Qianying Liu

Qianying Liu, Chaitanya Kaul, Jun Wang et al.

For medical image semantic segmentation (MISS), Vision Transformers have emerged as strong alternatives to convolutional neural networks thanks to their inherent ability to capture long-range correlations. However, existing research uses off-the-shelf vision Transformer blocks based on linear projections and feature processing which lack spatial and local context to refine organ boundaries. Furthermore, Transformers do not generalize well on small medical imaging datasets and rely on large-scale pre-training due to limited inductive biases. To address these problems, we demonstrate the design of a compact and accurate Transformer network for MISS, CS-Unet, which introduces convolutions in a multi-stage design for hierarchically enhancing spatial and local modeling ability of Transformers. This is mainly achieved by our well-designed Convolutional Swin Transformer (CST) block which merges convolutions with Multi-Head Self-Attention and Feed-Forward Networks for providing inherent localized spatial context and inductive biases. Experiments demonstrate CS-Unet without pre-training outperforms other counterparts by large margins on multi-organ and cardiac datasets with fewer parameters and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code is available at Github.

Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Qianying Liu et al.

Contrastive pre-training on distant supervision has shown remarkable effectiveness in improving supervised relation extraction tasks. However, the existing methods ignore the intrinsic noise of distant supervision during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we propose a weighted contrastive learning method by leveraging the supervised data to estimate the reliability of pre-training instances and explicitly reduce the effect of noise. Experimental results on three supervised datasets demonstrate the advantages of our proposed weighted contrastive learning approach compared to two state-of-the-art non-weighted baselines.Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/WCL

Yibin Shen, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

Solving math word problems is the task that analyses the relation of quantities and requires an accurate understanding of contextual natural language information. Recent studies show that current models rely on shallow heuristics to predict solutions and could be easily misled by small textual perturbations. To address this problem, we propose a Textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning framework, which enforces the models to distinguish semantically similar examples while holding different mathematical logic. We adopt a self-supervised manner strategy to enrich examples with subtle textual variance by textual reordering or problem re-construction. We then retrieve the hardest to differentiate samples from both equation and textual perspectives and guide the model to learn their representations. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art on both widely used benchmark datasets and also exquisitely designed challenge datasets in English and Chinese. \footnote{Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/yiyunya/Textual_CL_MWP}

Zhen Wan, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

Relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation types, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. In this paper, we introduce a simple enhancement of RE using $k$ nearest neighbors ($k$NN-RE). $k$NN-RE allows the model to consult training relations at test time through a nearest-neighbor search and provides a simple yet effective means to tackle the two issues above. Additionally, we observe that $k$NN-RE serves as an effective way to leverage distant supervision (DS) data for RE. Experimental results show that the proposed $k$NN-RE achieves state-of-the-art performances on a variety of supervised RE datasets, i.e., ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80, along with outperforming the best model to date on the i2b2 and Wiki80 datasets in the setting of allowing using DS. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/kNN-RE.

Chuang Ma, Qianying Liu, Tomoyuki Obuchi et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remain unreliable on spatial multiple-choice questions, and their failures are often attributed to poorly attended visual information. In this work, we identify a complementary failure mode, spatial lexical bias: adding a spatial relation word to the answer options can attract the model's decision and make the newly added option likely to be selected. Using nine open-weight MLLMs, we show that this phenomenon is widely observed. In particular, models can answer a binary spatial question correctly, yet consistently select an incorrect third spatial option once it is added to the answer set. We isolate such binary-stable but ternary-fragile cases as diagnostic examples and leverage mechanistic interpretability tools, revealing that a substantial part of the failure instead originates on the language side rather than the visual side: visual attention analyses and residual-stream probes show the correct spatial relation remains internally available on these failures, while irrelevant-option controls, activation patching, and sparse component interventions trace the bias to specific LLM-side channels and neurons. Based on this finding, we show that a lightweight LLM-only DPO update on tiny single-object-pair synthetic data mitigates the bias, lifting four-way robust accuracy by up to 100 points on synthetic data, and by 68.0, 32.6, and 20.1 points on broader evaluation datasets WhatsUp, SpatialMQA-Direct, and VSR.

Qianying Liu, Paul Henderson, Xiao Gu et al.

