Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is the process of identifying and extracting relations between entities that span multiple sentences within a document. Due to its realistic settings, DocRE has garnered increasing research attention in recent years. Previous research has mostly focused on developing sophisticated encoding models to better capture the intricate patterns between entity pairs. While these advancements are undoubtedly crucial, an even more foundational challenge lies in the data itself. The complexity inherent in DocRE makes the labeling process prone to errors, compounded by the extreme sparsity of positive relation samples, which is driven by both the limited availability of positive instances and the broad diversity of positive relation types. These factors can lead to biased optimization processes, further complicating the task of accurate relation extraction. Recognizing these challenges, we have developed a robust framework called COMM to better solve DocRE. COMM operates by initially employing an instance-aware reasoning method to dynamically capture pertinent information of entity pairs within the document and extract relational features. Following this, COMM takes into account the distribution of relations and the difficulty of samples to dynamically adjust the margins between prediction logits and the decision threshold, a process we call Concentrated Margin Maximization. In this way, COMM not only enhances the extraction of relevant relational features but also boosts DocRE performance by addressing the specific challenges posed by the data. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the versatility and effectiveness of COMM, especially its robustness when trained on low-quality data (achieves >10% performance gains).

Zhenyu Li, Yike Zhang, Tengyu Pan, Yutao Sun, Zhichao Duan, Junjie Fang, Rong Han, Zixuan Wang, Jianyong Wang. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Tengyu Pan, Zhichao Duan, Zhenyu Li, Bowen Dong, Ning Liu, Xiuxing Li, Jianyong Wang. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) visual decoding involves decoding the original image from brain signals elicited by visual stimuli. This often relies on manually labeled ROIs (Regions of Interest) to select brain voxels. However, these ROIs can contain redundant information and noise, reducing decoding performance. Additionally, the lack of automated ROI labeling methods hinders the practical application of fMRI visual decoding technology, especially for new subjects. This work presents TROI (Trainable Region of Interest), a novel two-stage, data-driven ROI labeling method for cross-subject fMRI decoding tasks, particularly when subject samples are limited. TROI leverages labeled ROIs in the dataset to pretrain an image decoding backbone on a cross-subject dataset, enabling efficient optimization of the input layer for new subjects without retraining the entire model from scratch. In the first stage, we introduce a voxel selection method that combines sparse mask training and low-pass filtering to quickly generate the voxel mask and determine input layer dimensions. In the second stage, we apply a learning rate rewinding strategy to fine-tune the input layer for downstream tasks. Experimental results on the same small sample dataset as the baseline method for brain visual retrieval and reconstruction tasks show that our voxel selection method surpasses the state-of-the-art method MindEye2 with an annotated ROI mask.

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is a critical yet challenging task due to the vast number of entities within knowledge bases and the diversity of natural language questions posed by users. Unfortunately, the performance of most KBQA models tends to decline significantly in real-world scenarios where high-quality annotated data is insufficient. To mitigate the burden associated with manual annotation, we introduce FlexKBQA by utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as program translators for addressing the challenges inherent in the few-shot KBQA task. Specifically, FlexKBQA leverages automated algorithms to sample diverse programs, such as SPARQL queries, from the knowledge base, which are subsequently converted into natural language questions via LLMs. This synthetic dataset facilitates training a specialized lightweight model for the KB. Additionally, to reduce the barriers of distribution shift between synthetic data and real user questions, FlexKBQA introduces an executionguided self-training method to iterative leverage unlabeled user questions. Furthermore, we explore harnessing the inherent reasoning capability of LLMs to enhance the entire framework. Consequently, FlexKBQA delivers substantial flexibility, encompassing data annotation, deployment, and being domain agnostic. Through extensive experiments on GrailQA, WebQSP, and KQA Pro, we observe that under the few-shot even the more challenging zero-shot scenarios, FlexKBQA achieves impressive results with a few annotations, surpassing all previous baselines and even approaching the performance of supervised models, achieving a remarkable 93% performance relative to the fully-supervised models. We posit that FlexKBQA represents a significant advancement towards exploring better integration of large and lightweight models. Code is available at https://github.com/leezythu/FlexKBQA.

