Ming Ding 0004

dblp:48/3462-4 · DBLP profile ↗
← Back
37ranked-venue papers
6as first author
30since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-5152-7011ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 34 · 6 first-author · 27 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 10 · 2 first-author · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 7 · 6 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2026 VisionReward: Fine-Grained Multi-Dimensional Human Preference Learning for Image and Video Generation
abstract
Visual generative models have achieved remarkable progress in synthesizing photorealistic images and videos, yet aligning their outputs with human preferences across critical dimensions remains a persistent challenge. Though reinforcement learning from human feedback offers promise for preference alignment, existing reward models for visual generation face limitations, including black-box scoring without interpretability and potentially resultant unexpected biases. We present VisionReward, a general framework for learning human visual preferences in both image and video generation. Specifically, we employ a hierarchical visual assessment framework to capture fine-grained human preferences, and leverages linear weighting to enable interpretable preference learning. Furthermore, we propose a multi-dimensional consistent strategy when using VisionReward as a reward model during preference optimization for visual generation. Experiments show that VisionReward can significantly outperform existing image and video reward models on both machine metrics and human evaluation. Notably, VisionReward surpasses VideoScore by 17.2% in preference prediction accuracy, and text-to-video models with VisionReward achieve a 31.6% higher pairwise win rate compared to the same models using VideoScore.
Jiazheng Xu, Yuanming Yang, Wenbo Duan, Shen Yang 0001, Qunlin Jin, Shurun Li, Jiayan Teng, Zhuoyi Yang, Wendi Zheng, Xiao Liu 0036, Ming Ding 0004, Shiyu Huang 0001, Xiaotao Gu, Minlie Huang, Jie Tang 0001, Yuxiao Dong
AAAI16
2025 AlignMMBench: Evaluating Chinese Multimodal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models
abstract
Yuhang Wu, Wenmeng Yu, Yean Cheng, Yan Wang, Xiaohan Zhang, Jiazheng Xu, Ming Ding, Yuxiao Dong. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.
Wenmeng Yu, Yean Cheng, Yan Wang 0120, Jiazheng Xu, Ming Ding 0004, Yuxiao Dong
ACL (1)7
2025 LVBench: An Extreme Long Video Understanding Benchmark
abstract
Recent progress in multimodal large language models has markedly enhanced the understanding of short videos (typically under one minute), and several evaluation datasets have emerged accordingly. However, these advancements fall short of meeting the demands of real-world applications such as embodied intelligence for long-term decision-making, in-depth movie reviews and discussions, and live sports commentary, all of which require comprehension of long videos spanning several hours. To address this gap, we introduce LVBench, a benchmark specifically designed for long video understanding. Our dataset comprises publicly sourced videos and encompasses a diverse set of tasks aimed at long video comprehension and information extraction. LVBench is designed to challenge multimodal models to demonstrate long-term memory and extended comprehension capabilities. Our extensive evaluations reveal that current multimodal models still underperform on these demanding long video understanding tasks. Through LVBench, we aim to spur the development of more advanced models capable of tackling the complexities of long video comprehension. Our data and code are publicly available at: https://lvbench.github.io.
Zehai He, Wenyi Hong, Yean Cheng, Ji Qi 0003, Ming Ding 0004, Xiaotao Gu, Shiyu Huang 0001, Bin Xu 0001, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
ICCV7
2025 VisualAgentBench: Towards Large Multimodal Models as Visual Foundation Agents
abstract
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have ushered in a new era in artificial intelligence, merging capabilities in both language and vision to form highly capable \textbf{Visual Foundation Agents} that are postulated to excel across a myriad of tasks. However, existing benchmarks fail to sufficiently challenge or showcase the full potential of LMMs as visual foundation agents in complex, real-world environments. To address this gap, we introduce VisualAgentBench (VAB), a comprehensive and unified benchmark specifically designed to train and evaluate LMMs as visual foundation agents across diverse scenarios in one standard setting, including Embodied, Graphical User Interface, and Visual Design, with tasks formulated to probe the depth of LMMs' understanding and interaction capabilities. Through rigorous testing across 9 proprietary LMM APIs and 9 open models (18 in total), we demonstrate the considerable yet still developing visual agent capabilities of these models. Additionally, VAB explores the synthesizing of visual agent trajectory data through hybrid methods including Program-based Solvers, LMM Agent Bootstrapping, and Human Demonstrations, offering insights into obstacles, solutions, and trade-offs one may meet in developing open LMM agents. Our work not only aims to benchmark existing models but also provides an instrumental playground for future development into visual foundation agents. Code, train, and test data are available at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/VisualAgentBench}.
