Qiong Wu

Jiang Zhang, Qiong Wu, Yiming Xu et al.

Toxic content detection is crucial for online services to remove inappropriate content that violates community standards. To automate the detection process, prior works have proposed varieties of machine learning (ML) approaches to train Language Models (LMs) for toxic content detection. However, both their accuracy and transferability across datasets are limited. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in toxic content detection due to their superior zero-shot and few-shot in-context learning ability as well as broad transferability on ML tasks. However, efficiently designing prompts for LLMs remains challenging. Moreover, the high run-time cost of LLMs may hinder their deployments in production. To address these challenges, in this work, we propose BD-LLM, a novel and efficient approach to Bootstrapping and Distilling LLMs for toxic content detection. Specifically, we design a novel prompting method named Decision-Tree-of-Thought (DToT) to bootstrap LLMs' detection performance and extract high-quality rationales. DToT can automatically select more fine-grained context to re-prompt LLMs when their responses lack confidence. Additionally, we use the rationales extracted via DToT to fine-tune student LMs. Our experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that DToT can improve the accuracy of LLMs by up to 4.6%. Furthermore, student LMs fine-tuned with rationales extracted via DToT outperform baselines on all datasets with up to 16.9\% accuracy improvement, while being more than 60x smaller than conventional LLMs. Finally, we observe that student LMs fine-tuned with rationales exhibit better cross-dataset transferability.

Qiong Wu, Weihao Ye, Yiyi Zhou et al.

In this paper, we propose a novel parameter and computation efficient tuning method for Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs), termed Efficient Attention Skipping (EAS). Concretely, we first reveal that multi-head attentions (MHAs), the main computational overhead of MLLMs, are often redundant to downstream tasks. Based on this observation, EAS evaluates the attention redundancy and skips the less important MHAs to speed up inference. Besides, we also propose a novel propagation-of-information adapter (PIA) to serve the attention skipping of EAS and keep parameter efficiency, which can be further re-parameterized into feed-forward networks (FFNs) for zero-extra latency. To validate EAS, we apply it to a recently proposed MLLM called LaVIN and a classic VL pre-trained model called METER, and conduct extensive experiments on a set of benchmarks. The experiments show that EAS not only retains high performance and parameter efficiency, but also greatly speeds up inference speed. For instance, LaVIN-EAS can obtain 89.98\% accuracy on ScineceQA while speeding up inference by 2.2 times to LaVIN

Viet Duong, Qiong Wu, Zhengyi Zhou et al.

As an emerging interpretable technique, Generalized Additive Models (GAMs) adopt neural networks to individually learn non-linear functions for each feature, which are then combined through a linear model for final predictions. Although GAMs can explain deep neural networks (DNNs) at the feature level, they require large numbers of model parameters and are prone to overfitting, making them hard to train and scale. Additionally, in real-world datasets with many features, the interpretability of feature-based explanations diminishes for humans. To tackle these issues, recent research has shifted towards concept-based interpretable methods. These approaches try to integrate concept learning as an intermediate step before making predictions, explaining the predictions in terms of human-understandable concepts. However, these methods require domain experts to extensively label concepts with relevant names and their ground-truth values. In response, we propose CAT, a novel interpretable Concept-bAsed Taylor additive model to simply this process. CAT does not have to require domain experts to annotate concepts and their ground-truth values. Instead, it only requires users to simply categorize input features into broad groups, which can be easily accomplished through a quick metadata review. Specifically, CAT first embeds each group of input features into one-dimensional high-level concept representation, and then feeds the concept representations into a new white-box Taylor Neural Network (TaylorNet). The TaylorNet aims to learn the non-linear relationship between the inputs and outputs using polynomials. Evaluation results across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that CAT can outperform or compete with the baselines while reducing the need of extensive model parameters. Importantly, it can explain model predictions through high-level concepts that human can understand.

Qiong Wu, Adam Hare, Sirui Wang et al.

Existing topic modeling and text segmentation methodologies generally require large datasets for training, limiting their capabilities when only small collections of text are available. In this work, we reexamine the inter-related problems of "topic identification" and "text segmentation" for sparse document learning, when there is a single new text of interest. In developing a methodology to handle single documents, we face two major challenges. First is sparse information: with access to only one document, we cannot train traditional topic models or deep learning algorithms. Second is significant noise: a considerable portion of words in any single document will produce only noise and not help discern topics or segments. To tackle these issues, we design an unsupervised, computationally efficient methodology called BATS: Biclustering Approach to Topic modeling and Segmentation. BATS leverages three key ideas to simultaneously identify topics and segment text: (i) a new mechanism that uses word order information to reduce sample complexity, (ii) a statistically sound graph-based biclustering technique that identifies latent structures of words and sentences, and (iii) a collection of effective heuristics that remove noise words and award important words to further improve performance. Experiments on four datasets show that our approach outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines when considering topic coherence, topic diversity, segmentation, and runtime comparison metrics.

