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Yufei He

Publications and source records attributed to Yufei He.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

MLR-Bench: Evaluating AI Agents on Open-Ended Machine Learning Research

Recent advancements in AI agents have demonstrated their growing potential to drive and support scientific discovery. In this work, we introduce MLR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating AI agents on open-ended machine learning research. MLR-Bench includes three key components: (1) 201 research tasks sourced from NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML workshops covering diverse ML topics; (2) MLR-Judge, an automated evaluation framework combining LLM-based reviewers with carefully designed review rubrics to assess research quality; and (3) MLR-Agent, a modular agent scaffold capable of completing research tasks through four stages: idea generation, proposal formulation, experimentation, and paper writing. Our framework supports both stepwise assessment across these distinct research stages, and end-to-end evaluation of the final research paper. We then use MLR-Bench to evaluate six frontier LLMs and an advanced coding agent, finding that while LLMs are effective at generating coherent ideas and well-structured papers, current coding agents frequently (e.g., in 80% of the cases) produce fabricated or invalidated experimental results--posing a major barrier to scientific reliability. We validate MLR-Judge through human evaluation, showing high agreement with expert reviewers, supporting its potential as a scalable tool for research evaluation. We open-source MLR-Bench to help the community benchmark, diagnose, and improve AI research agents toward trustworthy and transparent scientific discovery.

cs.LG↗

GuardReasoner: Towards Reasoning-based LLM Safeguards

As LLMs increasingly impact safety-critical applications, ensuring their safety using guardrails remains a key challenge. This paper proposes GuardReasoner, a new safeguard for LLMs, by guiding the guard model to learn to reason. Concretely, we first create the GuardReasonerTrain dataset, which consists of 127K samples with 460K detailed reasoning steps. Then, we introduce reasoning SFT to unlock the reasoning capability of guard models. In addition, we present hard sample DPO to further strengthen their reasoning ability. In this manner, GuardReasoner achieves better performance, explainability, and generalizability. Extensive experiments and analyses on 13 benchmarks of 3 guardrail tasks demonstrate its superiority. Remarkably, GuardReasoner 8B surpasses GPT-4o+CoT by 5.74% and LLaMA Guard 3 8B by 20.84% F1 score on average. We release the training data, code, and models with different scales (1B, 3B, 8B) of GuardReasoner : https://github.com/yueliu1999/GuardReasoner/.

cs.CR↗

Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance

Large language model (LLM) agents often struggle in environments where rules and required domain knowledge frequently change, such as regulatory compliance and user risk screening. Current approaches, like offline fine-tuning and standard prompting, are insufficient because they cannot effectively adapt to new knowledge during actual operation. To address this limitation, we propose the Adaptive Reflective Interactive Agent (ARIA), an LLM agent framework designed specifically to continuously learn updated domain knowledge at test time. ARIA assesses its own uncertainty through structured self-dialogue, proactively identifying knowledge gaps and requesting targeted explanations or corrections from human experts. It then systematically updates an internal, timestamped knowledge repository with provided human guidance, detecting and resolving conflicting or outdated knowledge through comparisons and clarification queries. We evaluate ARIA on the realistic customer due diligence name screening task on TikTok Pay, alongside publicly available dynamic knowledge tasks. Results demonstrate significant improvements in adaptability and accuracy compared to baselines using standard offline fine-tuning and existing self-improving agents. ARIA is deployed within TikTok Pay serving over 150 million monthly active users, confirming its practicality and effectiveness for operational use in rapidly evolving environments.

cs.LG↗

Can Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Be Detected and Removed?

Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions, because of their instruction-following capabilities and inability to distinguish between the original input instructions and maliciously injected instructions. To defend against such attacks, recent studies have developed various detection mechanisms. If we restrict ourselves specifically to works which perform detection rather than direct defense, most of them focus on direct prompt injection attacks, while there are few works for the indirect scenario, where injected instructions are indirectly from external tools, such as a search engine. Moreover, current works mainly investigate injection detection methods and pay less attention to the post-processing method that aims to mitigate the injection after detection. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of detecting and removing indirect prompt injection attacks, and we construct a benchmark dataset for evaluation. For detection, we assess the performance of existing LLMs and open-source detection models, and we further train detection models using our crafted training datasets. For removal, we evaluate two intuitive methods: (1) the segmentation removal method, which segments the injected document and removes parts containing injected instructions, and (2) the extraction removal method, which trains an extraction model to identify and remove injected instructions.

cs.CR↗

Efficient Inference for Large Reasoning Models: A Survey

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) significantly improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning to reason, exhibiting promising performance in solving complex tasks. However, their deliberative reasoning process leads to inefficiencies in token usage, memory consumption, and inference time. Thus, this survey provides a review of efficient inference methods designed specifically for LRMs, focusing on mitigating token inefficiency while preserving the reasoning quality. The overview structure of this paper is shown in Figure~\ref{fig:paper_structure}. First, we introduce a taxonomy to group the recent methods into two main categories: (a) explicit compact Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which reduces tokens while keeping the explicit reasoning structure, and (b) implicit latent CoT, which encodes reasoning steps within hidden representations instead of explicit tokens. Meanwhile, we discuss their strengths and weaknesses. Then, we conduct empirical analyses on existing methods from reasoning scenarios, object functions, and performance \& efficiency aspects. Besides, we present open challenges in this field, including human-centric controllable reasoning, trade-off between interpretability and efficiency of reasoning, ensuring the safety of efficient reasoning, and broader applications of efficient reasoning. In addition, we highlight key insights for enhancing LRMs' inference efficiency via techniques such as model merging, new architectures, and agent routers. We hope this work serves as a valuable guide, helping researchers overcome challenges in this vibrant field. A collection of efficient reasoning methods for LRMs (papers and codes) is provided at this link: https://github.com/yueliu1999/Awesome-Efficient-Inference-for-LRMs.

cs.CL↗

LPS-GNN : Deploying Graph Neural Networks on Graphs with 100-Billion Edges

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for various graph mining tasks, yet existing scalable solutions often struggle to balance execution efficiency with prediction accuracy. These difficulties stem from iterative message-passing techniques, which place significant computational demands and require extensive GPU memory, particularly when dealing with the neighbor explosion issue inherent in large-scale graphs. This paper introduces a scalable, low-cost, flexible, and efficient GNN framework called LPS-GNN, which can perform representation learning on 100 billion graphs with a single GPU in 10 hours and shows a 13.8% improvement in User Acquisition scenarios. We examine existing graph partitioning methods and design a superior graph partition algorithm named LPMetis. In particular, LPMetis outperforms current state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches on various evaluation metrics. In addition, our paper proposes a subgraph augmentation strategy to enhance the model's predictive performance. It exhibits excellent compatibility, allowing the entire framework to accommodate various GNN algorithms. Successfully deployed on the Tencent platform, LPS-GNN has been tested on public and real-world datasets, achieving performance lifts of 8. 24% to 13. 89% over SOTA models in online applications.

cs.LG↗

Efficient Reasoning via Chain of Unconscious Thought

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising performance but compromise token efficiency due to verbose reasoning processes. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that complex problems can be solved more efficiently through internalized cognitive processes. Inspired by UTT, we propose a new reasoning paradigm, termed Chain of Unconscious Thought (CoUT), to improve the token efficiency of LRMs by guiding them to mimic human unconscious thought and internalize reasoning processes. Concretely, we first prompt the model to internalize the reasoning by thinking in the hidden layer. Then, we design a bag of token-efficient strategies to further help models reduce unnecessary tokens yet preserve the performance. Our work reveals that models may possess beneficial unconscious thought, enabling improved efficiency without sacrificing performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CoUT. Remarkably, it surpasses CoT by reducing token usage by 47.62% while maintaining comparable accuracy, as shown in Figure 1. The code of CoUT is available at this link: https://github.com/Rohan-GRH/CoUT

cs.CL↗

Safety in Large Reasoning Models: A Survey

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have exhibited extraordinary prowess in tasks like mathematics and coding, leveraging their advanced reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, as these capabilities progress, significant concerns regarding their vulnerabilities and safety have arisen, which can pose challenges to their deployment and application in real-world settings. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of LRMs, meticulously exploring and summarizing the newly emerged safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies. By organizing these elements into a detailed taxonomy, this work aims to offer a clear and structured understanding of the current safety landscape of LRMs, facilitating future research and development to enhance the security and reliability of these powerful models.

