Multimodal Document Question Answering (MDQA) systems commonly follow a retrieve-then-answer paradigm; however, the retrieval stage often introduces substantial noise, making an effective reranking component indispensable. Existing reranker training frameworks in MDQA rely predominantly on proxy supervision derived from human annotations or large language model (LLM) outputs, which are frequently noisy and, more critically, misaligned with downstream answer quality. To overcome this limitation, we propose AD-Reranker, a novel framework that shifts reranker training from proxy imitation to answer-driven utility optimization. Specifically, we reformulate the reranker as an environment-grounded agent that interacts with a downstream reader, modeled as a deterministic environment. We further design a composite reward function that integrates answer correctness, thereby explicitly incentivizing ranking strategies aligned with downstream task performance. To optimize the agent, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), enabling stable and effective group-wise policy learning. Empirical results demonstrate that AD-Reranker achieves superior reranking quality and an optimal accuracy-efficiency trade-off. When integrated into standard MDQA pipelines, AD-Reranker improves accuracy by 1.9%–5.0% while reducing the reader's context token consumption by 15%–52%, providing strong evidence for the effectiveness of answer-driven reranker training.

Implicit feedback is central to modern recommender systems but is inherently noisy, often impairing model training and degrading user experience. At scale, such noise can mislead learning processes, reducing both recommendation accuracy and platform value. Existing denoising strategies typically overlook the entity-specific nature of noise while introducing high computational costs and complex hyperparameter tuning. To address these challenges, we propose EARD (Entity-Aware Reliability-Driven Denoising), a lightweight framework that shifts the focus from interaction-level signals to entity-level reliability. Motivated by the empirical observation that training loss correlates with noise, EARD quantifies user and item reliability via their average training losses as a proxy for reputation, and integrates these entity-level factors with interaction-level confidence. The framework is model-agnostic, computationally efficient, and requires only two intuitive hyperparameters. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and backbone models demonstrate that EARD yields substantial improvements over state-of-the-art baselines (e.g., up to 27.01% gain in NDCG@50), while incurring negligible additional computational cost. Comprehensive ablation studies and mechanism analyses further confirm EARD's robustness to hyperparameter choices and its practical scalability. These results highlight the importance of entity-aware reliability modeling for denoising implicit feedback and pave the way for more robust recommendation research.

In web-based AI services, providers typically host multiple large language models (LLMs) that exhibit diverse capabilities and incur different API costs. Meanwhile, LLM's performance depends not only on its inherent capacity but also on the reasoning strategy it employs, which together influence both answer quality and computational cost. A key challenge is therefore how to adaptively allocate models and strategies to achieve high-quality responses under constrained costs. To address this challenge, we propose Route-To-Reason (RTR), a unified routing framework that simultaneously selects suitable LLMs and reasoning strategies according to query complexity and user budget. Specifically, RTR learns dense vector representations of models and strategies that capture their behavioral characteristics in handling different queries. Leveraging these embeddings, RTR builds a routing table that estimates the cost and performance of different model–strategy pairs. During inference, RTR consults this routing table to dynamically assign the most appropriate pair, enabling adaptive and cost-efficient reasoning tailored to query difficulty and budget scenarios. Extensive experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that RTR achieves comparable or higher accuracy than the best single LLM while substantially reducing both token usage and API cost (by up to 60%), achieving a superior trade-off between performance and efficiency. By lowering the overhead of large-scale LLM inference, RTR contributes to cost-aware and environmentally sustainable deployment of web-based AI services.

Large-scale online marketplaces and recommender systems are crucial technological foundations for the development of e-commerce. In industrial recommender systems, features play a vital role as they carry essential information for downstream models. Accurate estimation of feature importance is critical, as it helps identify the most useful feature subsets from thousands of candidates for online services. Such a selection enables optimization of online performance while reducing computational burden. To address the feature selection challenges in deep learning, trainable gate-based and sensitivity-based methods have been proposed and proven effective in the industry. However, by analyzing real-world examples, we identified three bias issues that cause feature importance estimation to rely on partial model layers, samples, or gradients, ultimately leading to inaccurate feature importance estimates. We refer to these biases as layer bias, baseline bias, and approximation bias. To mitigate these biases, we propose FairFS, a fair and accurate feature selection algorithm. On one hand, FairFS directly regularizes feature importance estimation across all non-linear transformational layers to avoid layer bias. On the other hand, it employs a smooth baseline feature close to the classifier's decision boundary and an aggregated approximation method to mitigate bias issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate how FairFS mitigates these three biases and achieves state-of-the-art feature selection results.

