Qimin Zhong, Hao Liao, Haiming Qin, Mingyang Zhou, Rui Mao, Wei Chen, Naipeng Chao. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yuhong Dai, Jianxun Lian, Yitian Huang, Wei Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Mingqi Wu, Xing Xie, Hao Liao. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Role-playing capabilities in large language models (LLMs) often lack cognitive consistency in complex scenarios that require deep understanding and coherent reasoning.While recent reasoning models excel in math and coding tasks, they show limited effectiveness in open-ended role-playing scenarios.We introduce R-CHAR (Role-Consistent Hierarchical Adaptive Reasoning), a metacognition-driven framework that enhances role-playing performance through guided thinking trajectories synthesis and adaptive evaluation.Our approach demonstrates that concise thinking processes can achieve superior performance efficiently compared to elaborate reasoning chains in roleplaying social intelligence tasks, outperforming existing specialized models.Experimental results on the SocialBench benchmark show significant and stable performance improvements across varying scenario complexities, showing particular strength in long-context comprehension (from 34.64% to 68.59%) and grouplevel social interactions.Our work advances the development of cognitively consistent roleplaying systems, bridging the gap between surface-level mimicry and authentic character simulation.

We propose IPSI, a general iterative framework for structural inference in interacting dynamical systems. It integrates a pretrained structural estimator and a joint inference module based on the Variational Autoencoder (VAE); these components are alternately updated to progressively refine the inferred structures. Initially, the structural estimator is trained on labels from either a meta-dataset or a baseline model to extract features and generate structural priors, which provide multi-level guidance for training the joint inference module. In subsequent iterations, pseudolabels from the joint module replace the initial labels. IPSI is compatible with various VAE-based models. Experiments on synthetic datasets of physical systems demonstrate that IPSI significantly enhances the performance of structural inference models such as Neural Relational Inference (NRI). Ablation studies reveal that feature and structural prior inputs to the joint module offer complementary improvements from representational and generative perspectives.

Network connectivity minimization is a fundamental problem in controlling the spread of viruses in the Internet and facilitating information propagation in online social networks. The problem aims to identify a budget number of key nodes whose removal would minimize the connectivity of a network. However, the existing solutions heavily rely on the number of edges, making it challenging to handle large and densely connected social networks. In this study, we present a fast algorithm that is independent of the number of edges. To achieve this, we first introduce a surrogate matrix that approximates the residual adjacency matrix with arbitrary small predefined error. We then devise an efficient approach for inferring k influential nodes by optimizing the eigenvalues of the surrogate matrix. Remarkably, the algorithm has a small time complexity of O(knr3), with r being a small tunable number. Our algorithm thereby maintains a linear scalability in terms of the number of nodes and is unaffected by the number of edges. Hence, it has the capability to efficiently handle large and dense social networks. At last, we evaluate its performance against state-of-the-art techniques using diverse real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method in terms of both solution quality and computational efficiency.

Explainable recommender systems ( ERS ) aim to enhance users’ trust in the systems by offering personalized recommendations with transparent explanations. This transparency provides users with a clear understanding of the rationale behind the recommendations, fostering a sense of confidence and reliability in the system’s outputs. Generally, the explanations are presented in a familiar and intuitive way, which is in the form of natural language, thus enhancing their accessibility to users. Recently, there has been an increasing focus on leveraging reviews as a valuable source of rich information in both modeling user-item preferences and generating textual interpretations, which can be performed simultaneously in a multi-task framework. Despite the progress made in these review-based recommendation systems, the integration of implicit feedback derived from user-item interactions and user-written text reviews has yet to be fully explored. To fill this gap, we propose a model named SERMON (A s pect-enhanced E xplainable R ecommendation with M ulti-modal C o ntrast Lear n ing). Our model explores the application of multimodal contrastive learning to facilitate reciprocal learning across two modalities, thereby enhancing the modeling of user preferences. Moreover, our model incorporates the aspect information extracted from the review, which provides two significant enhancements to our tasks. Firstly, the quality of the generated explanations is improved by incorporating the aspect characteristics into the explanations generated by a pre-trained model with controlled textual generation ability. Secondly, the commonly used user-item interactions are transformed into user-item-aspect interactions, which we refer to as interaction triple, resulting in a more nuanced representation of user preference. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we conduct extensive experiments on three real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 2.0% improvement in prediction accuracy and a substantial 24.5% enhancement in explanation quality for the TripAdvisor dataset.

Wensheng Lu, Jianxun Lian, Wei Zhang, Guanghua Li, Mingyang Zhou, Hao Liao, Xing Xie. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

The influence maximization (IM) problem aims to identify a budgeted set of nodes with the highest potential to influence the largest number of users in a cascade model, a key challenge in viral marketing. Traditional \emph{IM} approaches consider each user/node independently as a potential target customer. However, in many scenarios, the target customers comprise motifs, where activating only one or a few users within a motif is insufficient for effective viral marketing, which, nevertheless, receives little attention. For instance, if a motif of three friends planning to dine together, targeting all three simultaneously is crucial for a restaurant advertisement to succeed. In this paper, we address the motif-oriented influence maximization problem under the linear threshold model. We prove that the motif-oriented IM problem is NP-hard and that the influence function is neither supermodular nor submodular, in contrast to the classical \emph{IM} setting. To simplify the problem, we establish the submodular upper and lower bounds for the influence function. By leveraging the submodular property, we propose a natural greedy strategy that simultaneously maximizes both bounds. Our algorithm has an approximation ratio of $\tau\cdot (1-1/e-\varepsilon)$ and a near-linear time complexity of $O((k+l)(m+\eta)\log \eta/\varepsilon^2)$. Experimental results on diverse datasets confirm the effectiveness of our approach in motif maximization.

