Junfeng Zhao

Jinyang Zhang, Hongxin Ding, Yue Fang et al.

Recent work has sought to understand Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning, yet a principled, model-intrinsic signal that captures its layer-wise reasoning dynamics remains underexplored. We bridge this gap by demonstrating that the l2 norm of hidden states serves as an endogenous signal of the model's reasoning intensity. Using Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) as a diagnostic probe, we observe that LLMs' internal reasoning is marked by a sharp increase in reasoning feature activations concentrated in late layers. Motivated by this pattern, we establish a formal link between reasoning intensity and the model's latent geometry and theoretically prove that the l2 norm of hidden states bounds the activation strength of SAE reasoning features. Empirical correlation analysis and causal interventions further validate the l2 norm as a faithful indicator, where heightened norms consistently correspond to critical reasoning steps. We then introduce three test-time scaling techniques guided by l2 norms: (i) Adaptive Layer-wise Reasoning Recursion, (ii) Endogenous Reasoning State Steering, and (iii) l2-guided Response Selection, which requires no additional training or data and is compatible with advanced inference engines. Experiments across model architectures and benchmarks show that l2-norm-based techniques significantly improve reasoning performance, offering a principled yet simple lens to perceive and control LLM latent reasoning dynamics. Our code is available at https://github.com/zjy1298/The-Tell-Tale-Norm.

Xinyu Ma, Xu Chu, Yasha Wang et al.

Graph data augmentation has shown superiority in enhancing generalizability and robustness of GNNs in graph-level classifications. However, existing methods primarily focus on the augmentation in the graph signal space and the graph structure space independently, neglecting the joint interaction between them. In this paper, we address this limitation by formulating the problem as an optimal transport problem that aims to find an optimal inter-graph node matching strategy considering the interactions between graph structures and signals. To solve this problem, we propose a novel graph mixup algorithm called FGWMixup, which seeks a midpoint of source graphs in the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein (FGW) metric space. To enhance the scalability of our method, we introduce a relaxed FGW solver that accelerates FGWMixup by improving the convergence rate from $\mathcal{O}(t^{-1})$ to $\mathcal{O}(t^{-2})$. Extensive experiments conducted on five datasets using both classic (MPNNs) and advanced (Graphormers) GNN backbones demonstrate that FGWMixup effectively improves the generalizability and robustness of GNNs. Codes are available at https://github.com/ArthurLeoM/FGWMixup.

Chaohe Zhang, Xu Chu, Liantao Ma et al.

Multimodal electronic health record (EHR) data are widely used in clinical applications. Conventional methods usually assume that each sample (patient) is associated with the unified observed modalities, and all modalities are available for each sample. However, missing modality caused by various clinical and social reasons is a common issue in real-world clinical scenarios. Existing methods mostly rely on solving a generative model that learns a mapping from the latent space to the original input space, which is an unstable ill-posed inverse problem. To relieve the underdetermined system, we propose a model solving a direct problem, dubbed learning with Missing Modalities in Multimodal healthcare data (M3Care). M3Care is an end-to-end model compensating the missing information of the patients with missing modalities to perform clinical analysis. Instead of generating raw missing data, M3Care imputes the task-related information of the missing modalities in the latent space by the auxiliary information from each patient's similar neighbors, measured by a task-guided modality-adaptive similarity metric, and thence conducts the clinical tasks. The task-guided modality-adaptive similarity metric utilizes the uncensored modalities of the patient and the other patients who also have the same uncensored modalities to find similar patients. Experiments on real-world datasets show that M3Care outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, the findings discovered by M3Care are consistent with experts and medical knowledge, demonstrating the capability and the potential of providing useful insights and explanations.

Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu, Yuzhen Xiao et al.