cs.CL↗

FiDeLiS: Faithful Reasoning in Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often challenged by generating erroneous or hallucinated responses, especially in complex reasoning tasks. Leveraging Knowledge Graphs (KGs) as external knowledge sources has emerged as a viable solution. However, existing KG-enhanced methods, either retrieval-based or agent-based, encounter difficulties in accurately retrieving knowledge and efficiently traversing KGs at scale. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, FiDeLiS, designed to improve the factuality of LLM responses by anchoring answers to verifiable reasoning steps retrieved from KGs. To achieve this, we leverage step-wise beam search with a deductive scoring function, allowing the LLM to validate reasoning process step by step, and halt the search once the question is deducible. In addition, we propose a Path-RAG module to pre-select a smaller candidate set for each beam search step, reducing computational costs by narrowing the search space. Extensive experiments show that our method, as a training-free framework, not only improve the performance but also enhance the factuality and interpretability across different benchmarks. Code is released at https://github.com/Y-Sui/FiDeLiS.

cs.AI↗

Can Knowledge Graphs Make Large Language Models More Trustworthy? An Empirical Study Over Open-ended Question Answering

Recent works integrating Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have shown promising improvements in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on closed-ended tasks, leaving a gap in evaluating performance on more complex, real-world scenarios. This limitation also hinders a thorough assessment of KGs' potential to reduce hallucinations in LLMs. To address this, we introduce OKGQA, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs augmented with KGs in open-ended, real-world question answering settings. OKGQA reflects practical complexities through diverse question types and incorporates metrics to quantify both hallucination rates and reasoning improvements in LLM+KG models. To consider the scenarios in which KGs may contain varying levels of errors, we propose a benchmark variant, OKGQA-P, to assess model performance when the semantics and structure of KGs are deliberately perturbed and contaminated. In this paper, we aims to (1) explore whether KGs can make LLMs more trustworthy in an open-ended setting, and (2) conduct a comparative analysis to shed light on method design. We believe this study can facilitate a more complete performance comparison and encourages continuous improvement in integrating KGs with LLMs to mitigate hallucination, and make LLMs more trustworthy. Code and data are released at https://github.com/Y-Sui/OKGQA.

cs.CL↗

UniGraph2: Learning a Unified Embedding Space to Bind Multimodal Graphs

Existing foundation models, such as CLIP, aim to learn a unified embedding space for multimodal data, enabling a wide range of downstream web-based applications like search, recommendation, and content classification. However, these models often overlook the inherent graph structures in multimodal datasets, where entities and their relationships are crucial. Multimodal graphs (MMGs) represent such graphs where each node is associated with features from different modalities, while the edges capture the relationships between these entities. On the other hand, existing graph foundation models primarily focus on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) and are not designed to handle the complexities of MMGs. To address these limitations, we propose UniGraph2, a novel cross-domain graph foundation model that enables general representation learning on MMGs, providing a unified embedding space. UniGraph2 employs modality-specific encoders alongside a graph neural network (GNN) to learn a unified low-dimensional embedding space that captures both the multimodal information and the underlying graph structure. We propose a new cross-domain multi-graph pre-training algorithm at scale to ensure effective transfer learning across diverse graph domains and modalities. Additionally, we adopt a Mixture of Experts (MoE) component to align features from different domains and modalities, ensuring coherent and robust embeddings that unify the information across modalities. Extensive experiments on a variety of multimodal graph tasks demonstrate that UniGraph2 significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models in tasks such as representation learning, transfer learning, and multimodal generative tasks, offering a scalable and flexible solution for learning on MMGs.

