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Qintian Guo

Publications and source records attributed to Qintian Guo.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

M$^3$Exam: Benchmarking Multimodal Memory for Realistic User-Agent Interactions

Language agents are increasingly deployed over accumulating multimodal information, yet existing benchmarks assume a human-human form with sparse visuals and straightforward content, evaluating neither reasoning over authentic multimodal file interaction nor the interpretation of concealed user information. We therefore introduce M$^3$Exam, a query-centric multimodal conversational memory benchmark built on realistic user-agent interaction, with multi-dimensional evaluation spanning cross-modal grounding and implicit information inference. Benchmarking MLLMs and memory systems reveals persistent gaps in cross-modal grounding, cross session reasoning, and the efficiency cost of accumulating multimodal context. We further propose M$^3$Proctor, a multimodal memory method that detects query modality bias and consumes raw visual sources only on demand, improving accuracy by 13% while cutting index-construction time and retrieved tokens by over 70%.

cs.CL

Cardinality Estimation for High Dimensional Similarity Queries with Adaptive Bucket Probing

In this work, we address the problem of cardinality estimation for similarity search in high-dimensional spaces. Our goal is to design a framework that is lightweight, easy to construct, and capable of providing accurate estimates with satisfying online efficiency. We leverage locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) to partition the vector space while preserving distance proximity. Building on this, we adopt the principles of classical multi-probe LSH to adaptively explore neighboring buckets, accounting for distance thresholds of varying magnitudes. To improve online efficiency, we employ progressive sampling to reduce the number of distance computations and utilize asymmetric distance computation in product quantization to accelerate distance calculations in high-dimensional spaces. In addition to handling static datasets, our framework includes updating algorithm designed to efficiently support large-scale dynamic scenarios of data updates.Experiments demonstrate that our methods can accurately estimate the cardinality of similarity queries, yielding satisfying efficiency.

cs.DB

Memory in the LLM Era: Modular Architectures and Strategies in a Unified Framework

Memory emerges as the core module in the large language model (LLM)-based agents for long-horizon complex tasks (e.g., multi-turn dialogue, game playing, scientific discovery), where memory can enable knowledge accumulation, iterative reasoning and self-evolution. A number of memory methods have been proposed in the literature. However, these methods have not been systematically and comprehensively compared under the same experimental settings. In this paper, we first summarize a unified framework that covers existing representative agent memory methods from a high-level perspective. We then extensively compare representative agent memory methods on two long-term conversational benchmarks and an agentic memory benchmark, and examine the effectiveness of representative methods, providing a thorough analysis of those methods. As a byproduct of our experimental analysis, we also design a new memory method by exploiting modules in the existing methods, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, based on these findings, we offer promising future research opportunities. We believe that a deeper understanding of the behavior of existing methods can provide valuable new insights for future research.

cs.CL

Breaking the Static Graph: Context-Aware Traversal for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Recent advances in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have shifted from simple vector similarity to structure-aware approaches like HippoRAG, which leverage Knowledge Graphs (KGs) and Personalized PageRank (PPR) to capture multi-hop dependencies. However, these methods suffer from a "Static Graph Fallacy": they rely on fixed transition probabilities determined during indexing. This rigidity ignores the query-dependent nature of edge relevance, causing semantic drift where random walks are diverted into high-degree "hub" nodes before reaching critical downstream evidence. Consequently, models often achieve high partial recall but fail to retrieve the complete evidence chain required for multi-hop queries. To address this, we propose CatRAG, Context-Aware Traversal for robust RAG, a framework that builds on the HippoRAG 2 architecture and transforms the static KG into a query-adaptive navigation structure. We introduce a multi-faceted framework to steer the random walk: (1) Symbolic Anchoring, which injects weak entity constraints to regularize the random walk; (2) Query-Aware Dynamic Edge Weighting, which dynamically modulates graph structure, to prune irrelevant paths while amplifying those aligned with the query's intent; and (3) Key-Fact Passage Weight Enhancement, a cost-efficient bias that structurally anchors the random walk to likely evidence. Experiments across four multi-hop benchmarks demonstrate that CatRAG consistently outperforms state of the art baselines. Our analysis reveals that while standard Recall metrics show modest gains, CatRAG achieves substantial improvements in reasoning completeness, the capacity to recover the entire evidence path without gaps. These results reveal that our approach effectively bridges the gap between retrieving partial context and enabling fully grounded reasoning. Resources are available at https://github.com/kwunhang/CatRAG.

cs.CL

ACGraph: An Efficient Asynchronous Out-of-Core Graph Processing Framework

Graphs are a ubiquitous data structure in diverse domains such as machine learning, social networks, and data mining. As real-world graphs continue to grow beyond the memory capacity of single machines, out-of-core graph processing systems have emerged as a viable solution. Yet, existing systems that rely on strictly synchronous, iteration-by-iteration execution incur significant overheads. In particular, their scheduling mechanisms lead to I/O inefficiencies, stemming from read and work amplification, and induce costly synchronization stalls hindering sustained disk utilization. To overcome these limitations, we present {\em ACGraph}, a novel asynchronous graph processing system optimized for SSD-based environments with constrained memory resources. ACGraph employs a dynamic, block-centric priority scheduler that adjusts in real time based on workload, along with an online asynchronous worklist that minimizes redundant disk accesses by efficiently reusing active blocks in memory. Moreover, ACGraph unifies asynchronous I/O with computation in a pipelined execution model that maintains sustained I/O activation, and leverages a highly optimized hybrid storage format to expedite access to low-degree vertices. We implement popular graph algorithms, such as Breadth-First Search (BFS), Weakly Connected Components (WCC), personalized PageRank (PPR), PageRank (PR), and $k$-core on ACGraph and demonstrate that ACGraph substantially outperforms state-of-the-art out-of-core graph processing systems in both runtime and I/O efficiency.