By integrating external knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become an effective strategy for mitigating the hallucination problems that large language models (LLMs) encounter when dealing with knowledge-intensive tasks. However, in the process of integrating external non-parametric supporting evidence with internal parametric knowledge, inevitable knowledge conflicts may arise, leading to confusion in the model's responses. To enhance the knowledge selection of LLMs in various contexts, some research has focused on refining their behavior patterns through instruction-tuning. Nonetheless, due to the absence of explicit negative signals and comparative objectives, models fine-tuned in this manner may still exhibit undesirable behaviors such as contextual ignorance and contextual overinclusion. To this end, we propose a Knowledge-aware Preference Optimization strategy, dubbed KnowPO, aimed at achieving adaptive knowledge selection based on contextual relevance in real retrieval scenarios. Concretely, we proposed a general paradigm for constructing knowledge conflict datasets, which comprehensively cover various error types and learn how to avoid these negative signals through preference optimization methods. Simultaneously, we proposed a rewriting strategy and data ratio optimization strategy to address preference imbalances. Experimental results show that KnowPO outperforms previous methods for handling knowledge conflicts by over 37\%, while also exhibiting robust generalization across various out-of-distribution datasets.

Yue Fang, Weibin Liao, Yuxin Guo et al.

Clinical Reasoning on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is a fundamental yet challenging task in modern healthcare. While in-context learning (ICL) offers a promising inference-time adaptation paradigm for large language models (LLMs) in EHR reasoning, existing methods face three fundamental challenges: (1) Perspective Limitation, where data-driven similarity fails to align with LLM reasoning needs and model-driven signals are constrained by limited clinical competence; (2) Cohort Awareness, as demonstrations are selected independently without modeling population-level structure; and (3) Information Aggregation, where redundancy and interaction effects among demonstrations are ignored, leading to diminishing marginal gains. To address these challenges, we propose GraphWalker, a principled demonstration selection framework for EHR-oriented ICL. GraphWalker (i) jointly models patient clinical information and LLM-estimated information gain by integrating data-driven and model-driven perspectives, (ii) incorporates Cohort Discovery to avoid noisy local optima, and (iii) employs a Lazy Greedy Search with Frontier Expansion algorithm to mitigate diminishing marginal returns in information aggregation. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world EHR benchmarks demonstrate that GraphWalker consistently outperforms state-of-the-art ICL baselines, yielding substantial improvements in clinical reasoning performance. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/PuppyKnightUniversity/GraphWalker

Xinyu Ma, Xu Chu, Yasha Wang et al.

In healthcare prediction tasks, it is essential to exploit the correlations between medical features and learn better patient health representations. Existing methods try to estimate feature correlations only from data, or increase the quality of estimation by introducing task-specific medical knowledge. However, such methods either are difficult to estimate the feature correlations due to insufficient training samples, or cannot be generalized to other tasks due to reliance on specific knowledge. There are medical research revealing that not all the medical features are strongly correlated. Thus, to address the issues, we expect to group up strongly correlated features and learn feature correlations in a group-wise manner to reduce the learning complexity without losing generality. In this paper, we propose a general patient health representation learning framework MedFACT. We estimate correlations via measuring similarity between temporal patterns of medical features with kernel methods, and cluster features with strong correlations into groups. The feature group is further formulated as a correlation graph, and we employ graph convolutional networks to conduct group-wise feature interactions for better representation learning. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of MedFACT. The discovered medical findings are also confirmed by literature, providing valuable medical insights and explanations.

Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Zhibang Yang et al.

Multi-agent systems based on large language models, particularly centralized architectures, have recently shown strong potential for complex and knowledge-intensive tasks. However, central agents often suffer from unstable long-horizon collaboration due to the lack of memory management, leading to context bloat, error accumulation, and poor cross-task generalization. To address both task-level memory inefficiency and the inability to reuse coordination experience, we propose StackPlanner, a hierarchical multi-agent framework with explicit memory control. StackPlanner addresses these challenges by decoupling high-level coordination from subtask execution with active task-level memory control, and by learning to retrieve and exploit reusable coordination experience via structured experience memory and reinforcement learning. Experiments on multiple deep-search and agent system benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enabling reliable long-horizon multi-agent collaboration.

Rihong Qiu, Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang et al.