Xiao Liu 0036, Tianjie Zhang, Yu Gu 0016, Iat Long Iong, Xixuan Song, Yifan Xu 0014, Shudan Zhang, Hanyu Lai, Jiadai Sun, Zehan Qi, Shuntian Yao, Xueqiao Sun, Qinkai Zheng, Hao Yu 0030, Hanchen Zhang, Wenyi Hong, Ming Ding 0004, Lihang Pan, Xiaotao Gu, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Chan Hee Song, Yu Su 0001, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
ICLR20
2025 CogCoM: A Visual Language Model with Chain-of-Manipulations Reasoning
abstract
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown broad effectiveness due to extensive training that aligns visual inputs with corresponding language responses. However, this conclusive alignment training causes models to overlook essential visual reasoning, leading to failures in handling detailed visual tasks and producing unfaithful responses. Drawing inspiration from human cognition in solving visual problems (e.g., marking, zoom in), this paper introduces Chain of Manipulations, a mechanism that enables VLMs to tackle problems step-by-step with evidence. After training, models can solve various visual problems by eliciting intrinsic manipulations (e.g., grounding, zoom in) with results (e.g., boxes, image) actively without relying external tools, while also allowing users to trace error causes. In this paper, we study the comprehensive methodology that includes: (1) a flexible design of manipulations based on extensive analysis, (2) an efficient automated data generation pipeline, (3) a compatible VLM architecture capable of multi-turn, multi-image, and (4) a model training process for versatile capabilities. With the design, we also manually annotate **6K** high-quality samples for challenging graphical mathematical problems. Our trained model, CogCoM, equipped with this mechanism and 17B parameters, achieves SOTA performance across **9** benchmarks in **4** categories, demonstrating its effectiveness while maintaining interpretability. Code, model, and data are available at https://github.com/THUDM/CogCoM.
Ji Qi 0003, Ming Ding 0004, Yushi Bai, Qingsong Lv, Wenyi Hong, Bin Xu 0001, Lei Hou 0001, Juan-Zi Li, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
ICLR2
2025 CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer
abstract
We present CogVideoX, a large-scale text-to-video generation model based on diffusion transformer, which can generate 10-second continuous videos that align seamlessly with text prompts, with a frame rate of 16 fps and resolution of 768 x 1360 pixels. Previous video generation models often struggled with limited motion and short durations. It is especially difficult to generate videos with coherent narratives based on text. We propose several designs to address these issues. First, we introduce a 3D Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to compress videos across spatial and temporal dimensions, enhancing both the compression rate and video fidelity. Second, to improve text-video alignment, we propose an expert transformer with expert adaptive LayerNorm to facilitate the deep fusion between the two modalities. Third, by employing progressive training and multi-resolution frame packing, CogVideoX excels at generating coherent, long-duration videos with diverse shapes and dynamic movements. In addition, we develop an effective pipeline that includes various pre-processing strategies for text and video data. Our innovative video captioning model significantly improves generation quality and semantic alignment. Results show that CogVideoX achieves state-of-the-art performance in both automated benchmarks and human evaluation. We publish the code and model checkpoints of CogVideoX along with our VAE model and video captioning model at https://github.com/THUDM/CogVideo.
Zhuoyi Yang, Jiayan Teng, Wendi Zheng, Ming Ding 0004, Shiyu Huang 0001, Jiazheng Xu, Yuanming Yang, Wenyi Hong, Guanyu Feng, Da Yin, Yean Cheng, Bin Xu 0001, Xiaotao Gu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
ICLR4
2024 CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agents
abstract
People are spending an enormous amount of time on dig-ital devices through graphical user interfaces (GUIs), e.g., computer or smartphone screens. Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT can assist people in tasks like writing emails, but struggle to understand and interact with GUIs, thus limiting their potential to increase automation levels. In this paper, we introduce CogAgent, an 18-billion-parameter visual language model (VLM) specializing in GUI understanding and navigation. By utilizing both low-resolution and high-resolution image encoders, CogA-gent supports input at a resolution of1120 × 1120, enabling it to recognize tiny page elements and text. As a general-ist visual language model, CogAgent achieves the state of the art on five text-rich and four general VQA benchmarks, including VQAv2, OK- VQA, Text- Vqa, St- Vqa, ChartQA, infoVQA, DocVQA, MM-Vet, and POPE. CogAgent, using only screenshots as input, outperforms LLM-based methods that consume extracted HTML text on both PC and Android GUI navigation tasks-Mind2Web and AITW, ad-vancing the state of the art. The model and codes are available at https://github.com/THUDM/CogVLM.
