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Ke Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Ke Liang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

From Inline Notes to Collected Commentaries: Toward Context-Preserving Organization of Exegetical Knowledge in Classical Chinese Texts

Inline notes and collected commentaries are important forms of scholarly communication that evolved within the Confucian exegetical tradition, yet have received little computational attention. Drawing on traditional Chinese exegetics and philology, this paper formulates collected commentary compilation as an NLP task and proposes a computational framework that preserves the contextual dependency of inline notes while enabling their automatic compilation and exegetical knowledge organization. It combines two-step prompt chaining for identifying the associated main-text segments and exegetical functions of annotations with cross-source mention clustering for integrating commentary across editions, achieving a CoNLL F1 score above 97% in a case study on the Classic of Mountains. Our framework lays the foundation for the large-scale organization of historical exegetical knowledge, thereby supporting a broad range of downstream philological and NLP tasks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Combined Dictionary Unfolding Network with Gradient-Adaptive Fidelity for Transferable Multi-Source Fusion

Deep Unfolding Network-based methods have emerged as effective solutions for multi-source image fusion by combining model-driven iterative optimization with data-driven deep learning. However, most existing deep unfolding image fusion methods are derived from alternating minimization, which updates the features of different modalities separately. This design introduces considerable computational and memory overhead, limiting deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. To address this issue, we propose CDNet, a lightweight Combined Dictionary Unfolding Network for multi-source image fusion. Rather than introducing a new sparse coding prior or empirically compressing an existing fusion network, CDNet translates the unique-common decomposition prior of coupled dictionary learning into a structurally constrained joint unfolding architecture. The resulting CDBlock follows a block-sparse interaction topology and performs a model-derived joint update of common and modality-specific representations, thereby streamlining feature learning and improving efficiency.In addition, we design a compact High- and Low-frequency Image Fidelity loss for unsupervised training without ground-truth images. We evaluate CDNet on four tasks, including multi-exposure image fusion, infrared and visible image fusion, medical image fusion, and infrared and visible image fusion for semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that CDNet achieves competitive or superior fusion performance with high efficiency. For infrared and visible image fusion, CDNet outperforms competing methods on four of six metrics on the TNO dataset and five of six metrics on the RoadScene dataset. In particular, it surpasses the second-best method by 1.23 dB and 1.59 dB in PSNR on TNO and RoadScene, respectively.

eess.IV↗
arXiv2026

Decoupled Travel Planning with Behavior Forest

Behavior sequences, composed of executable steps, serve as the operational foundation for multi-constraint planning problems such as travel planning. In such tasks, each planning step is not only constrained locally but also influenced by global constraints spanning multiple subtasks, leading to a tightly coupled and complex decision process. Existing travel planning methods typically rely on a single decision space that entangles all subtasks and constraints, failing to distinguish between locally acting constraints within a subtask and global constraints that span multiple subtasks. Consequently, the model is forced to jointly reason over local and global constraints at each decision step, increasing the reasoning burden and reducing planning efficiency. To address this problem, we propose the Behavior Forest method. Specifically, our approach structures the decision-making process into a forest of parallel behavior trees, where each behavior tree is responsible for a subtask. A global coordination mechanism is introduced to orchestrate the interactions among these trees, enabling modular and coherent travel planning. Within this framework, large language models are embedded as decision engines within behavior tree nodes, performing localized reasoning conditioned on task-specific constraints to generate candidate subplans and adapt decisions based on coordination feedback. The behavior trees, in turn, provide an explicit control structure that guides LLM generation. This design decouples complex tasks and constraints into manageable subspaces, enabling task-specific reasoning and reducing the cognitive load of LLM. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.67% on the TravelPlanner and by 11.82% on the ChinaTravel benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in increasing LLM performance for complex multi-constraint travel planning.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

