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Xiaofei Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaofei Xu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Agentic Metaverse Services: A New As-a-Service Paradigm

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is reconstructing the digital virtual world, upgrading agents through enhancing their abilities in autonomous learning, multi-modal interaction, content generation, and collaborative decision-making. In particular, the shift from conversational chatbots to agentic AI, the most recent significant technical breakthrough of GenAI, has brought a new form of services, agentic services and Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS), in which the agent's abilities are encapsulated, such as perception, decision-making, execution, collaboration, and content generation, to provide the customized agent services to users. The metaverse is a virtual ecosystem for human life, work, creation, and entertainment, supported by the new generation of digital technologies. Through combining agentic services and the metaverse, an Agentic Metaverse Service, denoted as AMServ, is produced for metaverse business processing, as a new form of metaverse service. The AaaS in the metaverse environment, denoted as Meta-AaaS, as an approach to realize AMServ, has become a new paradigm of agentic services and service computing. This paper overviews the evolution and new features of agents and services empowered by GenAI, reveals the roles and principles of agentic services in the metaverse environment, presents the forms, characteristics, and principles of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS, discusses the typical application examples of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS, and finally points out the new tendencies and research directions of the AMServ and the Meta-AaaS. The AMServ and the Meta-AaaS will bring great opportunities to human society and services in the AI era, and promote the rapid development of emerging service industries in the future.

cs.SE

Adaptive Polynomial Filtering for Hermitian Interior Eigenproblems: Convergence Analysis

Interior eigenvalue problems for large-scale sparse Hermitian matrices are fundamental in computational science. We propose an adaptive polynomial filtering strategy based on Chebyshev expansion of a step function, integrated into a filtered subspace iteration framework. We establish pointwise convergence bounds in both undamped and damped settings and incorporate an enhanced spurious eigenvalue detection technique to improve efficiency and robustness. At the implementation level, we employ MaSpMM to accelerate the polynomial filtering step. Numerical results demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed method compared with classical approaches.

math.NA

Enhance Large Language Models as Recommendation Systems with Collaborative Filtering

As powerful tools in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have been leveraged for crafting recommendations to achieve precise alignment with user preferences and elevate the quality of the recommendations. The existing approaches implement both non-tuning and tuning strategies. Compared to following the tuning strategy, the approaches following the non-tuning strategy avoid the relatively costly, time-consuming, and expertise-requiring process of further training pre-trained LLMs on task-specific datasets, but they suffer the issue of not having the task-specific business or local enterprise knowledge. To the best of our knowledge, none of the existing approaches following the non-tuning strategy explicitly integrates collaborative filtering, one of the most successful recommendation techniques. This study aims to fill the gap by proposing critique-based LLMs as recommendation systems (Critic-LLM-RS). For our purpose, we train a separate machine-learning model called Critic that implements collaborative filtering for recommendations by learning from the interactions between many users and items. The Critic provides critiques to LLMs to significantly refine the recommendations. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of Critic-LLM-RS on real datasets.

cs.IR

Tree of Agents: Improving Long-Context Capabilities of Large Language Models through Multi-Perspective Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) face persistent challenges when handling long-context tasks, most notably the lost in the middle issue, where information located in the middle of a long input tends to be underutilized. Some existing methods that reduce input have the risk of discarding key information, while others that extend context windows often lead to attention dispersion. To address these limitations, we propose Tree of Agents (TOA), a multi-agent reasoning framework that segments the input into chunks processed by independent agents. Each agent generates its local cognition, then agents dynamically exchange information for collaborative reasoning along tree-structured paths. TOA enables agents to probe different reasoning orders for multi-perspective understanding, effectively mitigating position bias and reducing hallucinations. To improve processing efficiency, we incorporate prefix-hash caching and adaptive pruning strategies, achieving significant performance improvements with comparable API overhead. Experiments show that TOA, powered by compact LLaMA3.1-8B, significantly outperforms multiple baselines and demonstrates comparable performance to the latest and much larger commercial models, such as Gemini1.5-pro, on various long-context tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/Aireduce952/Tree-of-Agents.

