Deqing Wang

Ting Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Zhongzhi Luan et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently garnered significant interest. With in-context learning, LLMs achieve impressive results in various natural language tasks. However, the application of LLMs to sentence embeddings remains an area of ongoing research. In this work, we propose an in-context learning-based method aimed at improving sentence embeddings performance. Our approach involves adapting the previous prompt-based representation method for autoregressive models, constructing a demonstration set that enables LLMs to perform in-context learning, and scaling up the LLMs to different model sizes. Through extensive experiments, in-context learning enables LLMs to generate high-quality sentence embeddings without any fine-tuning. It helps LLMs achieve performance comparable to current contrastive learning methods. By scaling model size, we find scaling to more than tens of billion parameters harms the performance on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks. However, the largest model outperforms other counterparts and achieves the new state-of-the-art result on transfer tasks. We also fine-tune LLMs with current contrastive learning approach, and the 2.7B OPT model, incorporating our prompt-based method, surpasses the performance of 4.8B ST5, achieving the new state-of-the-art results on STS tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/kongds/scaling_sentemb.

Ting Jiang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang et al.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising advancements in general visual and language understanding. However, the representation of multimodal information using MLLMs remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce a new framework, E5-V, designed to adapt MLLMs for achieving universal multimodal embeddings. Our findings highlight the significant potential of MLLMs in representing multimodal inputs compared to previous approaches. By leveraging MLLMs with prompts, E5-V effectively bridges the modality gap between different types of inputs, demonstrating strong performance in multimodal embeddings even without fine-tuning. We propose a single modality training approach for E5-V, where the model is trained exclusively on text pairs. This method demonstrates significant improvements over traditional multimodal training on image-text pairs, while reducing training costs by approximately 95%. Additionally, this approach eliminates the need for costly multimodal training data collection. Extensive experiments across four types of tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of E5-V. As a universal multimodal model, E5-V not only achieves but often surpasses state-of-the-art performance in each task, despite being trained on a single modality.

Ting Jiang, Deqing Wang, Leilei Sun et al.

Hierarchical text classification aims to leverage label hierarchy in multi-label text classification. Existing methods encode label hierarchy in a global view, where label hierarchy is treated as the static hierarchical structure containing all labels. Since global hierarchy is static and irrelevant to text samples, it makes these methods hard to exploit hierarchical information. Contrary to global hierarchy, local hierarchy as a structured labels hierarchy corresponding to each text sample. It is dynamic and relevant to text samples, which is ignored in previous methods. To exploit global and local hierarchies,we propose Hierarchy-guided BERT with Global and Local hierarchies (HBGL), which utilizes the large-scale parameters and prior language knowledge of BERT to model both global and local hierarchies.Moreover,HBGL avoids the intentional fusion of semantic and hierarchical modules by directly modeling semantic and hierarchical information with BERT.Compared with the state-of-the-art method HGCLR,our method achieves significant improvement on three benchmark datasets.

Yongjing Hao, Pengpeng Zhao, Xuefeng Xian et al.

Sequential Recommendation aims to predict the next item based on user behaviour. Recently, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has been proposed to improve recommendation performance. However, most of existing SSL methods use a uniform data augmentation scheme, which loses the sequence correlation of an original sequence. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Learnable Model Augmentation self-supervised learning for sequential Recommendation (LMA4Rec). Specifically, LMA4Rec first takes model augmentation as a supplementary method for data augmentation to generate views. Then, LMA4Rec uses learnable Bernoulli dropout to implement model augmentation learnable operations. Next, self-supervised learning is used between the contrastive views to extract self-supervised signals from an original sequence. Finally, experiments on three public datasets show that the LMA4Rec method effectively improves sequential recommendation performance compared with baseline methods.

Tao Zou, Le Yu, Junchen Ye et al.

Patent classification aims to assign multiple International Patent Classification (IPC) codes to a given patent. Recent methods for automatically classifying patents mainly focus on analyzing the text descriptions of patents. However, apart from the texts, each patent is also associated with some assignees, and the knowledge of their applied patents is often valuable for classification. Furthermore, the hierarchical taxonomy formulated by the IPC system provides important contextual information and enables models to leverage the correlations between IPC codes for more accurate classification. However, existing methods fail to incorporate the above aspects. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that comprehensively considers the information on patents for patent classification. To be specific, we first present an IPC codes correlations learning module to derive their semantic representations via adaptively passing and aggregating messages within the same level and across different levels along the hierarchical taxonomy. Moreover, we design a historical application patterns learning component to incorporate the corresponding assignee's previous patents by a dual channel aggregation mechanism. Finally, we combine the contextual information of patent texts that contains the semantics of IPC codes, and assignees' sequential preferences to make predictions. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the existing methods. Besides, we present the model's ability to capture the temporal patterns of assignees and the semantic dependencies among IPC codes.

