Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Ting Bai

Publications and source records attributed to Ting Bai.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Platoon Coordination and Leader Selection in Mixed Transportation Systems via Dynamic Programming

With the growing penetration of electric trucks, freight transportation is transitioning toward a mixed system comprising both fuel-powered and electric trucks. Enhancing truck platoon formation in such a heterogeneous environment presents new challenges. This paper investigates the hub-based platoon coordination problem in a mixed truck fleet, where the focus is to optimize the trucks' waiting times, charging amounts for electric trucks, and platoon leader assignments. The objective is to maximize the overall platoon revenue of the fleet while accounting for the associated waiting and charging costs. We formulate the problem as a mixed-integer linear program and present a dynamic programming approach to compute its sub-optimal solution efficiently. The proposed method operates in polynomial time, ensuring scalable computational efficiency. Simulation studies involving 1,000 trucks traveling between two hubs in Sweden demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach.

math.OC↗

Memory OS of AI Agent

Large Language Models (LLMs) face a crucial challenge from fixed context windows and inadequate memory management, leading to a severe shortage of long-term memory capabilities and limited personalization in the interactive experience with AI agents. To overcome this challenge, we innovatively propose a Memory Operating System, i.e., MemoryOS, to achieve comprehensive and efficient memory management for AI agents. Inspired by the memory management principles in operating systems, MemoryOS designs a hierarchical storage architecture and consists of four key modules: Memory Storage, Updating, Retrieval, and Generation. Specifically, the architecture comprises three levels of storage units: short-term memory, mid-term memory, and long-term personal memory. Key operations within MemoryOS include dynamic updates between storage units: short-term to mid-term updates follow a dialogue-chain-based FIFO principle, while mid-term to long-term updates use a segmented page organization strategy. Our pioneering MemoryOS enables hierarchical memory integration and dynamic updating. Extensive experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark show an average improvement of 49.11% on F1 and 46.18% on BLEU-1 over the baselines on GPT-4o-mini, showing contextual coherence and personalized memory retention in long conversations. The implementation code is open-sourced at https://github.com/BAI-LAB/MemoryOS.

cs.AI↗

KG-Retriever: Efficient Knowledge Indexing for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

Large language models with retrieval-augmented generation encounter a pivotal challenge in intricate retrieval tasks, e.g., multi-hop question answering, which requires the model to navigate across multiple documents and generate comprehensive responses based on fragmented information. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel Knowledge Graph-based RAG framework with a hierarchical knowledge retriever, termed KG-Retriever. The retrieval indexing in KG-Retriever is constructed on a hierarchical index graph that consists of a knowledge graph layer and a collaborative document layer. The associative nature of graph structures is fully utilized to strengthen intra-document and inter-document connectivity, thereby fundamentally alleviating the information fragmentation problem and meanwhile improving the retrieval efficiency in cross-document retrieval of LLMs. With the coarse-grained collaborative information from neighboring documents and concise information from the knowledge graph, KG-Retriever achieves marked improvements on five public QA datasets, showing the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed RAG framework.

cs.IR↗

A Cooperative Compliance Control Framework for Socially Optimal Mixed Traffic Routing

In mixed traffic environments, where Connected and Autonomed Vehicles (CAVs) coexist with potentially non-cooperative Human-Driven Vehicles (HDVs), the self-centered behavior of human drivers may compromise the efficiency, optimality, and safety of the overall traffic network. In this paper, we propose a Cooperative Compliance Control (CCC) framework for mixed traffic routing, where a Social Planner (SP) optimizes vehicle routes for system-wide optimality while a compliance controller incentivizes human drivers to align their behavior with route guidance from the SP through a "refundable toll" scheme. A key challenge arises from the heterogeneous and unknown response models of different human driver types to these tolls, making it difficult to design a proper controller and achieve desired compliance probabilities over the traffic network. To address this challenge, we employ Control Lyapunov Functions (CLFs) to adaptively correct (learn) crucial components of our compliance probability model online, construct data-driven feedback controllers, and demonstrate that we can achieve the desired compliance probability for HDVs, thereby contributing to the social optimality of the traffic network.

