Cao Liu

dblp:26/6730 · DBLP profile ↗
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8ranked-venue papers in the field
0as first author
8since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-7905-4404ORCID · corroborated

Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several

Information Retrieval & Web Search · 6Data Mining & Knowledge Discovery · 1Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web & Information Systems · 1
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 Factorized Latent Reasoning for LLM-based Recommendation
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been adopted for recommendation by framing user preference modeling as a language generation problem. However, existing latent reasoning approaches typically represent user intent with a single latent vector, which struggles to capture the inherently multi-faceted nature of user preferences. We propose Factorized Latent Reasoning (FLR), a novel framework for LLM-based sequential recommendation that decomposes latent reasoning into multiple disentangled preference factors. FLR introduces a lightweight multi-factor attention module that iteratively refines a latent thought representation, where each factor attends to distinct aspects of the user's interaction history. To encourage diversity and specialization, we design orthogonality, attention diversity, and sparsity regularization objectives, and dynamically aggregate factor contributions for the final prediction. We further integrate FLR with an efficient reinforcement learning strategy based on group-relative policy optimization, enabling stable alignment directly in the latent reasoning space. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that FLR consistently outperforms strong baselines while improving robustness and interpretability. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/ToAdventure/FLR.
Tianqi Gao, Chengkai Huang, Cao Liu, Lina Yao 0001
SIGIR4
2026 Purifying Multimodal Retrieval: Fragment-Level Evidence Selection for RAG
Xihang Wang, Chengkai Huang, Cao Liu, Quan Z. Sheng, Lina Yao 0001
SIGIR4
2024 Information bottleneck based knowledge selection for commonsense reasoning
Zhao Yang 0004, Yuanzhe Zhang, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Jun Zhao 0001, Kang Liu 0001
Inf. Sci.4
2024 A Segment Augmentation and Prediction Consistency Framework for Multi-label Unknown Intent Detection
abstract
Multi-label unknown intent detection is a challenging task where each utterance may contain not only multiple known but also unknown intents. To tackle this challenge, pioneers proposed to predict the intent number of the utterance first, then compare it with the results of known intent matching to decide whether the utterence contains unknown intent(s). Though they have made remarkable progress on this task, their methods still suffer from two important issues: (1) It is inadequate to extract multiple intents using only utterance encoding; (2) Optimizing two sub-tasks (intent number prediction and known intent matching) independently leads to inconsistent predictions. In this article, we propose to incorporate segment augmentation rather than only use utterance encoding to better detect multiple intents. We also design a prediction consistency module to bridge the gap between the two sub-tasks. Empirical results on MultiWOZ2.3 and MixSNIPS datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and significantly improves the best baseline.
Miaoxin Chen, Cao Liu, Boqi Dai, Hai-Tao Zheng 0002, Hui Wang 0030, Rui Xie 0005, Hong-Gee Kim
ACM Trans. Knowl. Discov. Data3
2023 Segment Augmentation and Prediction Consistency Neural Network for Multi-label Unknown Intent Detection
abstract
Multi-label unknown intent detection is a challenging task where each utterance may contain not only multiple known but also unknown intents. To tackle this challenge, pioneers proposed to predict the intent number of the utterance first, then compare it with the results of known intent matching to decide whether the utterance contains unknown intent(s). Though they have made remarkable progress on this task, their method still suffers from two important issues: 1) It is inadequate to extract multiple intents using only utterance encoding; 2) Optimizing two sub-tasks (intent number prediction and known intent matching) independently leads to inconsistent predictions. In this paper, we propose to incorporate segment augmentation rather than only use utterance encoding to better detect multiple intents. We also design a prediction consistency module to bridge the gap between the two sub-tasks. Empirical results on MultiWOZ2.3 show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves the best baseline significantly.
Miaoxin Chen, Cao Liu, Boqi Dai, Hai-Tao Zheng 0002, Jiansong Chen, Guanglu Wan, Rui Xie 0005
CIKM2
2022 Dialogue Topic Segmentation via Parallel Extraction Network with Neighbor Smoothing
abstract
Dialogue topic segmentation is a challenging task in which dialogues are split into segments with pre-defined topics. Existing works on topic segmentation adopt a two-stage paradigm, including text segmentation and segment labeling. However, such methods tend to focus on the local context in segmentation, and the inter-segment dependency is not well captured. Besides, the ambiguity and labeling noise in dialogue segment bounds bring further challenges to existing models. In this work, we propose the Parallel Extraction Network with Neighbor Smoothing (PEN-NS) to address the above issues. Specifically, we propose the parallel extraction network to perform segment extractions, optimizing the bipartite matching cost of segments to capture inter-segment dependency. Furthermore, we propose neighbor smoothing to handle the segment-bound noise and ambiguity. Experiments on a dialogue-based and a document-based topic segmentation dataset show that PEN-NS outperforms state-the-of-art models significantly.
Jinxiong Xia, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang 0087, Guanglu Wan, Houfeng Wang
SIGIR2
2021 Density-Based Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Intent Detection
abstract
Pre-trained language models have achieved noticeable performance on the intent detection task. However, due to assigning an identical weight to each sample, they suffer from the overfitting of simple samples and the failure to learn complex samples well. To handle this problem, we propose a density-based dynamic curriculum learning model. Our model defines the sample's difficulty level according to their eigenvectors' density. In this way, we exploit the overall distribution of all samples' eigenvectors simultaneously. Then we apply a dynamic curriculum learning strategy, which pays distinct attention to samples of various difficulty levels and alters the proportion of samples during the training process. Through the above operation, simple samples are well-trained, and complex samples are enhanced. Experiments on three open datasets verify that the proposed density-based algorithm can distinguish simple and complex samples significantly. Besides, our model obtains obvious improvement over the strong baselines.
Yantao Gong, Cao Liu, Jiazhen Yuan, Fan Yang 0087, Guanglu Wan, Jiansong Chen, Ruiyao Niu, Houfeng Wang
CIKM2
2021 Distant Supervision based Machine Reading Comprehension for Extractive Summarization in Customer Service
abstract
Given a long text, the summarization system aims to obtain a shorter highlight while keeping important information on the original text. For customer service, the summaries of most dialogues between an agent and a user focus on several fixed key points, such as user's question, user's purpose, the agent's solution, and so on. Traditional extractive methods are difficult to extract all predefined key points exactly. Furthermore, there is a lack of large-scale and high-quality extractive summarization datasets containing key points. In order to solve the above challenges, we propose a Distant Supervision based Machine Reading Comprehension model for extractive Summarization (DSMRC-S). DSMRC-S transforms the summarization task into the machine reading comprehension problem, to fetch key points from the original text exactly according to the predefined questions. In addition, a distant supervision method is proposed to alleviate the lack of eligible extractive summarization datasets. We conduct experiments on a large-scale summarization dataset collected in customer service scenarios, and the results show that the proposed DSMRC-S outperforms the strong baseline methods by 4 points on ROUGE-L.
Cao Liu, Jingyu Wang 0001, Shujie Hu, Fan Yang 0087, Guanglu Wan, Jiansong Chen, Jianxin Liao
SIGIR2