Tao Zou, Le Yu, Leilei Sun et al.

Accurate prediction of what types of patents that companies will apply for in the next period of time can figure out their development strategies and help them discover potential partners or competitors in advance. Although important, this problem has been rarely studied in previous research due to the challenges in modelling companies' continuously evolving preferences and capturing the semantic correlations of classification codes. To fill in this gap, we propose an event-based dynamic graph learning framework for patent application trend prediction. In particular, our method is founded on the memorable representations of both companies and patent classification codes. When a new patent is observed, the representations of the related companies and classification codes are updated according to the historical memories and the currently encoded messages. Moreover, a hierarchical message passing mechanism is provided to capture the semantic proximities of patent classification codes by updating their representations along the hierarchical taxonomy. Finally, the patent application trend is predicted by aggregating the representations of the target company and classification codes from static, dynamic, and hierarchical perspectives. Experiments on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach under various experimental conditions, and also reveal the abilities of our method in learning semantics of classification codes and tracking technology developing trajectories of companies.

Ting Jiang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang et al.

To overcome the overparameterized problem in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), pruning is widely used as a simple and straightforward compression method by directly removing unimportant weights. Previous first-order methods successfully compress PLMs to extremely high sparsity with little performance drop. These methods, such as movement pruning, use first-order information to prune PLMs while fine-tuning the remaining weights. In this work, we argue fine-tuning is redundant for first-order pruning, since first-order pruning is sufficient to converge PLMs to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. Under this motivation, we propose Static Model Pruning (SMP), which only uses first-order pruning to adapt PLMs to downstream tasks while achieving the target sparsity level. In addition, we also design a new masking function and training objective to further improve SMP. Extensive experiments at various sparsity levels show SMP has significant improvements over first-order and zero-order methods. Unlike previous first-order methods, SMP is also applicable to low sparsity and outperforms zero-order methods. Meanwhile, SMP is more parameter efficient than other methods due to it does not require fine-tuning.

Meng Yuan, Fuzhen Zhuang, Zhao Zhang et al.

Since Knowledge Graphs (KGs) contain rich semantic information, recently there has been an influx of KG-enhanced recommendation methods. Most of existing methods are entirely designed based on euclidean space without considering curvature. However, recent studies have revealed that a tremendous graph-structured data exhibits highly non-euclidean properties. Motivated by these observations, in this work, we propose a knowledge-based multiple adaptive spaces fusion method for recommendation, namely MCKG. Unlike existing methods that solely adopt a specific manifold, we introduce the unified space that is compatible with hyperbolic, euclidean and spherical spaces. Furthermore, we fuse the multiple unified spaces in an attention manner to obtain the high-quality embeddings for better knowledge propagation. In addition, we propose a geometry-aware optimization strategy which enables the pull and push processes benefited from both hyperbolic and spherical spaces. Specifically, in hyperbolic space, we set smaller margins in the area near to the origin, which is conducive to distinguishing between highly similar positive items and negative ones. At the same time, we set larger margins in the area far from the origin to ensure the model has sufficient error tolerance. The similar manner also applies to spherical spaces. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the MCKG has a significant improvement over state-of-the-art recommendation methods. Further ablation experiments verify the importance of multi-space fusion and geometry-aware optimization strategy, justifying the rationality and effectiveness of MCKG.

Ziming Wan, Deqing Wang, Xuehua Ming et al.

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have been widely applied in heterogeneous information network tasks, while most HGNNs suffer from poor scalability or weak representation when they are applied to large-scale heterogeneous graphs. To address these problems, we propose a novel Relation-aware Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Contrastive Learning (RHCO) for large-scale heterogeneous graph representation learning. Unlike traditional heterogeneous graph neural networks, we adopt the contrastive learning mechanism to deal with the complex heterogeneity of large-scale heterogeneous graphs. We first learn relation-aware node embeddings under the network schema view. Then we propose a novel positive sample selection strategy to choose meaningful positive samples. After learning node embeddings under the positive sample graph view, we perform a cross-view contrastive learning to obtain the final node representations. Moreover, we adopt the label smoothing technique to boost the performance of RHCO. Extensive experiments on three large-scale academic heterogeneous graph datasets show that RHCO achieves best performance over the state-of-the-art models.