Yong Liu, Yingtai Xiao, Qiong Wu et al.

Interactive recommender systems that enable the interactions between users and the recommender system have attracted increasing research attentions. Previous methods mainly focus on optimizing recommendation accuracy. However, they usually ignore the diversity of the recommendation results, thus usually results in unsatisfying user experiences. In this paper, we propose a novel diversified recommendation model, named Diversified Contextual Combinatorial Bandit (DC$^2$B), for interactive recommendation with users' implicit feedback. Specifically, DC$^2$B employs determinantal point process in the recommendation procedure to promote diversity of the recommendation results. To learn the model parameters, a Thompson sampling-type algorithm based on variational Bayesian inference is proposed. In addition, theoretical regret analysis is also provided to guarantee the performance of DC$^2$B. Extensive experiments on real datasets are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Qiong Wu, Felix Ming Fai Wong, Zhenming Liu et al.

We study the low rank regression problem $\my = M\mx + ε$, where $\mx$ and $\my$ are $d_1$ and $d_2$ dimensional vectors respectively. We consider the extreme high-dimensional setting where the number of observations $n$ is less than $d_1 + d_2$. Existing algorithms are designed for settings where $n$ is typically as large as $\Rank(M)(d_1+d_2)$. This work provides an efficient algorithm which only involves two SVD, and establishes statistical guarantees on its performance. The algorithm decouples the problem by first estimating the precision matrix of the features, and then solving the matrix denoising problem. To complement the upper bound, we introduce new techniques for establishing lower bounds on the performance of any algorithm for this problem. Our preliminary experiments confirm that our algorithm often out-performs existing baselines, and is always at least competitive.

Qiong Wu, Yong Liu, Chunyan Miao et al.

With the rapid development of recommender systems, accuracy is no longer the only golden criterion for evaluating whether the recommendation results are satisfying or not. In recent years, diversity has gained tremendous attention in recommender systems research, which has been recognized to be an important factor for improving user satisfaction. On the one hand, diversified recommendation helps increase the chance of answering ephemeral user needs. On the other hand, diversifying recommendation results can help the business improve product visibility and explore potential user interests. In this paper, we are going to review the recent advances in diversified recommendation. Specifically, we first review the various definitions of diversity and generate a taxonomy to shed light on how diversity have been modeled or measured in recommender systems. After that, we summarize the major optimization approaches to diversified recommendation from a taxonomic view. Last but not the least, we project into the future and point out trending research directions on this topic.

Ao Liu, Qiong Wu, Zhenming Liu et al.

This paper studies a stylized, yet natural, learning-to-rank problem and points out the critical incorrectness of a widely used nearest neighbor algorithm. We consider a model with $n$ agents (users) $\{x_i\}_{i \in [n]}$ and $m$ alternatives (items) $\{y_j\}_{j \in [m]}$, each of which is associated with a latent feature vector. Agents rank items nondeterministically according to the Plackett-Luce model, where the higher the utility of an item to the agent, the more likely this item will be ranked high by the agent. Our goal is to find neighbors of an arbitrary agent or alternative in the latent space. We first show that the Kendall-tau distance based kNN produces incorrect results in our model. Next, we fix the problem by introducing a new algorithm with features constructed from "global information" of the data matrix. Our approach is in sharp contrast to most existing feature engineering methods. Finally, we design another new algorithm identifying similar alternatives. The construction of alternative features can be done using "local information," highlighting the algorithmic difference between finding similar agents and similar alternatives.

Qiong Wu

This book discusses computational curiosity, from the psychology of curiosity to the computational models of curiosity, and then showcases several interesting applications of computational curiosity. A brief overview of the book is given as follows. Chapter 1 discusses the underpinnings of curiosity in human beings, including the major categories of curiosity, curiosity-related emotions and behaviors, and the benefits of curiosity. Chapter 2 reviews the arousal theories of curiosity in psychology and summarizes a general two-step process model for computational curiosity. Base on the perspective of the two-step process model, Chapter 3 reviews and analyzes some of the traditional computational models of curiosity. Chapter 4 introduces a novel generic computational model of curiosity, which is developed based on the arousal theories of curiosity. After the discussion of computational models of curiosity, we outline the important applications where computational curiosity may bring significant impacts in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 discusses the application of the generic computational model of curiosity in a machine learning framework. Chapter 7 discusses the application of the generic computational model of curiosity in a recommender system. In Chapter 8 and Chapter 9, the generic computational model of curiosity is studied in two types of pedagogical agents. In Chapter 8, a curious peer learner is studied. It is a non-player character that aims to provide a believable virtual learning environment for users. In Chapter 9, a curious learning companion is studied. It aims to enhance users' learning experience through providing meaningful interactions with them. Chapter 10 discusses open questions in the research field of computation curiosity.