arXiv subjects

Zhiqiang Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiqiang Zhang.

At least 109 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Similarity is Not All You Need: Endowing Retrieval Augmented Generation with Multi Layered Thoughts

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable achievements in various domains. However, the untimeliness and cost of knowledge updates coupled with hallucination issues of LLMs have curtailed their applications in knowledge intensive tasks, where retrieval augmented generation (RAG) can be of help. Nevertheless, existing retrieval augmented models typically use similarity as a bridge between queries and documents and follow a retrieve then read procedure. In this work, we argue that similarity is not always the panacea and totally relying on similarity would sometimes degrade the performance of retrieval augmented generation. To this end, we propose MetRag, a Multi layEred Thoughts enhanced Retrieval Augmented Generation framework. To begin with, beyond existing similarity oriented thought, we embrace a small scale utility model that draws supervision from an LLM for utility oriented thought and further come up with a smarter model by comprehensively combining the similarity and utility oriented thoughts. Furthermore, given the fact that the retrieved document set tends to be huge and using them in isolation makes it difficult to capture the commonalities and characteristics among them, we propose to make an LLM as a task adaptive summarizer to endow retrieval augmented generation with compactness-oriented thought. Finally, with multi layered thoughts from the precedent stages, an LLM is called for knowledge augmented generation. Extensive experiments on knowledge-intensive tasks have demonstrated the superiority of MetRag.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Your decision path does matter in pre-training industrial recommenders with multi-source behaviors

Online service platforms offering a wide range of services through miniapps have become crucial for users who visit these platforms with clear intentions to find services they are interested in. Aiming at effective content delivery, cross-domain recommendation are introduced to learn high-quality representations by transferring behaviors from data-rich scenarios. However, these methods overlook the impact of the decision path that users take when conduct behaviors, that is, users ultimately exhibit different behaviors based on various intents. To this end, we propose HIER, a novel Hierarchical decIsion path Enhanced Representation learning for cross-domain recommendation. With the help of graph neural networks for high-order topological information of the knowledge graph between multi-source behaviors, we further adaptively learn decision paths through well-designed exemplar-level and information bottleneck based contrastive learning. Extensive experiments in online and offline environments show the superiority of HIER.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Multi-domain Knowledge Graph Collaborative Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Diverse Downstream Tasks

Knowledge graphs (KGs) provide reliable external knowledge for a wide variety of AI tasks in the form of structured triples. Knowledge graph pre-training (KGP) aims to pre-train neural networks on large-scale KGs and provide unified interfaces to enhance different downstream tasks, which is a key direction for KG management, maintenance, and applications. Existing works often focus on purely research questions in open domains, or they are not open source due to data security and privacy in real scenarios. Meanwhile, existing studies have not explored the training efficiency and transferability of KGP models in depth. To address these problems, We propose a framework MuDoK to achieve multi-domain collaborative pre-training and efficient prefix prompt tuning to serve diverse downstream tasks like recommendation and text understanding. Our design is a plug-and-play prompt learning approach that can be flexibly adapted to different downstream task backbones. In response to the lack of open-source benchmarks, we constructed a new multi-domain KGP benchmark called KPI with two large-scale KGs and six different sub-domain tasks to evaluate our method and open-sourced it for subsequent research. We evaluated our approach based on constructed KPI benchmarks using diverse backbone models in heterogeneous downstream tasks. The experimental results show that our framework brings significant performance gains, along with its generality, efficiency, and transferability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Leave No One Behind: Online Self-Supervised Self-Distillation for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods play a pivotal role in modern recommendation systems. A key challenge lies in accurately modeling user preferences in the face of data sparsity. To tackle this challenge, recent methods leverage contrastive learning (CL) to derive self-supervision signals by maximizing the mutual information of two augmented views of the original user behavior sequence. Despite their effectiveness, CL-based methods encounter a limitation in fully exploiting self-supervision signals for users with limited behavior data, as users with extensive behaviors naturally offer more information. To address this problem, we introduce a novel learning paradigm, named Online Self-Supervised Self-distillation for Sequential Recommendation ($S^4$Rec), effectively bridging the gap between self-supervised learning and self-distillation methods. Specifically, we employ online clustering to proficiently group users by their distinct latent intents. Additionally, an adversarial learning strategy is utilized to ensure that the clustering procedure is not affected by the behavior length factor. Subsequently, we employ self-distillation to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from users with extensive behaviors (teachers) to users with limited behaviors (students). Experiments conducted on four real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