Science Question Answering (SQA) is an important task for evaluating models' capability to reason with scientific knowledge. However, the extensive availability of scientific information (e.g., basic concepts in biology, physics, and chemistry) in pre-trained corpora may cause large language models (LLMs) to rely more on memorized information rather than actual reasoning when answering questions. This reliance persists even with techniques like Chain-of-Thought prompting, resulting in shallow understanding and limited reasoning based on scientific knowledge. Therefore, to enhance LLMs' capacity to comprehend and apply scientific knowledge, we propose a framework calledMulti-AgentCooperation-basedKnowledgeExemplification (MCKE). Specifically, MCKE leverages knowledge alongside questions to create exemplified knowledge, promoting deeper understanding through innovative knowledge representation. To better evaluate the model's ability to reason and apply knowledge, we introduceNovSciQA, a multiple-choice question answering dataset based on newly created scientific knowledge. This dataset covers multi-subject scientific knowledge and questions that do not exist in reality, making it impossible for the model to rely on memorized answer-related information to answer questions. Experimental results show that the MCKE framework outperforms baselines, and the NovSciQA dataset effectively assesses models' knowledge understanding and application. Our code and dataset are available inhttps://anonymous.4open.science/r/MCKE-NovSciQA.

Cross-Domain Recommendation (CDR) can effectively alleviate the data sparsity issue in the recommendation system by transferring the source domain knowledge to the target domain. Many CDR methods try to find a mapping of latent embeddings of the overlapping nodes (e.g., the overlapping users) from source domains to target domains. However, due to the randomness of parameter initialization and model training, the embeddings from different domains may differ a lot and the inter-domain mapping can be difficult to learn. To this end, in this work, we propose a novel Similarity-Preserving Cross-Domain Recommendation ( SimCDR ) framework. Instead of trying to learn the inter-domain mapping, SimCDR aims to preserve the intra-domain similarities of users, such that the users that are close in the source domain are still close in the target domain. Specifically, we first verify that the intra-domain similarities of user embeddings can represent domain knowledge well. Then, based on this finding, we propose the SimCDR framework, which adds the auxiliary task of predicting similar users to preserve the intra-domain similarities of the source domain user embeddings, i.e., the source domain knowledge. Besides being distinct in knowledge transfer, SimCDR also supports multiple source domains and embedding compression, making it more suitable for real-world applications. We conduct thorough experiments that verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Fine-grained sentiment analysis, which aims to identify sentiments associated with specific aspects within sentences, faces challenges in effectively incorporating commonsense knowledge. Recent advancements leveraging large language models (LLMs) as data generators show promise but are limited by the LLMs' lack of nuanced, domain-specific understanding and pose a significant risk of data leakage during inference, potentially leading to inflated performance metrics. To address these limitations, we propose LLM-Kit, a novel framework for commonsense-enhanced fine-grained sentiment analysis that integrates knowledge via LLM-guided graph construction, effectively mitigating data leakage risks. LLM-Kit operates in two key stages: (1) Commonsense Graph Construction (CGC): We design second-order rules and leverage LLMs for evaluation to ensure the accuracy of the generated graph and mitigate the risk of data leakage from LLMs. (2) Knowledge-integration Graph Representation Learning (KGRL): We extract knowledge that is aware of various aspects through Graph Representation Learning (GRL). To capture the underlying semantic nuances within the input sentence, we develop a Sentence Semantic Learning (SSL) module based on RoBERTa that explicitly encodes internal semantics. This module provides complementary information to the GCN, improving the model's ability to discern subtle sentiment variations related to different aspects. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets affirm that LLM-Kit achieves comparable performance with state-of-the-art models.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) diagnosis aims to automatically classify ECG recordings into clinically meaningful categories, playing a vital role in medical decision-making. Deep learning methods, while promising, demand extensive annotated data and lack interpretability. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential in low-data scenarios and generating interpretable outputs, yet their application to ECG diagnosis, especially leveraging multimodal data (e.g., raw signals, derived features, and clinical knowledge), remains underexplored. To address these challenges, we propose ECG-Doctor, an interpretable and multimodal ECG diagnosis framework based on LLMs. ECG-Doctor comprises four key components: (1) ECG Knowledge Acquisition Module, which integrates external medical knowledge and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to address the inability of LLMs to follow standardized ECG diagnostic procedures; (2) ECG Feature Extraction Module, which incorporates domain knowledge to overcome LLMs' limitations in comprehensively understanding structured ECG features; (3) ECG Waveform Analysis Module, which introduces time-series ECG models to equip LLMs with the capability to interpret and reason over raw ECG signal morphologies; (4) KNN-based ECG Retrieval Module, which retrieves the top-k most similar ECG samples and guides LLMs through in-context learning (ICL), enabling them to differentiate and learn from variations across ECGs. The outputs of these modules are aggregated and provided to the LLM as diagnostic context, enabling ICL to perform comprehensive ECG diagnosis. This design effectively simulates the diagnostic reasoning process of experienced electrocardiologists. Extensive experiments on the PTB-XL dataset demonstrate that ECG-Doctor is compatible with various LLMs and consistently outperforms existing baselines at both 100 Hz and 500 Hz sampling rates, showcasing its strong versatility and robustness. Furthermore, ECG-Doctor provides well-grounded diagnostic explanations, highlighting its superior interpretability.