eess.SY↗

Graph Foundation Models: Concepts, Opportunities and Challenges

Foundation models have emerged as critical components in a variety of artificial intelligence applications, and showcase significant success in natural language processing and several other domains. Meanwhile, the field of graph machine learning is witnessing a paradigm transition from shallow methods to more sophisticated deep learning approaches. The capabilities of foundation models in generalization and adaptation motivate graph machine learning researchers to discuss the potential of developing a new graph learning paradigm. This paradigm envisions models that are pre-trained on extensive graph data and can be adapted for various graph tasks. Despite this burgeoning interest, there is a noticeable lack of clear definitions and systematic analyses pertaining to this new domain. To this end, this article introduces the concept of Graph Foundation Models (GFMs), and offers an exhaustive explanation of their key characteristics and underlying technologies. We proceed to classify the existing work related to GFMs into three distinct categories, based on their dependence on graph neural networks and large language models. In addition to providing a thorough review of the current state of GFMs, this article also outlooks potential avenues for future research in this rapidly evolving domain.

cs.LG↗

Invariant debiasing learning for recommendation via biased imputation

Previous debiasing studies utilize unbiased data to make supervision of model training. They suffer from the high trial risks and experimental costs to obtain unbiased data. Recent research attempts to use invariant learning to detach the invariant preference of users for unbiased recommendations in an unsupervised way. However, it faces the drawbacks of low model accuracy and unstable prediction performance due to the losing cooperation with variant preference. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate that invariant learning causes information loss by directly discarding the variant information, which reduces the generalization ability and results in the degradation of model performance in unbiased recommendations. Based on this consideration, we propose a novel lightweight knowledge distillation framework (KDDebias) to automatically learn the unbiased preference of users from both invariant and variant information. Specifically, the variant information is imputed to the invariant user preference in the distance-aware knowledge distillation process. Extensive experiments on three public datasets, i.e., Yahoo!R3, Coat, and MIND, show that with the biased imputation from the variant preference of users, our proposed method achieves significant improvements with less than 50% learning parameters compared to the SOTA unsupervised debiasing model in recommender systems. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/BAI-LAB/KD-Debias.

cs.IR↗

Distributed Charging Coordination for Electric Trucks under Limited Facilities and Travel Uncertainties

In this work, we address the problem of charging coordination between electric trucks and charging stations. The problem arises from the tension between the trucks' nontrivial charging times and the stations' limited charging facilities. Our goal is to reduce the trucks' waiting times at the stations while minimizing individual trucks' operational costs. We propose a distributed coordination framework that relies on computation and communication between the stations and the trucks, and handles uncertainties in travel times and energy consumption. Within the framework, the stations assign a limited number of charging ports to trucks according to the first-come, first-served rule. In addition, each station constructs a waiting time forecast model based on its historical data and provides its estimated waiting times to trucks upon request. When approaching a station, a truck sends its arrival time and estimated arrival-time windows to the nearby station and the distant stations, respectively. The truck then receives the estimated waiting times from these stations in response, and updates its charging plan accordingly while accounting for travel uncertainties. We performed simulation studies for $1,000$ trucks traversing the Swedish road network for $40$ days, using realistic traffic data with travel uncertainties. The results show that our method reduces the average waiting time of the trucks by $46.1\%$ compared to offline charging plans computed by the trucks without coordination and update, and by $33.8\%$ compared to the coordination scheme assuming zero waiting times at distant stations.

eess.SY↗

BaiJia: A Large-Scale Role-Playing Agent Corpus of Chinese Historical Characters

We introduce a comprehensive large-scale role-playing agent corpus, termed BaiJia, that comprises various Chinese historical characters. This corpus is noteworthy for being the pioneering compilation of low-resource data that can be utilized in large language models (LLMs) to engage in AI-driven historical role-playing agents. BaiJia addresses the challenges in terms of fragmented historical textual records in different forms and modalities, integrating various characters' information, including their biographical, literary, family relations, historical events, and so on. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our BaiJia agent corpus in bolstering the role-playing abilities of various foundational LLMs, and promoting the development and assessment of LLMs in the context of historical role-playing tasks. The agent corpus is available at baijia.online.