cs.AI

Finding Core Balanced Modules in Statistically Validated Stock Networks

Traditional threshold-based stock networks suffer from subjective parameter selection and inherent limitations: they constrain relationships to binary representations, failing to capture both correlation strength and negative dependencies. To address this, we introduce statistically validated correlation networks that retain only statistically significant correlations via a rigorous t-test of Pearson coefficients. We then propose a novel structure termed the largest strong correlation balanced module (LSCBM), defined as the maximum-size group of stocks with structural balance (i.e., positive edge-sign products for all triplets) and strong pairwise correlations. This balance condition ensures stable relationships, thus facilitating potential hedging opportunities through negative edges. Theoretically, within a random signed graph model, we establish LSCBM's asymptotic existence, size scaling, and multiplicity under various parameter regimes. To detect LSCBM efficiently, we develop MaxBalanceCore, a heuristic algorithm that leverages network sparsity. Simulations validate its efficiency, demonstrating scalability to networks of up to 10,000 nodes within tens of seconds. Empirical analysis demonstrates that LSCBM identifies core market subsystems that dynamically reorganize in response to economic shifts and crises. In the Chinese stock market (2013-2024), LSCBM's size surges during high-stress periods (e.g., the 2015 crash) and contracts during stable or fragmented regimes, while its composition rotates annually across dominant sectors (e.g., Industrials and Financials).

econ.GN

Towards AI-Native RAN: An Operator's Perspective of 6G Day 1 Standardization

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) has become the most certain and prominent feature of 6G mobile networks. Unlike 5G, where AI/ML was not natively integrated but rather an add-on feature over existing architecture, 6G shall incorporate AI from the onset to address its complexity and support ubiquitous AI applications. Based on our extensive mobile network operation and standardization experience from 2G to 5G, this paper explores the design and standardization principles of AI-Native radio access networks (RAN) for 6G, with a particular focus on its critical Day 1 architecture, functionalities and capabilities. We investigate the framework of AI-Native RAN and present its three essential capabilities to shed some light on the standardization direction; namely, AI-driven RAN processing/optimization/automation, reliable AI lifecycle management (LCM), and AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) provisioning. The standardization of AI-Native RAN, in particular the Day 1 features, including an AI-Native 6G RAN architecture, were proposed. For validation, a large-scale field trial with over 5000 5G-A base stations have been built and delivered significant improvements in average air interface latency, root cause identification, and network energy consumption with the proposed architecture and the supporting AI functions. This paper aims to provide a Day 1 framework for 6G AI-Native RAN standardization design, balancing technical innovation with practical deployment.

cs.NI

Generating Grounded Responses to Counter Misinformation via Learning Efficient Fine-Grained Critiques

Fake news and misinformation poses a significant threat to society, making efficient mitigation essential. However, manual fact-checking is costly and lacks scalability. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promise in automating counter-response generation to mitigate misinformation, but a critical challenge lies in their tendency to hallucinate non-factual information. Existing models mainly rely on LLM self-feedback to reduce hallucination, but this approach is computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose MisMitiFact, Misinformation Mitigation grounded in Facts, an efficient framework for generating fact-grounded counter-responses at scale. MisMitiFact generates simple critique feedback to refine LLM outputs, ensuring responses are grounded in evidence. We develop lightweight, fine-grained critique models trained on data sourced from readily available fact-checking sites to identify and correct errors in key elements such as numerals, entities, and topics in LLM generations. Experiments show that MisMitiFact generates counter-responses of comparable quality to LLMs' self-feedback while using significantly smaller critique models. Importantly, it achieves ~5x increase in feedback generation throughput, making it highly suitable for cost-effective, large-scale misinformation mitigation. Code and LLM prompt templates are at https://github.com/xxfwin/MisMitiFact.

cs.CL

COutfitGAN: Learning to Synthesize Compatible Outfits Supervised by Silhouette Masks and Fashion Styles

How to recommend outfits has gained considerable attention in both academia and industry in recent years. Many studies have been carried out regarding fashion compatibility learning, to determine whether the fashion items in an outfit are compatible or not. These methods mainly focus on evaluating the compatibility of existing outfits and rarely consider applying such knowledge to 'design' new fashion items. We propose the new task of generating complementary and compatible fashion items based on an arbitrary number of given fashion items. In particular, given some fashion items that can make up an outfit, the aim of this paper is to synthesize photo-realistic images of other, complementary, fashion items that are compatible with the given ones. To achieve this, we propose an outfit generation framework, referred to as COutfitGAN, which includes a pyramid style extractor, an outfit generator, a UNet-based real/fake discriminator, and a collocation discriminator. To train and evaluate this framework, we collected a large-scale fashion outfit dataset with over 200K outfits and 800K fashion items from the Internet. Extensive experiments show that COutfitGAN outperforms other baselines in terms of similarity, authenticity, and compatibility measurements.

cs.CV

Teaching Large Language Models Number-Focused Headline Generation With Key Element Rationales