Graph In-Context Learning, with the ability to adapt pre-trained graph models to novel and diverse downstream graphs without updating any parameters, has gained much attention in the community. The key to graph in-context learning is to perform downstream graphs conditioned on chosen prompt examples. Existing methods randomly select subgraphs or edges as prompts, leading to noisy graph prompts and inferior model performance. Additionally, due to the gap between pre-training and testing graphs, when the number of classes in the testing graphs is much greater than that in the training, the in-context learning ability will also significantly deteriorate. To tackle the aforementioned challenges, we develop a multi-stage adaptive prompt optimization method GraphPrompter, which optimizes the entire process of generating, selecting, and using graph prompts for better in-context learning capabilities. Firstly, Prompt Generator introduces a reconstruction layer to highlight the most informative edges and reduce irrelevant noise for graph prompt construction. Furthermore, in the selection stage, Prompt Selector employs the k-nearest neighbors algorithm and pre-trained selection layers to dynamically choose appropriate sam-ples and minimize the influence of irrelevant prompts. Finally, we leverage a Prompt Augmenter with a cache replacement strategy to enhance the generalization capability of the pre-trained model on new datasets. Extensive experiments show that GraphPrompter effectively enhances the in-context learning ability of graph models. On average across all the settings, our approach surpasses the state-of-the-art baselines by over 8 %. Our code is released at https://ithub.com/karin0018/GraphPrompter.

Few-Shot Fake News Detection (FS-FND) aims to distinguish inaccurate news from real ones in extremely lowresource scenarios. This task has garnered increased attention due to the widespread dissemination and harmful impact of fake news on social media. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated competitive performance with the help of their rich prior knowledge and excellent in-context learning abilities. However, existing methods face significant limitations, such as the Understanding Ambiguity and Information Scarcity, which significantly undermine the potential of LLMs. To address these shortcomings, we propose a Dual-perspective Knowledge-guided Fake News Detection (DKFND) model, designed to enhance LLMs from both inside and outside perspectives. Specifically, DKFND first identifies the knowledge concepts of each news article through a Detection Module. Subsequently, DKFND creatively designs an Investigation Module to retrieve inside and outside valuable information concerning to the current news, followed by another Judge Module to evaluate the relevance and confidence of them. Finally, a Determination Module further derives two respective predictions and obtain the final result. Extensive experiments on two public datasets show the efficacy of our proposed method, particularly in low-resource settings.

Recent advances in machine learning, particularly in Natural Language Processing (NLP), have produced powerful models trained on vast datasets. However, these models risk leaking sensitive information, raising privacy concerns. In response, regulatory measures such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have driven increasing interest in Machine Unlearning techniques, which enable models to selectively forget specific data entries. Early unlearning approaches primarily relied on pre-processing methods, while more recent research has shifted towards training-based solutions. Despite their effectiveness, a key limitation persists: most methods require access to original training data, which is often unavailable. Additionally, directly applying unlearning techniques bears the cost of undermining the model's expressive capabilities. To address these challenges, we introduce the Iterative Contrastive Unlearning (ICU) framework, which consists of three core components: A Knowledge Unlearning Induction module designed to target specific knowledge for removal using an unlearning loss; A Contrastive Learning Enhancement module to preserve the model's expressive capabilities against the pure unlearning goal; And an Iterative Unlearning Refinement module that dynamically adjusts the unlearning process through ongoing evaluation and updates. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our ICU method in unlearning sensitive information while maintaining the model's overall performance, offering a promising solution for privacy-conscious machine learning applications.