Ting Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Shengyue Luo et al.

To enhance the domain-specific capabilities of large language models, continued pre-training on a domain-specific corpus is a prevalent method. Recent work demonstrates that adapting models using reading comprehension data formatted by regex-based patterns can significantly improve performance on domain-specific tasks. However, regex-based patterns are incapable of parsing raw corpora using domain-specific knowledge. Furthermore, the question and answer pairs are extracted directly from the corpus in predefined formats offers limited context. To address this limitation, we improve reading comprehension via LLM and clustering. LLM focuses on leveraging domain knowledge within the corpus to refine comprehension stage, while clustering supplies relevant knowledge by extending the context to enrich reading stage. Additionally, our method incorporates parameter-efficient fine-tuning to improve the efficiency of domain adaptation. In comparison to AdaptLLM, our method achieves an improvement exceeding 5% in domain-specific tasks. Our code will available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.

Chenguang Du, Kaichun Yao, Hengshu Zhu et al.

Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) in information retrieval (IR) applications. Many existing HGNNs design a variety of tailor-made graph convolutions to capture structural and semantic information in heterogeneous graphs. However, existing HGNNs usually represent each node as a single vector in the multi-layer graph convolution calculation, which makes the high-level graph convolution layer fail to distinguish information from different relations and different orders, resulting in the information loss in the message passing. %insufficient mining of information. To this end, we propose a novel heterogeneous graph neural network with sequential node representation, namely Seq-HGNN. To avoid the information loss caused by the single vector node representation, we first design a sequential node representation learning mechanism to represent each node as a sequence of meta-path representations during the node message passing. Then we propose a heterogeneous representation fusion module, empowering Seq-HGNN to identify important meta-paths and aggregate their representations into a compact one. We conduct extensive experiments on four widely used datasets from Heterogeneous Graph Benchmark (HGB) and Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both accuracy and efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/nobrowning/SEQ_HGNN.

Ting Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Shengyue Luo et al.

Low-rank adaptation is a popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning method for large language models. In this paper, we analyze the impact of low-rank updating, as implemented in LoRA. Our findings suggest that the low-rank updating mechanism may limit the ability of LLMs to effectively learn and memorize new knowledge. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new method called MoRA, which employs a square matrix to achieve high-rank updating while maintaining the same number of trainable parameters. To achieve it, we introduce the corresponding non-parameter operators to reduce the input dimension and increase the output dimension for the square matrix. Furthermore, these operators ensure that the weight can be merged back into LLMs, which makes our method can be deployed like LoRA. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of our method across five tasks: instruction tuning, mathematical reasoning, continual pretraining, memory and pretraining. Our method outperforms LoRA on memory-intensive tasks and achieves comparable performance on other tasks.

Wei Chen, Meng Yuan, Zhao Zhang et al.

As trustworthy AI continues to advance, the fairness issue in recommendations has received increasing attention. A recommender system is considered unfair when it produces unequal outcomes for different user groups based on user-sensitive attributes (e.g., age, gender). Some researchers have proposed data augmentation-based methods aiming at alleviating user-level unfairness by altering the skewed distribution of training data among various user groups. Despite yielding promising results, they often rely on fairness-related assumptions that may not align with reality, potentially reducing the data quality and negatively affecting model effectiveness. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we study how to implement high-quality data augmentation to improve recommendation fairness. Specifically, we propose FairDgcl, a dynamic graph adversarial contrastive learning framework aiming at improving fairness in recommender system. First, FairDgcl develops an adversarial contrastive network with a view generator and a view discriminator to learn generating fair augmentation strategies in an adversarial style. Then, we propose two dynamic, learnable models to generate contrastive views within contrastive learning framework, which automatically fine-tune the augmentation strategies. Meanwhile, we theoretically show that FairDgcl can simultaneously generate enhanced representations that possess both fairness and accuracy. Lastly, comprehensive experiments conducted on four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FairDgcl.

Hongyan Xie, Yitong Yao, Yikun Ban et al.