cs.AI↗

YOLO-CCA: A Context-Based Approach for Traffic Sign Detection

Traffic sign detection is crucial for improving road safety and advancing autonomous driving technologies. Due to the complexity of driving environments, traffic sign detection frequently encounters a range of challenges, including low resolution, limited feature information, and small object sizes. These challenges significantly hinder the effective extraction of features from traffic signs, resulting in false positives and false negatives in object detection. To address these challenges, it is essential to explore more efficient and accurate approaches for traffic sign detection. This paper proposes a context-based algorithm for traffic sign detection, which utilizes YOLOv7 as the baseline model. Firstly, we propose an adaptive local context feature enhancement (LCFE) module using multi-scale dilation convolution to capture potential relationships between the object and surrounding areas. This module supplements the network with additional local context information. Secondly, we propose a global context feature collection (GCFC) module to extract key location features from the entire image scene as global context information. Finally, we build a Transformer-based context collection augmentation (CCA) module to process the collected local context and global context, which achieves superior multi-level feature fusion results for YOLOv7 without bringing in additional complexity. Extensive experimental studies performed on the Tsinghua-Tencent 100K dataset show that the mAP of our method is 92.1\%. Compared with YOLOv7, our approach improves 3.9\% in mAP, while the amount of parameters is reduced by 2.7M. On the CCTSDB2021 dataset the mAP is improved by 0.9\%. These results show that our approach achieves higher detection accuracy with fewer parameters. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/zippiest/yolo-cca}.

eess.IV↗

Emotional RAG: Enhancing Role-Playing Agents through Emotional Retrieval

As LLMs exhibit a high degree of human-like capability, increasing attention has been paid to role-playing research areas in which responses generated by LLMs are expected to mimic human replies. This has promoted the exploration of role-playing agents in various applications, such as chatbots that can engage in natural conversations with users and virtual assistants that can provide personalized support and guidance. The crucial factor in the role-playing task is the effective utilization of character memory, which stores characters' profiles, experiences, and historical dialogues. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology is used to access the related memory to enhance the response generation of role-playing agents. Most existing studies retrieve related information based on the semantic similarity of memory to maintain characters' personalized traits, and few attempts have been made to incorporate the emotional factor in the retrieval argument generation (RAG) of LLMs. Inspired by the Mood-Dependent Memory theory, which indicates that people recall an event better if they somehow reinstate during recall the original emotion they experienced during learning, we propose a novel emotion-aware memory retrieval framework, termed Emotional RAG, which recalls the related memory with consideration of emotional state in role-playing agents. Specifically, we design two kinds of retrieval strategies, i.e., combination strategy and sequential strategy, to incorporate both memory semantic and emotional states during the retrieval process. Extensive experiments on three representative role-playing datasets demonstrate that our Emotional RAG framework outperforms the method without considering the emotional factor in maintaining the personalities of role-playing agents. This provides evidence to further reinforce the Mood-Dependent Memory theory in psychology.

cs.AI↗

Efficient Multi-task Prompt Tuning for Recommendation

With the expansion of business scenarios, real recommender systems are facing challenges in dealing with the constantly emerging new tasks in multi-task learning frameworks. In this paper, we attempt to improve the generalization ability of multi-task recommendations when dealing with new tasks. We find that joint training will enhance the performance of the new task but always negatively impact existing tasks in most multi-task learning methods. Besides, such a re-training mechanism with new tasks increases the training costs, limiting the generalization ability of multi-task recommendation models. Based on this consideration, we aim to design a suitable sharing mechanism among different tasks while maintaining joint optimization efficiency in new task learning. A novel two-stage prompt-tuning MTL framework (MPT-Rec) is proposed to address task irrelevance and training efficiency problems in multi-task recommender systems. Specifically, we disentangle the task-specific and task-sharing information in the multi-task pre-training stage, then use task-aware prompts to transfer knowledge from other tasks to the new task effectively. By freezing parameters in the pre-training tasks, MPT-Rec solves the negative impacts that may be brought by the new task and greatly reduces the training costs. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed multi-task learning framework. MPT-Rec achieves the best performance compared to the SOTA multi-task learning method. Besides, it maintains comparable model performance but vastly improves the training efficiency (i.e., with up to 10% parameters in the full training way) in the new task learning.