Zero-shot composed image retrieval (ZS-CIR) is a rapidly growing area with significant practical applications, allowing users to retrieve a target image by providing a reference image and a relative caption describing the desired modifications. Existing ZS-CIR methods often struggle to capture fine-grained changes and integrate visual and semantic information effectively. They primarily rely on either transforming the multimodal query into a single text using image-to-text models or employing large language models for target image description generation, approaches that often fail to capture complementary visual information and complete semantic context. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Fine-Grained Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval method with Complementary VisualSemantic Integration (CVSI). Specifically, CVSI leverages three key components: (1) Visual Information Extraction, which not only extracts global image features but also uses a pre-trained mapping network to convert the image into a pseudo token, combining it with the modification text and the objects most likely to be added. (2) Semantic Information Extraction, which involves using a pre-trained captioning model to generate multiple captions for the reference image, followed by leveraging an LLM to generate the modified captions and the objects most likely to be added. (3) Complementary Information Retrieval, which integrates information extracted from both the query and database images to retrieve the target image, enabling the system to efficiently handle retrieval queries in a variety of situations. Extensive experiments on three public datasets (e.g., CIRR, CIRCO, and FashionIQ) demonstrate that CVSI significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/yyc6631/CVSI.

Modern recommender systems face a critical challenge in modeling the intricate interplay between multi-behavior interactions of users (e.g., clicks, adds-to-cart and purchases) and temporal dynamics that drive evolving preferences. While existing multi-behavior sequential recommendation methods attempt to capture these signals, they often suffer from fragmented modeling, such as decoupling behaviors and items into separate sequences, neglecting time-aware transitions, or relying on computationally intensive architectures that hinder real-world scalability. To address these limitations, we propose GEneralized Alternating Regressor (GEAR), a novel framework that unifies behaviors, items, and temporal contexts into a single autoregressive sequence through an alternating architecture. At its core, GEAR represents user interactions as triplets and processes them through a modular transformer architecture. In this architecture, each triplet is alternately modeled at lower layers to disentangle fine-grained patterns, while upper layers jointly learn cross-signal dependencies. This design mimics the interlocking mechanism of gears, enabling the seamless transitions between multi-behavior dynamics and item transitions. Additionally, we incorporate a time-bias term to quantify the decay of behavioral influence across both short- and long-term horizons. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness, generalizability, and computational efficiency of the proposed framework.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) congestion control is a fundamental mechanism in the Internet that maintains network stability and performance by adjusting the sending rate of connections. Recently, Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods have shown superior performance over traditional expert-designed solutions. However, the DRL policies are often represented by black-box neural networks, they lack interpretability, making verification challenging and requiring excessive floating-point computation. This work introduces a novel approach, Programmatic reinforcement learning for Congestion Control (ProCC), designed to autonomously discover a program as a control policy from scratch. Programs in ProCC include branching structures (e.g., if blocks and if-else blocks), conditions and actions. However, directly optimizing such program structures is challenging due to their discrete non-differentiable nature, and the program space grows exponentially as the depth increases. To address this issue, ProCC defines a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) and program transformation rules, enabling the construction of a program search graph where similar programs are closer in proximity. Subsequently, ProCC employs Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to efficiently explore the discrete space and obtain promising programs. Extensive experiments conducted in multiple simulated environments demonstrate that ProCC is adaptive and consistently performs well under varying network conditions. The learned program's performance surpasses that of state-of-the-art DRL agents, and more importantly, the generated policies are concise, transparent, and computationally efficient.

Sequential recommendation systems are integral to discerning temporal user preferences. Yet, the task of learning from abbreviated user interaction sequences poses a notable challenge. Data augmentation has been identified as a potent strategy to enhance the informational richness of these sequences. Traditional augmentation techniques, such as item randomization, may disrupt the inherent temporal dynamics. Although recent advancements in reverse chronological pseudo-item generation have shown promise, they can introduce temporal discrepancies when assessed in a natural chronological context. In response, we introduce a sophisticated approach, Bidirectional temporal data Augmentation with pre-training (BARec). Our approach leverages bidirectional temporal augmentation and knowledge-enhanced fine-tuning to synthesize authentic pseudo-prior items thatretain user preferences and capture deeper item semantic correlations, thus boosting the model’s expressive power. Our comprehensive experimental analysis on five benchmark datasets confirms the superiority of BARec across both short and elongated sequence contexts. Moreover, theoretical examination and case study offer further insight into the model’s logical processes and interpretability.

