The increasing size and complexity of large language models (LLMs) have raised significant challenges in deployment efficiency, particularly under resource constraints. Post-training quantization (PTQ) has emerged as a practical solution by compressing models without requiring retraining. While existing methods focus on uniform quantization schemes for both weights and activations, they often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation due to the non-uniform nature of activation distributions. In this work, we revisit the activation quantization problem from a theoretical perspective grounded in the Lloyd-Max optimality conditions. We identify the core issue as the non-uniform distribution of activations within the quantization interval, which causes the optimal quantization point under the Lloyd-Max criterion to shift away from the midpoint of the interval. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage orthogonal transformation method, RUQuant. In the first stage, activations are divided into blocks. Each block is mapped to uniformly sampled target vectors using composite orthogonal matrices, which are constructed from Householder reflections and Givens rotations. In the second stage, a global Householder reflection is fine-tuned to further minimize quantization error using Transformer output discrepancies. Empirical results show that our method achieves near-optimal quantization performance without requiring model fine-tuning: RUQuant achieves 99.8% of full-precision accuracy with W6A6 and 97% with W4A4 quantization for a 13B LLM, within approximately one minute. A fine-tuned variant yields even higher accuracy, demonstrating the effectiveness and scalability of our approach.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various domains, but they are constrained by massive computational and storage costs. Quantization, an effective technique for compressing models to fit resource-limited devices while preserving generative quality, encompasses two primary methods: quantization aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ). QAT involves additional retraining or fine-tuning, thus inevitably resulting in high training cost and making it unsuitable for LLMs. Consequently, PTQ has become the research hotspot in recent quantization methods. However, existing PTQ methods usually rely on various complex computation procedures and suffer from considerable performance degradation under low-bit quantization settings. To alleviate the above issues, we propose a simple and effective post-training quantization paradigm for LLMs, named SEPTQ. Specifically, SEPTQ first calculates the importance score for each element in the weight matrix and determines the quantization locations in a static global manner. Then it utilizes the mask matrix which represents the important locations to quantize and update the associated weights column-by-column until the appropriate quantized weight matrix is obtained. Compared with previous methods, SEPTQ simplifies the post-training quantization procedure into only two steps, and considers the effectiveness and efficiency simultaneously. Experimental results on various datasets across a suite of models ranging from millions to billions in different quantization bit-levels demonstrate that SEPTQ significantly outperforms other strong baselines, especially in low-bit quantization scenarios.

Multi-label intent detection aims to recognize multiple user intents behind dialogue utterances. The diversity of user utterances and the scarcity of training data motivate multi-label few-shot intent detection. However, existing methods ignore the hybrid of verb and noun within an intent, which is essential to identify the user intent. In this paper, we propose a label hierarchical structure-aware method for multi-label few-shot intent detection via prompt tuning (LHS). Firstly, for the support data, we concatenate the original utterance with the label description generated by GPT-4 to obtain the utterance-level representation. Then we construct a multi-label hierarchical structure-aware prompt model to learn the label hierarchical information. To learn more discriminative class prototypes, we devise a prototypical contrastive learning method to pull the utterances close to their corresponding intent labels and away from other intent labels. Extensive experiments on two datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

Meta-learning methods have shown to be effective in dealing with cold-start recommendation. However, most previous methods rely on an ideal assumption that there exists a similar data distribution between source and target tasks, which are unsuitable for the scenario that only extremely limited number of new user or item interactions are available. In this paper, we propose to boost meta-learning cold-start recommendation with graph neural network (MeGNN). First, it utilizes the global neighborhood translation learning to obtain consistent potential interactions for all new user and item nodes, which can refine their representations. Second, it employs the local neighborhood translation learning to predict specific potential interactions for each node, thus guaranteeing the personalized requirement. In experiments, we combine MeGNN with two representative meta-learning models MeLU and TaNP. Extensive results on two widely-used datasets show the superiority of MeGNN in four different scenarios.

