64 accepted papers
The control of large buildings encounters challenges in computational efficiency due to their size and nonlinear components. To address these issues, this paper proposes a Piecewise Affine (PWA)-based distributed scheme for Model Predictive Control (MPC) that optimizes energy and comfort through PWA
Oblique decision trees combine the transparency of trees with the power of multivariate decision boundaries—but learning high-quality oblique splits is NP-hard, and practical methods still rely on slow search or theory-free heuristics. We present the Hinge Regression Tree (HRT), which reframes each…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown impressive capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, alongside these successes, a more deceptive form of model error has emerged—**Reasoning Hallucination**—where logically coherent but factually incorrect reasoning traces lead to persuasive yet fa…
Generating stylized large language model (LLM) responses via representation editing is a promising way for fine-grained output control. However, there exists an inherent trade-off: imposing a distinctive style often degrades truthfulness. Existing representation editing methods, by naively injecting…
Efficient retrieval of external knowledge bases and web pages is crucial for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Previous works on training LLMs to leverage external retrievers for solving complex problems have predominantly employed end-to-end reinforcement learning. However, these approache
Continual Pre-Training (CPT) is essential for enabling Language Models (LMs) to integrate new factual knowledge without erasing old. While classical CPT techniques like data replay have become the standard paradigm, the mechanisms underlying how LMs acquire and retain facts over time, termed as cont…
Online to batch conversion involves constructing a new batch learner by utilizing a series of models generated by an existing online learning algorithm, for achieving generalization guarantees under i.i.d assumption. However, when applied to real-world streaming applications such as streaming recomm…
In legal practice, judges apply the trichotomous dogmatics of criminal law, sequentially assessingthe elements of the offense, unlawfulness, and culpability to determine whether an individual’s conduct constitutes a crime. Although current legal large language models (LLMs) show promising accuracy i
Group max-min fairness (MMF) is commonly used in fairness-aware recommender systems (RS) as an optimization objective, as it aims to protect marginalized item groups and ensures a fair competition platform. However, our theoretical analysis indicates that integrating MMF constraint violates the assu…
In this paper, we propose CitaLaw, the first benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ ability to produce legally sound responses with appropriate citations. CitaLaw features a diverse set of legal questions for both laypersons and practitioners, paired with a comprehensive corpus of law articles and pre…
Tool learning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to interact with external environments by invoking tools, serving as an effective strategy to mitigate the limitations inherent in their pre-training data. In this process, tool documentation plays a crucial role by providing usage instructions for…
Recent Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents replicate the R1-Zero paradigm, coupling online Reinforcement Learning (RL) with explicit chain-of-thought reasoning prior to object grounding and thereby achieving substantial performance gains. In this paper, we first conduct extensive analysis experime…
High-quality, large-scale instructions are crucial for aligning large language models (LLMs), however, there is a severe shortage of instruction in the field of natural language understanding (NLU). Previous works on constructing NLU instructions mainly focus on information extraction (IE), neglect…
Legal mathematical reasoning is essential for applying large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes legal contexts, where outputs must be both mathematically accurate and procedurally compliant. However, existing legal LLMs lack structured numerical reasoning, and open-domain models, though capable o
Text embeddings from PLM-based models enable a wide range of applications, yet their performance often degrades on longer texts. In this paper, we introduce a phenomenon we call Length Collapse, where embeddings of longer texts tend to cluster together. This clustering results in a distributional in…
Personalized product search aims to retrieve and rank items that match users’ preferences and search intent. Despite their effectiveness, existing approaches typically assume that users’ query fully captures their real motivation. However, our analysis of a real-world e-commerce platform reveals tha…
Unlike traditional search engines that present ranked lists of webpages, generative search engines rely solely on in-line citations as the key gateway to original real-world webpages, making it crucial to examine whether LLM-generated citations have biases—particularly for politically sensitive quer
Deep learning has excelled in medical image classification, but its clinical application is limited by poor interpretability. Capsule networks, known for encoding hierarchical relationships and spatial features, show potential in addressing this issue. Nevertheless, traditional capsule networks…
Previous studies have found that PLM-based retrieval models exhibit a preference for LLM-generated content, assigning higher relevance scores to these documents even when their semantic quality is comparable to human-written ones. This phenomenon, known as source bias, threatens the sustainable deve…
Query rewriting plays a pivotal role in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) by refining real-world queries of varying complexity. Existing approaches typically rely on outcome-supervised training or heuristic rules to guide the rewriting process. However, these paradigms often struggle to handle qu
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models are designed to incorporate external knowledge, reducing hallucinations caused by insufficient parametric (internal) knowledge. However, even with accurate and relevant retrieved content, RAG models can still produce hallucinations by generating outputs th…