Knowledge Tracing (KT) predicts future performance by modeling students' historical interactions, and understanding students' affective states can enhance the effectiveness of KT, thereby improving the quality of education. Although traditional KT values students' cognition and learning behaviors, efficient evaluation of students' affective states and their application in KT still require further exploration due to the non-affect-oriented nature of the data and budget constraints. To address this issue, we propose a computation-driven approach,DynamicAffectSimulationKnowledgeTracing (DASKT), to explore the impact of various student affective states (such as frustration, concentration, boredom, and confusion) on their knowledge states. In this model, we first extract affective factors from students' non-affect-oriented behavioral data, then use clustering and spatiotemporal sequence modeling to accurately simulate students' dynamic affect changes when dealing with different problems. Subsequently, we incorporate affect with time-series analysis to improve the model's ability to infer knowledge states over time and space. Extensive experimental results on two public real-world educational datasets show that DASKT can achieve more reasonable knowledge states under the effect of students' affective states. Moreover, DASKT outperforms the most advanced KT methods in predicting student performance. Our research highlights a promising avenue for future KT studies, focusing on achieving high interpretability and accuracy.

Zero-Shot Relational Learning (ZSRL), strives to predict relations that have not been observed during training, presenting a considerable challenge in terms of model generalization. Existing ZSRL methods usually utilize the prior knowledge of labels (e.g., text description, ontological schema) to enable knowledge transfer by learned features. Nonetheless, these methods remain limited to calculating the surface features exhibited by relations, failing to fully explore their underlying driving factors. This leads to insufficient discrimination between the shared and distinctive inherent components among relations, which consequently impedes the cognitive understanding required for advanced reasoning. In our study, we aim to identify and utilize shared factors that widely exist in the prior knowledge of classes to learn enhanced semantic representations via shared factors composition, and develop our Factor-based ZSRL framework (FZR) with Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to bridge inequality between seen and unseen classes. FZR is designed to restructure the semantic space in such a way that it captures the essence of relation formation, thereby facilitating superior knowledge transfer in zero-shot scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments and evaluate our model on real-world datasets, and the results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model in zero-shot relational learning tasks.

Formula recognition endeavors to automatically identify mathematical formulas from images. Currently, the Encoder-Decoder model has significantly advanced the translation from image to corresponding formula markups. Nonetheless, previous research primarily concentrated on single-line formula recognition, ignoring the recognition of multi-line formulas, which presents additional challenges such as more stringent grammatical restrictions and two- dimensional positions. In this work, we present GAP (Grammar And Position-Aware formula recognition), a comprehensive framework designed to tackle the challenges in multi-line mathematical formula recognition. First, to overcome the limitations imposed by grammar, we design a novel Grammar Aware Contrastive Learning (GACL) module, integrating complex grammar rules into the transcription model through a contrastive learning mechanism. Furthermore, primitive contrastive learning lacks clear directions for comprehending grammar rules and can lead to unstable convergence or prolonged training cycles. To enhance training efficiency, we propose Rank-Based Sampling (RBS) specialized for multi-line formulas, which guides the learning process by the importance ranking of different grammar errors. Finally, spatial location information is critical considering the two-dimensional nature of multi-line formulas. To aid the model in keeping track of that global information, we introduced a Visual Coverage (VC) mechanism that incorporates historical attention information into the image features via a parameter-free way. To validate the effectiveness of our GAP framework, we construct a new dataset Multi-Line containing 12,002 multi-line formulas and conduct extensive experiments to show the efficacy of our GAP framework in capturing grammatical rules, enhancing recognition accuracy, and enhancing training efficiency. Codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Sinon02/GAP.

Recommendation systems have attracted attention from academia and industry due to their wide range of application scenarios. However, cold start remains a challenging problem limited by sparse user interactions. Some scholars propose to transfer the dense information from the source domain to the target domain through cross-domain recommendation, but most of the work assumes that there is a small amount of historical interaction in the target domain. However, this approach essentially presupposes the existence of at least some historical interaction within the target domain. In this paper, we focus on the domain-level zero-shot recommendation (DZSR) problem. To address the above challenges, we propose a knowledge-aware cross-semantic alignment (K-CSA) framework to learn transferable source domain semantic information. The motivation is to establish stable alignments of interests in different domains through class semantic descriptions (CSDs). Specifically, due to the lack of effective information in the target domain, we learn semantic representations of source and target domain items based on knowledge graphs. Moreover, we conduct multi-view K-means to extract item CSDs from the learned semantic representations. Further, K-CSA learns universal user CSDs through the designed multi-head self-attention. To facilitate the transference of user interest from the source domain to the target domain, we devise a cross-semantic contrastive learning strategy, grounded in the prototype distribution matrix. We conduct extensive experiments on several real-world cross-domain datasets, and the experimental results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our proposed K-CSA compared with other baselines.

