Multimodal keyphrase generation (MKP) aims to extract a concise set of keyphrases that capture the essential meaning of paired image–text inputs, enabling structured understanding, indexing, and retrieval of multimedia data across the web and social platforms. Success in this task demands effectively bridging the semantic gap between heterogeneous modalities. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve superior cross-modal understanding by leveraging massive pretraining on image-text corpora, we observe that they often struggle with modality bias and fine-grained intra-modal feature extraction. This oversight leads to a lack of robustness in real-world scenarios where multimedia data is noisy, along with incomplete or misaligned modalities. To address this problem, we propose AimKP, a novel framework that explicitly reinforces intra-modal semantic learning in MLLMs while preserving cross-modal alignment. AimKP incorporates two core innovations: (i) Progressive Modality Masking, which forces fine-grained feature extraction from corrupted inputs by progressively masking modality information during training; (ii) Gradient-based Filtering, that identifies and discards noisy samples, preventing them from corrupting the model’s core cross-modal learning. Extensive experiments validate AimKP’s effectiveness in multimodal keyphrase generation and its robustness across different scenarios.

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucination, generating factually incorrect statements when handling questions beyond their knowledge and perception. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) addresses this by retrieving query-relevant contexts from knowledge bases to support LLM reasoning. Recent advances leverage pre-constructed graphs to capture the relational connections among distributed documents, showing remarkable performance in complex tasks. However, existing Graph-based RAG (GraphRAG) methods rely on a costly process to transform the corpus into a graph, introducing overwhelming token cost and update latency. Moreover, real-world queries vary in type and complexity, requiring different logic structures for accurate reasoning. The pre-built graph may not align with these required structures, resulting in ineffective knowledge retrieval. To this end, we propose a Logic-aware Retrieval Augmented Generation framework (LogicRAG) that dynamically extracts reasoning structures at inference time to guide adaptive retrieval without any pre-built graph. LogicRAG begins by decomposing the input query into a set of subproblems and constructing a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to model the logical dependencies among them. To support coherent multi-step reasoning, LogicRAG then linearizes the graph using topological sort, so that subproblems can be addressed in a logically consistent order. Besides, LogicRAG applies graph pruning to reduce redundant retrieval and uses context pruning to filter irrelevant context, significantly reducing the overall token cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LogicRAG achieves both superior performance and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

In collaborative filtering, learning effective embeddings for users and items from interaction data remains a central challenge. While recent efforts leverage large language models (LLMs) to enhance collaborative filtering, two critical limitations persist: (1) Efficiency: LLM-based inference is significantly slower than traditional embedding-based search; and (2) Topological Modeling: LLMs struggle to capture graph structures, which are essential for modeling multi-order user-item interactions. To address these limitations, we propose New Language Collaborative Filtering (NLCF), a framework that aligns LLMs with collaborative filtering by conceptualizing user-item graphs as new languages. This approach is based on two key insights: (1) LLMs excel at mastering new languages when trained on suitable corpora, and (2) the empirical conditional probability between tokens in corpora converges to the transition probabilities between nodes in graphs. NLCF translates user-item graphs into corpora, where users and items are treated as tokens. These corpora are used to fine-tune LLMs, and the learned representations are aggregated to construct user and item embeddings that encode multi-order interactions. Unlike methods that deploy LLMs for inference, NLCF distills LLM knowledge learned from corpora into compact embeddings, enabling both efficient training and real-time inference. The framework has been deployed on a billion-scale e-commerce platform for several months. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NLCF outperforms traditional graph CF models and LLM-based baselines while achieving significant training and inference efficiency improvement over LLM-based baselines.