Semi-supervised medical image segmentation has shown promise in training models with limited labeled data and abundant unlabeled data. However, state-of-the-art methods ignore a potentially valuable source of unsupervised semantic information -- spatial registration transforms between image volumes. To address this, we propose CCT-R, a contrastive cross-teaching framework incorporating registration information. To leverage the semantic information available in registrations between volume pairs, CCT-R incorporates two proposed modules: Registration Supervision Loss (RSL) and Registration-Enhanced Positive Sampling (REPS). The RSL leverages segmentation knowledge derived from transforms between labeled and unlabeled volume pairs, providing an additional source of pseudo-labels. REPS enhances contrastive learning by identifying anatomically-corresponding positives across volumes using registration transforms. Experimental results on two challenging medical segmentation benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of CCT-R across various semi-supervised settings, with as few as one labeled case. Our code is available at https://github.com/kathyliu579/ContrastiveCross-teachingWithRegistration.

Qianying Liu, Xiao Gu, Paul Henderson et al. · oxford

Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated great potential in medical image segmentation by utilizing knowledge from unlabeled data. However, most existing approaches do not explicitly capture high-level semantic relations between distant regions, which limits their performance. In this paper, we focus on representation learning for semi-supervised learning, by developing a novel Multi-Scale Cross Supervised Contrastive Learning (MCSC) framework, to segment structures in medical images. We jointly train CNN and Transformer models, regularising their features to be semantically consistent across different scales. Our approach contrasts multi-scale features based on ground-truth and cross-predicted labels, in order to extract robust feature representations that reflect intra- and inter-slice relationships across the whole dataset. To tackle class imbalance, we take into account the prevalence of each class to guide contrastive learning and ensure that features adequately capture infrequent classes. Extensive experiments on two multi-structure medical segmentation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MCSC. It not only outperforms state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods by more than 3.0% in Dice, but also greatly reduces the performance gap with fully supervised methods.

Chengzhi Zhong, Fei Cheng, Qianying Liu et al.

In this study, we investigate whether non-English-centric LLMs, despite their strong performance, `think' in their respective dominant language: more precisely, `think' refers to how the representations of intermediate layers, when un-embedded into the vocabulary space, exhibit higher probabilities for certain dominant languages during generation. We term such languages as internal $\textbf{latent languages}$. We examine the latent language of three typical categories of models for Japanese processing: Llama2, an English-centric model; Swallow, an English-centric model with continued pre-training in Japanese; and LLM-jp, a model pre-trained on balanced English and Japanese corpora. Our empirical findings reveal that, unlike Llama2 which relies exclusively on English as the internal latent language, Japanese-specific Swallow and LLM-jp employ both Japanese and English, exhibiting dual internal latent languages. For any given target language, the model preferentially activates the latent language most closely related to it. In addition, we explore how intermediate layers respond to questions involving cultural conflicts between latent internal and target output languages. We further explore how the language identity shifts across layers while keeping consistent semantic meaning reflected in the intermediate layer representations. This study deepens the understanding of non-English-centric large language models, highlighting the intricate dynamics of language representation within their intermediate layers.

Qianying Liu, Zhuo Gong, Zhengdong Yang et al.

Low-resource speech recognition has been long-suffering from insufficient training data. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages neighboring languages to improve low-resource scenario performance, founded on the hypothesis that similar linguistic units in neighboring languages exhibit comparable term frequency distributions, which enables us to construct a Huffman tree for performing multilingual hierarchical Softmax decoding. This hierarchical structure enables cross-lingual knowledge sharing among similar tokens, thereby enhancing low-resource training outcomes. Empirical analyses demonstrate that our method is effective in improving the accuracy and efficiency of low-resource speech recognition.

Yibin Shen, Qianying Liu, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation. In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference. The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets.

Yihua Zhu, Qianying Liu, Fei Cheng et al.