Wenyi Hong, Qingsong Lv, Jiazheng Xu, Wenmeng Yu, Junhui Ji, Yan Wang 0120, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001
CVPR10
2024 Inf-DiT: Upsampling Any-Resolution Image with Memory-Efficient Diffusion Transformer
Zhuoyi Yang, Heyang Jiang, Wenyi Hong, Jiayan Teng, Wendi Zheng, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001
ECCV (83)7
2024 CogView3: Finer and Faster Text-to-Image Generation via Relay Diffusion
Wendi Zheng, Jiayan Teng, Zhuoyi Yang, Jidong Chen, Xiaotao Gu, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001
ECCV (77)8
2024 Relay Diffusion: Unifying diffusion process across resolutions for image synthesis
abstract
Diffusion models achieved great success in image synthesis, but still face challenges in high-resolution generation. Through the lens of discrete cosine transformation, we find the main reason is that *the same noise level on a higher resolution results in a higher Signal-to-Noise Ratio in the frequency domain*. In this work, we present Relay Diffusion Model (RDM), which transfers a low-resolution image or noise into an equivalent high-resolution one for diffusion model via blurring diffusion and block noise. Therefore, the diffusion process can continue seamlessly in any new resolution or model without restarting from pure noise or low-resolution conditioning. RDM achieves state-of-the-art FID on CelebA-HQ and sFID on ImageNet 256$\times$256, surpassing previous works such as ADM, LDM and DiT by a large margin. All the codes and checkpoints are open-sourced at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/RelayDiffusion}.
Jiayan Teng, Wendi Zheng, Ming Ding 0004, Wenyi Hong, Jianqiao Wangni, Zhuoyi Yang, Jie Tang 0001
ICLR3
2024 CogVLM: Visual Expert for Pretrained Language Models
abstract
We introduce CogVLM, a powerful open-source visual language foundation model. Different from the popular \emph{shallow alignment} method which maps image features into the input space of language model, CogVLM bridges the gap between the frozen pretrained language model and image encoder by a trainable visual expert module in the attention and FFN layers. As a result, CogVLM enables a deep fusion of vision language features without sacrificing any performance on NLP tasks. CogVLM-17B achieves state-of-the-art performance on 17 classic cross-modal benchmarks, including 1) image captioning datasets: NoCaps, Flicker30k, 2) VQA datasets: OKVQA, TextVQA, OCRVQA, ScienceQA, 3) LVLM benchmarks: MM-Vet, MMBench, SEED-Bench, LLaVABench, POPE, MMMU, MathVista, 4) visual grounding datasets: RefCOCO, RefCOCO+, RefCOCOg, Visual7W. Codes and checkpoints are available at Github.
Qingsong Lv, Wenmeng Yu, Wenyi Hong, Ji Qi 0003, Yan Wang 0120, Junhui Ji, Zhuoyi Yang, Xixuan Song, Jiazheng Xu, Keqin Chen, Bin Xu 0001, Juan-Zi Li, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001
NeurIPS16
2024 Does Negative Sampling Matter? a Review With Insights Into its Theory and Applications
abstract
Negative sampling has swiftly risen to prominence as a focal point of research, with wide-ranging applications spanning machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, data mining, and recommender systems. This surge in interest prompts us to question the fundamental impact of negative sampling: Does negative sampling really matter? Is there a general framework that can incorporate all negative sampling methods? In what fields is it applied? Addressing these questions, we propose a general framework that using negative sampling. Delving into the history of negative sampling, we chart its evolution across five distinct trajectories. We dissect and categorize the strategies used to select negative sample candidates, detailing global, local, mini-batch, hop, and memory-based approaches. Our comprehensive review extends to an analysis of current negative sampling methodologies, systematically grouping them into five classifications: static, hard, GAN-based, Auxiliary-based, and In-batch. Beyond detailed categorization, we explore the practical application of negative sampling across various fields. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for negative sampling.