Zerui Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Zhishang Xiang, Zhimin Wei, Linfeng Gao, Xiao Huang, Zhihong Zhang, Jinsong Su. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Yilin Xiao, Jin Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Yujing Zhang, Chuang Zhou, Longhao Yang, Lingfei Ren, Xin Yang, Xiao Huang. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Generating SQLs from user queries is a long-standing challenge, where the accuracy of initial schema linking significantly impacts subsequent SQL generation performance. However, current schema linking models still struggle with missing relevant schema elements or an excess of redundant ones. A crucial reason for this is that commonly used metrics, recall and precision, fail to capture relevant element missing and thus cannot reflect actual schema linking performance. Motivated by this, we propose enhanced schema linking metrics by introducing a \textbf{restricted missing indicator}. Accordingly, we introduce \textbf{\underline{K}n\underline{a}psack optimization-based \underline{S}chema \underline{L}inking \underline{A}pproach (KaSLA)}, a plug-in schema linking method designed to prevent the missing of relevant schema elements while minimizing the inclusion of redundant ones. KaSLA employs a hierarchical linking strategy that first identifies the optimal table linking and subsequently links columns within the selected table to reduce linking candidate space. In each linking process, it utilizes a knapsack optimization approach to link potentially relevant elements while accounting for a limited tolerance of potentially redundant ones. With this optimization, KaSLA-1.6B achieves superior schema linking results compared to large-scale LLMs, including DeepSeek-V3 with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) schema linking method. Extensive experiments on Spider and BIRD benchmarks verify that KaSLA can significantly improve the SQL generation performance of SOTA Text2SQL models by substituting their schema linking processes. The code is available at https://github.com/DEEP-PolyU/KaSLA.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a promising paradigm for domain-specific knowledge integration. However, applying generic RAG frameworks to power grid operation and maintenance (O&M) faces critical challenges due to the strict physical constraints of electrical networks. We identify a fundamental Topological Association Modeling Deficiency in existing methods, manifesting as Retrieval Linkage Degradation (where semantic ambiguity severs links between abstract intents and specific technical entities) and Topological Reasoning Deficiency (failing to adhere to rigid physical interlocking rules, causing fatal safety violations). To address these bottlenecks, we introduce the Power Grid Work Ticket (PGWT) dataset to systematically evaluate topological reasoning under real-world noise and sparsity. Furthermore, we propose Topology-Semantic Aligned Retrieval (TSA-Retrieval). This framework harmonizes semantic spaces with topological structures by fusing symbolic pattern matching with subgraph structural encoding to ensure physical validity, while explicitly injecting topology-aware reasoning chains to guide constraint-compliant generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TSA-Retrieval significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs and generic RAG baselines, offering a robust and scalable solution for safety-critical applications.

Equipping large language models (LLMs) with external tools has emerged as a promising paradigm for addressing real-world tasks. Nonetheless, with the web-based tool ecosystems rapidly expanding, it is impractical to include all tools within the limited input length of LLMs. To alleviate these issues, researchers have explored incorporating a tool retrieval module to select the most relevant tools or represent tools as unique tokens within LLM parameters. However, most state-of-the-art methods are under transductive settings, assuming all tools have been observed during training. Such a setting deviates from reality as tools on the web are constantly updated and new tools are frequently added to the online ecosystem. When dealing with these unseen tools, which refer to tools not encountered during the training phase, these methods are limited by two key issues, including the large distribution shift and the sensitivity of semantic-only retrieval. To this end, inspired by human cognitive processes of mastering unseen tools through discovering and applying the logical information from prior experience, we introduce a novel Logic-Guided Semantic Bridging framework for inductive tool retrieval, namely, LoSemB, which aims to mine and transfer latent logical information for inductive tool retrieval without costly retraining. Specifically, LoSemB contains a logic-based embedding alignment module to mitigate distribution shifts and a relational augmented retrieval mechanism to overcome the limitations of semantic-only similarity methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LoSemB achieves advanced performance in both the inductive and transductive settings.

Click-through rate prediction tasks estimate interaction probabilities using user–item features (i.e., the combined set of user and item features). LLMs have emerged as a promising approach by organizing these features into prompts and fine-tuning LLMs to predict the interaction label. However, our feature-wise and interaction-wise analysis reveals two critical limitations, leading to incomplete relationship modeling between user–item features and interaction labels: (i) LLMs tend to utilize only a subset of available features, neglecting others, and (ii) they struggle with predictions for tail items that appear less frequently in the training samples. To bridge this gap, we propose Feature-Instructed Large language model for Monitoring ( FILM ), which introduces a self-monitoring temperature mechanism that dynamically guides LLMs to focus on informative features, and an auxiliary compaction loss that facilitates better feature-interaction relationship learning for tail items. By integrating these two designs, FILM not only improves feature utilization in LLMs but also enhances predictions for tail items. Furthermore, we demonstrate that FILM -generated interaction embeddings can be transferred to lightweight models, enabling efficient deployment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FILM achieves significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines by learning better relationships between user–item features and interaction labels and generalizes under different LLM backbones.

