Feiliang Ren

Yongkang Liu, Zijing Wang, Mengjie Zhao et al.

This work presents \textsc{ChunkFT}, a memory-efficient fine-tuning framework that reformulates full-parameter fine-tuning around a dynamically activated working set. \textsc{ChunkFT} enables gradient computation for arbitrary sub-tensors without modifying the network architecture, providing an algorithmic foundation for optimizing arbitrary sub-networks while avoiding standard dense gradient computation. We provide a theoretical convergence analysis of \textsc{ChunkFT} in the deterministic setting. Empirically, we apply \textsc{ChunkFT} to fine-tune Llama 3-8B and Llama 3-70B using a single RTX 4090-24GB GPU and 2$\times$ H800-80GB GPUs, respectively. Full-parameter fine-tuning of a 7B model with a 1K input length requires only 13.72GB of GPU memory. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of \textsc{ChunkFT} in memory usage, running time, and optimization quality. Moreover, downstream evaluations on language understanding, mathematical reasoning, and MT-Bench show that \textsc{ChunkFT} consistently outperforms existing memory-efficient baselines. Notably, \textsc{ChunkFT} achieves performance comparable to, and in some cases exceeding, full-parameter fine-tuning. Our repository is on https://github.com/misonsky/chunk.

Feiliang Ren, Yongkang Liu, Bochao Li et al.

Although existing machine reading comprehension models are making rapid progress on many datasets, they are far from robust. In this paper, we propose an understanding-oriented machine reading comprehension model to address three kinds of robustness issues, which are over sensitivity, over stability and generalization. Specifically, we first use a natural language inference module to help the model understand the accurate semantic meanings of input questions so as to address the issues of over sensitivity and over stability. Then in the machine reading comprehension module, we propose a memory-guided multi-head attention method that can further well understand the semantic meanings of input questions and passages. Third, we propose a multilanguage learning mechanism to address the issue of generalization. Finally, these modules are integrated with a multi-task learning based method. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets that are designed to measure models robustness, including DuReader (robust) and two SQuAD-related datasets. Extensive experiments show that our model can well address the mentioned three kinds of robustness issues. And it achieves much better results than the compared state-of-the-art models on all these datasets under different evaluation metrics, even under some extreme and unfair evaluations. The source code of our work is available at: https://github.com/neukg/RobustMRC.

Yongkang Liu, Xing Li, Mengjie Zhao et al.

As the number of model parameters increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the go-to choice for tailoring pre-trained large language models. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) uses a low-rank update method to simulate full parameter fine-tuning, which is widely used to reduce resource requirements. However, decreasing the rank encounters challenges with limited representational capacity when compared to full parameter fine-tuning. We present \textbf{SMoA}, a high-rank \textbf{S}tructured \textbf{MO}dulation \textbf{A}dapter that uses fewer trainable parameters while maintaining a higher rank, thereby improving the model's representational capacity and offering improved performance potential. The core idea is to freeze the original pretrained weights and selectively amplify or suppress important features of the original weights across multiple subspaces. The subspace mechanism provides an efficient way to increase the capacity and complexity of a model. We conduct both theoretical analyses and empirical studies on various tasks. Experiment results show that SMoA outperforms LoRA and its variants on 10 tasks, with extensive ablation studies validating its effectiveness.

Yongkang Liu, Xing Li, Mengjie Zhao et al.

As the number of model parameters increases, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has become the go-to choice for tailoring pre-trained large language models. Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) uses a low-rank update method to simulate full parameter fine-tuning, which is widely used to reduce resource requirements. However, decreasing the rank encounters challenges with limited representational capacity. Theory suggests that LoRA fine-tuning with rank r converges toward the top r singular values of the pre-trained weight matrix. As the rank increases, more principal singular directions are preserved, which generally improves the model's performance. However, a larger rank also introduces more trainable parameters, leading to higher computational cost. To overcome this dilemma, we propose SMoA, a \textbf{S}pectrum \textbf{Mo}dulation \textbf{A}dapter that enlarges the accessible family of spectrum-aware updates under a smaller parameter budget. SMoA partitions the layer into multiple aligned spectral blocks and applies one in-block Hadamard-modulated low-rank branch to each diagonal block, yielding broader coverage of pretrained spectral directions. We provide theoretical analysis and empirical results on multiple tasks. In our experiments, SMoA improves average performance in the current lower-budget setting over LoRA and competitive LoRA-style baselines.

Jiaqi Wang, Yuying Chang, Zhong Li et al.