Attributed graph clustering is a challenging task as it requires to jointly model graph structure and node attributes. Although recent advances in graph convolutional networks have shown the effectiveness of graph convolution in combining structural and content information, there is limited understanding of how to properly apply it for attributed graph clustering. Previous methods commonly use a fixed and low order graph convolution, which only aggregates information of few-hop neighbours and hence cannot fully capture the cluster structures of diverse graphs. In this paper, we first propose an adaptive graph convolution method (AGC) for attributed graph clustering, which exploits high-order graph convolutions to capture global cluster structures and adaptively selects an appropriate order$k$via intra-cluster distance. While AGC can find a reasonable$k$and avoid over-smoothing, it is not sensitive to the gradual decline of clustering performance as$k$increases. To search for a better$k$, we further propose an improved adaptive graph convolution method (IAGC) that not only observes the variation of intra-cluster distance, but also considers the inconsistencies of filtered features with graph structure and raw features, respectively. We establish the validity of our methods by theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets.

Multi-label aspect category detection allows a given review sentence to contain multiple aspect categories, which is shown to be more practical in sentiment analysis and attracting increasing attention. As annotating large amounts of data is time-consuming and labor-intensive, data scarcity occurs frequently in real-world scenarios, which motivates multi-label few-shot aspect category detection. However, research on this problem is still in infancy and few methods are available. In this paper, we propose a novel label-enhanced prototypical network (LPN) for multi-label few-shot aspect category detection. The highlights of LPN can be summarized as follows. First, it leverages label description as auxiliary knowledge to learn more discriminative prototypes, which can retain aspect-relevant information while eliminating the harmful effect caused by irrelevant aspects. Second, it integrates with contrastive learning, which encourages that the sentences with the same aspect label are pulled together in embedding space while simultaneously pushing apart the sentences with different aspect labels. In addition, it introduces an adaptive multi-label inference module to predict the aspect count in the sentence, which is simple yet effective. Extensive experimental results on three datasets demonstrate that our proposed model LPN can consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance.

Zero-shot intent classification is a vital and challenging task in dialogue systems, which aims to deal with numerous fast-emerging unacquainted intents without annotated training data. To obtain more satisfactory performance, the crucial points lie in two aspects: extracting better utterance features and strengthening the model generalization ability. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective meta-learning paradigm for zero-shot intent classification. To learn better semantic representations for utterances, we introduce a new mixture attention mechanism, which encodes the pertinent word occurrence patterns by leveraging the distributional signature attention and multi-layer perceptron attention simultaneously. To strengthen the transfer ability of the model from seen classes to unseen classes, we reformulate zero-shot intent classification with a meta-learning strategy, which trains the model by simulating multiple zero-shot classification tasks on seen categories, and promotes the model generalization ability with a meta-adapting procedure on mimic unseen categories. Extensive experiments on two real-world dialogue datasets in different languages show that our model outperforms other strong baselines on both standard and generalized zero-shot intent classification tasks.

User preference modeling is a vital yet challenging problem in personalized product search. In recent years, latent space based methods have achieved state-of-the-art performance by jointly learning semantic representations of products, users, and text tokens. However, existing methods are limited in their ability to model user preferences. They typically represent users by the products they visited in a short span of time using attentive models and lack the ability to exploit relational information such as user-product interactions or item co-occurrence relations. In this work, we propose to address the limitations of prior arts by exploring local and global user behavior patterns on a user successive behavior graph, which is constructed by utilizing short-term actions of all users. To capture implicit user preference signals and collaborative patterns, we use an efficient jumping graph convolution to explore high-order relations to enrich product representations for user preference modeling. Our approach can be seamlessly integrated with existing latent space based methods and be potentially applied in any product retrieval method that uses purchase history to model user preferences. Extensive experiments on eight Amazon benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our approach. The source code is available at https://github.com/floatSDSDS/SBG .

Graph convolutional neural networks (GCN) have been the model of choice for graph representation learning, which is mainly due to the effective design of graph convolution that computes the representation of a node by aggregating those of its neighbors. However, existing GCN variants commonly use 1-D graph convolution that solely operates on the object link graph without exploring informative relational information among object attributes. This significantly limits their modeling capability and may lead to inferior performance on noisy and sparse real-world networks. In this paper, we explore 2-D graph convolution to jointly model object links and attribute relations for graph representation learning. Specifically, we propose a computationally efficient dimensionwise separable 2-D graph convolution (DSGC) for filtering node features. Theoretically, we show that DSGC can reduce intra-class variance of node features on both the object dimension and the attribute dimension to learn more effective representations. Empirically, we demonstrate that by modeling attribute relations, DSGC achieves significant performance gain over state-of-the-art methods for node classification and clustering on a variety of real-world networks. The source code for reproducing the experimental results is available at https://github.com/liqimai/DSGC.