cs.LG↗

FlowReasoner: Reinforcing Query-Level Meta-Agents

This paper proposes a query-level meta-agent named FlowReasoner to automate the design of query-level multi-agent systems, i.e., one system per user query. Our core idea is to incentivize a reasoning-based meta-agent via external execution feedback. Concretely, by distilling DeepSeek R1, we first endow the basic reasoning ability regarding the generation of multi-agent systems to FlowReasoner. Then, we further enhance it via reinforcement learning (RL) with external execution feedback. A multi-purpose reward is designed to guide the RL training from aspects of performance, complexity, and efficiency. In this manner, FlowReasoner is enabled to generate a personalized multi-agent system for each user query via deliberative reasoning. Experiments on both engineering and competition code benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of FlowReasoner. Remarkably, it surpasses o1-mini by 10.52% accuracy across three benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/FlowReasoner.

cs.AI↗

Gaze-Guided 3D Hand Motion Prediction for Detecting Intent in Egocentric Grasping Tasks

Human intention detection with hand motion prediction is critical to drive the upper-extremity assistive robots in neurorehabilitation applications. However, the traditional methods relying on physiological signal measurement are restrictive and often lack environmental context. We propose a novel approach that predicts future sequences of both hand poses and joint positions. This method integrates gaze information, historical hand motion sequences, and environmental object data, adapting dynamically to the assistive needs of the patient without prior knowledge of the intended object for grasping. Specifically, we use a vector-quantized variational autoencoder for robust hand pose encoding with an autoregressive generative transformer for effective hand motion sequence prediction. We demonstrate the usability of these novel techniques in a pilot study with healthy subjects. To train and evaluate the proposed method, we collect a dataset consisting of various types of grasp actions on different objects from multiple subjects. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully predict sequential hand movement. Especially, the gaze information shows significant enhancements in prediction capabilities, particularly with fewer input frames, highlighting the potential of the proposed method for real-world applications.

cs.CV↗

Evaluating the Paperclip Maximizer: Are RL-Based Language Models More Likely to Pursue Instrumental Goals?

As large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, ensuring their alignment with human goals and values remains a pressing challenge. A key concern is \textit{instrumental convergence}, where an AI system, in optimizing for a given objective, develops unintended intermediate goals that override the ultimate objective and deviate from human-intended goals. This issue is particularly relevant in reinforcement learning (RL)-trained models, which can generate creative but unintended strategies to maximize rewards. In this paper, we explore instrumental convergence in LLMs by comparing models trained with direct RL optimization (e.g., the o1 model) to those trained with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We hypothesize that RL-driven models exhibit a stronger tendency for instrumental convergence due to their optimization of goal-directed behavior in ways that may misalign with human intentions. To assess this, we introduce InstrumentalEval, a benchmark for evaluating instrumental convergence in RL-trained LLMs. Initial experiments reveal cases where a model tasked with making money unexpectedly pursues instrumental objectives, such as self-replication, implying signs of instrumental convergence. Our findings contribute to a deeper understanding of alignment challenges in AI systems and the risks posed by unintended model behaviors.

cs.AI↗

UniGraph: Learning a Unified Cross-Domain Foundation Model for Text-Attributed Graphs

Foundation models like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have revolutionized artificial intelligence, exhibiting remarkable abilities to generalize across a wide array of tasks and applications beyond their initial training objectives. However, graph learning has predominantly focused on single-graph models, tailored to specific tasks or datasets, lacking the ability to transfer learned knowledge to different domains. This limitation stems from the inherent complexity and diversity of graph structures, along with the different feature and label spaces specific to graph data. In this paper, we recognize text as an effective unifying medium and employ Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) to leverage this potential. We present our UniGraph framework, designed to learn a foundation model for TAGs, which is capable of generalizing to unseen graphs and tasks across diverse domains. Unlike single-graph models that use pre-computed node features of varying dimensions as input, our approach leverages textual features for unifying node representations, even for graphs such as molecular graphs that do not naturally have textual features. We propose a novel cascaded architecture of Language Models (LMs) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) as backbone networks. Additionally, we propose the first pre-training algorithm specifically designed for large-scale self-supervised learning on TAGs, based on Masked Graph Modeling. We introduce graph instruction tuning using Large Language Models (LLMs) to enable zero-shot prediction ability. Our comprehensive experiments across various graph learning tasks and domains demonstrate the model's effectiveness in self-supervised representation learning on unseen graphs, few-shot in-context transfer, and zero-shot transfer, even surpassing or matching the performance of GNNs that have undergone supervised training on target datasets.