Text-to-SQL translates natural language questions into SQL statements grounded in a target database schema. Ensuring the reliability and executability of such systems requires validating generated SQL, but most existing approaches focus only on syntactic correctness, with few addressing semantic validation (detecting misalignments between questions and SQL). As a consequence, effective semantic validation still faces two key challenges: capturing both global user intent and SQL structural details, and constructing high-quality fine-grained sub-SQL annotations. To tackle these, we introduce HEROSQL, a hierarchical SQL representation approach that integrates global intent (via Logical Plans, LPs) and local details (via Abstract Syntax Trees, ASTs). To enable better information propagation, we employ a Nested Message Passing Neural Network (NMPNN) to capture inherent relational information in SQL and aggregate schema-guided semantics across LPs and ASTs. Additionally, to generate high-quality negative samples, we propose an AST-driven sub-SQL augmentation strategy, supporting robust optimization of fine-grained semantic inconsistencies. Extensive experiments conducted on Text-to-SQL validation benchmarks (both in-domain and out-of-domain settings) demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, achieving an average 9.40% improvement of AUPRC and 12.35% of AUROC in identifying semantic inconsistencies. It excels at detecting fine-grained semantic errors, provides large language models with more granular feedback, and ultimately enhances the reliability and interpretability of data querying platforms.

Xinyu Ma, Yifeng Xu, Yang Lin et al.

We introduce DRESS, a novel approach for generating stylized large language model (LLM) responses through representation editing. Existing methods like prompting and fine-tuning are either insufficient for complex style adaptation or computationally expensive, particularly in tasks like NPC creation or character role-playing. Our approach leverages the over-parameterized nature of LLMs to disentangle a style-relevant subspace within the model's representation space to conduct representation editing, ensuring a minimal impact on the original semantics. By applying adaptive editing strengths, we dynamically adjust the steering vectors in the style subspace to maintain both stylistic fidelity and semantic integrity. We develop two stylized QA benchmark datasets to validate the effectiveness of DRESS, and the results demonstrate significant improvements compared to baseline methods such as prompting and ITI. In short, DRESS is a lightweight, train-free solution for enhancing LLMs with flexible and effective style control, making it particularly useful for developing stylized conversational agents. Codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/ArthurLeoM/DRESS-LLM.

Zhihao Yu, Yujie Jin, Yongxin Xu et al.

While pioneering deep learning methods have made great strides in analyzing electronic health record (EHR) data, they often struggle to fully capture the semantics of diverse medical codes from limited data. The integration of external knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a promising avenue for improving healthcare predictions. However, LLM analyses may exhibit significant variance due to ambiguity problems and inconsistency issues, hindering their effective utilization. To address these challenges, we propose IntelliCare, a novel framework that leverages LLMs to provide high-quality patient-level external knowledge and enhance existing EHR models. Concretely, IntelliCare identifies patient cohorts and employs task-relevant statistical information to augment LLM understanding and generation, effectively mitigating the ambiguity problem. Additionally, it refines LLM-derived knowledge through a hybrid approach, generating multiple analyses and calibrating them using both the EHR model and perplexity measures. Experimental evaluations on three clinical prediction tasks across two large-scale EHR datasets demonstrate that IntelliCare delivers significant performance improvements to existing methods, highlighting its potential in advancing personalized healthcare predictions and decision support systems.

Hongxin Ding, Peinie Zou, Zhiyuan Wang et al.

Extracting medical knowledge from healthcare texts enhances downstream tasks like medical knowledge graph construction and clinical decision-making. However, the construction and application of knowledge extraction models lack automation, reusability and unified management, leading to inefficiencies for researchers and high barriers for non-AI experts such as doctors, to utilize knowledge extraction. To address these issues, we propose a ModelOps-based intelligent medical knowledge extraction framework that offers a low-code system for model selection, training, evaluation and optimization. Specifically, the framework includes a dataset abstraction mechanism based on multi-layer callback functions, a reusable model training, monitoring and management mechanism. We also propose a model recommendation method based on dataset similarity, which helps users quickly find potentially suitable models for a given dataset. Our framework provides convenience for researchers to develop models and simplifies model access for non-AI experts such as doctors.