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become central to post-training reasoning models, yet a key limitation of existing studies is their narrow view of the reasoning space: difficulty is treated as reasoning depth alone, and reward is concentrated on forward deductive state tracking. We instead characterize the reasoning space along two dimensions. Difficulty. Beyond reasoning depth, we study environment complexity, where models must identify the correct path amid distractors and interacting structures. Rewarded reasoning form. We consider four abilities core to real-world reasoning: deductive state tracking, abductive recovery of hidden events or facts, inductive rule induction, and analogical transfer. To disentangle these factors, we construct a synthetic knowledge-graph environment with controlled pre- and post-training distributions, where each instance varies along depth, complexity, and task family. Three findings emerge: joint depth-complexity coverage outperforms single-axis recipes; reasoning families respond non-uniformly, with abductive reasoning degrading outside the RL-covered region and task correlations clustering into deductive-abductive and inductive-analogy pairs; and uniform mixing outperforms staged curricula under a fixed budget. We also find that recent off-the-shelf models exhibit the same deductive-over-abductive asymmetry, suggesting that this gap is not merely an artifact of our controlled setup.

Dongsheng Yang, Wataru Sato, Qianying Liu et al.

Expressing various facial emotions is an important social ability for efficient communication between humans. A key challenge in human-robot interaction research is providing androids with the ability to make various human-like facial expressions for efficient communication with humans. The android Nikola, we have developed, is equipped with many actuators for facial muscle control. While this enables Nikola to simulate various human expressions, it also complicates identification of the optimal parameters for producing desired expressions. Here, we propose a novel method that automatically optimizes the facial expressions of our android. We use a machine vision algorithm to evaluate the magnitudes of seven basic emotions, and employ the Bayesian Optimization algorithm to identify the parameters that produce the most convincing facial expressions. Evaluations by naive human participants demonstrate that our method improves the rated strength of the android's facial expressions of anger, disgust, sadness, and surprise compared with the previous method that relied on Ekman's theory and parameter adjustments by a human expert.

Qianying Liu, Wenyu Guan, Jianhao Shen et al.

Previous studies have introduced a weakly-supervised paradigm for solving math word problems requiring only the answer value annotation. While these methods search for correct value equation candidates as pseudo labels, they search among a narrow sub-space of the enormous equation space. To address this problem, we propose a novel search algorithm with combinatorial strategy \textbf{ComSearch}, which can compress the search space by excluding mathematically equivalent equations. The compression allows the searching algorithm to enumerate all possible equations and obtain high-quality data. We investigate the noise in the pseudo labels that hold wrong mathematical logic, which we refer to as the \textit{false-matching} problem, and propose a ranking model to denoise the pseudo labels. Our approach holds a flexible framework to utilize two existing supervised math word problem solvers to train pseudo labels, and both achieve state-of-the-art performance in the weak supervision task.

Yihua Zhu, Qianying Liu, Jiaxin Wang et al.

Autoregressive LLMs perform well on relational tasks that require linking entities via relational words (e.g., father/son, friend), but it is unclear whether they learn the logical semantics of such relations (e.g., symmetry and inversion logic) and, if so, whether reversal-type failures arise from missing relational semantics or left-to-right order bias. We propose a controlled Knowledge Graph-based synthetic framework that generates text from symmetric/inverse triples, train GPT-style autoregressive models from scratch, and evaluate memorization, logical inference, and in-context generalization to unseen entities to address these questions. We find a sharp phase transition in which relational semantics emerge with sufficient logic-bearing supervision, even in shallow (2-3 layer) models, and that successful generalization aligns with stable intermediate-layer signals. Finally, order-matched forward/reverse tests and a diffusion baseline indicate that reversal failures are primarily driven by autoregressive order bias rather than deficient inversion semantics.

Xuyang Cao, Qianying Liu, Chuan Xiao et al.

In multilingual pretraining, the test loss of a pretrained model is heavily influenced by the proportion of each language in the pretraining data, namely the \textit{language mixture ratios}. Multilingual scaling laws can predict the test loss under different language mixture ratios and can therefore be used to estimate the optimal ratios. However, the current approaches to multilingual scaling laws do not measure the \textit{cross-lingual transfer} effect, resulting in suboptimal mixture ratios. In this paper, we consider multilingual pretraining as a cooperative game in which each language acts as a player that jointly contributes to pretraining, gaining the resulting reduction in test loss as the payoff. Consequently, from the perspective of cooperative game theory, we quantify the cross-lingual transfer from each language by its contribution in the game, and propose a game-theoretic multilingual scaling law called \textit{ShapleyLaw}. Our experiments show that ShapleyLaw outperforms baseline methods in model performance prediction and language mixture optimization.