Zhen Yang 0034, Ming Ding 0004, Tinglin Huang 0002, Yukuo Cen, Junshuai Song, Bin Xu 0001, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.2
2023 CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers
Wenyi Hong, Ming Ding 0004, Wendi Zheng, Xinghan Liu, Jie Tang 0001
ICLR2
2023 GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model
Aohan Zeng, Xiao Liu 0036, Zhengxiao Du, Hanyu Lai, Ming Ding 0004, Zhuoyi Yang, Yifan Xu 0014, Wendi Zheng, Weng Lam Tam, Zixuan Ma, Jidong Zhai, Zhiyuan Liu 0001, Peng Zhang 0077, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
ICLR6
2023 BatchSampler: Sampling Mini-Batches for Contrastive Learning in Vision, Language, and Graphs
abstract
In-Batch contrastive learning is a state-of-the-art self-supervised method that brings semantically-similar instances close while pushing dissimilar instances apart within a mini-batch. Its key to success is the negative sharing strategy, in which every instance serves as a negative for the others within the mini-batch. Recent studies aim to improve performance by sampling hard negatives within the current mini-batch, whose quality is bounded by the mini-batch itself. In this work, we propose to improve contrastive learning by sampling mini-batches from the input data. We present BatchSampler\footnoteThe code is available at BatchSampler to sample mini-batches of hard-to-distinguish (i.e., hard and true negatives to each other) instances. To make each mini-batch have fewer false negatives, we design the proximity graph of randomly-selected instances. To form the mini-batch, we leverage random walk with restart on the proximity graph to help sample hard-to-distinguish instances. BatchSampler is a simple and general technique that can be directly plugged into existing contrastive learning models in vision, language, and graphs. Extensive experiments on datasets of three modalities show that BatchSampler can consistently improve the performance of powerful contrastive models, as shown by significant improvements of SimCLR on ImageNet-100, SimCSE on STS (language), and GraphCL and MVGRL on graph datasets.
Zhen Yang 0034, Tinglin Huang 0001, Ming Ding 0004, Yuxiao Dong, Rex Ying, Yukuo Cen, Jie Tang 0001
KDD3
2023 ImageReward: Learning and Evaluating Human Preferences for Text-to-Image Generation
abstract
We present a comprehensive solution to learn and improve text-to-image models from human preference feedback. To begin with, we build ImageReward---the first general-purpose text-to-image human preference reward model---to effectively encode human preferences. Its training is based on our systematic annotation pipeline including rating and ranking, which collects 137k expert comparisons to date. In human evaluation, ImageReward outperforms existing scoring models and metrics, making it a promising automatic metric for evaluating text-to-image synthesis. On top of it, we propose Reward Feedback Learning (ReFL), a direct tuning algorithm to optimize diffusion models against a scorer. Both automatic and human evaluation support ReFL's advantages over compared methods. All code and datasets are provided at \url{https://github.com/THUDM/ImageReward}.
Jiazheng Xu, Xiao Liu 0036, Yuxuan Tong, Qinkai Li, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001, Yuxiao Dong
NeurIPS6
2023 Region or Global? A Principle for Negative Sampling in Graph-Based Recommendation
abstract
Graph-based recommendation systems are blossoming recently, which models user-item interactions as a user-item graph and utilizes graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn the embeddings for users and items. A fundamental challenge of graph-based recommendation is that there only exists observed positive user-item pairs in the user-item graph. Negative sampling is a vital technique to solve the one-class problem and is widely used in many recommendation methods. However, the previous works only focus on the design of negative sampling distribution but ignore the sampled region for negative sampling. In this work, we propose the Three-Region Principle to guide negative sampling, which suggests that we should negatively sample more items at an intermediate region and less adjacent and distant items. In light of this principle, we present the RecNS method, which is a general negative sampling method designed with two sampling strategies: positive-assisted sampling and exposure-augmented sampling. Instead of sampling existing negative items from graph data, we merge these two strategies in embedding space to generate negative item embeddings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed RecNS method significantly outperforms all negative sampling baselines, e.g., 10.47% for PinSage, 6.02% for NGCF, and 8.20% for LightGCN in terms of Recall@20 on the Alibaba dataset.