Number-focused headline generation is a summarization task requiring both high textual quality and precise numerical accuracy, which poses a unique challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing studies in the literature focus only on either textual quality or numerical reasoning and thus are inadequate to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel chain-of-thought framework for using rationales comprising key elements of the Topic, Entities, and Numerical reasoning (TEN) in news articles to enhance the capability for LLMs to generate topic-aligned high-quality texts with precise numerical accuracy. Specifically, a teacher LLM is employed to generate TEN rationales as supervision data, which are then used to teach and fine-tune a student LLM. Our approach teaches the student LLM automatic generation of rationales with enhanced capability for numerical reasoning and topic-aligned numerical headline generation. Experiments show that our approach achieves superior performance in both textual quality and numerical accuracy.

cs.CL

Learning to Synthesize Compatible Fashion Items Using Semantic Alignment and Collocation Classification: An Outfit Generation Framework

The field of fashion compatibility learning has attracted great attention from both the academic and industrial communities in recent years. Many studies have been carried out for fashion compatibility prediction, collocated outfit recommendation, artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled compatible fashion design, and related topics. In particular, AI-enabled compatible fashion design can be used to synthesize compatible fashion items or outfits in order to improve the design experience for designers or the efficacy of recommendations for customers. However, previous generative models for collocated fashion synthesis have generally focused on the image-to-image translation between fashion items of upper and lower clothing. In this paper, we propose a novel outfit generation framework, i.e., OutfitGAN, with the aim of synthesizing a set of complementary items to compose an entire outfit, given one extant fashion item and reference masks of target synthesized items. OutfitGAN includes a semantic alignment module, which is responsible for characterizing the mapping correspondence between the existing fashion items and the synthesized ones, to improve the quality of the synthesized images, and a collocation classification module, which is used to improve the compatibility of a synthesized outfit. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed models, we built a large-scale dataset consisting of 20,000 fashion outfits. Extensive experimental results on this dataset show that our OutfitGAN can synthesize photo-realistic outfits and outperform state-of-the-art methods in terms of similarity, authenticity and compatibility measurements.

cs.LG

Enhancing the Traditional Chinese Medicine Capabilities of Large Language Model through Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Although large language models perform well in understanding and responding to user intent, their performance in specialized domains such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) remains limited due to lack of expertise. In addition, high-quality data related to TCM is scarce and difficult to obtain, making large language models ineffective in handling TCM tasks. In this work, we propose a framework to improve the performance of large language models for TCM tasks using only a small amount of data. First, we use medical case data for supervised fine-tuning of the large model, making it initially capable of performing TCM tasks. Subsequently, we further optimize the model's performance using reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) to align it with the preference data. The ablation study also demonstrated the performance gain is attributed to both supervised fine-tuning and the direct policy optimization. The experimental results show that the model trained with a small amount of data achieves a significant performance improvement on a representative TCM task.

cs.CL

Harnessing Network Effect for Fake News Mitigation: Selecting Debunkers via Self-Imitation Learning

This study aims to minimize the influence of fake news on social networks by deploying debunkers to propagate true news. This is framed as a reinforcement learning problem, where, at each stage, one user is selected to propagate true news. A challenging issue is episodic reward where the "net" effect of selecting individual debunkers cannot be discerned from the interleaving information propagation on social networks, and only the collective effect from mitigation efforts can be observed. Existing Self-Imitation Learning (SIL) methods have shown promise in learning from episodic rewards, but are ill-suited to the real-world application of fake news mitigation because of their poor sample efficiency. To learn a more effective debunker selection policy for fake news mitigation, this study proposes NAGASIL - Negative sampling and state Augmented Generative Adversarial Self-Imitation Learning, which consists of two improvements geared towards fake news mitigation: learning from negative samples, and an augmented state representation to capture the "real" environment state by integrating the current observed state with the previous state-action pairs from the same campaign. Experiments on two social networks show that NAGASIL yields superior performance to standard GASIL and state-of-the-art fake news mitigation models.

cs.SI

Who Should I Engage with At What Time? A Missing Event Aware Temporal Graph Neural Network

Temporal graph neural network has recently received significant attention due to its wide application scenarios, such as bioinformatics, knowledge graphs, and social networks. There are some temporal graph neural networks that achieve remarkable results. However, these works focus on future event prediction and are performed under the assumption that all historical events are observable. In real-world applications, events are not always observable, and estimating event time is as important as predicting future events. In this paper, we propose MTGN, a missing event-aware temporal graph neural network, which uniformly models evolving graph structure and timing of events to support predicting what will happen in the future and when it will happen.MTGN models the dynamic of both observed and missing events as two coupled temporal point processes, thereby incorporating the effects of missing events into the network. Experimental results on several real-world temporal graphs demonstrate that MTGN significantly outperforms existing methods with up to 89% and 112% more accurate time and link prediction. Code can be found on https://github.com/HIT-ICES/TNNLS-MTGN.

cs.LG

Identifying Cost-effective Debunkers for Multi-stage Fake News Mitigation Campaigns