Qianying Liu, Katrina Qiyao Wang, Fei Cheng et al.

Large Language Models have garnered significant attention for their capabilities in multilingual natural language processing, while studies on risks associated with cross biases are limited to immediate context preferences. Cross-language disparities in reasoning-based recommendations remain largely unexplored, with a lack of even descriptive analysis. This study is the first to address this gap. We test LLM's applicability and capability in providing personalized advice across three key scenarios: university applications, travel, and relocation. We investigate multilingual bias in state-of-the-art LLMs by analyzing their responses to decision-making tasks across multiple languages. We quantify bias in model-generated scores and assess the impact of demographic factors and reasoning strategies (e.g., Chain-of-Thought prompting) on bias patterns. Our findings reveal that local language bias is prevalent across different tasks, with GPT-4 and Sonnet reducing bias for English-speaking countries compared to GPT-3.5 but failing to achieve robust multilingual alignment, highlighting broader implications for multilingual AI agents and applications such as education. \footnote{Code available at: https://github.com/yiyunya/assess_agentic_national_bias

Qianying Liu, Wenyu Guan, Sujian Li et al.

Automatically solving math word problems is a critical task in the field of natural language processing. Recent models have reached their performance bottleneck and require more high-quality data for training. We propose a novel data augmentation method that reverses the mathematical logic of math word problems to produce new high-quality math problems and introduce new knowledge points that can benefit learning the mathematical reasoning logic. We apply the augmented data on two SOTA math word problem solving models and compare our results with a strong data augmentation baseline. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach. We release our code and data at https://github.com/yiyunya/RODA.

Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu, Aysa Xuemo Fan et al.

Joint entity and relation extraction aims to extract relation triplets from plain text directly. Prior work leverages Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) models for triplet sequence generation. However, Seq2Seq enforces an unnecessary order on the unordered triplets and involves a large decoding length associated with error accumulation. These introduce exposure bias, which may cause the models overfit to the frequent label combination, thus deteriorating the generalization. We propose a novel Sequence-to-Unordered-Multi-Tree (Seq2UMTree) model to minimize the effects of exposure bias by limiting the decoding length to three within a triplet and removing the order among triplets. We evaluate our model on two datasets, DuIE and NYT, and systematically study how exposure bias alters the performance of Seq2Seq models. Experiments show that the state-of-the-art Seq2Seq model overfits to both datasets while Seq2UMTree shows significantly better generalization. Our code is available at https://github.com/WindChimeRan/OpenJERE .

Daojian Zeng, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu

Joint extraction of entities and relations has received significant attention due to its potential of providing higher performance for both tasks. Among existing methods, CopyRE is effective and novel, which uses a sequence-to-sequence framework and copy mechanism to directly generate the relation triplets. However, it suffers from two fatal problems. The model is extremely weak at differing the head and tail entity, resulting in inaccurate entity extraction. It also cannot predict multi-token entities (e.g. \textit{Steven Jobs}). To address these problems, we give a detailed analysis of the reasons behind the inaccurate entity extraction problem, and then propose a simple but extremely effective model structure to solve this problem. In addition, we propose a multi-task learning framework equipped with copy mechanism, called CopyMTL, to allow the model to predict multi-token entities. Experiments reveal the problems of CopyRE and show that our model achieves significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art method by 9% in NYT and 16% in WebNLG (F1 score). Our code is available at https://github.com/WindChimeRan/CopyMTL

Peitao Han, Fei Cheng, Lis K. Pereira et al.

The Arrow-of-Time (AoT) task, determining whether a video plays forward or backward by recognizing temporal irreversibility, is one humans solve with near-perfect accuracy, yet frontier Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) perform only modestly above chance. This gap raises a key question: do visual backbones fail to encode temporal information, or does information bottleneck lie elsewhere in the Video-LLM architecture? We address this question by isolating the vision encoder from the Video-LLM and tracing temporal information across the encoder, projector, and LLM. We find that video-centric encoders with explicit temporal modeling encode strong temporal signals, whereas frame-centric encoders do not. However, when video-centric representations are passed through a standard Video-LLM architecture, performance often collapses, revealing a bottleneck of temporal information flow. We identify projector design as a key factor: Q-Former disrupts temporal information, while a time-preserved MLP projection substantially improves the LLM's access to such information. Our layer-wise analysis further shows temporal representation dynamics across encoder layers. Guided by these findings, we build a Video-LLM with temporal-aware video-centric encoder, time-preserved projector, and AoT supervision, surpassing human performance on AoT$_{PPB}$ with 98.1\% accuracy, and improving broader temporal reasoning tasks by up to 6.0 points on VITATECS-Direction and 1.3 points on TVBench. Our results show that temporal reasoning in Video-LLMs requires both effective temporal encoding and reliable transfer of this information to the LLM.