Qinggang Zhang, Zhishang Xiang, Yilin Xiao, Le Wang, Junhui Li, Xinrun Wang, Jinsong Su. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in bridging the gap between natural language queries and database management systems, enabling users to interact with databases without the background of SQL. However, LLMs often struggle to fully exploit and comprehend the user intention and complex structures of databases. Decomposition-based methods have been proposed to enhance the performance of LLMs on complex tasks, but decomposing SQL generation into subtasks is non-trivial due to the declarative structure of SQL syntax and the intricate connections between query concepts and database elements. In this paper, we propose a novel Structure GUided text-to-SQL framework ( SGU-SQL) that incorporates syntax-based prompting to enhance the SQL generation capabilities of LLMs. Specifically, SGU-SQL establishes structure-aware links between user queries and database schema and recursively decomposes the complex generation task using syntax-based prompting to guide LLMs in incrementally constructing target SQLs. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that SGU-SQL consistently outperforms state-of-the-art text-to-SQL baselines.

Entity alignment (EA) aims to merge two knowledge graphs (KGs) by identifying equivalent entity pairs. Existing methods can be categorized into symbolic and neural models. Symbolic models, while precise, struggle with substructure heterogeneity and sparsity, whereas neural models, although effective, generally lack interpretability and cannot handle uncertainty. We propose NeuSymEA, a unified neuro-symbolic reasoning framework that combines the strengths of both methods to fully exploit the cross-KG structural pattern for robust entity alignment. NeuSymEA models the joint probability of all possible pairs' truth scores in a Markov random field, regulated by a set of rules, and optimizes it with the variational EM algorithm. In the E-step, a neural model parameterizes the truth score distributions and infers missing alignments. In the M-step, the rule weights are updated based on the observed and inferred alignments, handling uncertainty. We introduce an efficient symbolic inference engine driven by logic deduction, enabling reasoning with extended rule lengths. NeuSymEA achieves a significant 7.6\% hit@1 improvement on $DBP15K_{ZH-EN}$ compared with strong baselines and demonstrates robustness in low-resource settings, achieving 73.7\% hit@1 accuracy on $DBP15K_{FR-EN}$ with only 1\% pairs as seed alignments. Codes are released at https://github.com/chensyCN/NeuSymEA-NeurIPS25.

Knowledge-based visual question answering (KVQA) has been extensively studied to answer visual questions with external knowledge, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs).While several attempts have been proposed to leverage large language models (LLMs) as an implicit knowledge source, it remains challenging since LLMs may generate hallucinations.Moreover, multiple knowledge sources, e.g., images, KGs and LLMs, cannot be readily aligned for complex scenarios.To tackle these, we present a novel modality-aware integration with LLMs for KVQA (MAIL).It carefully leverages multimodal knowledge for both image understanding and knowledge reasoning.Specifically, (i) we propose a two-stage prompting strategy with LLMs to densely embody the image into a scene graph with detailed visual features; (ii) We construct a coupled concept graph by linking the mentioned entities with external facts.(iii) A tailored pseudo-siamese graph medium fusion is designed for sufficient multimodal fusion.We utilize the shared mentioned entities in two graphs as mediums to bridge a tight intermodal exchange, while maximally preserving insightful intra-modal learning by constraining the fusion within mediums.Extensive experiments show the superiority of MAIL.

Inductive knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer the missing relation for a set of newly-coming entities that never appeared in the training set. Such a setting is more in line with reality, as real-world KGs are constantly evolving and introducing new knowledge. Recent studies have shown promising results using message passing over subgraphs to embed newly-coming entities for inductive KGC. However, the inductive capability of these methods is usually limited by two key issues. (i) KGC always suffers from data sparsity, and the situation is even exacerbated in inductive KGC where new entities often have few or no connections to the original KG. (ii) Cold-start problem. It is over coarse-grained for accurate KG reasoning to generate representations for new entities by gathering the local information from few neighbors. To this end, we propose a novel iNfOmax RelAtion Network, namely NORAN, for inductive KG completion. It aims to mine latent relation patterns for inductive KG completion. Specifically, by centering on relations, NORAN provides a hyper view towards KG modeling, where the correlations between relations can be naturally captured as entity-independent logical evidence to conduct inductive KGC. Extensive experiment results on five benchmarks show that our framework substantially outperforms the state-of-the-art KGC methods.