Hongxin Ding, Yue Fang, Runchuan Zhu et al.

Large Language Models(LLMs) excel in general tasks but struggle in specialized domains like healthcare due to limited domain-specific knowledge.Supervised Fine-Tuning(SFT) data construction for domain adaptation often relies on heuristic methods, such as GPT-4 annotation or manual data selection, with a data-centric focus on presumed diverse, high-quality datasets. However, these methods overlook the model's inherent knowledge distribution, introducing noise, redundancy, and irrelevant data, leading to a mismatch between the selected data and the model's learning task, resulting in suboptimal performance. To address this, we propose a two-stage model-centric data selection framework, Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection (3DS), which aligns data with the model's knowledge distribution for optimized adaptation. In Stage1, we apply Prompt-Driven Data Selection via Explicit Alignment, where the the model filters irrelevant or redundant data based on its internal knowledge. In Stage2, we perform Decomposed Difficulty Data Selection, where data selection is guided by our defined difficulty decomposition, using three metrics: Instruction Understanding, Response Confidence, and Response Correctness. Additionally, an attention-based importance weighting mechanism captures token importance for more accurate difficulty calibration. This two-stage approach ensures the selected data is not only aligned with the model's knowledge and preferences but also appropriately challenging for the model to learn, leading to more effective and targeted domain adaptation. In the case study of the medical domain, our extensive experiments on real-world healthcare datasets demonstrate the superiority of 3DS over exisiting methods in accuracy by over 5.29%. Our dataset and code has been open-sourced at https://github.com/PuppyKnightUniversity/3DS.

Yue Fang, Yuxin Guo, Jiaran Gao et al.

Improving large language models (LLMs) for electronic health record (EHR) reasoning is essential for enabling accurate and generalizable clinical predictions. While LLMs excel at medical text understanding, they underperform on EHR-based prediction tasks due to challenges in modeling temporally structured, high-dimensional data. Existing approaches often rely on hybrid paradigms, where LLMs serve merely as frozen prior retrievers while downstream deep learning (DL) models handle prediction, failing to improve the LLM's intrinsic reasoning capacity and inheriting the generalization limitations of DL models. To this end, we propose EAG-RL, a novel two-stage training framework designed to intrinsically enhance LLMs' EHR reasoning ability through expert attention guidance, where expert EHR models refer to task-specific DL models trained on EHR data. Concretely, EAG-RL first constructs high-quality, stepwise reasoning trajectories using expert-guided Monte Carlo Tree Search to effectively initialize the LLM's policy. Then, EAG-RL further optimizes the policy via reinforcement learning by aligning the LLM's attention with clinically salient features identified by expert EHR models. Extensive experiments on two real-world EHR datasets show that EAG-RL improves the intrinsic EHR reasoning ability of LLMs by an average of 14.62%, while also enhancing robustness to feature perturbations and generalization to unseen clinical domains. These results demonstrate the practical potential of EAG-RL for real-world deployment in clinical prediction tasks. Our code have been available at https://github.com/devilran6/EAG-RL.

Zhibang Yang, Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu et al.

Federated Retrieval (FR) routes queries across multiple external knowledge sources, to mitigate hallucinations of LLMs, when necessary external knowledge is distributed. However, existing methods struggle to retrieve high-quality and relevant documents for ambiguous queries, especially in cross-domain scenarios, which significantly limits their effectiveness in supporting downstream generation tasks. Inspired by Dynamic Information Flow (DIF), we propose DFAMS, a novel framework that leverages DIF to identify latent query intents and construct semantically aligned knowledge partitions for accurate retrieval across heterogeneous sources. Specifically, DFAMS probes the DIF in LLMs by leveraging gradient signals from a few annotated queries and employing Shapley value-based attribution to trace neuron activation paths associated with intent recognition and subdomain boundary detection. Then, DFAMS leverages DIF to train an alignment module via multi-prototype contrastive learning, enabling fine-grained intra-source modeling and inter-source semantic alignment across knowledge bases. Experimental results across five benchmarks show that DFAMS outperforms advanced FR methods by up to 14.37\% in knowledge classification accuracy, 5.38\% in retrieval recall, and 6.45\% in downstream QA accuracy, demonstrating its effectiveness in complex FR scenarios. Our code are anonymous available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DFAMS/

Yuzhen Xiao, Jiahe Song, Yongxin Xu et al.