HeMeNet: Heterogeneous Multichannel Equivariant Network for Protein Multitask Learning

Understanding and leveraging the 3D structures of proteins is central to a variety of biological and drug discovery tasks. While deep learning has been applied successfully for structure-based protein function prediction tasks, current methods usually employ distinct training for each task. However, each of the tasks is of small size, and such a single-task strategy hinders the models' performance and generalization ability. As some labeled 3D protein datasets are biologically related, combining multi-source datasets for larger-scale multi-task learning is one way to overcome this problem. In this paper, we propose a neural network model to address multiple tasks jointly upon the input of 3D protein structures. In particular, we first construct a standard structure-based multi-task benchmark called Protein-MT, consisting of 6 biologically relevant tasks, including affinity prediction and property prediction, integrated from 4 public datasets. Then, we develop a novel graph neural network for multi-task learning, dubbed Heterogeneous Multichannel Equivariant Network (HeMeNet), which is E(3) equivariant and able to capture heterogeneous relationships between different atoms. Besides, HeMeNet can achieve task-specific learning via the task-aware readout mechanism. Extensive evaluations on our benchmark verify the effectiveness of multi-task learning, and our model generally surpasses state-of-the-art models.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Can Small Language Models be Good Reasoners for Sequential Recommendation?

Large language models (LLMs) open up new horizons for sequential recommendations, owing to their remarkable language comprehension and generation capabilities. However, there are still numerous challenges that should be addressed to successfully implement sequential recommendations empowered by LLMs. Firstly, user behavior patterns are often complex, and relying solely on one-step reasoning from LLMs may lead to incorrect or task-irrelevant responses. Secondly, the prohibitively resource requirements of LLM (e.g., ChatGPT-175B) are overwhelmingly high and impractical for real sequential recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel Step-by-step knowLedge dIstillation fraMework for recommendation (SLIM), paving a promising path for sequential recommenders to enjoy the exceptional reasoning capabilities of LLMs in a "slim" (i.e., resource-efficient) manner. We introduce CoT prompting based on user behavior sequences for the larger teacher model. The rationales generated by the teacher model are then utilized as labels to distill the downstream smaller student model (e.g., LLaMA2-7B). In this way, the student model acquires the step-by-step reasoning capabilities in recommendation tasks. We encode the generated rationales from the student model into a dense vector, which empowers recommendation in both ID-based and ID-agnostic scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SLIM over state-of-the-art baselines, and further analysis showcasing its ability to generate meaningful recommendation reasoning at affordable costs.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Continual Few-shot Event Detection via Hierarchical Augmentation Networks

Traditional continual event detection relies on abundant labeled data for training, which is often impractical to obtain in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce continual few-shot event detection (CFED), a more commonly encountered scenario when a substantial number of labeled samples are not accessible. The CFED task is challenging as it involves memorizing previous event types and learning new event types with few-shot samples. To mitigate these challenges, we propose a memory-based framework: Hierarchical Augmentation Networks (HANet). To memorize previous event types with limited memory, we incorporate prototypical augmentation into the memory set. For the issue of learning new event types in few-shot scenarios, we propose a contrastive augmentation module for token representations. Despite comparing with previous state-of-the-art methods, we also conduct comparisons with ChatGPT. Experiment results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all of these methods in multiple continual few-shot event detection tasks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Towards Automatic Evaluation for LLMs' Clinical Capabilities: Metric, Data, and Algorithm