Zhen Yang 0034, Ming Ding 0004, Xu Zou 0001, Jie Tang 0001, Bin Xu 0001, Chang Zhou 0005, Hongxia Yang
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.2
2023 MRT: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Publications
abstract
The fast development of science and technology is accompanied by the booming of cutting edge research. Researchers need to digest more and more recently published publications in order to keep themselves up to date. This becomes tough in particular with the prevalence of preprint publishing such as arXiv, where inspiring works could come out without being peer-reviewed. Is that possible to design an automatic system to help researchers quickly gain a glimpse of a piece of work or gain useful background knowledge for deeply understanding it To this end, we proposed a practical framework called Master Reading Tree (MRT) to trace the evolution of scientific publications. In this framework, we can build annotated evolution roadmaps for publications and identify important previous works or evolution tracks by generating expressive embeddings and clustering them into various groups. With comprehensive evaluations, our proposed framework demonstrates its superior capability in capturing underlying relations behind publications over several baseline algorithms. Finally, we integrated the proposed MRT framework on AMiner, an online academic platform, where users can generate roadmaps using MRT for free and their interactions are further used to refine the model.
Da Yin, Weng Lam Tam, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001
IEEE Trans. Knowl. Data Eng.3
2022 GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling
abstract
Zhengxiao Du, Yujie Qian, Xiao Liu, Ming Ding, Jiezhong Qiu, Zhilin Yang, Jie Tang. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.
Zhengxiao Du, Yujie Qian, Xiao Liu 0036, Ming Ding 0004, Jiezhong Qiu, Zhilin Yang 0001, Jie Tang 0001
ACL (1)4
2022 FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding
abstract
Yanan Zheng, Jing Zhou, Yujie Qian, Ming Ding, Chonghua Liao, Li Jian, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jie Tang, Sebastian Ruder, Zhilin Yang. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.
Yanan Zheng, Yujie Qian, Ming Ding 0004, Chonghua Liao, Li Jian, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jie Tang 0001, Sebastian Ruder, Zhilin Yang 0001
ACL (1)4
2022 Parameter-Efficient Tuning Makes a Good Classification Head
abstract
In recent years, pretrained models revolutionized the paradigm of natural language understanding (NLU), where we append a randomly initialized classification head after the pretrained backbone, e.g.BERT, and finetune the whole model.As the pretrained backbone makes a major contribution to the improvement, we naturally expect a good pretrained classification head can also benefit the training.However, the final-layer output of the backbone, i.e. the input of the classification head, will change greatly during finetuning, making the usual head-only pretraining (LP-FT) ineffective.In this paper, we find that parameter-efficient tuning makes a good classification head, with which we can simply replace the randomly initialized heads for a stable performance gain.Our experiments demonstrate that the classification head jointly pretrained with parameter-efficient tuning consistently improves the performance on 9 tasks in GLUE and SuperGLUE.* Equal contribution.Codes are at https://github. com/THUDM/Efficient-Head-Finetuning.
Zhuoyi Yang, Ming Ding 0004, Qingsong Lv, Jie Tang 0001
EMNLP2
2022 Rethinking the Setting of Semi-supervised Learning on Graphs
abstract
We argue that the present setting of semisupervised learning on graphs may result in unfair comparisons, due to its potential risk of over-tuning hyper-parameters for models. In this paper, we highlight the significant influence of tuning hyper-parameters, which leverages the label information in the validation set to improve the performance. To explore the limit of over-tuning hyperparameters, we propose ValidUtil, an approach to fully utilize the label information in the validation set through an extra group of hyper-parameters. With ValidUtil, even GCN can easily get high accuracy of 85.8% on Cora. To avoid over-tuning, we merge the training set and the validation set and construct an i.i.d. graph benchmark (IGB) consisting of 4 datasets. Each dataset contains 100 i.i.d. graphs sampled from a large graph to reduce the evaluation variance. Our experiments suggest that IGB is a more stable benchmark than previous datasets for semisupervised learning on graphs. Our code and data are released at https://github.com/THUDM/IGB/.
Ming Ding 0004, Weikai Li 0002, Ziyu Zeng, Yukuo Cen, Jie Tang 0001
IJCAI2
2022 CogView2: Faster and Better Text-to-Image Generation via Hierarchical Transformers
abstract
Development of transformer-based text-to-image models is impeded by its slow generation and complexity, for high-resolution images. In this work, we put forward a solution based on hierarchical transformers and local parallel autoregressive generation. We pretrain a 6B-parameter transformer with a simple and flexible self-supervised task, a cross-modal general language model (CogLM), and fine-tune it for fast super-resolution. The new text-to-image system, CogView2, shows very competitive generation compared to concurrent state-of-the-art DALL-E-2, and naturally supports interactive text-guided editing on images.
Ming Ding 0004, Wendi Zheng, Wenyi Hong, Jie Tang 0001
NeurIPS1
2022 STAM: A Spatiotemporal Aggregation Method for Graph Neural Network-based Recommendation
abstract
Graph neural network-based recommendation systems are blossoming recently, and its core component is aggregation methods that determine neighbor embedding learning. Prior arts usually focus on how to aggregate information from the perspective of spatial structure information, but temporal information about neighbors is left insufficiently explored.