Automatically generating controllable and diverse mathematical word problems (MWPs) which conform to equations and topics is a crucial task in information retrieval and natural language generation. Recent deep learning models mainly focus on improving the problem readability but overlook the mathematical logic coherence, which tends to generate unsolvable problems. In this paper, we draw inspiration from the human problem-designing process and propose a Mathematical structure Planning and Knowledge enhanced Generation model (MaPKG), following the "plan-then-generate" steps. Specifically, we propose a novel dynamic planning module to make sentence-level equation plans and a dual-attention mechanism for word-level generation, incorporating equation structure representation and external commonsense knowledge. Extensive experiments on two MWP datasets show our model can guarantee more solvable, high-quality, and diverse problems. Our code is available at https://github.com/KenelmQLH/MaPKG.git

In online games, predicting massive battle outcomes is a fundamental task of many applications, such as team optimization and tactical formulation. Existing works do not pay adequate attention to the massive battle. They either seek to evaluate individuals in isolation or mine simple pair-wise interactions between individuals, neither of which effectively captures the intricate interactions between massive units (e.g., individuals). Furthermore, as the team size increases, the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility of units emerges. Such a diminishing pattern is rarely noticed in previous work, and how to capture it from data remains a challenge. To this end, we propose a novel Massive battle outcome predictor with margiNal Effect modules, namely MassNE, which comprehensively incorporates individual effects, cooperation effects (i.e., intra-team interactions) and suppression effects (i.e., inter-team interactions) for predicting battle outcomes. Specifically, we design marginal effect modules to learn how units’ marginal utility changing respect to their number, where the monotonicity assumption is applied to ensure rationality. In addition, we evaluate the current classical models and provide mathematical proofs that MassNE is able to generalize several earlier works in massive settings. Massive battle datasets generated by StarCraft II APIs are adopted to evaluate the performances of MassNE. Extensive experiments empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of MassNE, and MassNE can reveal reasonable cooperation effects, suppression effects, and marginal utilities of combat units from the data.

Aspect-level sentiment analysis is a granular emotional classification task that refers to identifying sentiment polarities towards aspects in a sentence. Although previous research has reached a great achievement, this task remains very challenging. First, previous approaches only focus on one specific domain, which lacks the capability of transferring to other domains. Moreover, the majority of prior studies ignore the direct relationship between aspects and the corresponding sentiment words. To this end, in this paper, we propose a novel model named Efficient Adaptive Transfer Network (EATN) for aspect-level sentiment analysis which emphasizes the need of incorporating the correlation among multiple domains. The proposed EATN provides a Domain Adaptation Module (DAM) to learn common features from the sufficiently labeled source domain and to guide the classification performance in the target domain. Specifically, DAM comprises two special tasks, with one sentiment classification task aiming to learn sentiment knowledge and the other domain classification task focusing on learning domain-invariant features. Moreover, we design aspect-aware multi-head attention mechanism to capture the direct associations between the aspects and the contextual sentiment words, which is beneficial to learn the aspect-aware semantic knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our method.

Cross-domain sentiment classification (CDSC) aims to use the transferable semantics learned from the source domain to predict the sentiment of reviews in the unlabeled target domain. Existing studies in this task attach more attention to the sequence modeling of sentences while largely ignoring the rich domain-invariant semantics embedded in graph structures (i.e., the part-of-speech tags and dependency relations). As an important aspect of exploring characteristics of language comprehension, adaptive graph representations have played an essential role in recent years. To this end, in the paper, we aim to explore the possibility of learning invariant semantic features from graph-like structures in CDSC. Specifically, we present Graph Adaptive Semantic Transfer (GAST) model, an adaptive syntactic graph embedding method that is able to learn domain-invariant semantics from both word sequences and syntactic graphs. More specifically, we first raise a POS-Transformer module to extract sequential semantic features from the word sequences as well as the part-of-speech tags. Then, we design a Hybrid Graph Attention (HGAT) module to generate syntax-based semantic features by considering the transferable dependency relations. Finally, we devise an Integrated aDaptive Strategy (IDS) to guide the joint learning process of both modules. Extensive experiments on four public datasets indicate that GAST achieves comparable effectiveness to a range of state-of-the-art models.