Large language models (LLMs) are gaining increasing interests to improve clinical efficiency for medical diagnosis, owing to their unprecedented performance in modelling natural language. Ensuring the safe and reliable clinical applications, the evaluation of LLMs indeed becomes critical for better mitigating the potential risks, e.g., hallucinations. However, current evaluation methods heavily rely on labor-intensive human participation to achieve human-preferred judgements. To overcome this challenge, we propose an automatic evaluation paradigm tailored to assess the LLMs' capabilities in delivering clinical services, e.g., disease diagnosis and treatment. The evaluation paradigm contains three basic elements: metric, data, and algorithm. Specifically, inspired by professional clinical practice pathways, we formulate a LLM-specific clinical pathway (LCP) to define the clinical capabilities that a doctor agent should possess. Then, Standardized Patients (SPs) from the medical education are introduced as the guideline for collecting medical data for evaluation, which can well ensure the completeness of the evaluation procedure. Leveraging these steps, we develop a multi-agent framework to simulate the interactive environment between SPs and a doctor agent, which is equipped with a Retrieval-Augmented Evaluation (RAE) to determine whether the behaviors of a doctor agent are in accordance with LCP. The above paradigm can be extended to any similar clinical scenarios to automatically evaluate the LLMs' medical capabilities. Applying such paradigm, we construct an evaluation benchmark in the field of urology, including a LCP, a SPs dataset, and an automated RAE. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, providing more insights for LLMs' safe and reliable deployments in clinical practice.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Transfer Learning

Event Causality Identification (ECI) refers to the detection of causal relations between events in texts. However, most existing studies focus on sentence-level ECI with high-resource languages, leaving more challenging document-level ECI (DECI) with low-resource languages under-explored. In this paper, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Interaction Model with Multi-granularity Contrastive Transfer Learning (GIMC) for zero-shot cross-lingual document-level ECI. Specifically, we introduce a heterogeneous graph interaction network to model the long-distance dependencies between events that are scattered over a document. Then, to improve cross-lingual transferability of causal knowledge learned from the source language, we propose a multi-granularity contrastive transfer learning module to align the causal representations across languages. Extensive experiments show our framework outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model by 9.4% and 8.2% of average F1 score on monolingual and multilingual scenarios respectively. Notably, in the multilingual scenario, our zero-shot framework even exceeds GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning by 24.3% in overall performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Financial Default Prediction via Motif-preserving Graph Neural Network with Curriculum Learning

User financial default prediction plays a critical role in credit risk forecasting and management. It aims at predicting the probability that the user will fail to make the repayments in the future. Previous methods mainly extract a set of user individual features regarding his own profiles and behaviors and build a binary-classification model to make default predictions. However, these methods cannot get satisfied results, especially for users with limited information. Although recent efforts suggest that default prediction can be improved by social relations, they fail to capture the higher-order topology structure at the level of small subgraph patterns. In this paper, we fill in this gap by proposing a motif-preserving Graph Neural Network with curriculum learning (MotifGNN) to jointly learn the lower-order structures from the original graph and higherorder structures from multi-view motif-based graphs for financial default prediction. Specifically, to solve the problem of weak connectivity in motif-based graphs, we design the motif-based gating mechanism. It utilizes the information learned from the original graph with good connectivity to strengthen the learning of the higher-order structure. And considering that the motif patterns of different samples are highly unbalanced, we propose a curriculum learning mechanism on the whole learning process to more focus on the samples with uncommon motif distributions. Extensive experiments on one public dataset and two industrial datasets all demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

q-fin.RM↗

arXiv2024

Graph Neural Network with Two Uplift Estimators for Label-Scarcity Individual Uplift Modeling

Uplift modeling aims to measure the incremental effect, which we call uplift, of a strategy or action on the users from randomized experiments or observational data. Most existing uplift methods only use individual data, which are usually not informative enough to capture the unobserved and complex hidden factors regarding the uplift. Furthermore, uplift modeling scenario usually has scarce labeled data, especially for the treatment group, which also poses a great challenge for model training. Considering that the neighbors' features and the social relationships are very informative to characterize a user's uplift, we propose a graph neural network-based framework with two uplift estimators, called GNUM, to learn from the social graph for uplift estimation. Specifically, we design the first estimator based on a class-transformed target. The estimator is general for all types of outcomes, and is able to comprehensively model the treatment and control group data together to approach the uplift. When the outcome is discrete, we further design the other uplift estimator based on our defined partial labels, which is able to utilize more labeled data from both the treatment and control groups, to further alleviate the label scarcity problem. Comprehensive experiments on a public dataset and two industrial datasets show a superior performance of our proposed framework over state-of-the-art methods under various evaluation metrics. The proposed algorithms have been deployed online to serve real-world uplift estimation scenarios.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