Zengqing Wu, Run Peng, Shuyuan Zheng et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have increasingly been utilized in social simulations, where they are often guided by carefully crafted instructions to stably exhibit human-like behaviors during simulations. Nevertheless, we doubt the necessity of shaping agents' behaviors for accurate social simulations. Instead, this paper emphasizes the importance of spontaneous phenomena, wherein agents deeply engage in contexts and make adaptive decisions without explicit directions. We explored spontaneous cooperation across three competitive scenarios and successfully simulated the gradual emergence of cooperation, findings that align closely with human behavioral data. This approach not only aids the computational social science community in bridging the gap between simulations and real-world dynamics but also offers the AI community a novel method to assess LLMs' capability of deliberate reasoning.

Zhuo He, Yingdong Ru, Qianying Liu et al.

Recent advances in neural rendering have achieved impressive results on photorealistic shading and relighting, by using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) as a regression model to learn the rendering equation from a real-world dataset. Such methods show promise for photorealistically relighting real-world objects, which is difficult to classical rendering, as there is no easy-obtained material ground truth. However, significant challenges still remain the dense connections in MLPs result in a large number of parameters, which requires high computation resources, complicating the training, and reducing performance during rendering. Data driven approaches require large amounts of training data for generalization; unbalanced data might bias the model to ignore the unusual illumination conditions, e.g. dark scenes. This paper introduces pbnds+: a novel physics-based neural deferred shading pipeline utilizing convolution neural networks to decrease the parameters and improve the performance in shading and relighting tasks; Energy regularization is also proposed to restrict the model reflection during dark illumination. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms classical baselines, a state-of-the-art neural shading model, and a diffusion-based method.

Zizhou Zhang, Xinshi Li, Yu Cheng et al.

Credit risk management within supply chains has emerged as a critical research area due to its significant implications for operational stability and financial sustainability. The intricate interdependencies among supply chain participants mean that credit risks can propagate across networks, with impacts varying by industry. This study explores the application of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to enhance credit risk identification in supply chains. GANs enable the generation of synthetic credit risk scenarios, addressing challenges related to data scarcity and imbalanced datasets. By leveraging GAN-generated data, the model improves predictive accuracy while effectively capturing dynamic and temporal dependencies in supply chain data. The research focuses on three representative industries-manufacturing (steel), distribution (pharmaceuticals), and services (e-commerce) to assess industry-specific credit risk contagion. Experimental results demonstrate that the GAN-based model outperforms traditional methods, including logistic regression, decision trees, and neural networks, achieving superior accuracy, recall, and F1 scores. The findings underscore the potential of GANs in proactive risk management, offering robust tools for mitigating financial disruptions in supply chains. Future research could expand the model by incorporating external market factors and supplier relationships to further enhance predictive capabilities. Keywords- Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs); Supply Chain Risk; Credit Risk Identification; Machine Learning; Data Augmentation

Zhuohuan Hu, Richard Yu, Zizhou Zhang et al.

This paper leverages machine learning algorithms to forecast and analyze financial time series. The process begins with a denoising autoencoder to filter out random noise fluctuations from the main contract price data. Then, one-dimensional convolution reduces the dimensionality of the filtered data and extracts key information. The filtered and dimensionality-reduced price data is fed into a GANs network, and its output serve as input of a fully connected network. Through cross-validation, a model is trained to capture features that precede large price fluctuations. The model predicts the likelihood and direction of significant price changes in real-time price sequences, placing trades at moments of high prediction accuracy. Empirical results demonstrate that using autoencoders and convolution to filter and denoise financial data, combined with GANs, achieves a certain level of predictive performance, validating the capabilities of machine learning algorithms to discover underlying patterns in financial sequences. Keywords - CNN;GANs; Cryptocurrency; Prediction.

