75 accepted papers
Balancing exploration and exploitation remains a central challenge in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs). Current RLVR methods often overemphasize exploitation, leading to entropy collapse, reduced exploratory capacity, and ultimately limited perfo…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on standard benchmarks, yet it remains largely unexplored whether they truly meet user expectations. Existing evaluation approaches, relying on model heuristics, expert rubrics, or user simulation, fail to capture the diversity an…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) are two widely used post-training paradigms for improving the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Recent methods attempt to integrate SFT and RLVR in a single stage by reweighting or scheduling thei…
Modern task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems increasingly rely on large language model (LLM) agents, leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and long-context capabilities for long-term memory utilization. However, these methods prioritise semantic similarity over task intent, degrading multi-
Temporal reasoning over long, multi-session dialogues is a critical capability for conversational agents. As dialogue histories grow in length and accumulate noise, existing long-context models struggle to accurately identify temporally pertinent information, significantly impairing reasoning perfor…
As large language models evolve into tool-augmented agents, a central question remains unresolved: when is external tool use actually justified? Existing agent frameworks typically treat tools as ordinary actions and optimize for task success or reward, offering little principled distinction between…
Event reasoning is a fundamental ability that underlies many applications. It requires event schema knowledge to perform global reasoning and needs to deal with the diversity of the inter-event relations and the reasoning paradigms. The extent to which LLMs excel in event reasoning across various re…
Stickers are widely used in online chatting, which can vividly express someone's intention, emotion, or attitude. Existing conversation research typically retrieves stickers based on a single session or the previous textual information, which can not adapt to the multi-modal and multi-session nature…
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is effective for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, RLHF’s complex process limits its ability to continually learn human feedback, making it impractical for real-world applications where the deployed model continuo…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown great potential in learning generalizable representations for graph-structured data. However, existing SSL-based graph pre-training methods largely focus on improving graph representations by learning the structure information based on disturbing or reconstru…
Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models (LLMs), where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This phenomenon suggests a potential lack of necessary dependency between the predicted answer and the reasoning process. Consequ…
Video inpainting is a crucial task with diverse applications, including fine-grained video editing, video recovery, and video dewatermarking. However, most existing video inpainting methods primarily focus on visual content completion while neglecting text information. There are only a limited numbe…
Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS) have become increasingly important due to their ability to recommend items through interactive dialogue, adapting to user preferences in real time. Traditional CRS approaches face challenges in generating high-quality, diverse responses due to the limited ava
Large language models (LLMs) have made significant breakthroughs in extracting useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. Summarizing useful information from historical conversations has achieved remarkable performance, which, however, may introd
Few-shot Multi-label Intent Detection (MID) is crucial for dialogue systems, aiming to detect multiple intents of utterances in low-resource dialogue domains. Previous studies focus on a two-stage pipeline. They first learn representations of utterances with multiple labels and then use a threshold-
The pervasive spread of misinformation and disinformation in social media underscores the critical importance of detecting media bias. While robust Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as foundational tools for bias prediction, concerns about inherent biases within these models persist. In this…
Argumentation Mining (AM) aims to extract argumentative structures from texts by identifying argumentation components (ACs) and their argumentative relations (ARs). While previous works focus on representation learning to encode ACs and AC pairs, they fail to explicitly model the underlying reasonin…
Memes have emerged as a popular form of multimodal online communication, where their interpretation heavily depends on the specific context in which they appear. Current approaches predominantly focus on isolated meme analysis, either for harmful content detection or standalone interpretation, overl
Recent advances in video diffusion models have driven rapid progress in video editing techniques. However, video object removal, a critical subtask of video editing, remains challenging due to issues such as hallucinated objects and visual artifacts. Furthermore, existing methods often rely on compu…
Stance detection is critical for understanding the underlying position or attitude expressed toward a topic. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements across various natural language processing tasks including stance detection, however, their performance in stance detec…
The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than Eng…
The in-context learning (ICL) capability of large language models (LLMs) enables them to perform challenging tasks using provided demonstrations. However, ICL is highly sensitive to the ordering of demonstrations, leading to instability in predictions. This paper shows that this vulnerability can be…
Fine-tuning multi-turn dialogue systems requires high-quality supervision but often suffers from degraded performance when exposed to low-quality data. Supervision errors in early turns can propagate across subsequent turns, undermining coherence and response quality. Existing methods typically addr
Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use primarily focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, such as tool selection in a single turn, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. To…
This paper explores Machine Unlearning (MU), an emerging field that is gaining increased attention due to concerns about neural models unintentionally remembering personal or sensitive information. We present SeUL, a novel method that enables selective and fine-grained unlearning for language models…
Previous research has typically concentrated on leveraging the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer known questions (i.e., internal reasoning such as generate-then-read). In contrast, for questions that fall outside their known scope, these models rely on external knowledge r…