ChatUIE: Exploring Chat-based Unified Information Extraction using Large Language Models

Recent advancements in large language models have shown impressive performance in general chat. However, their domain-specific capabilities, particularly in information extraction, have certain limitations. Extracting structured information from natural language that deviates from known schemas or instructions has proven challenging for previous prompt-based methods. This motivated us to explore domain-specific modeling in chat-based language models as a solution for extracting structured information from natural language. In this paper, we present ChatUIE, an innovative unified information extraction framework built upon ChatGLM. Simultaneously, reinforcement learning is employed to improve and align various tasks that involve confusing and limited samples. Furthermore, we integrate generation constraints to address the issue of generating elements that are not present in the input. Our experimental results demonstrate that ChatUIE can significantly improve the performance of information extraction with a slight decrease in chatting ability.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

MDGNN: Multi-Relational Dynamic Graph Neural Network for Comprehensive and Dynamic Stock Investment Prediction

The stock market is a crucial component of the financial system, but predicting the movement of stock prices is challenging due to the dynamic and intricate relations arising from various aspects such as economic indicators, financial reports, global news, and investor sentiment. Traditional sequential methods and graph-based models have been applied in stock movement prediction, but they have limitations in capturing the multifaceted and temporal influences in stock price movements. To address these challenges, the Multi-relational Dynamic Graph Neural Network (MDGNN) framework is proposed, which utilizes a discrete dynamic graph to comprehensively capture multifaceted relations among stocks and their evolution over time. The representation generated from the graph offers a complete perspective on the interrelationships among stocks and associated entities. Additionally, the power of the Transformer structure is leveraged to encode the temporal evolution of multiplex relations, providing a dynamic and effective approach to predicting stock investment. Further, our proposed MDGNN framework achieves the best performance in public datasets compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) stock investment methods.

q-fin.ST↗

arXiv2024

RJUA-QA: A Comprehensive QA Dataset for Urology

We introduce RJUA-QA, a novel medical dataset for question answering (QA) and reasoning with clinical evidence, contributing to bridge the gap between general large language models (LLMs) and medical-specific LLM applications. RJUA-QA is derived from realistic clinical scenarios and aims to facilitate LLMs in generating reliable diagnostic and advice. The dataset contains 2,132 curated Question-Context-Answer pairs, corresponding about 25,000 diagnostic records and clinical cases. The dataset covers 67 common urological disease categories, where the disease coverage exceeds 97.6\% of the population seeking medical services in urology. Each data instance in RJUA-QA comprises: (1) a question mirroring real patient to inquiry about clinical symptoms and medical conditions, (2) a context including comprehensive expert knowledge, serving as a reference for medical examination and diagnosis, (3) a doctor response offering the diagnostic conclusion and suggested examination guidance, (4) a diagnosed clinical disease as the recommended diagnostic outcome, and (5) clinical advice providing recommendations for medical examination. RJUA-QA is the first medical QA dataset for clinical reasoning over the patient inquiries, where expert-level knowledge and experience are required for yielding diagnostic conclusions and medical examination advice. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted to evaluate the performance of both medical-specific and general LLMs on the RJUA-QA dataset. Our data is are publicly available at \url{https://github.com/alipay/RJU_Ant_QA}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

PEACE: Prototype lEarning Augmented transferable framework for Cross-domain rEcommendation