AtomicRAG: Atom-Entity Graphs for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Recent GraphRAG methods integrate graph structures into text indexing and retrieval, using knowledge graph triples to connect text chunks, thereby improving retrieval coverage and precision. However, we observe that treating text chunks as the basic unit of knowledge representation rigidly groups multiple atomic facts together, limiting the flexibility and adaptability needed to support diverse retrieval scenarios. Additionally, triple-based entity linking is sensitive to relation-extraction errors, which can lead to missing or incorrect reasoning paths and ultimately hurt retrieval accuracy. To address these issues, we propose the Atom-Entity Graph, a more precise and reliable architecture for knowledge representation and indexing. In our approach, knowledge is stored as knowledge atoms, namely individual, self-contained units of factual information, rather than coarse-grained text chunks. This allows knowledge elements to be flexibly reassembled without mutual interference, thereby enabling seamless alignment with diverse query perspectives. Edges between entities simply indicate whether a relationship exists. By combining personalized PageRank with relevance-based filtering, we maintain accurate entity connections and improve the reliability of reasoning. Theoretical analysis and experiments on five public benchmarks show that the proposed AtomicRAG algorithm outperforms strong RAG baselines in retrieval accuracy and reasoning robustness. Code: https://github.com/7HHHHH/AtomicRAG.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

ImgCoT: Compressing Long Chain of Thought into Compact Visual Tokens for Efficient Reasoning of Large Language Model

Compressing long chains of thought (CoT) into compact latent tokens is crucial for efficient reasoning with large language models (LLMs). Recent studies employ autoencoders to achieve this by reconstructing textual CoT from latent tokens, thus encoding CoT semantics. However, treating textual CoT as the reconstruction target forces latent tokens to preserve surface-level linguistic features (e.g., word choice and syntax), introducing a strong linguistic inductive bias that prioritizes linguistic form over reasoning structure and limits logical abstraction. Thus, we propose ImgCoT that replaces the reconstruction target from textual CoT to the visual CoT obtained by rendering CoT into images. This substitutes linguistic bias with spatial inductive bias, i.e., a tendency to model spatial layouts of the reasoning steps in visual CoT, enabling latent tokens to better capture global reasoning structure. Moreover, although visual latent tokens encode abstract reasoning structure, they may blur reasoning details. We thus propose a loose ImgCoT, a hybrid reasoning that augments visual latent tokens with a few key textual reasoning steps, selected based on low token log-likelihood. This design allows LLMs to retain both global reasoning structure and fine-grained reasoning details with fewer tokens than the complete CoT. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of the two versions of ImgCoT.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Deep Temporal Graph Clustering: A Comprehensive Benchmark and Datasets

Temporal Graph Clustering (TGC) is a new task with little attention, focusing on node clustering in temporal graphs. Compared with existing static graph clustering, it can find the balance between time requirement and space requirement (Time-Space Balance) through the interaction sequence-based batch-processing pattern. However, there are two major challenges that hinder the development of TGC, i.e., inapplicable clustering techniques and inapplicable datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a comprehensive benchmark, called BenchTGC. Specially, we design a BenchTGC Framework to illustrate the paradigm of temporal graph clustering and improve existing clustering techniques to fit temporal graphs. In addition, we also discuss problems with public temporal graph datasets and develop multiple datasets suitable for TGC task, called BenchTGC Datasets. According to extensive experiments, we not only verify the advantages of BenchTGC, but also demonstrate the necessity and importance of TGC task. We wish to point out that the dynamically changing and complex scenarios in real world are the foundation of temporal graph clustering. The code and data is available at: https://github.com/MGitHubL/BenchTGC.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

CLUENet: Cluster Attention Makes Neural Networks Have Eyes

Despite the success of convolution- and attention-based models in vision tasks, their rigid receptive fields and complex architectures limit their ability to model irregular spatial patterns and hinder interpretability, therefore posing challenges for tasks requiring high model transparency. Clustering paradigms offer promising interpretability and flexible semantic modeling, but suffer from limited accuracy, low efficiency, and gradient vanishing during training. To address these issues, we propose CLUster attEntion Network (CLUENet), an transparent deep architecture for visual semantic understanding. We propose three key innovations include (i) a Global Soft Aggregation and Hard Assignment with a Temperature-Scaled Cosin Attention and gated residual connections for enhanced local modeling, (ii) inter-block Hard and Shared Feature Dispatching, and (iii) an improved cluster pooling strategy. These enhancements significantly improve both classification performance and visual interpretability. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet demonstrate that CLUENet outperforms existing clustering methods and mainstream visual models, offering a compelling balance of accuracy, efficiency, and transparency.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