Large language models have exhibited robust performance across diverse natural language processing tasks. This report introduces TechGPT-2.0, a project designed to enhance the capabilities of large language models specifically in knowledge graph construction tasks, including named entity recognition (NER) and relationship triple extraction (RTE) tasks in NLP applications. Additionally, it serves as a LLM accessible for research within the Chinese open-source model community. We offer two 7B large language model weights and a QLoRA weight specialized for processing lengthy texts.Notably, TechGPT-2.0 is trained on Huawei's Ascend server. Inheriting all functionalities from TechGPT-1.0, it exhibits robust text processing capabilities, particularly in the domains of medicine and law. Furthermore, we introduce new capabilities to the model, enabling it to process texts in various domains such as geographical areas, transportation, organizations, literary works, biology, natural sciences, astronomical objects, and architecture. These enhancements also fortified the model's adeptness in handling hallucinations, unanswerable queries, and lengthy texts. This report provides a comprehensive and detailed introduction to the full fine-tuning process on Huawei's Ascend servers, encompassing experiences in Ascend server debugging, instruction fine-tuning data processing, and model training. Our code is available at https://github.com/neukg/TechGPT-2.0

Feiliang Ren, Longhui Zhang, Xiaofeng Zhao et al.

Tagging based relational triple extraction methods are attracting growing research attention recently. However, most of these methods take a unidirectional extraction framework that first extracts all subjects and then extracts objects and relations simultaneously based on the subjects extracted. This framework has an obvious deficiency that it is too sensitive to the extraction results of subjects. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a bidirectional extraction framework based method that extracts triples based on the entity pairs extracted from two complementary directions. Concretely, we first extract all possible subject-object pairs from two paralleled directions. These two extraction directions are connected by a shared encoder component, thus the extraction features from one direction can flow to another direction and vice versa. By this way, the extractions of two directions can boost and complement each other. Next, we assign all possible relations for each entity pair by a biaffine model. During training, we observe that the share structure will lead to a convergence rate inconsistency issue which is harmful to performance. So we propose a share-aware learning mechanism to address it. We evaluate the proposed model on multiple benchmark datasets. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed model is very effective and it achieves state-of-the-art results on all of these datasets. Moreover, experiments show that both the proposed bidirectional extraction framework and the share-aware learning mechanism have good adaptability and can be used to improve the performance of other tagging based methods. The source code of our work is available at: https://github.com/neukg/BiRTE.

Feiliang Ren, Longhui Zhang, Shujuan Yin et al.

Table filling based relational triple extraction methods are attracting growing research interests due to their promising performance and their abilities on extracting triples from complex sentences. However, this kind of methods are far from their full potential because most of them only focus on using local features but ignore the global associations of relations and of token pairs, which increases the possibility of overlooking some important information during triple extraction. To overcome this deficiency, we propose a global feature-oriented triple extraction model that makes full use of the mentioned two kinds of global associations. Specifically, we first generate a table feature for each relation. Then two kinds of global associations are mined from the generated table features. Next, the mined global associations are integrated into the table feature of each relation. This "generate-mine-integrate" process is performed multiple times so that the table feature of each relation is refined step by step. Finally, each relation's table is filled based on its refined table feature, and all triples linked to this relation are extracted based on its filled table. We evaluate the proposed model on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results show our model is effective and it achieves state-of-the-art results on all of these datasets. The source code of our work is available at: https://github.com/neukg/GRTE.

Feiliang Ren, Longhui Zhang, Shujuan Yin et al.

Tagging based methods are one of the mainstream methods in relational triple extraction. However, most of them suffer from the class imbalance issue greatly. Here we propose a novel tagging based model that addresses this issue from following two aspects. First, at the model level, we propose a three-step extraction framework that can reduce the total number of samples greatly, which implicitly decreases the severity of the mentioned issue. Second, at the intra-model level, we propose a confidence threshold based cross entropy loss that can directly neglect some samples in the major classes. We evaluate the proposed model on NYT and WebNLG. Extensive experiments show that it can address the mentioned issue effectively and achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets. The source code of our model is available at: https://github.com/neukg/ConCasRTE.

Yaduo Liu, Longhui Zhang, Shujuan Yin et al.

The multi-format information extraction task in the 2021 Language and Intelligence Challenge is designed to comprehensively evaluate information extraction from different dimensions. It consists of an multiple slots relation extraction subtask and two event extraction subtasks that extract events from both sentence-level and document-level. Here we describe our system for this multi-format information extraction competition task. Specifically, for the relation extraction subtask, we convert it to a traditional triple extraction task and design a voting based method that makes full use of existing models. For the sentence-level event extraction subtask, we convert it to a NER task and use a pointer labeling based method for extraction. Furthermore, considering the annotated trigger information may be helpful for event extraction, we design an auxiliary trigger recognition model and use the multi-task learning mechanism to integrate the trigger features into the event extraction model. For the document-level event extraction subtask, we design an Encoder-Decoder based method and propose a Transformer-alike decoder. Finally,our system ranks No.4 on the test set leader-board of this multi-format information extraction task, and its F1 scores for the subtasks of relation extraction, event extractions of sentence-level and document-level are 79.887%, 85.179%, and 70.828% respectively. The codes of our model are available at {https://github.com/neukg/MultiIE}.