Zhen Yang 0034, Ming Ding 0004, Bin Xu 0001, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001
WWW2
2021 The International Workshop on Pretraining: Algorithms, Architectures, and Applications ([email protected] 2021)
abstract
The International Workshop on Pretraining: Algorithms, Architectures, and Applications ([email protected] 2021) presents interdisciplinary contributions in pretraining. The workshop is related to machine learning, deep learning, representation learning, natural language processing, computer vision, graph learning, and knowledge discovery. The program of the workshop will focus on presenting and discussing the state-of-the-art, open problems, challenges and latest models, techniques and algorithms in the field of pretraining, covering aspects of algorithms, architectures and applications.
Ming Ding 0004, Yuxiao Dong, Xiao Liu 0036, Jiezhong Qiu, Jie Tang 0001, Zhilin Yang 0001
KDD1
2021 MixGCF: An Improved Training Method for Graph Neural Network-based Recommender Systems
abstract
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have recently emerged as state-of-the-art collaborative filtering (CF) solution. A fundamental challenge of CF is to distill negative signals from the implicit feedback, but negative sampling in GNN-based CF has been largely unexplored. In this work, we propose to study negative sampling by leveraging both the user-item graph structure and GNNs' aggregation process. We present the MixGCF method---a general negative sampling plugin that can be directly used to train GNN-based recommender systems. In MixGCF, rather than sampling raw negatives from data, we design the hop mixing technique to synthesize hard negatives. Specifically, the idea of hop mixing is to generate the synthetic negative by aggregating embeddings from different layers of raw negatives' neighborhoods. The layer and neighborhood selection process are optimized by a theoretically-backed hard selection strategy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that by using MixGCF, state-of-the-art GNN-based recommendation models can be consistently and significantly improved, e.g., 26% for NGCF and 22% for LightGCN in terms of [email protected]
Tinglin Huang 0001, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding 0004, Zhen Yang 0034, Wenzheng Feng, Xinyu Wang 0001, Jie Tang 0001
KDD3
2021 Are we really making much progress?: Revisiting, benchmarking and refining heterogeneous graph neural networks
abstract
Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have been blossoming in recent years, but the unique data processing and evaluation setups used by each work obstruct a full understanding of their advancements. In this work, we present a systematical reproduction of 12 recent HGNNs by using their official codes, datasets, settings, and hyperparameters, revealing surprising findings about the progress of HGNNs. We find that the simple homogeneous GNNs, e.g., GCN and GAT, are largely underestimated due to improper settings. GAT with proper inputs can generally match or outperform all existing HGNNs across various scenarios. To facilitate robust and reproducible HGNN research, we construct the Heterogeneous Graph Benchmark (HGB) , consisting of 11 diverse datasets with three tasks. HGB standardizes the process of heterogeneous graph data splits, feature processing, and performance evaluation. Finally, we introduce a simple but very strong baseline Simple-HGN-which significantly outperforms all previous models on HGB-to accelerate the advancement of HGNNs in the future.
Qingsong Lv, Ming Ding 0004, Wenzheng Feng, Siming He, Chang Zhou 0005, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang 0001
KDD2
2021 CogView: Mastering Text-to-Image Generation via Transformers
abstract
Text-to-Image generation in the general domain has long been an open problem, which requires both a powerful generative model and cross-modal understanding. We propose CogView, a 4-billion-parameter Transformer with VQ-VAE tokenizer to advance this problem. We also demonstrate the finetuning strategies for various downstream tasks, e.g. style learning, super-resolution, text-image ranking and fashion design, and methods to stabilize pretraining, e.g. eliminating NaN losses. CogView achieves the state-of-the-art FID on the blurred MS COCO dataset, outperforming previous GAN-based models and a recent similar work DALL-E.