Federated learning enables collaborative AI training across organizations without compromising data privacy. Decentralized federated learning (DFL) improves this by offering enhanced reliability and security through peer-to-peer (P2P) model sharing. However, DFL faces challenges in terms of slow convergence rate due to complex P2P graphs. To address this issue, we propose an efficient algorithm to accelerate DFL by introducing a limited number of k of edges into the P2P graphs. Specifically, we establish a connection between the convergence rate and the second smallest eigenvalue of the laplacian matrix of the P2P graph. We prove that finding the optimal set of edges to maximize this eigenvalue is an NP-complete problem. Our quantitative analysis shows the positive effect of strategic edge additions on improving this eigenvalue. Based on the analysis, we then propose an efficient algorithm to compute the best set of candidate edges to maximize the second smallest eigenvalue, and consequently the convergence rate is maximized. Our algorithm has a low time complexity of O(krn^2). Experimental results on diverse datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms in accelerating DFL convergence.

Hao Cheng, Shuo Wang, Wensheng Lu, Wei Zhang, Mingyang Zhou, Kezhong Lu, Hao Liao. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

In this paper, we present an algorithmic study on how to surpass competitors in popularity by strategic promotions in social networks. We first propose a novel model, in which we integrate the Preferential Attachment (PA) model for popularity growth with the Independent Cascade (IC) model for influence propagation in social networks called PA-IC model. In PA-IC, a popular item and a novice item grab shares of popularity from the natural popularity growth via the PA model, while the novice item tries to gain extra popularity via influence cascade in a social network. The popularity ratio is defined as the ratio of the popularity measure between the novice item and the popular item. We formulate Popularity Ratio Maximization (PRM) as the problem of selecting seeds in multiple rounds to maximize the popularity ratio in the end. We analyze the popularity ratio and show that it is monotone but not submodular. To provide an effective solution, we devise a surrogate objective function and show that empirically it is very close to the original objective function while theoretically, it is monotone and submodular. We design two efficient algorithms, one for the overlapping influence and non-overlapping seeds (across rounds) setting and the other for the non-overlapping influence and overlapping seed setting, and further discuss how to deal with other models and problem variants. Our empirical evaluation further demonstrates that our proposed method consistently achieves the best popularity promotion compared to other methods. Our theoretical and empirical analyses shed light on the interplay between influence maximization and preferential attachment in social networks.

Networks are one of the most powerful structures for modeling problems in the real world. Many machine learning algorithms, however, require that each input example is a real vector. Network embedding learns from feature representations of nodes and links in a network, and converts it to vectors. Community structure is an important feature of the network, which represents the relationship among nodes and attracts the attention of relevant researchers. Many algorithms have been developed to identify the community structure. These algorithms usually identify different communities in the network, generating different types of information. In this paper, we propose a "Community Splitter" model based on random walk and RNN (Recurrent Neural Networks) that combines the node information generated by multiple community detection algorithms to improve node representation and link prediction. Extensive experiments on nine real datasets demonstrate that our proposed Community Splitter model has a significant prediction power compared to state-of-the-art link prediction models.

The bloom of the Internet and the recent breakthroughs in deep learning techniques open a new door to AI for E-commence, with a trend evolved from using a few financial factors such as liquidity and profitability to using more advanced AI techniques to process complex and multi-modal data.In this paper, we tackle the practical problem of restaurant survival prediction.We argue that traditional methods ignore two essential aspects, which are very helpful for the task: 1) modeling customer reviews and 2) jointly considering status prediction and result explanation.Thus, we propose a novel joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on the multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users' textual reviews.Moreover, we design a graph neural network to capture the high-order interactions and design a co-attention mechanism to capture the most informative and meaningful signal from noisy textual reviews.Our results on two datasets show a significant and consistent improvement over the SOTA techniques (average 6.8% improvement in prediction and 45.3% improvement in explanation).

Nowadays, with the development of web services, the survival of online service has captured public attention significantly. Future prediction of business is crucial to the shopkeepers. Predicting how the business will develop and explaining what key factors are leading to it are two most important tasks. Existing literatures usually tackle only one of these two tasks, ignoring that they are two closely related tasks and complement each other. In this paper, we propose a review-based neural model, named Deep Concept-aware Model (DCA), to predict restaurants' future status and provide explainable sentences simultaneously in an end2end framework. Specifically, we use co-attention to select concepts and implement prediction and explanation tasks through Factorization Machine and Gated Recurrent Unit, respectively. We conduct extensive experiments on three Chinese cities' datasets. The proposed joint model outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods for both prediction (average 40.96% improvement in AUC) and explanation (average 9.72% improvement in BLEU and 86.05% in Precision metric of ROUGE).

In the past two decades, analyzing the information network has been intensively studied from various disciplines. Small world property and scale-free property prevail in network science research. The comparison and classification of different kinds of graphs are extremely important. However, how to design a robust and accurate classification with deep learning techniques for network property still lack enough attention, which is a vital task in various application scenarios. In this paper, we proposed the reliable network property classifier based on graph embedding(RNC) to classify the network property (scale free or small world property). In order to process non-euclidean data, we embedded each network into an image and use dimensional reduction, rasterization, and convolutional neural networks to complete the classification problem. The method can effectively accomplish classification tasks in not only artificial networks but also real networks. Besides, RNC wins greatly in terms of robustness on real networks, showing the robustness of RNC against the incomplete structure of the network.