Inference-time scaling has attracted much attention which significantly enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks by increasing the length of Chain-of-Thought. These longer intermediate reasoning rationales embody various meta-reasoning skills in human cognit…
Video content editing has a wide range of applications. With the advancement of diffusion-based generative models, video editing techniques have made remarkable progress, yet they still remain far from practical usability. Existing inversion-based video editing methods are time-consuming and struggl…
Large language models (LLMs) can store a significant amount of factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their parametric knowledge may conflict with the information provided in the context—this phenomenon, known as context-memory knowledge conflicts, can lead to undesirable model behaviour, s…
Mathematical reasoning through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has emerged as a powerful capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), which can be further enhanced through Test-Time Scaling (TTS) methods like Beam Search and DVTS. However, these methods, despite improving accuracy by allocating more computati
Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance on Contextual Question Answering (CQA). However, prior approaches typically employ elaborate reasoning strategies regardless of question complexity, leading to low adaptability. Recent efficient test-time scaling metho
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a common method to enhance the tool calling capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), with the training data often being synthesized. The current data synthesis process generally involves sampling a set of tools, formulating a requirement based on these tools, and…
Despite demonstrating impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still often struggle to accurately express the factual knowledge they possess, especially in cases where the LLMs’ knowledge boundaries are ambiguous. To improve LLMs’ factual expressions, we propose the UAlign framework, wh…
Harmful fine-tuning (HFT), performed directly on open-source LLMs or through Fine-tuning-as-a-Service, breaks safety alignment and poses significant threats. Existing methods aim to mitigate HFT risks by learning robust representation on alignment data or making harmful data unlearnable, but they tr…
Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily either focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex depe…
The success of large language models (LLM) benefits from large-scale model parameters and large amounts of pre-training data. However, the textual data for training LLM can not be confirmed to be legal because they are crawled from different web sites. For example, there are copyrighted articles, pe…
Numerous works are proposed to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents to better fulfill instructions, ensuring they are trustful and helpful.Nevertheless, some human instructions are often malicious or misleading and following them will lead to untruthful and unsafe responses.Previous…
Dialogue policy learning (DPL) aims to determine an abstract representation (also known as action) to guide what the response should be. Typically, DPL is cast as a sequential decision problem across a series of predefined action candidates. However, such static and narrow actions can limit response…
Text clustering is a fundamental task in natural language processing with numerous applications. However, traditional clustering methods often struggle with domain-specific fine-tuning and the presence of outliers. To address these challenges, we introduce LLMEdgeRefine, an iterative clustering meth…
Language-guided video summarization empowers users to use natural language queries to effortlessly summarize lengthy videos into concise and relevant summaries that cater specifically to their information needs, which is more friendly to access and digest. However, most of the previous works rely on…
Managing long sequences has become an important and necessary feature for large language models (LLMs). However, assessing their ability to handle long contexts remains a challenge. This paper introduces M4LE, a Multi-ability, Multi-range, Multi-task, Multi-domain benchmark for Long-context Evaluati…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for complex multi-turn conversations across diverse real-world applications. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on single-turn evaluations, overlooking the models’ capabilities in multi-turn interactions. To address this gap, we introduce , a…
Stance detection is a challenging task that aims to identify public opinion from social media platforms with respect to specific targets. Previous work on stance detection largely focused on pure texts. In this paper, we study multi-modal stance detection for tweets consisting of texts and images, w…
In an era characterized by the rapid proliferation of information, the pervasive issues of misinformation and disinformation have significantly impacted numerous individuals. Consequently, the evaluation of information’s truthfulness and accuracy has garnered substantial attention among researchers.…
The growing interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized applications has revealed a significant challenge: when tailored to specific domains, LLMs tend to experience catastrophic forgetting, compromising their general capabilities and leading to a suboptimal user experience. Additionall…
With the increasing risk posed by jailbreak attacks, recent studies have investigated various methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs), mainly falling into two strategies: safety training and safeguards. Safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, whic…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in the biomedical domain with the advancement of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, existing retrieval-augmented approaches face challenges in addressing diverse queries and documents, particularly for medical knowledge queries, res…
Conversational retrieval refers to an information retrieval system that operates in an iterative and interactive manner, requiring the retrieval of various external resources, such as persona, knowledge, and even response, to effectively engage with the user and successfully complete the dialogue. H…
Progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has significantly advanced the generation of images from textual descriptions. Existing metrics, such as CLIP, effectively measure the semantic alignment between single prompts and their corresponding images. However, they fall short in evaluating a model’s abi…
Prior study shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU), which typically requires models to gain abilities to perceive and reason both document texts and layouts (e.g., locations of texts and table-cells). To this end, we propose visually guide…
Text watermarking has emerged as a pivotal technique for identifying machine-generated text. However, existing methods often rely on arbitrary vocabulary partitioning during decoding to embed watermarks, which compromises the availability of suitable tokens and significantly degrades the quality of…