Ming Ding 0004, Zhuoyi Yang, Wenyi Hong, Wendi Zheng, Chang Zhou 0005, Da Yin, Junyang Lin, Xu Zou 0001, Zhou Shao, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001
NeurIPS1
2021 UFC-BERT: Unifying Multi-Modal Controls for Conditional Image Synthesis
abstract
Conditional image synthesis aims to create an image according to some multi-modal guidance in the forms of textual descriptions, reference images, and image blocks to preserve, as well as their combinations. In this paper, instead of investigating these control signals separately, we propose a new two-stage architecture, UFC-BERT, to unify any number of multi-modal controls. In UFC-BERT, both the diverse control signals and the synthesized image are uniformly represented as a sequence of discrete tokens to be processed by Transformer. Different from existing two-stage autoregressive approaches such as DALL-E and VQGAN, UFC-BERT adopts non-autoregressive generation (NAR) at the second stage to enhance the holistic consistency of the synthesized image, to support preserving specified image blocks, and to improve the synthesis speed. Further, we design a progressive algorithm that iteratively improves the non-autoregressively generated image, with the help of two estimators developed for evaluating the compliance with the controls and evaluating the fidelity of the synthesized image, respectively. Extensive experiments on a newly collected large-scale clothing dataset M2C-Fashion and a facial dataset Multi-Modal CelebA-HQ verify that UFC-BERT can synthesize high-fidelity images that comply with flexible multi-modal controls.
Chang Zhou 0005, Rui Men, Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001, Jingren Zhou 0001, Hongxia Yang
NeurIPS6
2021 Adaptive Diffusion in Graph Neural Networks
abstract
The success of graph neural networks (GNNs) largely relies on the process of aggregating information from neighbors defined by the input graph structures. Notably, message passing based GNNs, e.g., graph convolutional networks, leverage the immediate neighbors of each node during the aggregation process, and recently, graph diffusion convolution (GDC) is proposed to expand the propagation neighborhood by leveraging generalized graph diffusion. However, the neighborhood size in GDC is manually tuned for each graph by conducting grid search over the validation set, making its generalization practically limited. To address this issue, we propose the adaptive diffusion convolution (ADC) strategy to automatically learn the optimal neighborhood size from the data. Furthermore, we break the conventional assumption that all GNN layers and feature channels (dimensions) should use the same neighborhood for propagation. We design strategies to enable ADC to learn a dedicated propagation neighborhood for each GNN layer and each feature channel, making the GNN architecture fully coupled with graph structures---the unique property that differs GNNs from traditional neural networks. By directly plugging ADC into existing GNNs, we observe consistent and significant outperformance over both GDC and their vanilla versions across various datasets, demonstrating the improved model capacity brought by automatically learning unique neighborhood size per layer and per channel in GNNs.
Jialin Zhao 0004, Yuxiao Dong, Ming Ding 0004, Evgeny Kharlamov, Jie Tang 0001
NeurIPS3
2020 GCC: Graph Contrastive Coding for Graph Neural Network Pre-Training
abstract
Graph representation learning has emerged as a powerful technique for addressing real-world problems. Various downstream graph learning tasks have benefited from its recent developments, such as node classification, similarity search, and graph classification. However, prior arts on graph representation learning focus on domain specific problems and train a dedicated model for each graph dataset, which is usually non-transferable to out-of-domain data. Inspired by the recent advances in pre-training from natural language processing and computer vision, we design Graph Contrastive Coding (GCC) --- a self-supervised graph neural network pre-training framework --- to capture the universal network topological properties across multiple networks. We design GCC's pre-training task as subgraph instance discrimination in and across networks and leverage contrastive learning to empower graph neural networks to learn the intrinsic and transferable structural representations. We conduct extensive experiments on three graph learning tasks and ten graph datasets. The results show that GCC pre-trained on a collection of diverse datasets can achieve competitive or better performance to its task-specific and trained-from-scratch counterparts. This suggests that the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm presents great potential for graph representation learning.
Jiezhong Qiu, Yuxiao Dong, Jing Zhang 0001, Hongxia Yang, Ming Ding 0004, Kuansan Wang, Jie Tang 0001
KDD6
2020 Understanding Negative Sampling in Graph Representation Learning
abstract
Graph representation learning has been extensively studied in recent years, in which sampling is a critical point. Prior arts usually focus on sampling positive node pairs, while the strategy for negative sampling is left insufficiently explored. To bridge the gap, we systematically analyze the role of negative sampling from the perspectives of both objective and risk, theoretically demonstrating that negative sampling is as important as positive sampling in determining the optimization objective and the resulted variance. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to derive the theory and quantify that a nice negative sampling distribution is pn(u|v) ∝ pd(u|v)α, 0 < α < 1. With the guidance of the theory, we propose MCNS, approximating the positive distribution with self-contrast approximation and accelerating negative sampling by Metropolis-Hastings. We evaluate our method on 5 datasets that cover extensive downstream graph learning tasks, including link prediction, node classification and recommendation, on a total of 19 experimental settings. These relatively comprehensive experimental results demonstrate its robustness and superiorities.