Entity alignment (EA) aims to merge two knowledge graphs (KGs) by identifying equivalent entity pairs. While existing methods heavily rely on human-generated labels, it is prohibitively expensive to incorporate cross-domain experts for annotation in real-world scenarios. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents new avenues for automating EA with annotations, inspired by their comprehensive capability to process semantic information. However, it is nontrivial to directly apply LLMs for EA since the annotation space in real-world KGs is large. LLMs could also generate noisy labels that may mislead the alignment. To this end, we propose a unified framework, LLM4EA, to effectively leverage LLMs for EA. Specifically, we design a novel active learning policy to significantly reduce the annotation space by prioritizing the most valuable entities based on the entire inter-KG and intra-KG structure. Moreover, we introduce an unsupervised label refiner to continuously enhance label accuracy through in-depth probabilistic reasoning. We iteratively optimize the policy based on the feedback from a base EA model. Extensive experiments demonstrate the advantages of LLM4EA on four benchmark datasets in terms of effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency.

Knowledge-based question answering (KBQA) is widely used in many scenarios that necessitate domain knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) bring opportunities to KBQA, while their costs are significantly higher and absence of domain-specific knowledge during pre-training. We are motivated to combine LLMs and prior small models on knowledge graphs (KGMs) for both inferential accuracy and cost saving. However, it remains challenging since accuracy and cost are not readily combined in the optimization as two distinct metrics. It is also laborious for model selection since different models excel in diverse knowledge. To this end, we propose Coke, a novel cost-efficient strategy for KBQA with LLMs, modeled as a tailored multi-armed bandit problem to minimize calls to LLMs within limited budgets. We first formulate the accuracy expectation with a cluster-level Thompson Sampling for either KGMs or LLMs. A context-aware policy is optimized to further distinguish the expert model subject to the question semantics. The overall decision is bounded by the cost regret according to historical expenditure on failures. Extensive experiments showcase the superior performance of Coke, which moves the Pareto frontier with up to 20.89% saving of GPT-4 fees while achieving a 2.74% higher accuracy on the benchmark datasets.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in many real-world applications. Nonetheless, LLMs are often criticized for their tendency to produce hallucinations, wherein the models fabricate incorrect statements on tasks beyond their knowledge and perception. To alleviate this issue, graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) has been extensively explored which leverages the factual knowledge in knowledge graphs (KGs) to ground the LLM's responses in established facts and principles. However, most state-of-the-art LLMs are closed-source, making it challenging to develop a prompting framework that can efficiently and effectively integrate KGs into LLMs with hard prompts only. Generally, existing KG-enhanced LLMs usually suffer from three critical issues, including huge search space, high API costs, and laborious prompt engineering, that impede their widespread application in practice. To this end, we introduce a novel **Know**ledge **Gr**aph based **P**romp**T**ing framework, namely **KnowGPT**, to enhance LLMs with domain knowledge. KnowGPT contains a knowledge extraction module to extract the most informative knowledge from KGs, and a context-aware prompt construction module to automatically convert extracted knowledge into effective prompts. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that KnowGPT significantly outperforms all competitors. Notably, KnowGPT achieves a 92.6% accuracy on OpenbookQA leaderboard, comparable to human-level performance.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) can structurally organize large-scale information in the form of triples and significantly support many real-world applications. While most KG embedding algorithms hold the assumption that all triples are correct, considerable errors were inevitably injected during the construction process. It is urgent to develop effective error-aware KG embedding, since errors in KGs would lead to significant performance degradation in downstream applications. To this end, we propose a novel framework named Attributed Error-aware Knowledge Embedding (AEKE). It leverages the semantics contained in entity attributes to guide the KG embedding model learning against the impact of erroneous triples. We design two triple-level hypergraphs to model the topological structures of the KG and its attributes, respectively. The confidence score of each triple is jointly calculated based on self-contradictory within the triple, consistency between local and global structures, and homogeneity between structures and attributes. We leverage confidence scores to adaptively update the weighted aggregation in the multi-view graph learning framework and margin loss in KG embedding, such that potential errors will contribute little to KG learning. Experiments on three real-world KGs demonstrate that AEKE outperforms state-of-the-art KG embedding and error detection algorithms.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) could effectively integrate a large number of real-world assertions, and improve the performance of various applications, such as recommendation and search. KG error detection has been intensively studied since real-world KGs inevitably contain erroneous triples. While existing studies focus on developing a novel algorithm dedicated to one or a few data characteristics, we explore advancing KG error detection by assembling a set of state-of-the-art (SOTA) KG error detectors. However, it is nontrivial to develop a practical ensemble learning framework for KG error detection. Existing ensemble learning models heavily rely on labels, while it is expensive to acquire labeled errors in KGs. Also, KG error detection itself is challenging since triples contain rich semantic information and might be false because of various reasons. To this end, we propose to leverage active learning to minimize human efforts. Our proposed framework - KAEL, could effectively assemble a set of off-the-shelf error detection algorithms, by actively using a limited number of manual annotations. It adaptively updates the ensemble learning policy in each iteration based on active queries, i.e., the answers from experts. After all annotation budget is used, KAEL utilizes the trained policy to identify remaining suspicious triples. Experiments on real-world KGs demonstrate that we can achieve significant improvement when applying KAEL to assemble SOTA error detectors. KAEL also outperforms SOTA ensemble learning baselines significantly.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have been widely used to enhance complex question answering (QA). To understand complex questions, existing studies employ language models (LMs) to encode contexts. Despite the simplicity, they neglect the latent relational information among question concepts and answers in KGs. While question concepts ubiquitously present hyponymy at the semantic level, e.g., mammals and animals, this feature is identically reflected in the hierarchical relations in KGs, e.g., a_type_of. Therefore, we are motivated to explore comprehensive reasoning by the hierarchical structures in KGs to help understand questions. However, it is non-trivial to reason over tree-like structures compared with chained paths. Moreover, identifying appropriate hierarchies relies on expertise. To this end, we propose HamQA, a novel Hierarchy-aware multi-hop Question Answering framework on knowledge graphs, to effectively align the mutual hierarchical information between question contexts and KGs. The entire learning is conducted in Hyperbolic space, inspired by its advantages of embedding hierarchical structures. Specifically, (i) we design a context-aware graph attentive network to capture context information. (ii) Hierarchical structures are continuously preserved in KGs by minimizing the Hyperbolic geodesic distances. The comprehensive reasoning is conducted to jointly train both components and provide a top-ranked candidate as an optimal answer. We achieve a higher ranking than the state-of-the-art multi-hop baselines on the official OpenBookQA leaderboard with an accuracy of 85%.

