Shuo Wang

Xinze Li, Sen Mei, Zhenghao Liu et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has proven its effectiveness in mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external resources. To adapt LLMs for the RAG systems, current approaches use instruction tuning to optimize LLMs, improving their ability to utilize retrieved knowledge. This supervised fine-tuning (SFT) approach focuses on equipping LLMs to handle diverse RAG tasks using different instructions. However, it trains RAG modules to overfit training signals and overlooks the varying data preferences among agents within the RAG system. In this paper, we propose a Differentiable Data Rewards (DDR) method, which end-to-end trains RAG systems by aligning data preferences between different RAG modules. DDR works by collecting the rewards to optimize each agent in the RAG system with the rollout method, which prompts agents to sample some potential responses as perturbations, evaluates the impact of these perturbations on the whole RAG system, and subsequently optimizes the agent to produce outputs that improve the performance of the RAG system. Our experiments on various knowledge-intensive tasks demonstrate that DDR significantly outperforms the SFT method, particularly for LLMs with smaller-scale parameters that depend more on the retrieved knowledge. Additionally, DDR exhibits a stronger capability to align the data preference between RAG modules. The DDR method makes the generation module more effective in extracting key information from documents and mitigating conflicts between parametric memory and external knowledge. All codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/RAG-DDR.

Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of NLP tasks. However, they often exhibit suboptimal behaviors and inconsistencies when exposed to unfamiliar external information, underscoring their limitations in effectively leveraging such knowledge. Inspired by constructivist learning theory, we propose ThinkNote, a novel framework that enhances the external knowledge utilization of LLMs through a two-stage constructivist cognitive modeling process. Specifically, ThinkNote performs knowledge assimilation to align new information with the model's parametric memory, forming a coherent internal representation. It then applies thought accommodation to adapt internal reasoning, thereby promoting more consistent and reliable outputs. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that ThinkNote achieves a 10% improvement over strong baseline methods on various question-answering benchmarks. Further analysis indicates that ThinkNote effectively integrates and utilizes external knowledge to help LLMs generate accurate responses and improves their self-consistency. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/ThinkNote.

Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Chenyan Xiong et al.

Large language models (LLMs) require lengthy prompts as the input context to produce output aligned with user intentions, a process that incurs extra costs during inference. In this paper, we propose the Gist COnditioned deCOding (Gist-COCO) model, introducing a novel method for compressing prompts which also can assist the prompt interpretation and engineering. Gist-COCO employs an encoder-decoder based language model and then incorporates an additional encoder as a plugin module to compress prompts with inputs using gist tokens. It finetunes the compression plugin module and uses the representations of gist tokens to emulate the raw prompts in the vanilla language model. By verbalizing the representations of gist tokens into gist prompts, the compression ability of Gist-COCO can be generalized to different LLMs with high compression rates. Our experiments demonstrate that Gist-COCO outperforms previous prompt compression models in both passage and instruction compression tasks. Further analysis on gist verbalization results suggests that our gist prompts serve different functions in aiding language models. They may directly provide potential answers, generate the chain-of-thought, or simply repeat the inputs. All data and codes are available at https://github.com/OpenMatch/Gist-COCO .

Zheni Zeng, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu et al.

Although retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) remains essential for knowledge-based question answering (KBQA), current paradigms face critical challenges under specific domains. Existing methods struggle with targeted adaptation on small-scale KBs: vanilla unsupervised training exhibits poor effectiveness, while fine-tuning incurs prohibitive costs of external signals. We present KBAlign, a self-supervised framework that enhances RAG systems through efficient model adaptation. Our key insight is to leverage the model's intrinsic capabilities for knowledge alignment through two innovative mechanisms: multi-grained self-annotation that captures global knowledge for data construction, and iterative tuning that accelerates convergence through self verification. This framework enables cost-effective model adaptation to specific textual KBs, without human supervision or external model assistance. Experiments demonstrate that KBAlign can achieve 90\% of the performance gain obtained through GPT-4-supervised adaptation, while relying entirely on self-annotation of much smaller models. KBAlign significantly improves downstream QA accuracy across multiple domains with tiny costs, particularly benefiting scenarios requiring deep knowledge integration from specialized corpora. We release our experimental data, models, and process analyses to the community for further exploration (https://github.com/thunlp/KBAlign).

Shuo Wang, Keke Gai, Jing Yu et al.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has garnered significant attention as a privacy-preserving machine learning framework for sample-aligned feature federation. However, traditional VFL approaches do not address the challenges of class and feature continual learning, resulting in catastrophic forgetting of knowledge from previous tasks. To address the above challenge, we propose a novel vertical federated continual learning method, named Vertical Federated Continual Learning via Evolving Prototype Knowledge (V-LETO), which primarily facilitates the transfer of knowledge from previous tasks through the evolution of prototypes. Specifically, we propose an evolving prototype knowledge method, enabling the global model to retain both previous and current task knowledge. Furthermore, we introduce a model optimization technique that mitigates the forgetting of previous task knowledge by restricting updates to specific parameters of the local model, thereby enhancing overall performance. Extensive experiments conducted in both CIL and FIL settings demonstrate that our method, V-LETO, outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods. For example, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 10.39% and 35.15% for CIL and FIL tasks, respectively. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/V-LETO-0108/README.md.