A General Anchor-Based Framework for Scalable Fair Clustering

Fair clustering is crucial for mitigating bias in unsupervised learning, yet existing algorithms often suffer from quadratic or super-quadratic computational complexity, rendering them impractical for large-scale datasets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Anchor-based Fair Clustering Framework (AFCF), a novel, general, and plug-and-play framework that empowers arbitrary fair clustering algorithms with linear-time scalability. Our approach first selects a small but representative set of anchors using a novel fair sampling strategy. Then, any off-the-shelf fair clustering algorithm can be applied to this small anchor set. The core of our framework lies in a novel anchor graph construction module, where we formulate an optimization problem to propagate labels while preserving fairness. This is achieved through a carefully designed group-label joint constraint, which we prove theoretically ensures that the fairness of the final clustering on the entire dataset matches that of the anchor clustering. We solve this optimization efficiently using an ADMM-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on multiple large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that AFCF drastically accelerates state-of-the-art methods, which reduces computational time by orders of magnitude while maintaining strong clustering performance and fairness guarantees.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Breaking the Gradient Barrier: Unveiling Large Language Models for Strategic Classification

Strategic classification~(SC) explores how individuals or entities modify their features strategically to achieve favorable classification outcomes. However, existing SC methods, which are largely based on linear models or shallow neural networks, face significant limitations in terms of scalability and capacity when applied to real-world datasets with significantly increasing scale, especially in financial services and the internet sector. In this paper, we investigate how to leverage large language models to design a more scalable and efficient SC framework, especially in the case of growing individuals engaged with decision-making processes. Specifically, we introduce GLIM, a gradient-free SC method grounded in in-context learning. During the feed-forward process of self-attention, GLIM implicitly simulates the typical bi-level optimization process of SC, including both the feature manipulation and decision rule optimization. Without fine-tuning the LLMs, our proposed GLIM enjoys the advantage of cost-effective adaptation in dynamic strategic environments. Theoretically, we prove GLIM can support pre-trained LLMs to adapt to a broad range of strategic manipulations. We validate our approach through experiments with a collection of pre-trained LLMs on real-world and synthetic datasets in financial and internet domains, demonstrating that our GLIM exhibits both robustness and efficiency, and offering an effective solution for large-scale SC tasks.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Putting on the Thinking Hats: A Survey on Chain of Thought Fine-tuning from the Perspective of Human Reasoning Mechanism

Chain of thought (CoT) fine-tuning aims to endow large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities by training them on curated reasoning traces. It leverages both supervised and reinforced fine-tuning to cultivate human-like reasoning skills in LLMs, including detailed planning, divergent thinking, intuitive judgment, timely reflection, internal thinking, and fact perception, etc. As CoT fine-tuning has advanced, LLMs have demonstrated substantial improvements in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, existing surveys about CoT fine-tuning primarily focus on technical aspects and overlook a systematic analysis from the perspective of human reasoning mechanisms. Given that the ultimate goal of CoT fine-tuning is to enable LLMs to reason like humans, it is crucial to investigate this technique through the lens of human cognition. To fill this gap, we present the first comprehensive survey of CoT fine-tuning grounded in human reasoning theory. Specifically, inspired by the well-known Six Thinking Hats framework, which systematically characterizes common human thinking modes using six metaphorical hats, we classify and examine CoT fine-tuning methods through this lens. Furthermore, building upon this theory, we outline potential directions for future research in CoT fine-tuning. In addition, we compile a comprehensive overview of existing datasets and model performances, and a real-time GitHub repository \footnote{https://github.com/AI-Chen/Awesome-CoT-Finetuning} that continuously tracks recent advances in this area is maintained. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource to inspire innovation and foster progress in this rapidly evolving field.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

MAPO: Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization

Recent advances in reinforcement learning for foundation models, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), have significantly improved the performance of foundation models on reasoning tasks. Notably, the advantage function serves as a central mechanism in GRPO for ranking the trajectory importance. However, existing explorations encounter both advantage reversion and advantage mirror problems, which hinder the reasonable advantage allocation across different query samples. In this work, we propose an easy but effective GRPO strategy, Mixed Advantage Policy Optimization (MAPO). We reveal that the trajectory appears with different certainty and propose the advantage percent deviation for samples with high-certainty trajectories. Furthermore, we dynamically reweight the advantage function for samples with varying trajectory certainty, thereby adaptively configuring the advantage function to account for sample-specific characteristics. Comparison with related state-of-the-art methods, along with ablation studies on different advantage variants, validates the effectiveness of our approach.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2025