Feiliang Ren, Juchen Li, Huihui Zhang et al.

Knowledge graph embedding is an important task and it will benefit lots of downstream applications. Currently, deep neural networks based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, most of these existing methods are very complex and need much time for training and inference. To address this issue, we propose a simple but effective atrous convolution based knowledge graph embedding method. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method has following main characteristics. First, it effectively increases feature interactions by using atrous convolutions. Second, to address the original information forgotten issue and vanishing/exploding gradient issue, it uses the residual learning method. Third, it has simpler structure but much higher parameter efficiency. We evaluate our method on six benchmark datasets with different evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments show that our model is very effective. On these diverse datasets, it achieves better results than the compared state-of-the-art methods on most of evaluation metrics. The source codes of our model could be found at https://github.com/neukg/AcrE.

Ning An, Lei Hei, Yong Jiang et al.

Relational triple extraction is crucial work for the automatic construction of knowledge graphs. Existing methods only construct shallow representations from a token or token pair-level. However, previous works ignore local spatial dependencies of relational triples, resulting in a weakness of entity pair boundary detection. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel Region-based Table Filling method (RTF). We devise a novel region-based tagging scheme and bi-directional decoding strategy, which regard each relational triple as a region on the relation-specific table, and identifies triples by determining two endpoints of each region. We also introduce convolution to construct region-level table representations from a spatial perspective which makes triples easier to be captured. In addition, we share partial tagging scores among different relations to improve learning efficiency of relation classifier. Experimental results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art with better generalization capability on three variants of two widely used benchmark datasets.

Yifei Lu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li et al.

Tool invocation significantly enhances the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet challenges persist, particularly in complex task scenarios. Current methods, such as instruction-enhanced reasoning and supervised fine-tuning, often result in unnecessarily long reasoning paths and face difficulties in verifying the correctness of intermediate steps. In this paper, we propose CodeTool, a novel framework for stepwise code generation that improves LLM tool invocation by leveraging the concise and easily verifiable nature of code. CodeTool incorporates two distinct process rewards: the On-the-spot Reward, which provides immediate feedback on the accuracy of each tool invocation, and the Latent Reward, which assesses the contribution of each step toward overall task completion. By maximizing the cumulative reward of the On-the-spot and Latend Rewards at each step, LLMs are guided to follow efficient and accurate reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on StableToolBench and RestBench-TMDB demonstrate the superiority of CodeTool over existing approaches.

Jiaqi Wang, Binquan Ji, Haibo Luo et al.

Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models can be dynamically optimized using Test-Time Scaling (TTS) to mitigate Overthinking. Methods such as Coconut, SoftCoT and its variant are effective in continuous latent space inference, the core bottleneck still lies in the efficient generation and utilization of high-quality Latent Thought. Drawing from the theory of SoftCoT++ that a larger variance in the generated Latent Thought distribution more closely approximates the golden truth distribution, we propose a Latent Thought-Augmented Training Framework--LTA-Thinker, which improves distributional variance and enhances reasoning performance from two perspectives. First, LTA-Thinker constructs a Latent Thought generation architecture based on a learnable prior. This architecture aims to increase the variance distribution of generated Latent Thought Vectors in order to simplify the overall structure and raise the performance ceiling. Second, LTA-Thinker introduces a distribution-based directional optimization paradigm that jointly constrains both distribution locality and distribution scale. This mechanism improves information efficiency and computational cost through a multi-objective co-training strategy, which combines standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) loss with two novel losses: Semantic Alignment Loss, which utilizes KL divergence to ensure that the Latent Thought is highly relevant to the semantics of the question; Reasoning Focus Loss, which utilizes a contrastive learning mechanism to guide the model to focus on the most critical reasoning steps. Experiments show that LTA-thinker achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance among various baselines and demonstrates a higher performance ceiling and better scaling effects.

Lei Hei, Tingjing Liao, Yingxin Pei et al.