Xiaoyang Yu, Youfang Lin, Shuo Wang et al.

In a multi-agent system (MAS), action semantics indicates the different influences of agents' actions toward other entities, and can be used to divide agents into groups in a physically heterogeneous MAS. Previous multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms apply global parameter-sharing across different types of heterogeneous agents without careful discrimination of different action semantics. This common implementation decreases the cooperation and coordination between agents in complex situations. However, fully independent agent parameters dramatically increase the computational cost and training difficulty. In order to benefit from the usage of different action semantics while also maintaining a proper parameter-sharing structure, we introduce the Unified Action Space (UAS) to fulfill the requirement. The UAS is the union set of all agent actions with different semantics. All agents first calculate their unified representation in the UAS, and then generate their heterogeneous action policies using different available-action-masks. To further improve the training of extra UAS parameters, we introduce a Cross-Group Inverse (CGI) loss to predict other groups' agent policies with the trajectory information. As a universal method for solving the physically heterogeneous MARL problem, we implement the UAS adding to both value-based and policy-based MARL algorithms, and propose two practical algorithms: U-QMIX and U-MAPPO. Experimental results in the SMAC environment prove the effectiveness of both U-QMIX and U-MAPPO compared with several state-of-the-art MARL methods.

Sheng Hang, Chaoxiang He, Hongsheng Hu et al.

Detecting illicit visual content demands more than image-level NSFW flags; moderators must also know what objects make an image illegal and where those objects occur. We introduce a zero-shot pipeline that simultaneously (i) detects if an image contains harmful content, (ii) identifies each critical element involved, and (iii) localizes those elements with pixel-accurate masks - all in one pass. The system first applies foundation segmentation model (SAM) to generate candidate object masks and refines them into larger independent regions. Each region is scored for malicious relevance by a vision-language model using open-vocabulary prompts; these scores weight a fusion step that produces a consolidated malicious object map. An ensemble across multiple segmenters hardens the pipeline against adaptive attacks that target any single segmentation method. Evaluated on a newly-annotated 790-image dataset spanning drug, sexual, violent and extremist content, our method attains 85.8% element-level recall, 78.1% precision and a 92.1% segment-success rate - exceeding direct zero-shot VLM localization by 27.4% recall at comparable precision. Against PGD adversarial perturbations crafted to break SAM and VLM, our method's precision and recall decreased by no more than 10%, demonstrating high robustness against attacks. The full pipeline processes an image in seconds, plugs seamlessly into existing VLM workflows, and constitutes the first practical tool for fine-grained, explainable malicious-image moderation.

Hao Jiang, Zhipeng Zhang, Yu Gao et al.

Recent advances in end-to-end autonomous driving leverage multi-view images to construct BEV representations for motion planning. In motion planning, autonomous vehicles need considering both hard constraints imposed by geometrically occupied obstacles (e.g., vehicles, pedestrians) and soft, rule-based semantics with no explicit geometry (e.g., lane boundaries, traffic priors). However, existing end-to-end frameworks typically rely on BEV features learned in an implicit manner, lacking explicit modeling of risk and guidance priors for safe and interpretable planning. To address this, we propose FlowDrive, a novel framework that introduces physically interpretable energy-based flow fields-including risk potential and lane attraction fields-to encode semantic priors and safety cues into the BEV space. These flow-aware features enable adaptive refinement of anchor trajectories and serve as interpretable guidance for trajectory generation. Moreover, FlowDrive decouples motion intent prediction from trajectory denoising via a conditional diffusion planner with feature-level gating, alleviating task interference and enhancing multimodal diversity. Experiments on the NAVSIM v2 benchmark demonstrate that FlowDrive achieves state-of-the-art performance with an EPDMS of 86.3, surpassing prior baselines in both safety and planning quality. The project is available at https://astrixdrive.github.io/FlowDrive.github.io/.

Bowen Ping, Shuo Wang, Hanqing Wang et al.

Fine-tuning is a crucial process for adapting large language models (LLMs) to diverse applications. In certain scenarios, such as multi-tenant serving, deploying multiple LLMs becomes necessary to meet complex demands. Recent studies suggest decomposing a fine-tuned LLM into a base model and corresponding delta weights, which are then compressed using low-rank or low-bit approaches to reduce costs. In this work, we observe that existing low-rank and low-bit compression methods can significantly harm the model performance for task-specific fine-tuned LLMs (e.g., WizardMath for math problems). Motivated by the long-tail distribution of singular values in the delta weights, we propose a delta quantization approach using mixed-precision. This method employs higher-bit representation for singular vectors corresponding to larger singular values. We evaluate our approach on various fine-tuned LLMs, including math LLMs, code LLMs, chat LLMs, and even VLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach performs comparably to full fine-tuned LLMs, surpassing both low-rank and low-bit baselines by a considerable margin. Additionally, we show that our method is compatible with various backbone LLMs, such as Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral, highlighting its generalizability.