cs.DB

LiCoMemory: Lightweight and Cognitive Agentic Memory for Efficient Long-Term Reasoning

Large Language Model (LLM) agents exhibit remarkable conversational and reasoning capabilities but remain constrained by limited context windows and the lack of persistent memory. Recent efforts address these limitations via external memory architectures, often employing graph-based representations, yet most adopt flat, entangled structures that intertwine semantics with topology, leading to redundant representations, unstructured retrieval, and degraded efficiency and accuracy. To resolve these issues, we propose LiCoMemory, an end-to-end agentic memory framework for real-time updating and retrieval, which introduces CogniGraph, a lightweight hierarchical graph that utilizes entities and relations as semantic indexing layers, and employs temporal and hierarchy-aware search with integrated reranking for adaptive and coherent knowledge retrieval. Experiments on long-term dialogue benchmarks, LoCoMo and LongMemEval, show that LiCoMemory not only outperforms established baselines in temporal reasoning, multi-session consistency, and retrieval efficiency, but also notably reduces update latency. Our official code and data are available at https://github.com/EverM0re/LiCoMemory.

cs.IR

Contextualized Token Discrimination for Speech Search Query Correction

Query spelling correction is an important function of modern search engines since it effectively helps users express their intentions clearly. With the growing popularity of speech search driven by Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, this paper introduces a novel method named Contextualized Token Discrimination (CTD) to conduct effective speech query correction. In CTD, we first employ BERT to generate token-level contextualized representations and then construct a composition layer to enhance semantic information. Finally, we produce the correct query according to the aggregated token representation, correcting the incorrect tokens by comparing the original token representations and the contextualized representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method across all metrics, and we further present a new benchmark dataset with erroneous ASR transcriptions to offer comprehensive evaluations for audio query correction.

cs.SD

EraRAG: Efficient and Incremental Retrieval Augmented Generation for Growing Corpora

Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Graph-RAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) by structuring retrieval over an external corpus. However, existing approaches typically assume a static corpus, requiring expensive full-graph reconstruction whenever new documents arrive, limiting their scalability in dynamic, evolving environments. To address these limitations, we introduce EraRAG, a novel multi-layered Graph-RAG framework that supports efficient and scalable dynamic updates. Our method leverages hyperplane-based Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to partition and organize the original corpus into hierarchical graph structures, enabling efficient and localized insertions of new data without disrupting the existing topology. The design eliminates the need for retraining or costly recomputation while preserving high retrieval accuracy and low latency. Experiments on large-scale benchmarks demonstrate that EraRag achieves up to an order of magnitude reduction in update time and token consumption compared to existing Graph-RAG systems, while providing superior accuracy performance. This work offers a practical path forward for RAG systems that must operate over continually growing corpora, bridging the gap between retrieval efficiency and adaptability. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/EverM0re/EraRAG-Official.

cs.IR

Optimal Approximate Matrix Multiplication over Sliding Window

Matrix multiplication is a core operation in numerous applications, yet its exact computation becomes prohibitively expensive as data scales, especially in streaming environments where timeliness is critical. In many real-world scenarios, data arrives continuously, making it essential to focus on recent information via sliding windows. While existing approaches offer approximate solutions, they often suffer from suboptimal space complexities when extended to the sliding-window setting. In this work, we introduce SO-COD, a novel algorithm for approximate matrix multiplication (AMM) in the sliding-window streaming setting, where only the most recent data is retained for computation. Inspired by frequency estimation over sliding windows, our method tracks significant contributions, referred to as snapshots, from incoming data and efficiently updates them as the window advances. Given matrices \(\boldsymbol{X} \in \mathbb{R}^{d_x \times n}\) and \(\boldsymbol{Y} \in \mathbb{R}^{d_y \times n}\) for computing \(\boldsymbol{X} \boldsymbol{Y}^T\), we analyze two data settings. In the \emph{normalized} setting, where each column of the input matrices has a unit \(L_2\) norm, SO-COD achieves an optimal space complexity of \( O\left(\frac{d_x+d_y}ε\right) \). In the \emph{unnormalized} setting, where the square of column norms vary within a bounded range \([1, R]\), we show that the space requirement is \( O\left(\frac{d_x+d_y}ε\log R\right) \), which matches the theoretical lower bound for an \(ε\)-approximation guarantee. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that SO-COD effectively balances space cost and approximation error, making it a promising solution for large-scale, dynamic streaming matrix multiplication.

cs.DS

Personalized PageRank on Evolving Graphs with an Incremental Index-Update Scheme

{\em Personalized PageRank (PPR)} stands as a fundamental proximity measure in graph mining. Since computing an exact SSPPR query answer is prohibitive, most existing solutions turn to approximate queries with guarantees. The state-of-the-art solutions for approximate SSPPR queries are index-based and mainly focus on static graphs, while real-world graphs are usually dynamically changing. However, existing index-update schemes can not achieve a sub-linear update time. Motivated by this, we present an efficient indexing scheme to maintain indexed random walks in expected $O(1)$ time after each graph update. To reduce the space consumption, we further propose a new sampling scheme to remove the auxiliary data structure for vertices while still supporting $O(1)$ index update cost on evolving graphs. Extensive experiments show that our update scheme achieves orders of magnitude speed-up on update performance over existing index-based dynamic schemes without sacrificing the query efficiency.

cs.DB