Online social networks have become a fertile ground for spreading fake news. Methods to automatically mitigate fake news propagation have been proposed. Some studies focus on selecting top k influential users on social networks as debunkers, but the social influence of debunkers may not translate to wide mitigation information propagation as expected. Other studies assume a given set of debunkers and focus on optimizing intensity for debunkers to publish true news, but as debunkers are fixed, even if with high social influence and/or high intensity to post true news, the true news may not reach users exposed to fake news and therefore mitigation effect may be limited. In this paper, we propose the multi-stage fake news mitigation campaign where debunkers are dynamically selected within budget at each stage. We formulate it as a reinforcement learning problem and propose a greedy algorithm optimized by predicting future states so that the debunkers can be selected in a way that maximizes the overall mitigation effect. We conducted extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world social networks and show that our solution outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of mitigation effect.

cs.SI

Requirements Elicitation in Cognitive Service for Recommendation

Nowadays, cognitive service provides more interactive way to understand users' requirements via human-machine conversation. In other words, it has to capture users' requirements from their utterance and respond them with the relevant and suitable service resources. To this end, two phases must be applied: I.Sequence planning and Real-time detection of user requirement, II.Service resource selection and Response generation. The existing works ignore the potential connection between these two phases. To model their connection, Two-Phase Requirement Elicitation Method is proposed. For the phase I, this paper proposes a user requirement elicitation framework (URef) to plan a potential requirement sequence grounded on user profile and personal knowledge base before the conversation. In addition, it can also predict user's true requirement and judge whether the requirement is completed based on the user's utterance during the conversation. For the phase II, this paper proposes a response generation model based on attention, SaRSNet. It can select the appropriate resource (i.e. knowledge triple) in line with the requirement predicted by URef, and then generates a suitable response for recommendation. The experimental results on the open dataset \emph{DuRecDial} have been significantly improved compared to the baseline, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

cs.AI

Data Correction and Evolution Analysis of the ProgrammableWeb Service Ecosystem

The evolution analysis on Web service ecosystems has become a critical problem as the frequency of service changes on the Internet increases rapidly. Developers need to understand these evolution patterns to assist in their decision-making on service selection. ProgrammableWeb is a popular Web service ecosystem on which several evolution analyses have been conducted in the literature. However, the existing studies have ignored the quality issues of the ProgrammableWeb dataset and the issue of service obsolescence. In this study, we first report the quality issues identified in the ProgrammableWeb dataset from our empirical study. Then, we propose a novel method to correct the relevant evolution analysis data by estimating the life cycle of application programming interfaces (APIs) and mashups. We also reveal how to use three different dynamic network models in the service ecosystem evolution analysis based on the corrected ProgrammableWeb dataset. Our experimental experience iterates the quality issues of the original ProgrammableWeb and highlights several research opportunities.

cs.SE

DySR: A Dynamic Representation Learning and Aligning based Model for Service Bundle Recommendation

An increasing number and diversity of services are available, which result in significant challenges to effective reuse service during requirement satisfaction. There have been many service bundle recommendation studies and achieved remarkable results. However, there is still plenty of room for improvement in the performance of these methods. The fundamental problem with these studies is that they ignore the evolution of services over time and the representation gap between services and requirements. In this paper, we propose a dynamic representation learning and aligning based model called DySR to tackle these issues. DySR eliminates the representation gap between services and requirements by learning a transformation function and obtains service representations in an evolving social environment through dynamic graph representation learning. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset from ProgrammableWeb show that DySR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in commonly used evaluation metrics, improving $F1@5$ from $36.1\%$ to $69.3\%$.

cs.AI

Online Deployment Algorithms for Microservice Systems with Complex Dependencies

Cloud and edge computing have been widely adopted in many application scenarios. With the increasing demand of fast iteration and complexity of business logic, it is challenging to achieve rapid development and continuous delivery in such highly distributed cloud and edge computing environment. At present, microservice-based architecture has been the dominant deployment style, and a microservice system has to evolve agilely to offer stable Quality of Service (QoS) in the situation where user requirement changes frequently. Many research have been conducted to optimally re-deploy microservices to adapt to changing requirements. Nevertheless, complex dependencies between microservices and the existence of multiple instances of one single microservice in a microservice system have not been fully considered in existing works. This paper defines SPPMS, the Service Placement Problem in Microservice Systems that feature complex dependencies and multiple instances, as a Fractional Polynomial Problem (FPP) . Considering the high computation complexity of FPP, it is then transformed into a Quadratic Sum-of-Ratios Fractional Problem (QSRFP) which is further solved by the proposed greedy-based algorithms. Experiments demonstrate that our models and algorithms outperform existing approaches in both quality and computation speed.

cs.DC