In-Context Learning (ICL) technique based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has gained prominence in Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks for its lower computing resource consumption, less manual labeling overhead, and stronger generalizability. Nevertheless, most ICL-based NER methods depend on large-parameter LLMs: the open-source models demand substantial computational resources for deployment and inference, while the closed-source ones incur high API costs, raise data-privacy concerns, and hinder community collaboration. To address this question, we propose an Ensemble Learning Method for Named Entity Recognition (EL4NER), which aims at aggregating the ICL outputs of multiple open-source, small-parameter LLMs to enhance overall performance in NER tasks at less deployment and inference cost. Specifically, our method comprises three key components. First, we design a task decomposition-based pipeline that facilitates deep, multi-stage ensemble learning. Second, we introduce a novel span-level sentence similarity algorithm to establish an ICL demonstration retrieval mechanism better suited for NER tasks. Third, we incorporate a self-validation mechanism to mitigate the noise introduced during the ensemble process. We evaluated EL4NER on multiple widely adopted NER datasets from diverse domains. Our experimental results indicate that EL4NER surpasses most closed-source, large-parameter LLM-based methods at a lower parameter cost and even attains state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among ICL-based methods on certain datasets. These results show the parameter efficiency of EL4NER and underscore the feasibility of employing open-source, small-parameter LLMs within the ICL paradigm for NER tasks.

Weibin Liao, Xin Gao, Tianyu Jia et al.

Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) has emerged as a critical task for enabling seamless interaction with databases. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in this domain. However, existing NL2SQL methods predominantly rely on closed-source LLMs leveraging prompt engineering, while open-source models typically require fine-tuning to acquire domain-specific knowledge. Despite these efforts, open-source LLMs struggle with complex NL2SQL tasks due to the indirect expression of user query objectives and the semantic gap between user queries and database schemas. Inspired by the application of reinforcement learning in mathematical problem-solving to encourage step-by-step reasoning in LLMs, we propose LearNAT (Learning NL2SQL with AST-guided Task Decomposition), a novel framework that improves the performance of open-source LLMs on complex NL2SQL tasks through task decomposition and reinforcement learning. LearNAT introduces three key components: (1) a Decomposition Synthesis Procedure that leverages Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) to guide efficient search and pruning strategies for task decomposition, (2) Margin-aware Reinforcement Learning, which employs fine-grained step-level optimization via DPO with AST margins, and (3) Adaptive Demonstration Reasoning, a mechanism for dynamically selecting relevant examples to enhance decomposition capabilities. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets, Spider and BIRD, demonstrate that LearNAT enables a 7B-parameter open-source LLM to achieve performance comparable to GPT-4, while offering improved efficiency and accessibility.

Jinyang Zhang, Yue Fang, Hongxin Ding et al.

Conventional continual pretraining (CPT) for large language model (LLM) domain adaptation often suffers from catastrophic forgetting and limited domain capacity. Existing strategies adopt layer expansion, introducing additional trainable parameters to accommodate new knowledge. However, the uniform expansion and updates still entangle general and domain learning, undermining its effectiveness. Our pilot studies reveal that LLMs exhibit functional specialization, where layers and units differentially encode general-critical capabilities, suggesting that parameter expansion and optimization should be function-aware. We then propose ADEPT, Adaptive Expansion and Dynamic Decoupled Tuning for continual pretraining, a two-stage framework for domain-adaptive CPT. ADEPT first performs General-Competence Guided Selective Layer Expansion, duplicating layers least critical for the general domain to increase representational capacity while minimizing interference with general knowledge. It then applies Adaptive Unit-Wise Decoupled Tuning, disentangling parameter units within expanded layers according to their general-domain importance and assigning asymmetric learning rates to balance knowledge injection and retention. Experiments on mathematical and medical benchmarks show that ADEPT outperforms full-parameter CPT by up to 5.76% on the general domain and 5.58% on the target domain with only 15% of parameters tuned and less than 50% training time. Ablation studies, theoretical analysis, and extended investigations further demonstrate the necessity of targeted expansion and decoupled optimization, providing new principles for efficient and robust domain-adaptive CPT. Our code is open-sourced at https://github.com/PuppyKnightUniversity/ADEPT