cs.IR↗

Learning Social Graph for Inactive User Recommendation

Social relations have been widely incorporated into recommender systems to alleviate data sparsity problem. However, raw social relations don't always benefit recommendation due to their inferior quality and insufficient quantity, especially for inactive users, whose interacted items are limited. In this paper, we propose a novel social recommendation method called LSIR (\textbf{L}earning \textbf{S}ocial Graph for \textbf{I}nactive User \textbf{R}ecommendation) that learns an optimal social graph structure for social recommendation, especially for inactive users. LSIR recursively aggregates user and item embeddings to collaboratively encode item and user features. Then, graph structure learning (GSL) is employed to refine the raw user-user social graph, by removing noisy edges and adding new edges based on the enhanced embeddings. Meanwhile, mimic learning is implemented to guide active users in mimicking inactive users during model training, which improves the construction of new edges for inactive users. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that LSIR achieves significant improvements of up to 129.58\% on NDCG in inactive user recommendation. Our code is available at~\url{https://github.com/liun-online/LSIR}.

cs.SI↗

Distributed Charging Coordination of Electric Trucks with Limited Charging Resources

Electric trucks usually need to charge their batteries during long-range delivery missions, and the charging times are often nontrivial. As charging resources are limited, waiting times for some trucks can be prolonged at certain stations. To facilitate the efficient operation of electric trucks, we propose a distributed charging coordination framework. Within the scheme, the charging stations provide waiting estimates to incoming trucks upon request and assign charging ports according to the first-come, first-served rule. Based on the updated information, the individual trucks compute where and how long to charge whenever approaching a charging station in order to complete their delivery missions timely and cost-effectively. We perform empirical studies for trucks traveling over the Swedish road network and compare our scheme with the one where charging plans are computed offline, assuming unlimited charging facilities. It is shown that the proposed scheme outperforms the offline approach at the expense of little communication overhead.

eess.SY↗

Rollout-Based Charging Strategy for Electric Trucks with Hours-of-Service Regulations (Extended Version)

Freight drivers of electric trucks need to design charging strategies for where and how long to recharge the truck in order to complete delivery missions on time. Moreover, the charging strategies should be aligned with drivers' driving and rest time regulations, known as hours-of-service (HoS) regulations. This letter studies the optimal charging problems of electric trucks with delivery deadlines under HoS constraints. We assume that a collection of charging and rest stations is given along a pre-planned route with known detours and that the problem data are deterministic. The goal is to minimize the total cost associated with the charging and rest decisions during the entire trip. This problem is formulated as a mixed integer program with bilinear constraints, resulting in a high computational load when applying exact solution approaches. To obtain real-time solutions, we develop a rollout-based approximate scheme, which scales linearly with the number of stations while offering solid performance guarantees. We perform simulation studies over the Swedish road network based on realistic truck data. The results show that our rollout-based approach provides near-optimal solutions to the problem in various conditions while cutting the computational time drastically.

eess.SY↗

EulerNet: Adaptive Feature Interaction Learning via Euler's Formula for CTR Prediction

Learning effective high-order feature interactions is very crucial in the CTR prediction task. However, it is very time-consuming to calculate high-order feature interactions with massive features in online e-commerce platforms. Most existing methods manually design a maximal order and further filter out the useless interactions from them. Although they reduce the high computational costs caused by the exponential growth of high-order feature combinations, they still suffer from the degradation of model capability due to the suboptimal learning of the restricted feature orders. The solution to maintain the model capability and meanwhile keep it efficient is a technical challenge, which has not been adequately addressed. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive feature interaction learning model, named as EulerNet, in which the feature interactions are learned in a complex vector space by conducting space mapping according to Euler's formula. EulerNet converts the exponential powers of feature interactions into simple linear combinations of the modulus and phase of the complex features, making it possible to adaptively learn the high-order feature interactions in an efficient way. Furthermore, EulerNet incorporates the implicit and explicit feature interactions into a unified architecture, which achieves the mutual enhancement and largely boosts the model capabilities. Such a network can be fully learned from data, with no need of pre-designed form or order for feature interactions. Extensive experiments conducted on three public datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach. Our code is available at: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/EulerNet.