Personalized search systems in e-commerce platforms increasingly involve user interactions with AI assistants, where users consult about products, usage scenarios, and more. Leveraging consultation to personalize search services is trending. Existing methods typically rely on semantic similarity to
Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. In this paper, we comprehensively study its key designs to balance the new abilities while retaining the original abilities, and present an effective CPT method that can greatly imp…
In search scenarios, user experience can be hindered by erroneous queries due to typos, voice errors, or knowledge gaps. Therefore, query correction is crucial for search engines. Current correction models, usually small models trained on specific data, often struggle with queries beyond their train…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective in enhancing the knowledge coverage of large language models (LLMs) and mitigating hallucinations by incorporating external retrieved documents. However, documents deemed relevant by the retriever are not necessarily helpful for answer genera
Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated a superior ability to serve as ranking models. However, concerns have arisen as LLMs will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users’ sensitive attributes (gender). Worse still, in this paper, we identify a subtler form of discrim…
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 i…
The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to an influx of AI-generated content (AIGC) on the internet, transforming the corpus of Information Retrieval (IR) systems from solely human-written to a coexistence with LLM-generated content. The impact of this surge in AIGC on IR systems r…
In-context learning has been extensively validated in large language models. However, the mechanism and selection strategy for in-context example selection, which is a crucial ingredient in this approach, lacks systematic and in-depth research. In this paper, we propose a data compression approach t…
To tackle the problem of domain-specific knowledge scarcity within large language models (LLMs), knowledge graph-retrievalaugmented method has been proven to be an effective and efficient technique for knowledge infusion. However, existing approaches face two primary challenges: knowledge mismatch b…
In this paper, we address the issue of using logic rules to explain the results from legal case retrieval. The task is critical to legal case retrieval because the users (e.g., lawyers or judges) are highly specialized and require the system to provide logic, faithful, and interpretable explanations…
Redundancy is a persistent challenge in Capsule Networks (CapsNet) leading to high computational costs and parameter counts. Although previous studies have introduced pruning after the initial capsule layer dynamic routing's fully connected nature and non-orthogonal weight matrices reintroduce redun…
Fine-tuning pretrained large models to downstream tasks is an important problem, which however suffers from huge memory overhead due to large-scale parameters. This work strives to reduce memory overhead in fine-tuning from perspectives of activation function and layer normalization. To this end, we…
In recommender systems, the cold-start problem poses a significant challenge, especially as users transition from being new to more engaged. Existing solutions often lack the granularity to accommodate this evolving user engagement, resulting in suboptimal performance for intermediate and older user…
The task of Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is to find anomalies existing in given videos, which has been extensively studied. This paper addresses the task of Video Anomaly Prediction (VAP), which is to predict whether any anomaly will happen in streaming videos. With VAP, we can intervene or alert b…
The performance of video prediction has been greatly boosted by advanced deep neural networks. However, most of the current methods suffer from large model sizes and require extra inputs, e.g., semantic/depth maps, for promising performance. For efficiency consideration, in this paper, we propose a…
It is challenging to realize the safe navigation of mobile robots in crowds. Most of the previous studies may lead to unsafe robot navigation in crowds, as safety guarantee is lacked. To solve this problem, we devise a safety filter (SF) that enables realization of safe robot navigation in crowds, a…
Identifying the causes of an event, also termed as causal attribution, is a commonly encountered task in many application problems. Available methods, mostly in Bayesian or causal inference literature, suffer from two main drawbacks: 1) cannot attribute for individuals, and 2) attributing one singl…
Persuasive dialogue aims to persuade users to achieve some targets by conversations. While previous persuasion models have achieved notable successes, they mostly base themselves on utterance semantic matching, and an important aspect has been ignored, that is, the strategy of the conversations, for…
Contextual batched bandit (CBB) is a setting where a batch of rewards is observed from the environment at the end of each episode, but the rewards of the non-executed actions are unobserved, resulting in partial-information feedback. Existing approaches for CBB often ignore the rewards of the non-ex…
"Single image super-resolution (SR) has been boosted by deep convolutional neural networks with growing model complexity and computational costs. To deploy existing SR networks onto edge devices, it is necessary to accelerate them for large image (4K) processing. The different areas in an image ofte…
A growing interest emerges in event extraction which aims to extract multiple events with triggers and arguments. Previous methods mitigate the problem of multiple events extraction by predicting the arguments conditioned on the event trigger and event type, assuming that these arguments belong to a…
Due to the constraints of the imaging device and high cost in operation time, computer tomography (CT) scans are usually acquired with low within-slice resolution. Improving the inter-slice resolution is beneficial to the disease diagnosis for both human experts and computer-aided systems. To this e…