Athanasios Tragakis, Qianying Liu, Chaitanya Kaul et al.

We propose a novel transformer-style architecture called Global-Local Filter Network (GLFNet) for medical image segmentation and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance. We replace the self-attention mechanism with a combination of global-local filter blocks to optimize model efficiency. The global filters extract features from the whole feature map whereas the local filters are being adaptively created as 4x4 patches of the same feature map and add restricted scale information. In particular, the feature extraction takes place in the frequency domain rather than the commonly used spatial (image) domain to facilitate faster computations. The fusion of information from both spatial and frequency spaces creates an efficient model with regards to complexity, required data and performance. We test GLFNet on three benchmark datasets achieving state-of-the-art performance on all of them while being almost twice as efficient in terms of GFLOP operations.

Zizhou Zhang, Qinyan Shen, Zhuohuan Hu et al.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) are vital to the modern economy, yet their credit risk analysis often struggles with scarce data, especially for online lenders lacking direct credit records. This paper introduces a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based framework, leveraging SME interactions from transaction and social data to map spatial dependencies and predict loan default risks. Tests on real-world datasets from Discover and Ant Credit (23.4M nodes for supply chain analysis, 8.6M for default prediction) show the GNN surpasses traditional and other GNN baselines, with AUCs of 0.995 and 0.701 for supply chain mining and default prediction, respectively. It also helps regulators model supply chain disruption impacts on banks, accurately forecasting loan defaults from material shortages, and offers Federal Reserve stress testers key data for CCAR risk buffers. This approach provides a scalable, effective tool for assessing SME credit risk.

Yihua Zhu, Qianying Liu, Akiko Aizawa et al.

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions using structured knowledge from KBs. While LLM-only approaches offer generalization, they suffer from outdated knowledge, hallucinations, and lack of transparency. Chain-based KG-RAG methods address these issues by incorporating external KBs, but are limited to simple chain-structured questions due to the absence of planning and logical structuring. Inspired by semantic parsing methods, we propose PDRR: a four-stage framework consisting of Predict, Decompose, Retrieve, and Reason. Our method first predicts the question type and decomposes the question into structured triples. Then retrieves relevant information from KBs and guides the LLM as an agent to reason over and complete the decomposed triples. Experimental results demonstrate that PDRR consistently outperforms existing methods across various LLM backbones and achieves superior performance on both chain-structured and non-chain complex questions.

Qianying Liu, Xiao Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang et al.

We present ReMatch, a framework that leverages the generative strength of MLLMs for multimodal retrieval. Previous approaches treated an MLLM as a simple encoder, ignoring its generative nature, and under-utilising its compositional reasoning and world knowledge. We instead train the embedding MLLM end-to-end with a chat-style generative matching stage. The matching stage uses the same MLLM to autoregressively decide relevance from multi-view inputs, including both raw data and its own projected embeddings for each query and document. It provides instance-wise discrimination supervision that complements a standard contrastive loss, offering stronger gradients on hard negatives and preserving the compositional strengths of the original MLLM. To obtain semantically richer multimodal embeddings, we use multiple learnable tokens to augment each input, generating fine-grained contextual, mutually orthogonal embeddings with low inference cost. Leveraging our established high-performance baseline,we assemble the ideas mentioned above into a powerful training recipe and achieve a new state-of-the-art on the Massive Multimodal Embedding Benchmark (MMEB). Our experiments show particularly strong zero-shot generalization results on five datasets, highlighting the robustness and transferability of ReMatch.

Chengzhi Zhong, Fei Cheng, Qianying Liu et al.

Large language models exhibit strong multilingual capabilities despite limited exposure to non-English data. Prior studies show that English-centric large language models map multilingual content into English-aligned representations at intermediate layers and then project them back into target-language token spaces in the final layer. From this observation, we hypothesize that this cross-lingual transition is governed by a small and sparse set of dimensions, which occur at consistent indices across the intermediate to final layers. Building on this insight, we introduce a simple, training-free method to identify and manipulate these dimensions, requiring only as few as 50 sentences of either parallel or monolingual data. Experiments on a multilingual generation control task reveal the interpretability of these dimensions, demonstrating that the interventions in these dimensions can switch the output language while preserving semantic content, and that it surpasses the performance of prior neuron-based approaches at a substantially lower cost.

