arXiv subjects

Zengchang Qin

Publications and source records attributed to Zengchang Qin.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Beyond Sentiment: Structured Information Extraction from Financial News

Financial sentiment analysis has become a standard component in news-driven stock prediction, yet it reduces rich, multi-dimensional news articles to a single polarity score. We hypothesize that financial news encodes multiple orthogonal information dimensions---event type, impact scope, temporal horizon, and semantic confidence---that sentiment alone cannot capture, and that these dimensions carry independent predictive value. To test this hypothesis, we propose a structured information extraction framework that leverages LLaMA-3.1-70B to extract six semantic dimensions from financial news. Through large-scale experiments on 41,618 news--stock pairs from the FNSPID dataset, we find that (i) FinBERT sentiment features exhibit strong predictive power under nonlinear models (F1=0.576) but substantially weaker performance under linear models (F1=0.230), revealing a highly nonlinear sentiment--return relationship; (ii) LLM-extracted structured features, while individually weaker, capture information orthogonal to sentiment, as evidenced by a 53.5% systematic disagreement rate between the two approaches; and (iii) combining both signal sources yields F1=0.600, significantly outperforming either alone ($p < 0.0001$), with consistent improvements across all seven event types. Ablation experiments confirm that non-sentiment structural dimensions (event type, impact subject, time horizon, confidence) independently contribute $\Delta\text{F1} = +0.019$ beyond FinBERT alone. Feature importance analysis reveals balanced contributions from all six extracted dimensions (14--21%), demonstrating that compressing news into a single sentiment score incurs substantial information loss. Our results suggest that the sentiment--semantics decoupling in financial text is systematic and exploitable, opening a new direction for multi-dimensional financial NLP.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

PersonaTree: Structured Lifecycle Memory for Person Understanding in LLM Agents

Persistent LLM agents require memory representations that make the formation of person understanding explicit across long term interaction. Existing agent memory methods emphasize information retention and retrieval, yet give limited account of how accumulated interaction evidence is abstracted into person understanding. We view this process as schema formation, where situated evidence is abstracted into reusable patterns and stable person level claims. We introduce PersonaTree, a structured lifecycle memory framework that realizes this view as a three level persona tree with explicit support paths from evidence to claims. PersonaTree maintains the tree through conservative writing, confidence guided consolidation, and query conditioned path retrieval, returning only the evidence depth required by each query. Across six person understanding and persistent memory benchmarks with three answer backbones, PersonaTree ranks first in 12 of 18 compact scores and reaches the top two in 16 settings. Ablations show that hierarchy improves abstract person understanding on KnowMe, while support path retrieval improves RealPref alignment under a comparable context budget.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

FlashMem: Distilling Intrinsic Latent Memory via Computation Reuse

The stateless architecture of Large Language Models inherently lacks the mechanism to preserve dynamic context, compelling agents to redundantly reprocess history to maintain long-horizon autonomy. While latent memory offers a solution, current approaches are hindered by architectural segregation, relying on auxiliary encoders that decouple memory from the reasoning backbone. We propose FlashMem, a framework that distills intrinsic memory directly from transient reasoning states via computation reuse. Leveraging the property that internal representations uniquely encode input trajectories, FlashMem identifies the last hidden state as a sufficient statistic for the interaction history. This enables a Shared-KV Consolidator to synthesize memory by attending directly to the backbone's frozen cache, eliminating redundant re-parameterization. Furthermore, a parameter-free Cognitive Monitor leverages attention entropy to adaptively trigger consolidation only when high epistemic uncertainty is detected. Experiments demonstrate that FlashMem matches the performance of heavy baselines while reducing inference latency by 5 times, effectively bridging the gap between efficiency and persistent cognition.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Align Attention Heads Before Merging Them: An Effective Way for Converting MHA to GQA

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across diverse natural language processing tasks. However, as the model size and the input sequence's length increase, the linearly increasing key-value (KV) cache significantly degrades inference throughput. Therefore, grouped-query attention (GQA), as an alternative to multi-head attention (MHA), has been widely introduced into LLMs. In this work, we propose a cost-effective method for converting MHA into GQA with any compression ratio of KV heads. The key point of our method lies in the application of Procrustes analysis to the attention heads, which enhances the similarity among attention heads while preserving computational invariance, thereby improving the model's post-training performance. Subsequently, we employ $\mathit{L_0}$ regularization to prune redundant parameters. The model after pruning can be adapted to the standard GQA framework. Experimental results show that our strategy can compress up to 87.5\% KV heads of LLaMA2-7B model and 75\% KV heads of Sheared-LLaMA-1.3B with acceptable performance degradation. Our code is released at https://github.com/fpcsong/mha2gqa.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

From Image to Video, what do we need in multimodal LLMs?