One typical approach to long-form document matching is first conducting alignment between cross-document sentence pairs, and then aggregating all of the sentence-level matching signals. However, this approach could be problematic because the alignment between documents is partial — despite two docum…
Studies have shown that the sentence’s syntactic structures are important for semantic sentence matching. A typical approach is encoding each sentence’s syntactic structure into an embedding vector, which can be combined with other features to predict the final matching scores. Though successes have…
Most dialog systems posit that users have figured out clear and specific goals before starting an interaction. For example, users have determined the departure, the destination, and the travel time for booking a flight. However, in many scenarios, limited by experience and knowledge, users may know…
In this paper, we present a neural model for joint dropped pronoun recovery (DPR) and conversational discourse parsing (CDP) in Chinese conversational speech. We show that DPR and CDP are closely related, and a joint model benefits both tasks. We refer to our model as DiscProReco, and it first encod…
Learning discrete dialog structure graph from human-human dialogs yields basic insights into the structure of conversation, and also provides background knowledge to facilitate dialog generation. However, this problem is less studied in open-domain dialogue. In this paper, we conduct unsupervised di…
Regret bounds of online kernel selection in a finite kernel set have been well studied, having at least an order O( √ NT) of magnitude after T rounds, where N is the number of candidate kernels. But it is still an unsolved problem to achieve sublinear regret bounds of online kernel selection in a co…
Space-time video super-resolution (STVSR) aims to increase the spatial and temporal resolutions of low-resolution and low-frame-rate videos. Recently, deformable convolution based methods have achieved promising STVSR performance, but they could only infer the intermediate frame pre-defined in the t…
In this paper, we put forward a simple yet effective method to detect meaningful straight lines, a.k.a. semantic lines, in given scenes. Prior methods take line detection as a special case of object detection, while neglect the inherent characteristics of lines, leading to less efficient and subopti…
How to generate informative, coherent and sustainable open-domain conversations is a non-trivial task. Previous work on knowledge grounded conversation generation focus on improving dialog informativeness with little attention on dialog coherence. In this paper, to enhance multi-turn dialog coherenc…
Co-saliency detection (Co-SOD) aims to segment the common salient foreground in a group of relevant images. In this paper, inspired by human behavior, we propose a gradient-induced co-saliency detection (GICD) method. We first abstract a consensus representation for the grouped images in the embeddi…
Intra-saliency and inter-saliency cues have been extensively studied for co-saliency detection (Co-SOD). Model-based methods produce coarse Co-SOD results due to hand-crafted intra- and inter-saliency features. Current data-driven models exploit inter-saliency cues, but undervalue the potential powe…
We introduce kernels with random Fourier features in the meta-learning framework for few-shot learning. We propose meta variational random features (MetaVRF) to learn adaptive kernels for the base-learner, which is developed in a latent variable model by treating the random feature basis as the late…
Domain generalization models learn to generalize to previously unseen domains, but suffer from prediction uncertainty and domain shift. In this paper, we address both problems. We introduce a probabilistic meta-learning model for domain generalization, in which classifier parameters shared across do…
Despite online learning (OL) techniques have boosted the performance of semi-supervised video object segmentation (VOS) methods, the huge time costs of OL greatly restricts their practicality. Matching based and propagation based methods run at a faster speed by avoiding OL techniques. However, they…
Tone mapping aims to reproduce a standard dynamic range image from a high dynamic range image with visual information preserved. State-of-the-art tone mapping algorithms mostly decompose an image into a base layer and a detail layer, and process them accordingly. These methods may have problems of h…
Deep neural networks have demonstrated their power in many computer vision applications. State-of-the-art deep architectures such as VGG, ResNet, and DenseNet are mostly optimized by the SGD-Momentum algorithm, which updates the weights by considering their past and current gradients. Nonetheless, S…
Most of existing image denoising methods assume the corrupted noise to be additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). However, the realistic noise in real-world noisy images is much more complex than AWGN, and is hard to be modeled by simple analytical distributions. As a result, many state-of-the-art den…
Multivariate time series usually contain a large number of missing values, which hinders the application of advanced analysis methods on multivariate time series data. Conventional approaches to addressing the challenge of missing values, including mean/zero imputation, case deletion, and matrix fac…
Most of the existing denoising algorithms are developed for grayscale images. It is not trivial to extend them for color image denoising since the noise statistics in R, G, and B channels can be very different for real noisy images. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel (MC) optimization model f…
While there has been increasing interest in the task of describing video with natural language, current computer vision algorithms are still severely limited in terms of the variability and complexity of the videos and their associated language that they can recognize. This is in part due to the si…
Patch based image modeling has achieved a great success in low level vision such as image denoising. In particular, the use of image nonlocal self-similarity (NSS) prior, which refers to the fact that a local patch often has many nonlocal similar patches to it across the image, has significantly enh…