Knowledge Graph (KG) errors introduce non-negligible noise, severely affecting KG-related downstream tasks. Detecting errors in KGs is challenging since the patterns of errors are unknown and diverse, while ground-truth labels are rare or even unavailable. A traditional solution is to construct logical rules to verify triples, but it is not generalizable since different KGs have distinct rules with domain knowledge involved. Recent studies focus on designing tailored detectors or ranking triples based on KG embedding loss. However, they all rely on negative samples for training, which are generated by randomly replacing the head or tail entity of existing triples. Such a negative sampling strategy is not enough for prototyping practical KG errors, e.g., (Bruce_Lee, place_of_birth, China), in which the three elements are often relevant, although mismatched. We desire a more effective unsupervised learning mechanism tailored for KG error detection. To this end, we propose a novel framework - ContrAstive knowledge Graph Error Detection (CAGED). It introduces contrastive learning into KG learning and provides a novel way of modeling KG. Instead of following the traditional setting, i.e., considering entities as nodes and relations as semantic edges, CAGED augments a KG into different hyper-views, by regarding each relational triple as a node. After joint training with KG embedding and contrastive learning loss, CAGED assesses the trustworthiness of each triple based on two learning signals, i.e., the consistency of triple representations across multi-views and the self-consistency within the triple. Extensive experiments on three real-world KGs show that CAGED outperforms state-of-the-art methods in KG error detection. Our codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/Qing145/CAGED.git.