Knowledge tracing is a crucial and fundamental task in online education systems, which can predict students' knowledge state for personalized learning. Unfortunately, existing methods are domain-specific, whereas there are many domains (e.g., subjects, schools) in the real education scene and some domains suffer from the problem of lacking sufficient data. Therefore, how to exploit the knowledge in other domains, to improve the model's performance for target domain remains pretty much open. We term this problem as Domain Adaptation for Knowledge Tracing (DAKT), which aims to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target one for knowledge tracing. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptable method, namely Adaptable Knowledge Tracing (AdaptKT), which contains three phases to explore this problem. Specifically, phase I is instance selection. Given the question texts of two domains, we train an auto-encoder to select and embed similar instances from both domains. Phase II is distribution discrepancy minimizing. After obtaining the selected instances and their linguistic representations, we train a knowledge tracing model and adopt the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to minimize the discrepancy between the distributions of the domain-specific knowledge states. Phase III is fine-tuning of the output layer. We replace the output layer of the model that trained in phase II by a new one to make the knowledge tracing model's output dimension matches the number of knowledge concepts in the target domain. The new output layer is trained while other parameters that before it are frozen. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets, where the experimental results clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of AdaptKT for solving DAKT problem. We will public the code on the Github after the acceptance of the paper.

Modern recommendation systems introduce the re-ranking stage to optimize the entire list directly. This paper focuses on the design of re-ranking framework in feed to optimally model the mutual influence between items and further promote user engagement. On mobile devices, users browse the feed almost in a top-down manner and rarely compare items back and forth. Besides, users often compare item with its adjacency based on their partial observations. Given the distinct user behavior patterns, the modeling of mutual influence between items should be carefully designed. Existing re-ranking models encode the mutual influence between items with sequential encoding methods. However, previous works may be dissatisfactory due to the ignorance of connections between items on different scopes. In this paper, we first discuss Unidirectivity and Locality on the impacts and consequences, then report corresponding solutions in industrial applications. We propose a novel framework based on the empirical evidence from user analysis. To address the above problems, we design a \underlineS cope-aware \underlineR e-ranking with \underlineG ated \underlineA ttention model (SRGA ) to emulate the user behavior patterns from two aspects: 1) we emphasize the influence along the user's common browsing direction; 2) we strength the impacts of pivotal adjacent items within the user visual window. Specifically, we design a global scope attention to encode inter-item patterns unidirectionally from top to bottom. Besides, we devise a local scope attention sliding over the recommendation list to underline interactions among neighboring items. Furthermore, we design a learned gate mechanism to aggregating the information dynamically from local and global scope attention. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B testing demonstrate the benefits of our novel framework. The proposed SRGA model achieves the best performance in offline metrics compared with the state-of-the-art re-ranking methods. Further, empirical results on live traffic validate that our recommender system, equipped with SRGA in the re-ranking stage, improves significantly in user engagement.

Recent studies in recommender systems have managed to achieve significantly improved performance. However, despite being extensively studied, these methods still suffer from two limitations. First, previous studies either encode the document or extract latent sentiment via neural networks, which are difficult to interpret the sentiment of reviewers intuitively. Second, they neglect the personalized interaction of reviews with user/item, i.e., each review has different contributions when modeling the preference of user/item

Assessing the proficiency of trial lawyers in different legal fields is of significant importance since a qualified lawyer or lawyer team can strive for his clients' best rights while ensuring the fairness of litigations. However, proficiency assessment for lawyers is very challenging due to many technical and domain challenges, such as the lack of unified evaluation standards, and the complex interactions between lawyers and cases in real legal systems. To this end, we propose a novel proficiency assessment network for trial lawyers (LawyerPAN) to quantify lawyer proficiency through online litigation records. Specifically, we first leverage the theories in psychological measurement for mapping the proficiency of lawyers in each field into a unified real number space. Meanwhile, the characteristics of cases (i.e., case difficulty and discrimination) are well modeled to ensure fairness when assessing lawyers in different cases and fields. Then, we model the interactions between lawyers and cases from two perspectives: the anticipatory perspective aims to measure the personal proficiency of anticipated strategy, and the adversarial perspective seeks to depict the gap of lawyers' proficiency between both sides (i.e., plaintiffs and defendants). Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real-world data, and the results show the effectiveness and interpretability of our approaches on assessing the proficiency of trial lawyers.