Covering from Image LLMs to the more complex Video LLMs, the Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated profound capabilities in comprehending cross-modal information as numerous studies have illustrated. Previous methods delve into designing comprehensive Video LLMs through integrating video foundation models with primitive LLMs. Despite its effectiveness, such paradigm renders Video LLM's structure verbose and typically requires substantial video data for pre-training. Crucially, it neglects leveraging the foundational contributions of ready-made Image LLMs. In this paper, we introduce RED-VILLM, a Resource-Efficient Development pipeline which builds robust Video LLMs through leveraging the prior knowledge of Image LLMs. Specifically, since a video is naturally a combination of images along the temporal dimension, we devise a temporal adaptation plug-and-play structure, endowing the backbone Image LLM with the capability to grasp temporal information. Moreover, through applying this pipeline, we achieve the first Video LLM within the Chinese-speaking community. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Video LLMs developed through our approach surpass conventional Video LLMs, requiring minimal instructional data and training resources. Our approach highlights the potential for a more cost-effective and scalable advancement in multimodal models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Mix-of-Granularity: Optimize the Chunking Granularity for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Integrating information from various reference databases is a major challenge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems because each knowledge source adopts a unique data structure and follows different conventions. Retrieving from multiple knowledge sources with one fixed strategy usually leads to under-exploitation of information. To mitigate this drawback, inspired by Mix-of-Expert, we introduce Mix-of-Granularity (MoG), a method that dynamically determines the optimal granularity of a knowledge source based on input queries using a router. The router is efficiently trained with a newly proposed loss function employing soft labels. We further extend MoG to MoG-Graph (MoGG), where reference documents are pre-processed as graphs, enabling the retrieval of distantly situated snippets. Experiments demonstrate that MoG and MoGG effectively predict optimal granularity levels, significantly enhancing the performance of the RAG system in downstream tasks. The code of both MoG and MoGG are released in https://github.com/ZGChung/Mix-of-Granularity.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

SyntheT2C: Generating Synthetic Data for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models on the Text2Cypher Task

Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with existing Knowledge Graph (KG) databases presents a promising avenue for enhancing LLMs' efficacy and mitigating their "hallucinations". Given that most KGs reside in graph databases accessible solely through specialized query languages (e.g., Cypher), it is critical to connect LLMs with KG databases by automating the translation of natural language into Cypher queries (termed as "Text2Cypher" task). Prior efforts tried to bolster LLMs' proficiency in Cypher generation through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). However, these explorations are hindered by the lack of annotated datasets of Query-Cypher pairs, resulting from the labor-intensive and domain-specific nature of such annotation. In this study, we propose SyntheT2C, a methodology for constructing a synthetic Query-Cypher pair dataset, comprising two distinct pipelines: (1) LLM-based prompting and (2) template-filling. SyntheT2C is applied to two medical KG databases, culminating in the creation of a synthetic dataset, MedT2C. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the MedT2C dataset effectively enhances the performance of backbone LLMs on Text2Cypher task via SFT. Both the SyntheT2C codebase and the MedT2C dataset are released in https://github.com/ZGChung/SyntheT2C.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Integrating MedCLIP and Cross-Modal Fusion for Automatic Radiology Report Generation

Automating radiology report generation can significantly reduce the workload of radiologists and enhance the accuracy, consistency, and efficiency of clinical documentation.We propose a novel cross-modal framework that uses MedCLIP as both a vision extractor and a retrieval mechanism to improve the process of medical report generation.By extracting retrieved report features and image features through an attention-based extract module, and integrating them with a fusion module, our method improves the coherence and clinical relevance of generated reports.Experimental results on the widely used IU-Xray dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, showing improvements over commonly used methods in both report quality and relevance.Additionally, ablation studies provide further validation of the framework, highlighting the importance of accurate report retrieval and feature integration in generating comprehensive medical reports.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

ScalingNote: Scaling up Retrievers with Large Language Models for Real-World Dense Retrieval