cs.LG↗

Coordinating O&M and Logistical Resources to Enhance Post-Disaster Resilience of Interdependent Power and Natural Gas Distribution Systems

Electric power and natural gas systems are becoming increasingly interdependent, driven by the growth of natural gas-fired generation and the electrification of the gas industry. Recent energy crises have underscored the urgent need for enhanced resilience in these interdependent systems. In response to this challenge, this paper focuses on the interdependent electric power and natural gas distribution systems and proposes a comprehensive strategy for enhancing their resilience, which involves optimally coordinating various resources encompassing emergency operation and maintenance (O&M) and logistical support, to efficiently restore damaged services and infrastructure. Specifically, generators, including those with fuel switching capability, are dispatched to provide emergency power, with the logistical process of fuel supply being particularly managed by coordinated scheduling of mobile fuel tankers. Additionally, integrated demand responses for power and gas are dispatched to alleviate operational stresses using a zonewise approach that groups customers with intertwined energy supplies into individual, dispatchable units. Furthermore, the strategy incorporates the repair of damaged facilities, with particular consideration given to the varying repair efficiencies dependent on the dispatched repair units, aiming to closely simulate actual repair scenarios. The strategy is encapsulated in a mixed-integer second-order cone programming model, with case studies conducted to validate its effectiveness.

eess.SY↗

GraphMAE2: A Decoding-Enhanced Masked Self-Supervised Graph Learner

Graph self-supervised learning (SSL), including contrastive and generative approaches, offers great potential to address the fundamental challenge of label scarcity in real-world graph data. Among both sets of graph SSL techniques, the masked graph autoencoders (e.g., GraphMAE)--one type of generative method--have recently produced promising results. The idea behind this is to reconstruct the node features (or structures)--that are randomly masked from the input--with the autoencoder architecture. However, the performance of masked feature reconstruction naturally relies on the discriminability of the input features and is usually vulnerable to disturbance in the features. In this paper, we present a masked self-supervised learning framework GraphMAE2 with the goal of overcoming this issue. The idea is to impose regularization on feature reconstruction for graph SSL. Specifically, we design the strategies of multi-view random re-mask decoding and latent representation prediction to regularize the feature reconstruction. The multi-view random re-mask decoding is to introduce randomness into reconstruction in the feature space, while the latent representation prediction is to enforce the reconstruction in the embedding space. Extensive experiments show that GraphMAE2 can consistently generate top results on various public datasets, including at least 2.45% improvements over state-of-the-art baselines on ogbn-Papers100M with 111M nodes and 1.6B edges.

cs.LG↗

SCR: Training Graph Neural Networks with Consistency Regularization

We present the SCR framework for enhancing the training of graph neural networks (GNNs) with consistency regularization. Regularization is a set of strategies used in Machine Learning to reduce overfitting and improve the generalization ability. However, it is unclear how to best design the generalization strategies in GNNs, as it works in a semi-supervised setting for graph data. The major challenge lies in how to efficiently balance the trade-off between the error from the labeled data and that from the unlabeled data. SCR is a simple yet general framework in which we introduce two strategies of consistency regularization to address the challenge above. One is to minimize the disagreements among the perturbed predictions by different versions of a GNN model. The other is to leverage the Mean Teacher paradigm to estimate a consistency loss between teacher and student models instead of the disagreement of the predictions. We conducted experiments on three large-scale node classification datasets in the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SCR framework is a general one that can enhance various GNNs to achieve better performance. Finally, SCR has been the top-1 entry on all three OGB leaderboards as of this submission.

cs.SI↗