The ever-growing biomedical publications magnify the challenge of extracting structured data from unstructured texts.This task involves two components: biomedical entity identification (Named Entity Recognition, NER) and their interrelation determination (Relation Extraction, RE).However, existing methods often neglect unique features of the biomedical literature, such as ambiguous entities, nested proper nouns, and overlapping relation triplets, and underutilize prior knowledge, leading to an intolerable performance decline in the biomedical domain, especially with limited annotated training data.In this paper, we propose the Biomedical Relation-First eXtraction (Bio-RFX) model by leveraging sentence-level relation classification before entity extraction to tackle entity ambiguity.Moreover, we exploit structural constraints between entities and relations to guide the model's hypothesis space, enhancing extraction performance across different training scenarios.Comprehensive experimental results on biomedical datasets show that Bio-RFX achieves significant improvements on both NER and RE tasks.Even under the lowresource training scenarios, it outperforms all baselines in NER and has highly competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned baselines in RE 1 .

Structured tabular data is a fundamental data type in numerous fields, and the capacity to reason over tables is crucial for answering questions and validating hypotheses. However, constructing labeled data for complex reasoning tasks is labor-intensive, and the quantity of annotated data remains insufficient to support the intricate demands of real-world applications. To address the insufficient annotation challenge, we present a self-training framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR-ST) by generating diverse synthetic data with complex logic. Specifically, UCTR-ST incorporates several essential techniques: we aggregate diverse programs and execute them on tables based on a “Program-Management” component, and we bridge the gap between programs and text with a powerful “Program-Transformation” module that generates natural language sentences with complex logic. Furthermore, we optimize the procedure using “Table-Text Manipulator” to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. The entire framework utilizes self-training techniques to leverage the unlabeled training data, which results in significant performance improvements when tested on real-world data. Experimental results demonstrate that UCTR-ST achieves above 90% of the supervised model performance on different tasks and domains, reducing the dependence on manual annotation. Additionally, our approach can serve as a data augmentation technique, significantly boosting the performance of supervised models in low-resourced domains.

Structured tabular data exist across nearly all fields. Reasoning task over these data aims to answer questions or determine the truthiness of hypothesis sentences by understanding the semantic meaning of a table. While previous works have devoted significant efforts to the tabular reasoning task, they always assume there are sufficient labeled data. However, constructing reasoning samples over tables (and related text) is labor-intensive, especially when the reasoning process is complex. When labeled data is insufficient, the performance of models will suffer an unendurable decline. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for unsupervised complex tabular reasoning (UCTR), which generates sufficient and diverse synthetic data with complex logic for tabular reasoning tasks, assuming no human-annotated data at all. Specifically, we first utilize a random sampling strategy to collect diverse programs of different types and execute them on tables based on a "Program-Executor" module. To bridge the gap between the programs and natural language sentences, we design a powerful "NL-Generator" module to generate natural language sentences with complex logic from these programs. Since a table often occurs with its surrounding texts, we further propose novel "Table-to-Text" and "Text-to-Table" operators to handle joint table-text reasoning scenarios. This way, we can adequately exploit the unlabeled table resources to obtain a well-performed reasoning model under an unsupervised setting. Our experiments cover different tasks (question answering and fact verification) and different domains (general and specific), showing that our unsupervised methods can achieve at most 93% performance compared to supervised models. The impressive performance demonstrates that UCTR can significantly reduce the dependence on manual annotation. Moreover, we also find that it can substantially boost the supervised performance in low-resourced domains as a data augmentation technique.

Entity linking aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base, which is significant and fundamental for various downstream applications, e.g., knowledge base completion, question answering, and information extraction. While great efforts have been devoted to this task, most of these studies follow the assumption that large-scale labeled data is available. However, when the labeled data is insufficient for specific domains due to labor-intensive annotation work, the performance of existing algorithms will suffer an intolerable decline. In this paper, we endeavor to solve the problem of few-shot entity linking, which only requires a minimal amount of in-domain labeled data and is more practical in real situations. Specifically, we firstly propose a novel weak supervision strategy to generate non-trivial synthetic entity-mention pairs based on mention rewriting. Since the quality of the synthetic data has a critical impact on effective model training, we further design a meta-learning mechanism to assign different weights to each synthetic entity-mention pair automatically. Through this way, we can profoundly exploit rich and precious semantic information to derive a well-trained entity linking model under the few-shot setting. The experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed method can extensively improve the state-of-the-art few-shot entity linking model and achieve impressive performance when only a small amount of labeled data is available. Moreover, we also demonstrate the outstanding ability of the model's transferability. Our code and models will be open-sourced.