SPHENIC: Topology-Aware Multi-View Clustering for Spatial Transcriptomics

Spatial transcriptomics clustering is pivotal for identifying cell subpopulations by leveraging spatial location information. While recent graph-based methods modeling cell-cell interactions have improved clustering accuracy, they remain limited in two key aspects: (i) reliance on local aggregation in static graphs often fails to capture robust global topological structures (e.g., loops and voids) and is vulnerable to noisy edges; and (ii) dimensionality reduction techniques frequently neglect spatial coherence, causing physically adjacent spots to be erroneously separated in the latent space. To overcome these challenges, we propose SPHENIC, a Spatial Persistent Homology-Enhanced Neighborhood Integrative Clustering method. Specifically, it explicitly incorporates topology-invariant features into the clustering network to ensure robust representation learning against noise. Furthermore, we design a dual-regularized optimization module that imposes spatial constraints alongside distributional optimization, ensuring that the embedding space preserves the physical proximity of cells. Extensive experiments on 11 benchmark datasets demonstrate that SPHENIC outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 4.19%-9.14%, validating its superiority in characterizing complex tissue architectures.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2025

Measure Domain's Gap: A Similar Domain Selection Principle for Multi-Domain Recommendation

Multi-Domain Recommendation (MDR) achieves the desirable recommendation performance by effectively utilizing the transfer information across different domains. Despite the great success, most existing MDR methods adopt a single structure to transfer complex domain-shared knowledge. However, the beneficial transferring information should vary across different domains. When there is knowledge conflict between domains or a domain is of poor quality, unselectively leveraging information from all domains will lead to a serious Negative Transfer Problem (NTP). Therefore, how to effectively model the complex transfer relationships between domains to avoid NTP is still a direction worth exploring. To address these issues, we propose a simple and dynamic Similar Domain Selection Principle (SDSP) for multi-domain recommendation in this paper. SDSP presents the initial exploration of selecting suitable domain knowledge for each domain to alleviate NTP. Specifically, we propose a novel prototype-based domain distance measure to effectively model the complexity relationship between domains. Thereafter, the proposed SDSP can dynamically find similar domains for each domain based on the supervised signals of the domain metrics and the unsupervised distance measure from the learned domain prototype. We emphasize that SDSP is a lightweight method that can be incorporated with existing MDR methods for better performance while not introducing excessive time overheads. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first solution that can explicitly measure domain-level gaps and dynamically select appropriate domains in the MDR field. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Skip-Thinking: Chunk-wise Chain-of-Thought Distillation Enable Smaller Language Models to Reason Better and Faster

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation allows a large language model (LLM) to guide a small language model (SLM) in reasoning tasks. Existing methods train the SLM to learn the long rationale in one iteration, resulting in two issues: 1) Long rationales lead to a large token-level batch size during training, making gradients of core reasoning tokens (i.e., the token will directly affect the correctness of subsequent reasoning) over-smoothed as they contribute a tiny fraction of the rationale. As a result, the SLM converges to sharp minima where it fails to grasp the reasoning logic. 2) The response is slow, as the SLM must generate a long rationale before reaching the answer. Therefore, we propose chunk-wise training (CWT), which uses a heuristic search to divide the rationale into internal semantically coherent chunks and focuses SLM on learning from only one chunk per iteration. In this way, CWT naturally isolates non-reasoning chunks that do not involve the core reasoning token (e.g., summary and transitional chunks) from the SLM learning for reasoning chunks, making the fraction of the core reasoning token increase in the corresponding iteration. Based on CWT, skip-thinking training (STT) is proposed. STT makes the SLM automatically skip non-reasoning medium chunks to reach the answer, improving reasoning speed while maintaining accuracy. We validate our approach on a variety of SLMs and multiple reasoning tasks.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2025