Zhen Yang 0034, Ming Ding 0004, Chang Zhou 0005, Hongxia Yang, Jingren Zhou 0001, Jie Tang 0001
KDD2
2020 CogLTX: Applying BERT to Long Texts
abstract
BERTs are incapable of processing long texts due to its quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. The straightforward thoughts to address this problem, such as slicing the text by a sliding window or simplifying transformers, suffer from insufficient long-range attentions or need customized CUDA kernels. The limited text length of BERT reminds us the limited capacity (5∼ 9 chunks) of the working memory of humans – then how do human beings Cognize Long TeXts? Founded on the cognitive theory stemming from Baddeley, our CogLTX framework identifies key sentences by training a judge model, concatenates them for reasoning and enables multi-step reasoning via rehearsal and decay. Since relevance annotations are usually unavailable, we propose to use treatment experiments to create supervision. As a general algorithm, CogLTX outperforms or gets comparable results to SOTA models on NewsQA, HotpotQA, multi-class and multi-label long-text classification tasks with memory overheads independent of the text length.
Ming Ding 0004, Chang Zhou 0005, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001
NeurIPS1
2019 Cognitive Graph for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension at Scale
abstract
We propose a new CogQA framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering in web-scale documents. Founded on the dual process theory in cognitive science, the framework gradually builds a cognitive graph in an iterative process by coordinating an implicit extraction module (System 1) and an explicit reasoning module (System 2). While giving accurate answers, our framework further provides explainable reasoning paths. Specifically, our implementation based on BERT and graph neural network efficiently handles millions of documents for multi-hop reasoning questions in the HotpotQA fullwiki dataset, achieving a winning joint F1 score of 34.9 on the leaderboard, compared to 23.1 of the best competitor.
Ming Ding 0004, Chang Zhou 0005, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001
ACL (1)1
2019 Towards Knowledge-Based Recommender Dialog System
abstract
Qibin Chen, Junyang Lin, Yichang Zhang, Ming Ding, Yukuo Cen, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.
Junyang Lin, Yichang Zhang, Ming Ding 0004, Yukuo Cen, Hongxia Yang, Jie Tang 0001
EMNLP/IJCNLP (1)4
2019 ProNE: Fast and Scalable Network Representation Learning
abstract
Recent advances in network embedding has revolutionized the field of graph and network mining. However, (pre-)training embeddings for very large-scale networks is computationally challenging for most existing methods. In this work, we present ProNE---a fast, scalable, and effective model, whose single-thread version is 10--400x faster than efficient network embedding benchmarks with 20 threads, including LINE, DeepWalk, node2vec, GraRep, and HOPE. As a concrete example, the single-version ProNE requires only 29 hours to embed a network of hundreds of millions of nodes while it takes LINE weeks and DeepWalk months by using 20 threads. To achieve this, ProNE first initializes network embeddings efficiently by formulating the task as sparse matrix factorization. The second step of ProNE is to enhance the embeddings by propagating them in the spectrally modulated space. Extensive experiments on networks of various scales and types demonstrate that ProNE achieves both effectiveness and significant efficiency superiority when compared to the aforementioned baselines. In addition, ProNE's embedding enhancement step can be also generalized for improving other models at speed, e.g., offering >10% relative gains for the used baselines.
Jie Zhang 0078, Yuxiao Dong, Yan Wang 0120, Jie Tang 0001, Ming Ding 0004
IJCAI5
2018 Semi-supervised Learning on Graphs with Generative Adversarial Nets
abstract
We investigate how generative adversarial nets (GANs) can help semi-supervised learning on graphs. We first provide insights on working principles of adversarial learning over graphs and then present GraphSGAN, a novel approach to semi-supervised learning on graphs. In GraphSGAN, generator and classifier networks play a novel competitive game. At equilibrium, generator generates fake samples in low-density areas between subgraphs. In order to discriminate fake samples from the real, classifier implicitly takes the density property of subgraph into consideration. An efficient adversarial learning algorithm has been developed to improve traditional normalized graph Laplacian regularization with a theoretical guarantee. Experimental results on several different genres of datasets show that the proposed GraphSGAN significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. GraphSGAN can be also trained using mini-batch, thus enjoys the scalability advantage.
Ming Ding 0004, Jie Tang 0001, Jie Zhang 0078
CIKM1