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning tasks but are expensive to deploy. Thus small language models (SLMs) are fine-tuned on CoT data generated by LLMs to copy LLMs' abilities. However, these CoT data may include noisy rationales that either fail to substantiate the answers or contribute no additional information to support answer prediction, which leads SLMs to capture spurious correlations between questions and answers and compromise the quality of reasoning. In this work, we propose Chain-of-Thought Correctness Perception Distillation (CoPeD), which aims to improve the reasoning quality of the student model from the perspectives of task setting and data utilization. Firstly, we introduce a correctness-aware task setting that encourages the student model to predict answers based on correct rationales and revise them when they are incorrect. This setting improves the faithfulness of reasoning and allows the model to learn from its mistakes. Then, we propose a Correctness-Aware Weighted loss, which dynamically adjusts the contribution of each training instance based on the combined loss of the rationale and the answer. This strategy encourages the model to focus more on samples where the rationale offers stronger support for the correct answer. Experiments have shown that CoPeD is effective on both in-distribution (IND) and out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmark reasoning datasets.

Zixuan Huang, Yikun Ban, Lean Fu et al.

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as an effective approach for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, its performance is highly dependent on the quality of the underlying human preference data. To address this bottleneck, prior work has explored various data selection strategies, but these methods often overlook the impact of the evolving states of the language model during the optimization process. In this paper, we introduce a novel problem: Sample Scheduling for DPO, which aims to dynamically and adaptively schedule training samples based on the model's evolving batch-wise states throughout preference optimization. To solve this problem, we propose SamS, an efficient and effective algorithm that adaptively selects samples in each training batch based on the LLM's learning feedback to maximize the potential generalization performance. Notably, without modifying the core DPO algorithm, simply integrating SamS significantly improves performance across tasks, with minimal additional computational overhead. This work points to a promising new direction for improving LLM alignment through batch-wise sample selection, with potential generalization to RLHF and broader supervised learning paradigms.

Zheng Dou, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang et al.

Scientific document representation learning provides powerful embeddings for various tasks, while current methods face challenges across three approaches. 1) Contrastive training with citation-structural signals underutilizes citation information and still generates single-vector representations. 2) Fine-grained representation learning, which generates multiple vectors at the sentence or aspect level, requires costly integration and lacks domain generalization. 3) Task-aware learning depends on manually predefined task categorization, overlooking nuanced task distinctions and requiring extra training data for task-specific modules. To address these problems, we propose a new method that unifies the three approaches for better representations, namely FLeW. Specifically, we introduce a novel triplet sampling method that leverages citation intent and frequency to enhance citation-structural signals for training. Citation intents (background, method, result), aligned with the general structure of scientific writing, facilitate a domain-generalized facet partition for fine-grained representation learning. Then, we adopt a simple weight search to adaptively integrate three facet-level embeddings into a task-specific document embedding without task-aware fine-tuning. Experiments show the applicability and robustness of FLeW across multiple scientific tasks and fields, compared to prior models.

Hao Geng, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang et al.

Accurate citation count prediction of newly published papers could help editors and readers rapidly figure out the influential papers in the future. Though many approaches are proposed to predict a paper's future citation, most ignore the dynamic heterogeneous graph structure or node importance in academic networks. To cope with this problem, we propose a Dynamic heterogeneous Graph and Node Importance network (DGNI) learning framework, which fully leverages the dynamic heterogeneous graph and node importance information to predict future citation trends of newly published papers. First, a dynamic heterogeneous network embedding module is provided to capture the dynamic evolutionary trends of the whole academic network. Then, a node importance embedding module is proposed to capture the global consistency relationship to figure out each paper's node importance. Finally, the dynamic evolutionary trend embeddings and node importance embeddings calculated above are combined to jointly predict the future citation counts of each paper, by a log-normal distribution model according to multi-faced paper node representations. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that our model significantly improves all indicators compared to the SOTA models.

Ting Jiang, Jian Jiao, Shaohan Huang et al.

We propose PromptBERT, a novel contrastive learning method for learning better sentence representation. We firstly analyze the drawback of current sentence embedding from original BERT and find that it is mainly due to the static token embedding bias and ineffective BERT layers. Then we propose the first prompt-based sentence embeddings method and discuss two prompt representing methods and three prompt searching methods to make BERT achieve better sentence embeddings. Moreover, we propose a novel unsupervised training objective by the technology of template denoising, which substantially shortens the performance gap between the supervised and unsupervised settings. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our method. Compared to SimCSE, PromptBert achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement based on BERT and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting.