Ha-Thanh Nguyen, Chaoran Liu, Qianying Liu et al.

We present BIS Reasoning 1.0, the first large-scale Japanese dataset of syllogistic reasoning problems explicitly designed to evaluate belief-inconsistent reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Unlike prior datasets such as NeuBAROCO and JFLD, which focus on general or belief-aligned reasoning, BIS Reasoning 1.0 introduces logically valid yet belief-inconsistent syllogisms to uncover reasoning biases in LLMs trained on human-aligned corpora. We benchmark state-of-the-art models - including GPT models, Claude models, and leading Japanese LLMs - revealing significant variance in performance, with GPT-4o achieving 79.54% accuracy. Our analysis identifies critical weaknesses in current LLMs when handling logically valid but belief-conflicting inputs. These findings have important implications for deploying LLMs in high-stakes domains such as law, healthcare, and scientific literature, where truth must override intuitive belief to ensure integrity and safety.

Dongsheng Yang, Qianying Liu, Wataru Sato et al.

Automatic robotic facial expression generation is crucial for human-robot interaction, as handcrafted methods based on fixed joint configurations often yield rigid and unnatural behaviors. Although recent automated techniques reduce the need for manual tuning, they tend to fall short by not adequately bridging the gap between human preferences and model predictions-resulting in a deficiency of nuanced and realistic expressions due to limited degrees of freedom and insufficient perceptual integration. In this work, we propose a novel learning-to-rank framework that leverages human feedback to address this discrepancy and enhanced the expressiveness of robotic faces. Specifically, we conduct pairwise comparison annotations to collect human preference data and develop the Human Affective Pairwise Impressions (HAPI) model, a Siamese RankNet-based approach that refines expression evaluation. Results obtained via Bayesian Optimization and online expression survey on a 35-DOF android platform demonstrate that our approach produces significantly more realistic and socially resonant expressions of Anger, Happiness, and Surprise than those generated by baseline and expert-designed methods. This confirms that our framework effectively bridges the gap between human preferences and model predictions while robustly aligning robotic expression generation with human affective responses.

Zhengdong Yang, Qianying Liu, Sheng Li et al.

We present a novel approach centered on the decoding stage of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that enhances multilingual performance, especially for low-resource languages. It utilizes a cross-lingual embedding clustering method to construct a hierarchical Softmax (H-Softmax) decoder, which enables similar tokens across different languages to share similar decoder representations. It addresses the limitations of the previous Huffman-based H-Softmax method, which relied on shallow features in token similarity assessments. Through experiments on a downsampled dataset of 15 languages, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving low-resource multilingual ASR accuracy.

Zhuoyuan Mao, Raj Dabre, Qianying Liu et al.

This paper studies the impact of layer normalization (LayerNorm) on zero-shot translation (ZST). Recent efforts for ZST often utilize the Transformer architecture as the backbone, with LayerNorm at the input of layers (PreNorm) set as the default. However, Xu et al. (2019) has revealed that PreNorm carries the risk of overfitting the training data. Based on this, we hypothesize that PreNorm may overfit supervised directions and thus have low generalizability for ZST. Through experiments on OPUS, IWSLT, and Europarl datasets for 54 ZST directions, we demonstrate that the original Transformer setting of LayerNorm after residual connections (PostNorm) consistently outperforms PreNorm by up to 12.3 BLEU points. We then study the performance disparities by analyzing the differences in off-target rates and structural variations between PreNorm and PostNorm. This study highlights the need for careful consideration of the LayerNorm setting for ZST.

Qianying Liu, Dongsheng Yang, Wenjie Zhong et al.

Numerical reasoning over table-and-text hybrid passages, such as financial reports, poses significant challenges and has numerous potential applications. Noise and irrelevant variables in the model input have been a hindrance to its performance. Additionally, coarse-grained supervision of the whole solution program has impeded the model's ability to learn the underlying numerical reasoning process. In this paper, we propose three pretraining tasks that operate at both the whole program and sub-program level: Variable Integrity Ranking, which guides the model to focus on useful variables; Variable Operator Prediction, which decomposes the supervision into fine-grained single operator prediction; and Variable Keyphrase Masking, which encourages the model to identify key evidence that sub-programs are derived from. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods, surpassing transformer-based model baselines.

