graphs constructed from various sources, the representations of which could contain much information. We propose an adversarial embedding transfer network ATransN, which transfers knowledge from one or more teacher knowledge graphs to a target one through an aligned entity set without explicit data leakage. Specifically, we add soft constraints on aligned entity pairs and neighbours to the existing knowledge representation learning methods. To handle the problem of possible distribution differences between teacher and target knowledge graphs, we introduce an adversarial adaption module. The discriminator of this module evaluates the degree of consistency between the embeddings of an aligned entity pair. The consistency score is then used as the weights of soft constraints. It is not necessary to acquire the relations and triplets in teacher knowledge graphs because we only utilize the entity representations. Knowledge graph completion results show that ATransN achieves better performance against baselines without transfer on three datasets, CN3l, WK3l, and DWY100k. The ablation study demonstrates that ATransN can bring steady and consistent improvement in different settings. The extension of combining other knowledge graph embedding algorithms and the extension with three teacher graphs display the promising generalization of the adversarial transfer network.

Peifeng Wang, Jialong Han, Chenliang Li et al.

Knowledge graph embedding aims at modeling entities and relations with low-dimensional vectors. Most previous methods require that all entities should be seen during training, which is unpractical for real-world knowledge graphs with new entities emerging on a daily basis. Recent efforts on this issue suggest training a neighborhood aggregator in conjunction with the conventional entity and relation embeddings, which may help embed new entities inductively via their existing neighbors. However, their neighborhood aggregators neglect the unordered and unequal natures of an entity's neighbors. To this end, we summarize the desired properties that may lead to effective neighborhood aggregators. We also introduce a novel aggregator, namely, Logic Attention Network (LAN), which addresses the properties by aggregating neighbors with both rules- and network-based attention weights. By comparing with conventional aggregators on two knowledge graph completion tasks, we experimentally validate LAN's superiority in terms of the desired properties.

Peifeng Wang, Shuangyin Li, Rong pan

Knowledge representation learning aims at modeling knowledge graph by encoding entities and relations into a low dimensional space. Most of the traditional works for knowledge embedding need negative sampling to minimize a margin-based ranking loss. However, those works construct negative samples through a random mode, by which the samples are often too trivial to fit the model efficiently. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge representation learning framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). In this GAN-based framework, we take advantage of a generator to obtain high-quality negative samples. Meanwhile, the discriminator in GAN learns the embeddings of the entities and relations in knowledge graph. Thus, we can incorporate the proposed GAN-based framework into various traditional models to improve the ability of knowledge representation learning. Experimental results show that our proposed GAN-based framework outperforms baselines on triplets classification and link prediction tasks.

Feng Nie, Jinpeng Wang, Jin-Ge Yao et al.

Recent neural models for data-to-text generation are mostly based on data-driven end-to-end training over encoder-decoder networks. Even though the generated texts are mostly fluent and informative, they often generate descriptions that are not consistent with the input structured data. This is a critical issue especially in domains that require inference or calculations over raw data. In this paper, we attempt to improve the fidelity of neural data-to-text generation by utilizing pre-executed symbolic operations. We propose a framework called Operation-guided Attention-based sequence-to-sequence network (OpAtt), with a specifically designed gating mechanism as well as a quantization module for operation results to utilize information from pre-executed operations. Experiments on two sports datasets show our proposed method clearly improves the fidelity of the generated texts to the input structured data.

Feng Nie, Hailin Chen, Jinpeng Wang et al.

Recent neural models for data-to-document generation have achieved remarkable progress in producing fluent and informative texts. However, large proportions of generated texts do not actually conform to the input data. To address this issue, we propose a new training framework which attempts to verify the consistency between the generated texts and the input data to guide the training process. To measure the consistency, a relation extraction model is applied to check information overlaps between the input data and the generated texts. The non-differentiable consistency signal is optimized via reinforcement learning. Experimental results on a recently released challenging dataset ROTOWIRE show improvements from our framework in various metrics.

Huabin Zheng, Jingyu Wang, Zhengjie Huang et al.

OCR character segmentation for multilingual printed documents is difficult due to the diversity of different linguistic characters. Previous approaches mainly focus on monolingual texts and are not suitable for multilingual-lingual cases. In this work, we particularly tackle the Chinese/English mixed case by reframing it as a semantic segmentation problem. We take advantage of the successful architecture called fully convolutional networks (FCN) in the field of semantic segmentation. Given a wide enough receptive field, FCN can utilize the necessary context around a horizontal position to determinate whether this is a splitting point or not. As a deep neural architecture, FCN can automatically learn useful features from raw text line images. Although trained on synthesized samples with simulated random disturbance, our FCN model generalizes well to real-world samples. The experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms the previous methods.

Shuangyin Li, Jiefei Li, Guan Huang et al.

To date, there have been massive Semi-Structured Documents (SSDs) during the evolution of the Internet. These SSDs contain both unstructured features (e.g., plain text) and metadata (e.g., tags). Most previous works focused on modeling the unstructured text, and recently, some other methods have been proposed to model the unstructured text with specific tags. To build a general model for SSDs remains an important problem in terms of both model fitness and efficiency. We propose a novel method to model the SSDs by a so-called Tag-Weighted Topic Model (TWTM). TWTM is a framework that leverages both the tags and words information, not only to learn the document-topic and topic-word distributions, but also to infer the tag-topic distributions for text mining tasks. We present an efficient variational inference method with an EM algorithm for estimating the model parameters. Meanwhile, we propose three large-scale solutions for our model under the MapReduce distributed computing platform for modeling large-scale SSDs. The experimental results show the effectiveness, efficiency and the robustness by comparing our model with the state-of-the-art methods in document modeling, tags prediction and text classification. We also show the performance of the three distributed solutions in terms of time and accuracy on document modeling.