Dense retrieval in most industries employs dual-tower architectures to retrieve query-relevant documents. Due to online deployment requirements, existing real-world dense retrieval systems mainly enhance performance by designing negative sampling strategies, overlooking the advantages of scaling up. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited superior performance that can be leveraged for scaling up dense retrieval. However, scaling up retrieval models significantly increases online query latency. To address this challenge, we propose ScalingNote, a two-stage method to exploit the scaling potential of LLMs for retrieval while maintaining online query latency. The first stage is training dual towers, both initialized from the same LLM, to unlock the potential of LLMs for dense retrieval. Then, we distill only the query tower using mean squared error loss and cosine similarity to reduce online costs. Through theoretical analysis and comprehensive offline and online experiments, we show the effectiveness and efficiency of ScalingNote. Our two-stage scaling method outperforms end-to-end models and verifies the scaling law of dense retrieval with LLMs in industrial scenarios, enabling cost-effective scaling of dense retrieval systems. Our online method incorporating ScalingNote significantly enhances the relevance between retrieved documents and queries.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

LogicalDefender: Discovering, Extracting, and Utilizing Common-Sense Knowledge

Large text-to-image models have achieved astonishing performance in synthesizing diverse and high-quality images guided by texts. With detail-oriented conditioning control, even finer-grained spatial control can be achieved. However, some generated images still appear unreasonable, even with plentiful object features and a harmonious style. In this paper, we delve into the underlying causes and find that deep-level logical information, serving as common-sense knowledge, plays a significant role in understanding and processing images. Nonetheless, almost all models have neglected the importance of logical relations in images, resulting in poor performance in this aspect. Following this observation, we propose LogicalDefender, which combines images with the logical knowledge already summarized by humans in text. This encourages models to learn logical knowledge faster and better, and concurrently, extracts the widely applicable logical knowledge from both images and human knowledge. Experiments show that our model has achieved better logical performance, and the extracted logical knowledge can be effectively applied to other scenarios.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

CADReN: Contextual Anchor-Driven Relational Network for Controllable Cross-Graphs Node Importance Estimation

Node Importance Estimation (NIE) is crucial for integrating external information into Large Language Models through Retriever-Augmented Generation. Traditional methods, focusing on static, single-graph characteristics, lack adaptability to new graphs and user-specific requirements. CADReN, our proposed method, addresses these limitations by introducing a Contextual Anchor (CA) mechanism. This approach enables the network to assess node importance relative to the CA, considering both structural and semantic features within Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Extensive experiments show that CADReN achieves better performance in cross-graph NIE task, with zero-shot prediction ability. CADReN is also proven to match the performance of previous models on single-graph NIE task. Additionally, we introduce and opensource two new datasets, RIC200 and WK1K, specifically designed for cross-graph NIE research, providing a valuable resource for future developments in this domain.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Boosting Semantic Segmentation from the Perspective of Explicit Class Embeddings

Semantic segmentation is a computer vision task that associates a label with each pixel in an image. Modern approaches tend to introduce class embeddings into semantic segmentation for deeply utilizing category semantics, and regard supervised class masks as final predictions. In this paper, we explore the mechanism of class embeddings and have an insight that more explicit and meaningful class embeddings can be generated based on class masks purposely. Following this observation, we propose ECENet, a new segmentation paradigm, in which class embeddings are obtained and enhanced explicitly during interacting with multi-stage image features. Based on this, we revisit the traditional decoding process and explore inverted information flow between segmentation masks and class embeddings. Furthermore, to ensure the discriminability and informativity of features from backbone, we propose a Feature Reconstruction module, which combines intrinsic and diverse branches together to ensure the concurrence of diversity and redundancy in features. Experiments show that our ECENet outperforms its counterparts on the ADE20K dataset with much less computational cost and achieves new state-of-the-art results on PASCAL-Context dataset. The code will be released at https://gitee.com/mindspore/models and https://github.com/Carol-lyh/ECENet.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Sparse Double Descent: Where Network Pruning Aggravates Overfitting

People usually believe that network pruning not only reduces the computational cost of deep networks, but also prevents overfitting by decreasing model capacity. However, our work surprisingly discovers that network pruning sometimes even aggravates overfitting. We report an unexpected sparse double descent phenomenon that, as we increase model sparsity via network pruning, test performance first gets worse (due to overfitting), then gets better (due to relieved overfitting), and gets worse at last (due to forgetting useful information). While recent studies focused on the deep double descent with respect to model overparameterization, they failed to recognize that sparsity may also cause double descent. In this paper, we have three main contributions. First, we report the novel sparse double descent phenomenon through extensive experiments. Second, for this phenomenon, we propose a novel learning distance interpretation that the curve of $\ell_{2}$ learning distance of sparse models (from initialized parameters to final parameters) may correlate with the sparse double descent curve well and reflect generalization better than minima flatness. Third, in the context of sparse double descent, a winning ticket in the lottery ticket hypothesis surprisingly may not always win.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Reasoning with Multi-Structure Commonsense Knowledge in Visual Dialog

