Xianfeng Tang


2024

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BlendFilter: Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Query Generation Blending and Knowledge Filtering
Haoyu Wang | Ruirui Li | Haoming Jiang | Jinjin Tian | Zhengyang Wang | Chen Luo | Xianfeng Tang | Monica Xiao Cheng | Tuo Zhao | Jing Gao
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Retrieval-augmented Large Language Models (LLMs) offer substantial benefits in enhancing performance across knowledge-intensive scenarios. However, these methods often struggle with complex inputs and encounter difficulties due to noisy knowledge retrieval, notably hindering model effectiveness. To address this issue, we introduce BlendFilter, a novel approach that elevates retrieval-augmented LLMs by integrating query generation blending with knowledge filtering. BlendFilter proposes the blending process through its query generation method, which integrates both external and internal knowledge augmentation with the original query, ensuring comprehensive information gathering. Additionally, our distinctive knowledge filtering module capitalizes on the intrinsic capabilities of the LLM, effectively eliminating extraneous data. We conduct extensive experiments on three open-domain question answering benchmarks, and the findings clearly indicate that our innovative BlendFilter surpasses state-of-the-art baselines significantly.

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Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark
Fenglin Liu | Zheng Li | Hongjian Zhou | Qingyu Yin | Jingfeng Yang | Xianfeng Tang | Chen Luo | Ming Zeng | Haoming Jiang | Yifan Gao | Priyanka Nigam | Sreyashi Nag | Bing Yin | Yining Hua | Xuan Zhou | Omid Rohanian | Anshul Thakur | Lei Clifton | David A. Clifton
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and clinical tasks that are complex but common in real-world practice, e.g., open-ended decision-making, long document processing, and emerging drug analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs

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Sequential LLM Framework for Fashion Recommendation
Han Liu | Xianfeng Tang | Tianlang Chen | Jiapeng Liu | Indu Indu | Henry Peng Zou | Peng Dai | Roberto Fernandez Galan | Michael D Porter | Dongmei Jia | Ning Zhang | Lian Xiong
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

The fashion industry is one of the leading domains in the global e-commerce sector, prompting major online retailers to employ recommendation systems for product suggestions and customer convenience. While recommendation systems have been widely studied, most are designed for general e-commerce problems and struggle with the unique challenges of the fashion domain. To address these issues, we propose a sequential fashion recommendation framework that leverages a pre-trained large language model (LLM) enhanced with recommendation-specific prompts. Our framework employs parameter-efficient fine-tuning with extensive fashion data and introduces a novel mix-up-based retrieval technique for translating text into relevant product suggestions. Extensive experiments show our proposed framework significantly enhances fashion recommendation performance.

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Graph Chain-of-Thought: Augmenting Large Language Models by Reasoning on Graphs
Bowen Jin | Chulin Xie | Jiawei Zhang | Kashob Kumar Roy | Yu Zhang | Zheng Li | Ruirui Li | Xianfeng Tang | Suhang Wang | Yu Meng | Jiawei Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Large language models (LLMs), while exhibiting exceptional performance, suffer from hallucinations, especially on knowledge-intensive tasks. Existing works propose to augment LLMs with individual text units retrieved from external knowledge corpora to alleviate the issue. However, in many domains, texts are interconnected (e.g., academic papers in a bibliographic graph are linked by citations and co-authorships) which form a (text-attributed) graph. The knowledge in such graphs is encoded not only in single texts/nodes but also in their associated connections. To facilitate the research of augmenting LLMs with graphs, we manually construct a Graph Reasoning Benchmark dataset called GRBench, containing 1,740 questions that can be answered with the knowledge from 10 domain graphs. Then, we propose a simple and effective framework called Graph Chain-of-thought (Graph-CoT) to augment LLMs with graphs by encouraging LLMs to reason on the graph iteratively. Each Graph-CoT iteration consists of three sub-steps: LLM reasoning, LLM-graph interaction, and graph execution. We conduct systematic experiments with three LLM backbones on GRBench, where Graph-CoT outperforms the baselines consistently. The code is available at https://github.com/PeterGriffinJin/Graph-CoT/.