cs.IR↗

Information Retrieval Meets Large Language Models: A Strategic Report from Chinese IR Community

The research field of Information Retrieval (IR) has evolved significantly, expanding beyond traditional search to meet diverse user information needs. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in text understanding, generation, and knowledge inference, opening up exciting avenues for IR research. LLMs not only facilitate generative retrieval but also offer improved solutions for user understanding, model evaluation, and user-system interactions. More importantly, the synergistic relationship among IR models, LLMs, and humans forms a new technical paradigm that is more powerful for information seeking. IR models provide real-time and relevant information, LLMs contribute internal knowledge, and humans play a central role of demanders and evaluators to the reliability of information services. Nevertheless, significant challenges exist, including computational costs, credibility concerns, domain-specific limitations, and ethical considerations. To thoroughly discuss the transformative impact of LLMs on IR research, the Chinese IR community conducted a strategic workshop in April 2023, yielding valuable insights. This paper provides a summary of the workshop's outcomes, including the rethinking of IR's core values, the mutual enhancement of LLMs and IR, the proposal of a novel IR technical paradigm, and open challenges.

cs.IR↗

Large-Scale Multi-Fleet Platoon Coordination: A Dynamic Programming Approach

Truck platooning is a promising technology that enables trucks to travel in formations with small inter-vehicle distances for improved aerodynamics and fuel economy. The real-world transportation system includes a vast number of trucks owned by different fleet owners, for example, carriers. To fully exploit the benefits of platooning, efficient dispatching strategies that facilitate the platoon formations across fleets are required. This paper presents a distributed framework for addressing multi-fleet platoon coordination in large transportation networks, where each truck has a fixed route and aims to maximize its own fleet's platooning profit by scheduling its waiting times at hubs. The waiting time scheduling problem of individual trucks is formulated as a distributed optimal control problem with continuous decision space and a reward function that takes non-zero values only at discrete points. By suitably discretizing the decision and state spaces, we show that the problem can be solved exactly by dynamic programming, without loss of optimality. Finally, a realistic simulation study is conducted over the Swedish road network with $5,000$ trucks to evaluate the profit and efficiency of the approach. The simulation study shows that, compared to single-fleet platooning, multi-fleet platooning provided by our method achieves around $15$ times higher monetary profit and increases the CO$_2$ emission reductions from $0.4\%$ to $5.5\%$. In addition, it shows that the developed approach can be carried out in real-time and thus is suitable for platoon coordination in large transportation systems.

eess.SY↗

Directed Acyclic Graph Factorization Machines for CTR Prediction via Knowledge Distillation

With the growth of high-dimensional sparse data in web-scale recommender systems, the computational cost to learn high-order feature interaction in CTR prediction task largely increases, which limits the use of high-order interaction models in real industrial applications. Some recent knowledge distillation based methods transfer knowledge from complex teacher models to shallow student models for accelerating the online model inference. However, they suffer from the degradation of model accuracy in knowledge distillation process. It is challenging to balance the efficiency and effectiveness of the shallow student models. To address this problem, we propose a Directed Acyclic Graph Factorization Machine (KD-DAGFM) to learn the high-order feature interactions from existing complex interaction models for CTR prediction via Knowledge Distillation. The proposed lightweight student model DAGFM can learn arbitrary explicit feature interactions from teacher networks, which achieves approximately lossless performance and is proved by a dynamic programming algorithm. Besides, an improved general model KD-DAGFM+ is shown to be effective in distilling both explicit and implicit feature interactions from any complex teacher model. Extensive experiments are conducted on four real-world datasets, including a large-scale industrial dataset from WeChat platform with billions of feature dimensions. KD-DAGFM achieves the best performance with less than 21.5% FLOPs of the state-of-the-art method on both online and offline experiments, showing the superiority of DAGFM to deal with the industrial scale data in CTR prediction task. Our implementation code is available at: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DAGFM.

cs.IR↗