Relation extraction (RE) aims to identify semantic relations between entities in unstructured text. Although recent work extends traditional RE to multimodal scenarios, most approaches still adopt classification-based paradigms with fused multimodal features, representing relations as discrete labels. This paradigm has two significant limitations: (1) it overlooks structural constraints like entity types and positional cues, and (2) it lacks semantic expressiveness for fine-grained relation understanding. We propose \underline{R}etrieval \underline{O}ver \underline{C}lassification (ROC), a novel framework that reformulates multimodal RE as a retrieval task driven by relation semantics. ROC integrates entity type and positional information through a multimodal encoder, expands relation labels into natural language descriptions using a large language model, and aligns entity-relation pairs via semantic similarity-based contrastive learning. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets MNRE and MORE and exhibits stronger robustness and interpretability.

Binquan Ji, Jiaqi Wang, Ruiting Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable prowess in text generation, yet producing long-form, factual documents grounded in extensive external knowledge bases remains a significant challenge. Existing "top-down" methods, which first generate a hypothesis or outline and then retrieve evidence, often suffer from a disconnect between the model's plan and the available knowledge, leading to content fragmentation and factual inaccuracies. To address these limitations, we propose a novel "bottom-up," data-driven framework that inverts the conventional generation pipeline. Our approach is predicated on a "Retrieval-First for Knowledge, Clustering for Structure" strategy, which first establishes the "knowledge boundaries" of the source corpus before any generative planning occurs. Specifically, we perform exhaustive iterative retrieval from the knowledge base and then employ an unsupervised clustering algorithm to organize the retrieved documents into distinct "knowledge clusters." These clusters form an objective, data-driven foundation that directly guides the subsequent generation of a hierarchical outline and the final document content. This bottom-up process ensures that the generated text is strictly constrained by and fully traceable to the source material, proactively adapting to the finite scope of the knowledge base and fundamentally mitigating the risk of hallucination. Experimental results on both 14B and 32B parameter models demonstrate that our method achieves performance comparable to or exceeding state-of-the-art baselines, and is expected to demonstrate unique advantages in knowledge-constrained scenarios that demand high fidelity and structural coherence. Our work presents an effective paradigm for generating reliable, structured, long-form documents, paving the way for more robust LLM applications in high-stakes, knowledge-intensive domains.

Cheng Liu, Yifei Lu, Fanghua Ye et al.

Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) have emerged as a significant application direction for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing approaches typically rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to enable models to imitate character behaviors in specific scenarios, but often neglect the underlying \emph{cognitive} mechanisms driving these behaviors. Inspired by cognitive psychology, we introduce \textbf{CogDual}, a novel RPLA adopting a \textit{cognize-then-respond } reasoning paradigm. By jointly modeling external situational awareness and internal self-awareness, CogDual generates responses with improved character consistency and contextual alignment. To further optimize the performance, we employ reinforcement learning with two general-purpose reward schemes designed for open-domain text generation. Extensive experiments on the CoSER benchmark, as well as Cross-MR and LifeChoice, demonstrate that CogDual consistently outperforms existing baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks.

Binquan Ji, Haibo Luo, Yifei Lu et al.

Knowledge-intensive multi-hop question answering (QA) tasks, which require integrating evidence from multiple sources to address complex queries, often necessitate multiple rounds of retrieval and iterative generation by large language models (LLMs). However, incorporating many documents and extended contexts poses challenges -such as hallucinations and semantic drift-for lightweight LLMs with fewer parameters. This work proposes a novel framework called DEC (Dynamic Enhancement Chain). DEC first decomposes complex questions into logically coherent subquestions to form a hallucination-free reasoning chain. It then iteratively refines these subquestions through context-aware rewriting to generate effective query formulations. For retrieval, we introduce a lightweight discriminative keyword extraction module that leverages extracted keywords to achieve targeted, precise document recall with relatively low computational overhead. Extensive experiments on three multi-hop QA datasets demonstrate that DEC performs on par with or surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks while significantly reducing token consumption. Notably, our approach attains state-of-the-art results on models with 8B parameters, showcasing its effectiveness in various scenarios, particularly in resource-constrained environments.

Feiliang Ren, Yongkang Liu, Bochao Li et al.

Most existing multi-document machine reading comprehension models mainly focus on understanding the interactions between the input question and documents, but ignore following two kinds of understandings. First, to understand the semantic meaning of words in the input question and documents from the perspective of each other. Second, to understand the supporting cues for a correct answer from the perspective of intra-document and inter-documents. Ignoring these two kinds of important understandings would make the models oversee some important information that may be helpful for inding correct answers. To overcome this deiciency, we propose a deep understanding based model for multi-document machine reading comprehension. It has three cascaded deep understanding modules which are designed to understand the accurate semantic meaning of words, the interactions between the input question and documents, and the supporting cues for the correct answer. We evaluate our model on two large scale benchmark datasets, namely TriviaQA Web and DuReader. Extensive experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results on both datasets.

