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He Chang

Publications and source records attributed to He Chang.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

ForecastAgentSearch: Towards a Multi-Expert Agent Search System for Geopolitical Event Forecasting

Geopolitical event forecasting is a challenging task, as it requires understanding complex regional contexts, dynamic event signals, and uncertain future outcomes. Recent advances in large language model agents provide new opportunities for building forecasting systems that can reason with diverse sources and expert perspectives. In this paper, we present \textit{ForecastAgentSearch}, a preliminary framework that formulates geopolitical event forecasting as a multi-expert agent search problem. Given a forecasting query, the system first analyzes the task context, then searches and ranks relevant expert agents based on their regional knowledge, domain expertise, reliability, and complementarity. The selected agents provide specialized analyses, which are further coordinated to generate a final forecast with explanations and uncertainty awareness. We discuss the key design challenges of agent profiling, expert retrieval, ranking, and multi-agent coordination, and outline possible evaluation protocols for future development. This work aims to provide an initial step toward searchable and reliable agent-based forecasting systems.

cs.MA

Scattered Hypothesis Generation for Open-Ended Event Forecasting

Despite the importance of open-ended event forecasting for risk management, current LLM-based methods predominantly target only the most probable outcomes, neglecting the intrinsic uncertainty of real-world events. To bridge this gap, we advance open-ended event forecasting from pinpoint forecasting to scatter forecasting by introducing the proxy task of hypothesis generation. This paradigm aims to generate an inclusive and diverse set of hypotheses that broadly cover the space of plausible future events. To this end, we propose SCATTER, a reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes inclusiveness and diversity of the hypothesis. Specifically, we design a novel hybrid reward that consists of three components: 1) a validity reward that measures semantic alignment with observed events, 2) an intra-group diversity reward to encourage variation within sampled responses, and 3) an inter-group diversity reward to promote exploration across distinct modes. By integrating the validity-gated score into the overall objective, we confine the exploration of wildly diversified outcomes to contextually plausible futures, preventing the mode collapse issue. Experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets, i.e., OpenForecast and OpenEP, demonstrate that SCATTER significantly outperforms strong baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/Sambac1/SCATTER.

cs.IR

ThinkTank-ME: A Multi-Expert Framework for Middle East Event Forecasting

Event forecasting is inherently influenced by multifaceted considerations, including international relations, regional historical dynamics, and cultural contexts. However, existing LLM-based approaches employ single-model architectures that generate predictions along a singular explicit trajectory, constraining their ability to capture diverse geopolitical nuances across complex regional contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce ThinkTank-ME, a novel Think Tank framework for Middle East event forecasting that emulates collaborative expert analysis in real-world strategic decision-making. To facilitate expert specialization and rigorous evaluation, we construct POLECAT-FOR-ME, a Middle East-focused event forecasting benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of multi-expert collaboration in handling complex temporal geopolitical forecasting tasks. The code is available at https://github.com/LuminosityX/ThinkTank-ME.

cs.LG

Integrate Temporal Graph Learning into LLM-based Temporal Knowledge Graph Model

Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (TKGF) aims to predict future events based on the observed events in history. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities, generating significant research interest in their application for reasoning over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs). Existing LLM-based methods have integrated retrieved historical facts or static graph representations into LLMs. Despite the notable performance of LLM-based methods, they are limited by the insufficient modeling of temporal patterns and ineffective cross-modal alignment between graph and language, hindering the ability of LLMs to fully grasp the temporal and structural information in TKGs. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel framework TGL-LLM to integrate temporal graph learning into LLM-based temporal knowledge graph model. Specifically, we introduce temporal graph learning to capture the temporal and relational patterns and obtain the historical graph embedding. Furthermore, we design a hybrid graph tokenization to sufficiently model the temporal patterns within LLMs. To achieve better alignment between graph and language, we employ a two-stage training paradigm to finetune LLMs on high-quality and diverse data, thereby resulting in better performance. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our approach outperforms a range of state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.

cs.IR

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Temporal Event Forecasting

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in various data mining tasks, such as knowledge question answering, mathematical reasoning, and commonsense reasoning. However, the reasoning capability of LLMs on temporal event forecasting has been under-explored. To systematically investigate their abilities in temporal event forecasting, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-based methods for temporal event forecasting. Due to the lack of a high-quality dataset that involves both graph and textual data, we first construct a benchmark dataset, named MidEast-TE-mini. Based on this dataset, we design a series of baseline methods, characterized by various input formats and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) modules. From extensive experiments, we find that directly integrating raw texts into the input of LLMs does not enhance zero-shot extrapolation performance. In contrast, fine-tuning LLMs with raw texts can significantly improve performance. Additionally, LLMs enhanced with retrieval modules can effectively capture temporal relational patterns hidden in historical events. However, issues such as popularity bias and the long-tail problem persist in LLMs, particularly in the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) method. These findings not only deepen our understanding of LLM-based event forecasting methods but also highlight several promising research directions. We consider that this comprehensive evaluation, along with the identified research opportunities, will significantly contribute to future research on temporal event forecasting through LLMs.

cs.CL

ToDA: Target-oriented Diffusion Attacker against Recommendation System

Recommendation systems (RS) have become indispensable tools for web services to address information overload, thus enhancing user experiences and bolstering platforms' revenues. However, with their increasing ubiquity, security concerns have also emerged. As the public accessibility of RS, they are susceptible to specific malicious attacks where adversaries can manipulate user profiles, leading to biased recommendations. Recent research often integrates additional modules using generative models to craft these deceptive user profiles, ensuring them are imperceptible while causing the intended harm. Albeit their efficacy, these models face challenges of unstable training and the exploration-exploitation dilemma, which can lead to suboptimal results. In this paper, we pioneer to investigate the potential of diffusion models (DMs), for shilling attacks. Specifically, we propose a novel Target-oriented Diffusion Attack model (ToDA). It incorporates a pre-trained autoencoder that transforms user profiles into a high dimensional space, paired with a Latent Diffusion Attacker (LDA)-the core component of ToDA. LDA introduces noise into the profiles within this latent space, adeptly steering the approximation towards targeted items through cross-attention mechanisms. The global horizon, implemented by a bipartite graph, is involved in LDA and derived from the encoded user profile feature. This makes LDA possible to extend the generation outwards the on-processing user feature itself, and bridges the gap between diffused user features and target item features. Extensive experiments compared to several SOTA baselines demonstrate ToDA's effectiveness. Specific studies exploit the elaborative design of ToDA and underscore the potency of advanced generative models in such contexts.

cs.CR