To help merchants/customers to provide/access a variety of services through miniapps, online service platforms have occupied a critical position in the effective content delivery, in which how to recommend items in the new domain launched by the service provider for customers has become more urgent. However, the non-negligible gap between the source and diversified target domains poses a considerable challenge to cross-domain recommendation systems, which often leads to performance bottlenecks in industrial settings. While entity graphs have the potential to serve as a bridge between domains, rudimentary utilization still fail to distill useful knowledge and even induce the negative transfer issue. To this end, we propose PEACE, a Prototype lEarning Augmented transferable framework for Cross-domain rEcommendation. For domain gap bridging, PEACE is built upon a multi-interest and entity-oriented pre-training architecture which could not only benefit the learning of generalized knowledge in a multi-granularity manner, but also help leverage more structural information in the entity graph. Then, we bring the prototype learning into the pre-training over source domains, so that representations of users and items are greatly improved by the contrastive prototype learning module and the prototype enhanced attention mechanism for adaptive knowledge utilization. To ease the pressure of online serving, PEACE is carefully deployed in a lightweight manner, and significant performance improvements are observed in both online and offline environments.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Not All Negatives Are Worth Attending to: Meta-Bootstrapping Negative Sampling Framework for Link Prediction

The rapid development of graph neural networks (GNNs) encourages the rising of link prediction, achieving promising performance with various applications. Unfortunately, through a comprehensive analysis, we surprisingly find that current link predictors with dynamic negative samplers (DNSs) suffer from the migration phenomenon between "easy" and "hard" samples, which goes against the preference of DNS of choosing "hard" negatives, thus severely hindering capability. Towards this end, we propose the MeBNS framework, serving as a general plugin that can potentially improve current negative sampling based link predictors. In particular, we elaborately devise a Meta-learning Supported Teacher-student GNN (MST-GNN) that is not only built upon teacher-student architecture for alleviating the migration between "easy" and "hard" samples but also equipped with a meta learning based sample re-weighting module for helping the student GNN distinguish "hard" samples in a fine-grained manner. To effectively guide the learning of MST-GNN, we prepare a Structure enhanced Training Data Generator (STD-Generator) and an Uncertainty based Meta Data Collector (UMD-Collector) for supporting the teacher and student GNN, respectively. Extensive experiments show that the MeBNS achieves remarkable performance across six link prediction benchmark datasets.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Which Matters Most in Making Fund Investment Decisions? A Multi-granularity Graph Disentangled Learning Framework

In this paper, we highlight that both conformity and risk preference matter in making fund investment decisions beyond personal interest and seek to jointly characterize these aspects in a disentangled manner. Consequently, we develop a novel M ulti-granularity Graph Disentangled Learning framework named MGDL to effectively perform intelligent matching of fund investment products. Benefiting from the well-established fund graph and the attention module, multi-granularity user representations are derived from historical behaviors to separately express personal interest, conformity and risk preference in a fine-grained way. To attain stronger disentangled representations with specific semantics, MGDL explicitly involve two self-supervised signals, i.e., fund type based contrasts and fund popularity. Extensive experiments in offline and online environments verify the effectiveness of MGDL.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Think-in-Memory: Recalling and Post-thinking Enable LLMs with Long-Term Memory

Memory-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in long-term human-machine interactions, which basically relies on iterative recalling and reasoning of history to generate high-quality responses. However, such repeated recall-reason steps easily produce biased thoughts, \textit{i.e.}, inconsistent reasoning results when recalling the same history for different questions. On the contrary, humans can keep thoughts in the memory and recall them without repeated reasoning. Motivated by this human capability, we propose a novel memory mechanism called TiM (Think-in-Memory) that enables LLMs to maintain an evolved memory for storing historical thoughts along the conversation stream. The TiM framework consists of two crucial stages: (1) before generating a response, a LLM agent recalls relevant thoughts from memory, and (2) after generating a response, the LLM agent post-thinks and incorporates both historical and new thoughts to update the memory. Thus, TiM can eliminate the issue of repeated reasoning by saving the post-thinking thoughts as the history. Besides, we formulate the basic principles to organize the thoughts in memory based on the well-established operations, (\textit{i.e.}, insert, forget, and merge operations), allowing for dynamic updates and evolution of the thoughts. Furthermore, we introduce Locality-Sensitive Hashing into TiM to achieve efficient retrieval for the long-term conversations. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments on real-world and simulated dialogues covering a wide range of topics, demonstrating that equipping existing LLMs with TiM significantly enhances their performance in generating responses for long-term interactions.

cs.CL↗