Shilei Liu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Bochao Li et al.

Neural conversation models have shown great potentials towards generating fluent and informative responses by introducing external background knowledge. Nevertheless, it is laborious to construct such knowledge-grounded dialogues, and existing models usually perform poorly when transfer to new domains with limited training samples. Therefore, building a knowledge-grounded dialogue system under the low-resource setting is a still crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage learning framework based on weakly supervised learning which benefits from large scale ungrounded dialogues and unstructured knowledge base. To better cooperate with this framework, we devise a variant of Transformer with decoupled decoder which facilitates the disentangled learning of response generation and knowledge incorporation. Evaluation results on two benchmarks indicate that our approach can outperform other state-of-the-art methods with less training data, and even in zero-resource scenario, our approach still performs well.

Shilei Liu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Bochao Li et al.

Knowledge-grounded dialogue is a task of generating a fluent and informative response based on both conversation context and a collection of external knowledge, in which knowledge selection plays an important role and attracts more and more research interest. However, most existing models either select only one knowledge or use all knowledge for responses generation. The former may lose valuable information in discarded knowledge, while the latter may bring a lot of noise. At the same time, many approaches need to train the knowledge selector with knowledge labels that indicate ground-truth knowledge, but these labels are difficult to obtain and require a large number of manual annotations. Motivated by these issues, we propose Knoformer, a dialogue response generation model based on reinforcement learning, which can automatically select one or more related knowledge from the knowledge pool and does not need knowledge labels during training. Knoformer is evaluated on two knowledge-guided conversation datasets, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Yongkang Liu, Shi Feng, Daling Wang et al.

We investigate response selection for multi-turn conversation in retrieval-based chatbots. Existing studies pay more attention to the matching between utterances and responses by calculating the matching score based on learned features, leading to insufficient model reasoning ability. In this paper, we propose a graph-reasoning network (GRN) to address the problem. GRN first conducts pre-training based on ALBERT using next utterance prediction and utterance order prediction tasks specifically devised for response selection. These two customized pre-training tasks can endow our model with the ability of capturing semantical and chronological dependency between utterances. We then fine-tune the model on an integrated network with sequence reasoning and graph reasoning structures. The sequence reasoning module conducts inference based on the highly summarized context vector of utterance-response pairs from the global perspective. The graph reasoning module conducts the reasoning on the utterance-level graph neural network from the local perspective. Experiments on two conversational reasoning datasets show that our model can dramatically outperform the strong baseline methods and can achieve performance which is close to human-level.

Shilei Liu, Yu Guo, Bochao Li et al.

This paper describes our submission to subtask a and b of SemEval-2020 Task 4. For subtask a, we use a ALBERT based model with improved input form to pick out the common sense statement from two statement candidates. For subtask b, we use a multiple choice model enhanced by hint sentence mechanism to select the reason from given options about why a statement is against common sense. Besides, we propose a novel transfer learning strategy between subtasks which help improve the performance. The accuracy scores of our system are 95.6 / 94.9 on official test set and rank 7$^{th}$ / 2$^{nd}$ on Post-Evaluation leaderboard.

Cunxiang Wang, Feiliang Ren, Zhichao Lin et al.

Embedding entities and relations into a continuous multi-dimensional vector space have become the dominant method for knowledge graph embedding in representation learning. However, most existing models ignore to represent hierarchical knowledge, such as the similarities and dissimilarities of entities in one domain. We proposed to learn a Domain Representations over existing knowledge graph embedding models, such that entities that have similar attributes are organized into the same domain. Such hierarchical knowledge of domains can give further evidence in link prediction. Experimental results show that domain embeddings give a significant improvement over the most recent state-of-art baseline knowledge graph embedding models.

Feiliang Ren, Yining Hou, Yan Li et al.

Knowledge graph is a kind of valuable knowledge base which would benefit lots of AI-related applications. Up to now, lots of large-scale knowledge graphs have been built. However, most of them are non-Chinese and designed for general purpose. In this work, we introduce TechKG, a large scale Chinese knowledge graph that is technology-oriented. It is built automatically from massive technical papers that are published in Chinese academic journals of different research domains. Some carefully designed heuristic rules are used to extract high quality entities and relations. Totally, it comprises of over 260 million triplets that are built upon more than 52 million entities which come from 38 research domains. Our preliminary ex-periments indicate that TechKG has high adaptability and can be used as a dataset for many diverse AI-related applications. We released TechKG at: http://www.techkg.cn.