Zhihao Yu, Liantao Ma, Yasha Wang et al.

Deep learning algorithms, especially Transformer-based models, have achieved significant performance by capturing long-range dependencies and historical information. However, the power of convolution has not been fully investigated. Moreover, most existing works ignore the dynamic interaction among variables and evolutionary noise in series. Addressing these issues, we propose a Hierarchical Memorizing Network (HMNet). In particular, a hierarchical convolution structure is introduced to extract the information from the series at various scales. Besides, we propose a dynamic variable interaction module to learn the varying correlation and an adaptive denoising module to search and exploit similar patterns to alleviate noises. These modules can cooperate with the hierarchical structure from the perspective of fine to coarse grain. Experiments on five benchmarks demonstrate that HMNet significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 10.6% on MSE and 5.7% on MAE. Our code is released at https://github.com/yzhHoward/HMNet.

Xinke Jiang, Ruizhe Zhang, Yongxin Xu et al.

In this paper, we investigate the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) based on Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to improve the accuracy and reliability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent approaches suffer from insufficient and repetitive knowledge retrieval, tedious and time-consuming query parsing, and monotonous knowledge utilization. To this end, we develop a Hypothesis Knowledge Graph Enhanced (HyKGE) framework, which leverages LLMs' powerful reasoning capacity to compensate for the incompleteness of user queries, optimizes the interaction process with LLMs, and provides diverse retrieved knowledge. Specifically, HyKGE explores the zero-shot capability and the rich knowledge of LLMs with Hypothesis Outputs to extend feasible exploration directions in the KGs, as well as the carefully curated prompt to enhance the density and efficiency of LLMs' responses. Furthermore, we introduce the HO Fragment Granularity-aware Rerank Module to filter out noise while ensuring the balance between diversity and relevance in retrieved knowledge. Experiments on two Chinese medical multiple-choice question datasets and one Chinese open-domain medical Q&A dataset with two LLM turbos demonstrate the superiority of HyKGE in terms of accuracy and explainability.

Xinke Jiang, Rihong Qiu, Yongxin Xu et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become essential in interpreting relational data across various domains, yet, they often struggle to generalize to unseen graph data that differs markedly from training instances. In this paper, we introduce a novel framework called General Retrieval-Augmented Graph Learning (RAGraph), which brings external graph data into the general graph foundation model to improve model generalization on unseen scenarios. On the top of our framework is a toy graph vector library that we established, which captures key attributes, such as features and task-specific label information. During inference, the RAGraph adeptly retrieves similar toy graphs based on key similarities in downstream tasks, integrating the retrieved data to enrich the learning context via the message-passing prompting mechanism. Our extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that RAGraph significantly outperforms state-of-the-art graph learning methods in multiple tasks such as node classification, link prediction, and graph classification across both dynamic and static datasets. Furthermore, extensive testing confirms that RAGraph consistently maintains high performance without the need for task-specific fine-tuning, highlighting its adaptability, robustness, and broad applicability.

Xinyu Ma, Xu Chu, Zhibang Yang et al.