Soft Reasoning Paths for Knowledge Graph Completion

Reasoning paths are reliable information in knowledge graph completion (KGC) in which algorithms can find strong clues of the actual relation between entities. However, in real-world applications, it is difficult to guarantee that computationally affordable paths exist toward all candidate entities. According to our observation, the prediction accuracy drops significantly when paths are absent. To make the proposed algorithm more stable against the missing path circumstances, we introduce soft reasoning paths. Concretely, a specific learnable latent path embedding is concatenated to each relation to help better model the characteristics of the corresponding paths. The combination of the relation and the corresponding learnable embedding is termed a soft path in our paper. By aligning the soft paths with the reasoning paths, a learnable embedding is guided to learn a generalized path representation of the corresponding relation. In addition, we introduce a hierarchical ranking strategy to make full use of information about the entity, relation, path, and soft path to help improve both the efficiency and accuracy of the model. Extensive experimental results illustrate that our algorithm outperforms the compared state-of-the-art algorithms by a notable margin. The code will be made publicly available after the paper is officially accepted.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Knowledge Graph Completion with Relation-Aware Anchor Enhancement

Text-based knowledge graph completion methods take advantage of pre-trained language models (PLM) to enhance intrinsic semantic connections of raw triplets with detailed text descriptions. Typical methods in this branch map an input query (textual descriptions associated with an entity and a relation) and its candidate entities into feature vectors, respectively, and then maximize the probability of valid triples. These methods are gaining promising performance and increasing attention for the rapid development of large language models. According to the property of the language models, the more related and specific context information the input query provides, the more discriminative the resultant embedding will be. In this paper, through observation and validation, we find a neglected fact that the relation-aware neighbors of the head entities in queries could act as effective contexts for more precise link prediction. Driven by this finding, we propose a relation-aware anchor enhanced knowledge graph completion method (RAA-KGC). Specifically, in our method, to provide a reference of what might the target entity be like, we first generate anchor entities within the relation-aware neighborhood of the head entity. Then, by pulling the query embedding towards the neighborhoods of the anchors, it is tuned to be more discriminative for target entity matching. The results of our extensive experiments not only validate the efficacy of RAA-KGC but also reveal that by integrating our relation-aware anchor enhancement strategy, the performance of current leading methods can be notably enhanced without substantial modifications.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Let Synthetic Data Shine: Domain Reassembly and Soft-Fusion for Single Domain Generalization

Single Domain Generalization (SDG) aims to train models that maintain consistent performance across diverse scenarios using data from a single source. While latent diffusion models (LDMs) show promise for augmenting limited source data, our analysis reveals that directly employing synthetic data may not only fail to provide benefits but can actually compromise performance due to substantial feature distribution discrepancies between synthetic and real target domains. To address this issue, we propose Discriminative Domain Reassembly and Soft-Fusion (DRSF), a training framework leveraging synthetic data to improve model generalization. We employ LDMs to produce diverse pseudo-target domain samples and introduce two key modules to handle distribution bias. First, Discriminative Feature Decoupling and Reassembly (DFDR) module uses entropy-guided attention to recalibrate channel-level features, suppressing synthetic noise while preserving semantic consistency. Second, Multi-pseudo-domain Soft Fusion (MDSF) module uses adversarial training with latent-space feature interpolation, creating continuous feature transitions between domains. Extensive SDG experiments on image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation demonstrate that DRSF delivers substantial performance gains with only marginal computational overhead. Notably, DRSF's plug-and-play architecture enables seamless integration with unsupervised domain adaptation paradigms, underscoring its broad applicability to diverse, real-world domain challenges.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Model

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and linguistic reasoning to address complex tasks such as image captioning and visual question answering. While MLLMs demonstrate remarkable versatility, MLLMs appears limited performance on special applications. But tuning MLLMs for downstream tasks encounters two key challenges: Task-Expert Specialization, where distribution shifts between pre-training and target datasets constrain target performance, and Open-World Stabilization, where catastrophic forgetting erases the model general knowledge. In this work, we systematically review recent advancements in MLLM tuning methodologies, classifying them into three paradigms: (I) Selective Tuning, (II) Additive Tuning, and (III) Reparameterization Tuning. Furthermore, we benchmark these tuning strategies across popular MLLM architectures and diverse downstream tasks to establish standardized evaluation analysis and systematic tuning principles. Finally, we highlight several open challenges in this domain and propose future research directions. To facilitate ongoing progress in this rapidly evolving field, we provide a public repository that continuously tracks developments: https://github.com/WenkeHuang/Awesome-MLLM-Tuning.

cs.CL↗