Multi-task clustering improves the clustering performance of each task by transferring knowledge across related tasks. Most existing multi-task clustering methods are based on the ideal assumption that the tasks are completely related. However, in real applications, the tasks are usually partially related. In these cases, brute-force transfer may cause negative effect which degrades the clustering performance. In this paper, we propose two multi-task clustering methods for partially related tasks: the self-adapted multi-task clustering (SAMTC) method and the manifold regularized coding multi-task clustering (MRCMTC) method, which can automatically identify and transfer related instances among the tasks, thus avoiding negative transfer. Both SAMTC and MRCMTC construct the similarity matrix for each target task by exploiting useful information from the source tasks through related instances transfer, and adopt spectral clustering to get the final clustering results. But, they learn the related instances from the source tasks in different ways. Experimental results on real data sets show the superiorities of the proposed algorithms over traditional single-task clustering methods and existing multi-task clustering methods on both completely and partially related tasks.

Multi-task clustering and multi-view clustering have severally found wide applications and received much attention in recent years. Nevertheless, there are many clustering problems that involve both multi-task clustering and multi-view clustering, i.e., the tasks are closely related and each task can be analyzed from multiple views. In this paper, we introduce a multi-task multi-view clustering framework which integrates within-view-task clustering, multi-view relationship learning, and multi-task relationship learning. Under this framework, we propose two multi-task multi-view clustering algorithms, the bipartite graph based multi-task multi-view clustering algorithm, and the semi-nonnegative matrix tri-factorization based multi-task multi-view clustering algorithm. The former one can deal with the multi-task multi-view clustering of nonnegative data, the latter one is a general multi-task multi-view clustering method, i.e., it can deal with the data with negative feature values. Experimental results on publicly available data sets in web page mining and image mining show the superiority of the proposed multi-task multi-view clustering algorithms over either multi-task clustering algorithms or multi-view clustering algorithms for multi-task clustering of multi-view data.

Traditional clustering algorithms deal with a single clustering task on a single dataset. However, there are many related tasks in the real world, which motivates multitask clustering. Recently some multitask clustering algorithms have been proposed, and among them multitask Bregman clustering (MBC) is a very applicable method. MBC alternatively updates clusters and learns relationships between clusters of different tasks, and the two phases boost each other. However, the boosting does not always have positive effects on improving the clustering performance, it may also cause negative effects. Another issue of MBC is that it cannot deal with nonlinear separable data. In this article, we show that in MBC, the process of using cluster relationship to boost the cluster updating phase may cause negative effects, that is, cluster centroids may be skewed under some conditions. We propose a smart multitask Bregman clustering (S-MBC) algorithm which can identify the negative effects of the boosting and avoid the negative effects if they occur. We then propose a multitask kernel clustering (MKC) framework for nonlinear separable data by using a similar framework like MBC in the kernel space. We also propose a specific optimization method, which is quite different from that of MBC, to implement the MKC framework. Since MKC can also cause negative effects like MBC, we further extend the framework of MKC to a smart multitask kernel clustering (S-MKC) framework in a similar way that S-MBC is extended from MBC. We conduct experiments on 10 real world multitask clustering datasets to evaluate the performance of S-MBC and S-MKC. The results on clustering accuracy show that: (1) compared with the original MBC algorithm MBC, S-MBC and S-MKC perform much better; (2) compared with the convex discriminative multitask relationship clustering (DMTRC) algorithms DMTRC-L and DMTRC-R which also avoid negative transfer, S-MBC and S-MKC perform worse in the (ideal) case in which different tasks have the same cluster number and the empirical label marginal distribution in each task distributes evenly, but better or comparable in other (more general) cases. Moreover, S-MBC and S-MKC can work on the datasets in which different tasks have different number of clusters, violating the assumptions of DMTRC-L and DMTRC-R. The results on efficiency show that S-MBC and S-MKC consume more computational time than MBC and less computational time than DMTRC-L and DMTRC-R. Overall S-MBC and S-MKC are competitive compared with the state-of-the-art multitask clustering algorithms in synthetical terms of accuracy, efficiency and applicability.