With the increasingly powerful performances and enormous scales of pretrained models, promoting parameter efficiency in fine-tuning has become a crucial need for effective and efficient adaptation to various downstream tasks. One representative line of fine-tuning methods is Orthogonal Fine-tuning (OFT), which rigorously preserves the angular distances within the parameter space to preserve the pretrained knowledge. Despite the empirical effectiveness, OFT still suffers low parameter efficiency at $\mathcal{O}(d^2)$ and limited capability of downstream adaptation. Inspired by Givens rotation, in this paper, we proposed quasi-Givens Orthogonal Fine-Tuning (qGOFT) to address the problems. We first use $\mathcal{O}(d)$ Givens rotations to accomplish arbitrary orthogonal transformation in $SO(d)$ with provable equivalence, reducing parameter complexity from $\mathcal{O}(d^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(d)$. Then we introduce flexible norm and relative angular adjustments under soft orthogonality regularization to enhance the adaptation capability of downstream semantic deviations. Extensive experiments on various tasks and pretrained models validate the effectiveness of our methods.

Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective solution to the issues faced by Large Language Models (LLMs) in hallucination generation and knowledge obsolescence by incorporating externally retrieved knowledge. However, existing methods lack effective control mechanisms for integrating internal and external knowledge. Inspired by human cognitive processes, we propose Parenting, a novel framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. Specifically, Parenting utilizes a key parameter mining method that combines forward and backward propagation signals to localize subspaces representing different capabilities. Then, Parenting employs a type-tailored tuning strategy, applying specific and appropriate optimizations to different subspaces, aiming to achieve a balanced enhancement of both adherence and robustness. Extensive experiments on various datasets and models validate the effectiveness and generalizability of our method.

Zhihao Yu, Xu Chu, Yujie Jin et al.

Electronic health record (EHR) data has emerged as a valuable resource for analyzing patient health status. However, the prevalence of missing data in EHR poses significant challenges to existing methods, leading to spurious correlations and suboptimal predictions. While various imputation techniques have been developed to address this issue, they often obsess unnecessary details and may introduce additional noise when making clinical predictions. To tackle this problem, we propose SMART, a Self-Supervised Missing-Aware RepresenTation Learning approach for patient health status prediction, which encodes missing information via elaborated attentions and learns to impute missing values through a novel self-supervised pre-training approach that reconstructs missing data representations in the latent space. By adopting missing-aware attentions and focusing on learning higher-order representations, SMART promotes better generalization and robustness to missing data. We validate the effectiveness of SMART through extensive experiments on six EHR tasks, demonstrating its superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Hongxin Ding, Baixiang Huang, Yue Fang et al.

Interactive medical questioning is essential in real-world clinical consultations, where physicians must actively gather information from patients. While medical Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in static medical question answering, they predominantly operate under a reactive paradigm: generating answers directly without seeking additional information, which risks incorrect diagnoses in such interactive settings. To address this limitation, we propose ProMed, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that transitions medical LLMs toward a proactive paradigm, equipping them with the ability to ask clinically valuable questions before decision-making. At the core of ProMed is the Shapley Information Gain (SIG) reward, which quantifies the clinical utility of each question by combining the amount of newly acquired information with its contextual importance, estimated via Shapley values. We integrate SIG into a two-stage training pipeline: (1) SIG-Guided Model Initialization uses Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct high-reward interaction trajectories to supervise the model, and (2) SIG-Augmented Policy Optimization, which integrates SIG and enhances RL with a novel SIG-guided Reward Distribution Mechanism that assigns higher rewards to informative questions for targeted optimization. Extensive experiments on two newly curated partial-information medical benchmarks demonstrate that ProMed significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by an average of 6.29% and delivers a 54.45% gain over the reactive paradigm, while also generalizing robustly to out-of-domain cases.

Yongan Zhang, Junfeng Zhao, Jian Li et al.