Legal Judgment Prediction is a fundamental task in legal intelligence of the civil law system, which aims to automatically predict the judgment results of multiple subtasks, such as charge, law article, and term of penalty prediction. Existing studies mainly focus on the impact of the entire fact description on all subtasks. They ignore the practical judicial scenario, where judges adopt circumstances of crime (i.e., various parts of the fact) to decide judgment results. To this end, in this paper, we propose a circumstance-aware legal judgment prediction framework (i.e., NeurJudge) by exploring circumstances of crime. Specifically, NeurJudge utilizes the results of intermediate subtasks to separate the fact description into different circumstances and exploits them to make the predictions of other subtasks. In addition, considering the popularity of confusing verdicts (i.e., charges and law articles), we further extend NeurJudge to a more comprehensive framework which is denoted by NeurJudge+. Particularly, NeurJudge+ utilizes a label embedding method to incorporate the semantics of labels (i.e., charges and law articles) into facts to generate more expressive fact representations for confusing verdicts problems. Extensive experimental results on two real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of our proposed frameworks.

In the Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction scenario, user's sequential behaviors are well utilized to capture the user interest in the recent literature. However, despite being extensively studied, these sequential methods still suffer from three limitations. First, existing methods mostly utilize attention on the behavior of users, which is not always suitable for CTR prediction, because users often click on new products that are irrelevant to any historical behaviors. Second, in the real scenario, there are numerous users that have operations a long time ago, but turn relatively inactive in recent times. Thus, it is hard to precisely capture user's current preferences through early behaviors. Third, multiple representations of user's historical behaviors in different feature subspaces are largely ignored. To remedy these issues, we propose a Multi-Interactive Attention Network (MIAN) to comprehensively extract the latent relationship among all kinds of fine-grained features (e.g., gender, age and occupation in user-profile). Specifically, MIAN contains a Multi-Interactive Layer (MIL) that integrates three local interaction modules to capture multiple representations of user preference through sequential behaviors and simultaneously utilize the fine-grained user-specific as well as context information. In addition, we design a Global Interaction Module (GIM) to learn the high-order interactions and balance the different impacts of multiple features. Finally, Offline experiment results from three datasets, together with an Online A/B test in a large-scale recommendation system, demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

We study the problem of question retrieval in community question answering (CQA). The biggest challenge within this task is lexical gaps between questions since similar questions are usually expressed with different but semantically related words. To bridge the gaps, state-of-the-art methods incorporate extra information such as word-to-word translation and categories of questions into the traditional language models. We find that the existing language model based methods can be interpreted using a new framework, that is they represent words and question categories in a vector space and calculate question-question similarities with a linear combination of dot products of the vectors. The problem is that these methods are either heuristic on data representation or difficult to scale up. We propose a principled and efficient approach to learning representations of data in CQA. In our method, we simultaneously learn vectors of words and vectors of question categories by optimizing an objective function naturally derived from the framework. In question retrieval, we incorporate learnt representations into traditional language models in an effective and efficient way. We conduct experiments on large scale data from Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Knows, and compared our method with state-of-the-art methods on two public data sets. Experimental results show that our method can significantly improve on baseline methods for retrieval relevance. On 1 million training data, our method takes less than 50 minutes to learn a model on a single multicore machine, while the translation based language model needs more than 2 days to learn a translation table on the same machine.

This paper studies the problem of question retrieval in community question answering (CQA). To bridge lexical gaps in questions, which is regarded as the biggest challenge in retrieval, state-of-the-art methods learn translation models using answers under an assumption that they are parallel texts. In practice, however, questions and answers are far from "parallel". Indeed, they are heterogeneous for both the literal level and user behaviors. There are a particularly large number of low quality answers, to which the performance of translation models is vulnerable. To address these problems, we propose a supervised question-answer topic modeling approach. The approach assumes that questions and answers share some common latent topics and are generated in a "question language" and "answer language" respectively following the topics. The topics also determine an answer quality signal. Compared with translation models, our approach not only comprehensively models user behaviors on CQA portals, but also highlights the instinctive heterogeneity of questions and answers. More importantly, it takes answer quality into account and performs robustly against noise in answers. With the topic modeling approach, we propose a topic-based language model, which matches questions not only on a term level but also on a topic level. We conducted experiments on large scale data from Yahoo! Answers and Baidu Knows. Experimental results show that the proposed model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art retrieval models in CQA.