Unintended dataset biases typically exist in existing Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) datasets, including label bias, where models favor the majority class due to imbalanced training data, as well as the speaker and neutral word bias, where models make unfair predictions because of excess…
Multiple knowledge (e.g., co-reference, topics, emotional causes, etc) has been demonstrated effective for emotion detection. However, exploring this knowledge in Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is currently a blank slate due to the lack of annotated data and the high cost involved in obt…
Large language models (LLMs) outperform information retrieval techniques for downstream knowledge-intensive tasks when being prompted to generate world knowledge. However, community concerns abound regarding the factuality and potential implications of using this uncensored knowledge. In light of th…
Automatic diagnosis (AD), a critical application of AI in healthcare, employs machine learning techniques to assist doctors in gathering patient symptom information for precise disease diagnosis. The Transformer-based method utilizes an input symptom sequence, predicts itself through auto-regression…
Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, greatly empower dialogue systems with strong language understanding and generation capabilities. However, most of the previous works prompt the LLMs to directly generate a response based on the dialogue context, overlooking the underlying linguistic cue…
Pretrained language models (PLMs) based knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are prone to generate responses that are factually inconsistent with the provided knowledge source. In such inconsistent responses, the dialogue models fail to accurately express the external factual knowledge they rely upon…
Thanks in part to the availability of copious annotated resources for some entity categories, existing studies have achieved superior performance in multimodal named entity recognition (MNER). However, in the real-world scenario, it is infeasible to enumerate all entity categories in advance. Theref…
Recent legislation of the “right to be forgotten” has led to the interest in machine unlearning, where the learned models are endowed with the function to forget information about specific training instances as if they have never existed in the training set. Previous work mainly focuses on computer…
Open-domain dialogue system usually requires different sources of knowledge to generate more informative and evidential responses. However, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems either focus on a single knowledge source or overlook the dependency between multiple sources of knowledge, which m…
Knowledge probing is a task to assess the knowledge encoded within pre-trained language models (PLMs) by having the PLM complete prompts such as "Italy is located in \_\_,". The model's prediction precision serves as a lower bound for the amount of knowledge it contains. Subsequent works explore tra…
Dialogue models are often enriched with extensive external knowledge to provide informative responses through a retrieval-augmented pipeline. Nevertheless, retrieval-augmented approaches rely on finely annotated retrieval training data and knowledge-grounded response generation data, making it costl…
Recent efforts have endeavored to employ the sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model in Information Extraction~(IE) due to its potential to tackle multiple IE tasks in a unified manner. Under this formalization, multiple structured objects are concatenated as the target sequence in a predefined order.…
Generating persona consistent dialogue response is important for developing an intelligent conversational agent. Recent works typically fine-tune large-scale pre-trained models on this task by concatenating persona texts and dialogue history as a single input sequence to generate the target response…
Prior study has shown that pretrained language models (PLM) can boost the performance of text-based recommendation. In contrast to previous works that either use PLM to encode user history as a whole input text, or impose an additional aggregation network to fuse multi-turn history representations,…
News recommendation (NR) is essential for online news services. Existing NR methods typically adopt a news-user representation learning framework, facing two potential limitations. First, in news encoder, single candidate news encoding suffers from an insufficient semantic information problem. Secon…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been witnessed its potential for training a dialogue policy agent towards maximizing the accumulated rewards given from users. However, the reward can be very sparse for it is usually only provided at the end of a dialog session, which causes unaffordable interaction…
This work extends the current quotation recommendation task to a more realistic quotation recommender system that learns to predict when to quote and what to quote jointly. The system consists of three modules (tasks), a prediction module to predict whether to quote given conversation contexts, a re…
Humor plays an important role in our daily life, as it is an essential and fascinating element in the communication between persons. Therefore, how to recognize punchlines from the dialogue, i.e. conversational humor recognition, has attracted much interest of computational linguistics communities.…
Most reinforcement learning methods for dialog policy learning train a centralized agent that selects a predefined joint action concatenating domain name, intent type, and slot name. The centralized dialog agent suffers from a great many user-agent interaction requirements due to the large action sp…
We present a fast and scalable architecture called Explicit Modular Decomposition (EMD), in which we incorporate both classification-based and extraction-based methods and design four modules (for clas- sification and sequence labelling) to jointly extract dialogue states. Experimental results based…
Automatic news recommendation has gained much attention from the academic community and industry. Recent studies reveal that the key to this task lies within the effective representation learning of both news and users. Existing works typically encode news title and content separately while neglecti…
To help individuals express themselves better, quotation recommendation is receiving growing attention. Nevertheless, most prior efforts focus on modeling quotations and queries separately and ignore the relationship between the quotations and the queries. In this work, we introduce a transformation…
In recent years, world business in online discussions and opinion sharing on social media is booming. Re-entry prediction task is thus proposed to help people keep track of the discussions which they wish to continue. Nevertheless, existing works only focus on exploiting chatting history and context…
This paper presents a new method - adversarial advantage actor-critic (Adversarial A2C), which significantly improves the efficiency of dialogue policy learning in task-completion dialogue systems. Inspired by generative adversarial networks (GAN), we train a discriminator to differentiate responses…