Zhen Wan, Fei Cheng, Zhuoyuan Mao et al.

In spite of the potential for ground-breaking achievements offered by large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3), they still lag significantly behind fully-supervised baselines (e.g., fine-tuned BERT) in relation extraction (RE). This is due to the two major shortcomings of LLMs in RE: (1) low relevance regarding entity and relation in retrieved demonstrations for in-context learning; and (2) the strong inclination to wrongly classify NULL examples into other pre-defined labels. In this paper, we propose GPT-RE to bridge the gap between LLMs and fully-supervised baselines. GPT-RE successfully addresses the aforementioned issues by (1) incorporating task-specific entity representations in demonstration retrieval; and (2) enriching the demonstrations with gold label-induced reasoning logic. We evaluate GPT-RE on four widely-used RE datasets, and observe that GPT-RE achieves improvements over not only existing GPT-3 baselines, but also fully-supervised baselines. Specifically, GPT-RE achieves SOTA performances on the Semeval and SciERC datasets, and competitive performances on the TACRED and ACE05 datasets.

Qianying Liu, Fei Cheng, Sadao Kurohashi

Meta learning with auxiliary languages has demonstrated promising improvements for cross-lingual natural language processing. However, previous studies sample the meta-training and meta-testing data from the same language, which limits the ability of the model for cross-lingual transfer. In this paper, we propose XLA-MAML, which performs direct cross-lingual adaption in the meta-learning stage. We conduct zero-shot and few-shot experiments on Natural Language Inference and Question Answering. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method across different languages, tasks, and pretrained models. We also give analysis on various cross-lingual specific settings for meta-learning including sampling strategy and parallelism.

Jun Wang, Qianying Liu, Haotian Xie et al.

In recent years, advances in the development of whole-slide images have laid a foundation for the utilization of digital images in pathology. With the assistance of computer images analysis that automatically identifies tissue or cell types, they have greatly improved the histopathologic interpretation and diagnosis accuracy. In this paper, the Convolutional Neutral Network (CNN) has been adapted to predict and classify lymph node metastasis in breast cancer. Unlike traditional image cropping methods that are only suitable for large resolution images, we propose a novel data augmentation method named Random Center Cropping (RCC) to facilitate small resolution images. RCC enriches the datasets while retaining the image resolution and the center area of images. In addition, we reduce the downsampling scale of the network to further facilitate small resolution images better. Moreover, Attention and Feature Fusion (FF) mechanisms are employed to improve the semantic information of images. Experiments demonstrate that our methods boost performances of basic CNN architectures. And the best-performed method achieves an accuracy of 97.96% and an AUC of 99.68% on RPCam datasets, respectively.

Qianying Liu, Sicong Jiang, Yizhong Wang et al.

In this paper, we introduce LiveQA, a new question answering dataset constructed from play-by-play live broadcast. It contains 117k multiple-choice questions written by human commentators for over 1,670 NBA games, which are collected from the Chinese Hupu (https://nba.hupu.com/games) website. Derived from the characteristics of sports games, LiveQA can potentially test the reasoning ability across timeline-based live broadcasts, which is challenging compared to the existing datasets. In LiveQA, the questions require understanding the timeline, tracking events or doing mathematical computations. Our preliminary experiments show that the dataset introduces a challenging problem for question answering models, and a strong baseline model only achieves the accuracy of 53.1\% and cannot beat the dominant option rule. We release the code and data of this paper for future research.

Akiko Aizawa, Frederic Bergeron, Junjie Chen et al.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 has made the public pay close attention to related news, covering various domains, such as sanitation, treatment, and effects on education. Meanwhile, the COVID-19 condition is very different among the countries (e.g., policies and development of the epidemic), and thus citizens would be interested in news in foreign countries. We build a system for worldwide COVID-19 information aggregation containing reliable articles from 10 regions in 7 languages sorted by topics. Our reliable COVID-19 related website dataset collected through crowdsourcing ensures the quality of the articles. A neural machine translation module translates articles in other languages into Japanese and English. A BERT-based topic-classifier trained on our article-topic pair dataset helps users find their interested information efficiently by putting articles into different categories.