Visual Dialog requires an agent to engage in a conversation with humans grounded in an image. Many studies on Visual Dialog focus on the understanding of the dialog history or the content of an image, while a considerable amount of commonsense-required questions are ignored. Handling these scenarios depends on logical reasoning that requires commonsense priors. How to capture relevant commonsense knowledge complementary to the history and the image remains a key challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel model by Reasoning with Multi-structure Commonsense Knowledge (RMK). In our model, the external knowledge is represented with sentence-level facts and graph-level facts, to properly suit the scenario of the composite of dialog history and image. On top of these multi-structure representations, our model can capture relevant knowledge and incorporate them into the vision and semantic features, via graph-based interaction and transformer-based fusion. Experimental results and analysis on VisDial v1.0 and VisDialCK datasets show that our proposed model effectively outperforms comparative methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

KBGN: Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network for Adaptive Vision-Text Reasoning in Visual Dialogue

Visual dialogue is a challenging task that needs to extract implicit information from both visual (image) and textual (dialogue history) contexts. Classical approaches pay more attention to the integration of the current question, vision knowledge and text knowledge, despising the heterogeneous semantic gaps between the cross-modal information. In the meantime, the concatenation operation has become de-facto standard to the cross-modal information fusion, which has a limited ability in information retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge-Bridge Graph Network (KBGN) model by using graph to bridge the cross-modal semantic relations between vision and text knowledge in fine granularity, as well as retrieving required knowledge via an adaptive information selection mode. Moreover, the reasoning clues for visual dialogue can be clearly drawn from intra-modal entities and inter-modal bridges. Experimental results on VisDial v1.0 and VisDial-Q datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms existing models with state-of-the-art results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

DAM: Deliberation, Abandon and Memory Networks for Generating Detailed and Non-repetitive Responses in Visual Dialogue

Visual Dialogue task requires an agent to be engaged in a conversation with human about an image. The ability of generating detailed and non-repetitive responses is crucial for the agent to achieve human-like conversation. In this paper, we propose a novel generative decoding architecture to generate high-quality responses, which moves away from decoding the whole encoded semantics towards the design that advocates both transparency and flexibility. In this architecture, word generation is decomposed into a series of attention-based information selection steps, performed by the novel recurrent Deliberation, Abandon and Memory (DAM) module. Each DAM module performs an adaptive combination of the response-level semantics captured from the encoder and the word-level semantics specifically selected for generating each word. Therefore, the responses contain more detailed and non-repetitive descriptions while maintaining the semantic accuracy. Furthermore, DAM is flexible to cooperate with existing visual dialogue encoders and adaptive to the encoder structures by constraining the information selection mode in DAM. We apply DAM to three typical encoders and verify the performance on the VisDial v1.0 dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art performance with high-quality responses. The code is available at https://github.com/JXZe/DAM.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Pixel Level Data Augmentation for Semantic Image Segmentation using Generative Adversarial Networks

Semantic segmentation is one of the basic topics in computer vision, it aims to assign semantic labels to every pixel of an image. Unbalanced semantic label distribution could have a negative influence on segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we investigate using data augmentation approach to balance the semantic label distribution in order to improve segmentation performance. We propose using generative adversarial networks (GANs) to generate realistic images for improving the performance of semantic segmentation networks. Experimental results show that the proposed method can not only improve segmentation performance on those classes with low accuracy, but also obtain 1.3% to 2.1% increase in average segmentation accuracy. It shows that this augmentation method can boost accuracy and be easily applicable to any other segmentation models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Multi-Level Network for High-Speed Multi-Person Pose Estimation

In multi-person pose estimation, the left/right joint type discrimination is always a hard problem because of the similar appearance. Traditionally, we solve this problem by stacking multiple refinement modules to increase network's receptive fields and capture more global context, which can also increase a great amount of computation. In this paper, we propose a Multi-level Network (MLN) that learns to aggregate features from lower-level (left/right information), upper-level (localization information), joint-limb level (complementary information) and global-level (context) information for discrimination of joint type. Through feature reuse and its intra-relation, MLN can attain comparable performance to other conventional methods while runtime speed retains at 42.2 FPS.

cs.CV↗