The prediction of formation resistivity plays a crucial role in the evaluation of oil and gas reservoirs, identification and assessment of geothermal energy resources, groundwater detection and monitoring, and carbon capture and storage. However, traditional well logging techniques fail to measure accurate resistivity in cased boreholes, and the transient electromagnetic method for cased borehole resistivity logging encounters challenges of high-frequency disaster (the problem of inadequate learning by neural networks in high-frequency features) and noise interference, badly affecting accuracy. To address these challenges, frequency-aware framework and temporal anti-noise block are proposed to build frequency aware LSTM (FAL). The frequency-aware framework implements a dual-stream structure through wavelet transformation, allowing the neural network to simultaneously handle high-frequency and low-frequency flows of time-series data, thus avoiding high-frequency disaster. The temporal anti-noise block integrates multiple attention mechanisms and soft-threshold attention mechanisms, enabling the model to better distinguish noise from redundant features. Ablation experiments demonstrate that the frequency-aware framework and temporal anti-noise block contribute significantly to performance improvement. FAL achieves a 24.3% improvement in R2 over LSTM, reaching the highest value of 0.91 among all models. In robustness experiments, the impact of noise on FAL is approximately 1/8 of the baseline, confirming the noise resistance of FAL. The proposed FAL effectively reduces noise interference in predicting formation resistivity from cased transient electromagnetic well logging curves, better learns high-frequency features, and thereby enhances the prediction accuracy and noise resistance of the neural network model.

Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yuchen Fang et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown considerable effectiveness in a variety of graph learning tasks, particularly those based on the message-passing approach in recent years. However, their performance is often constrained by a limited receptive field, a challenge that becomes more acute in the presence of sparse graphs. In light of the power series, which possesses infinite expansion capabilities, we propose a novel Graph Power Filter Neural Network (GPFN) that enhances node classification by employing a power series graph filter to augment the receptive field. Concretely, our GPFN designs a new way to build a graph filter with an infinite receptive field based on the convergence power series, which can be analyzed in the spectral and spatial domains. Besides, we theoretically prove that our GPFN is a general framework that can integrate any power series and capture long-range dependencies. Finally, experimental results on three datasets demonstrate the superiority of our GPFN over state-of-the-art baselines.

Shunsuke Aoki, Lung En Jan, Junfeng Zhao et al.

Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) have real-time information from the surrounding environment by using local on-board sensors, V2X (Vehicle-to-Everything) communications, pre-loaded vehicle-specific lookup tables, and map database. CAVs are capable of improving energy efficiency by incorporating these information. In particular, Eco-Cruise and Eco-Lane Selection on highways and/or motorways have immense potential to save energy, because there are generally fewer traffic controllers and the vehicles keep moving in general. In this paper, we present a cooperative and energy-efficient lane-selection strategy named MultiCruise, where each CAV selects one among multiple candidate lanes that allows the most energy-efficient travel. MultiCruise incorporates an Eco-Cruise component to select the most energy-efficient lane. The Eco-Cruise component calculates the driving parameters and prospective energy consumption of the ego vehicle for each candidate lane, and the Eco-Lane Selection component uses these values. As a result, MultiCruise can account for multiple data sources, such as the road curvature and the surrounding vehicles' velocities and accelerations. The eco-autonomous driving strategy, MultiCruise, is tested, designed and verified by using a co-simulation test platform that includes autonomous driving software and realistic road networks to study the performance under realistic driving conditions. Our experimental evaluations show that our eco-autonomous MultiCruise saves up to 8.5% fuel consumption.

Shunsuke Aoki, Lung En Jan, Junfeng Zhao et al.

With advances in sensing, computing, and communication technologies, Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) are becoming feasible. The advent of CAVs presents new opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of individual vehicles. However, testing and verifying energy-efficient autonomous driving systems are difficult due to safety considerations and repeatability. In this paper, we present a co-simulation platform to develop and test novel vehicle eco-autonomous driving technologies named InfoRich, which incorporates the information from on-board sensors, V2X communications, and map database. The co-simulation platform includes eco-autonomous driving software, vehicle dynamics and powertrain (VD&PT) model, and a traffic environment simulator. Also, we utilize synthetic drive cycles derived from real-world driving data to test the strategies under realistic driving scenarios. To build road networks from the real-world driving data, we develop an Automated Parser and Calculator for Map/Scenario named AutoPASCAL. Overall, the simulation platform provides a realistic vehicle model, powertrain model, sensor model, traffic model, and road-network model to enable the evaluation of the energy efficiency of eco-autonomous driving.