Yongchun Zhu, Fuzhen Zhuang, Deqing Wang

While Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA) algorithms, i.e., there are only labeled data from source domains, have been actively studied in recent years, most algorithms and theoretical results focus on Single-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (SUDA). However, in the practical scenario, labeled data can be typically collected from multiple diverse sources, and they might be different not only from the target domain but also from each other. Thus, domain adapters from multiple sources should not be modeled in the same way. Recent deep learning based Multi-source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (MUDA) algorithms focus on extracting common domain-invariant representations for all domains by aligning distribution of all pairs of source and target domains in a common feature space. However, it is often very hard to extract the same domain-invariant representations for all domains in MUDA. In addition, these methods match distributions without considering domain-specific decision boundaries between classes. To solve these problems, we propose a new framework with two alignment stages for MUDA which not only respectively aligns the distributions of each pair of source and target domains in multiple specific feature spaces, but also aligns the outputs of classifiers by utilizing the domain-specific decision boundaries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method can achieve remarkable results on popular benchmark datasets for image classification.

Ting Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang et al.

While pre-trained language models have achieved great success on various natural language understanding tasks, how to effectively leverage them into non-autoregressive generation tasks remains a challenge. To solve this problem, we present a non-autoregressive generation model based on pre-trained transformer models. To bridge the gap between autoregressive and non-autoregressive models, we propose a simple and effective iterative training method called MIx Source and pseudo Target (MIST). Unlike other iterative decoding methods, which sacrifice the inference speed to achieve better performance based on multiple decoding iterations, MIST works in the training stage and has no effect on inference time. Our experiments on three generation benchmarks including question generation, summarization and paraphrase generation, show that the proposed framework achieves the new state-of-the-art results for fully non-autoregressive models. We also demonstrate that our method can be used to a variety of pre-trained models. For instance, MIST based on the small pre-trained model also obtains comparable performance with seq2seq models.

Ting Jiang, Deqing Wang, Leilei Sun et al.

Extreme Multi-label text Classification (XMC) is a task of finding the most relevant labels from a large label set. Nowadays deep learning-based methods have shown significant success in XMC. However, the existing methods (e.g., AttentionXML and X-Transformer etc) still suffer from 1) combining several models to train and predict for one dataset, and 2) sampling negative labels statically during the process of training label ranking model, which reduces both the efficiency and accuracy of the model. To address the above problems, we proposed LightXML, which adopts end-to-end training and dynamic negative labels sampling. In LightXML, we use generative cooperative networks to recall and rank labels, in which label recalling part generates negative and positive labels, and label ranking part distinguishes positive labels from these labels. Through these networks, negative labels are sampled dynamically during label ranking part training by feeding with the same text representation. Extensive experiments show that LightXML outperforms state-of-the-art methods in five extreme multi-label datasets with much smaller model size and lower computational complexity. In particular, on the Amazon dataset with 670K labels, LightXML can reduce the model size up to 72% compared to AttentionXML.

Baoyu Jing, Chenwei Lu, Deqing Wang et al.

Cross-domain text classification aims at building a classifier for a target domain which leverages data from both source and target domain. One promising idea is to minimize the feature distribution differences of the two domains. Most existing studies explicitly minimize such differences by an exact alignment mechanism (aligning features by one-to-one feature alignment, projection matrix etc.). Such exact alignment, however, will restrict models' learning ability and will further impair models' performance on classification tasks when the semantic distributions of different domains are very different. To address this problem, we propose a novel group alignment which aligns the semantics at group level. In addition, to help the model learn better semantic groups and semantics within these groups, we also propose a partial supervision for model's learning in source domain. To this end, we embed the group alignment and a partial supervision into a cross-domain topic model, and propose a Cross-Domain Labeled LDA (CDL-LDA). On the standard 20Newsgroup and Reuters dataset, extensive quantitative (classification, perplexity etc.) and qualitative (topic detection) experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed group alignment and partial supervision.

Deqing Wang, Hui Zhang, Rui Liu et al.

Much work has been done on feature selection. Existing methods are based on document frequency, such as Chi-Square Statistic, Information Gain etc. However, these methods have two shortcomings: one is that they are not reliable for low-frequency terms, and the other is that they only count whether one term occurs in a document and ignore the term frequency. Actually, high-frequency terms within a specific category are often regards as discriminators. This paper focuses on how to construct the feature selection function based on term frequency, and proposes a new approach based on $t$-test, which is used to measure the diversity of the distributions of a term between the specific category and the entire corpus. Extensive comparative experiments on two text corpora using three classifiers show that our new approach is comparable to or or slightly better than the state-of-the-art feature selection methods (i.e., $χ^2$, and IG) in terms of macro-$F_1$ and micro-$F_1$.