Yongfeng Zhang


2024

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Language is All a Graph Needs
Ruosong Ye | Caiqi Zhang | Runhui Wang | Shuyuan Xu | Yongfeng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

The emergence of large-scale pre-trained language models has revolutionized various AI research domains. Transformers-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have gradually replaced CNNs and RNNs to unify fields of computer vision and natural language processing. Compared with independent data like images, videos or texts, graphs usually contain rich structural and relational information. Meanwhile, languages, especially natural language, being one of the most expressive mediums, excels in describing complex structures. However, existing work on incorporating graph problems into the generative language modeling framework remains very limited. Considering the rising prominence of LLMs, it becomes essential to explore whether LLMs can also replace GNNs as the foundation model for graphs. In this paper, we propose InstructGLM (Instruction-finetuned Graph Language Model) with highly scalable prompts based on natural language instructions. We use natural language to describe multi-scale geometric structure of the graph and then instruction finetune an LLM to perform graph tasks, which enables Generative Graph Learning. Our method surpasses all GNN baselines on ogbn-arxiv, Cora and PubMed datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and sheds light on generative LLMs as new foundation model for graph machine learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/InstructGLM.

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The Impact of Reasoning Step Length on Large Language Models
Mingyu Jin | Qinkai Yu | Dong Shu | Haiyan Zhao | Wenyue Hua | Yanda Meng | Yongfeng Zhang | Mengnan Du
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To shed light on this, we have conducted several empirical experiments to explore the relations. Specifically, we design experiments that expand and compress the rationale reasoning steps within CoT demonstrations, while keeping all other factors constant. We have the following key findings. First, the results indicate that lengthening the reasoning steps in prompts, even without adding new information into the prompt, considerably enhances LLMs’ reasoning abilities across multiple datasets. Alternatively, shortening the reasoning steps, even while preserving the key information, significantly diminishes the reasoning abilities of models. This finding highlights the importance of the number of steps in CoT prompts and provides practical guidance to make better use of LLMs’ potential in complex problem-solving scenarios. Second, we also investigated the relationship between the performance of CoT and the rationales used in demonstrations. Surprisingly, the result shows that even incorrect rationales can yield favorable outcomes if they maintain the requisite length of inference. Third, we observed that the advantages of increasing reasoning steps are task-dependent: simpler tasks require fewer steps, whereas complex tasks gain significantly from longer inference sequences.

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Pre-trained Language Models for Entity Blocking: A Reproducibility Study
Runhui Wang | Yongfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Entity Resolution (ER) is an essential task in data integration and its goal is to find records that represent the same entity in a dataset. Deep learning models, especially large pre-trained language models, have achieved state-of-the-art results on this task. A typical ER pipeline consists of Entity Blocking and Entity Matching: Entity Blocking finds candidate record pairs that potentially match and Entity Matching determines if the pairs match. The goal of the entity blocking step is to include as many matching pairs as possible while including as few non-matching pairs as possible. On the other hand, the blocking task can also be considered as an Information Retrieval (IR) task. However, state-of-the-art neural IR models that are based on large language models have not been evaluated on the ER task. What’s more, the generalization ability of state-of-the-art methods for entity blocking is not well-studied but an import aspect in real-world applications. In this work, we evaluate state-of-the-art models for Entity Blocking along with neural IR models on a wide range of real-world datasets, and also study their in-distribution and out-of-distribution generalization abilities.

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UP5: Unbiased Foundation Model for Fairness-aware Recommendation
Wenyue Hua | Yingqiang Ge | Shuyuan Xu | Jianchao Ji | Zelong Li | Yongfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent advances in Foundation Models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled them to the forefront of Recommender Systems (RS). Despite their utility, there is a growing concern that LLMs might inadvertently perpetuate societal stereotypes, resulting in unfair recommendations. Since fairness is critical for RS as many users take it for decision-making and demand fulfillment, this paper focuses on user-side fairness for LLM-based recommendation where the users may require a recommender system to be fair on specific sensitive features such as gender or age. In this paper, we dive into the extent of unfairness exhibited by LLM-based recommender models based on both T5 and LLaMA backbones, and discuss appropriate methods for promoting equitable treatment of users in LLM-based recommendation models. We introduce a novel Counterfactually-Fair-Prompt (CFP) method towards Unbiased Foundation mOdels (UFO) for fairness-aware LLM-based recommendation. Experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets, MovieLens-1M and Insurance, and compared with both matching-based and sequential-based fairness-aware recommendation models. Results show that CFP achieves better recommendation performance with a high level of fairness.

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NPHardEval: Dynamic Benchmark on Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models via Complexity Classes
Lizhou Fan | Wenyue Hua | Lingyao Li | Haoyang Ling | Yongfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Complex reasoning ability is one of the most important features of Large Language Models (LLMs). Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, they are inadequate in offering a rigorous evaluation and prone to the risk of overfitting, as these publicly accessible and static benchmarks allow models to potentially tailor their responses to specific benchmark metrics, thereby inflating their performance. Addressing these limitations, we introduce a new benchmark NPHardEval. It contains a broad spectrum of 900 algorithmic questions belonging up to the NP-Hard complexity class, offering a rigorous measure of the reasoning ability of LLMs utilizing computational complexity. Moreover, this benchmark is designed with a dynamic update mechanism, where the datapoints are refreshed on a monthly basis. Such regular updates play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of LLMs overfitting to the benchmark, promoting a more accurate and reliable assessment of their reasoning capabilities. The benchmark dataset and code of NPHardEval are available at https://github.com/casmlab/NPHardEval.

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Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions
Lei Li | Yongfeng Zhang | Dugang Liu | Li Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

Large language models (LLM) not only have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to reshape many other fields, e.g., recommender systems (RS). However, most of the related work treats an LLM as a component of the conventional recommendation pipeline (e.g., as a feature extractor), which may not be able to fully leverage the generative power of LLM. Instead of separating the recommendation process into multiple stages, such as score computation and re-ranking, this process can be simplified to one stage with LLM: directly generating recommendations from the complete pool of items. This survey reviews the progress, methods, and future directions of LLM-based generative recommendation by examining three questions: 1) What generative recommendation is, 2) Why RS should advance to generative recommendation, and 3) How to implement LLM-based generative recommendation for various RS tasks. We hope that this survey can provide the context and guidance needed to explore this interesting and emerging topic.

2023

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VIP5: Towards Multimodal Foundation Models for Recommendation
Shijie Geng | Juntao Tan | Shuchang Liu | Zuohui Fu | Yongfeng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Computer Vision (CV), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Recommender Systems (RecSys) are three prominent AI applications that have traditionally developed independently, resulting in disparate modeling and engineering methodologies. This has impeded the ability for these fields to directly benefit from each other’s advancements. With the recent development of foundation models, large language models have emerged as a potential general-purpose interface for unifying different modalities and problem formulations. In light of this, we propose the development of a multimodal foundation model (MFM) considering visual, textual, and personalization modalities under the P5 recommendation paradigm, thus named VIP5 (Visual P5), to unify various modalities and recommendation tasks. This will enable the processing of multiple modalities in a shared architecture for improved recommendations. To achieve this, we introduce multimodal personalized prompts to accommodate multiple modalities under a shared format. Additionally, we propose a parameter-efficient training method for foundation models, which involves freezing the P5 backbone and fine-tuning lightweight adapters, resulting in improved recommendation performance and increased efficiency in terms of training time and memory usage. Code and data of VIP5 are available at https://github.com/jeykigung/VIP5.

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Discover, Explain, Improve: An Automatic Slice Detection Benchmark for Natural Language Processing
Wenyue Hua | Lifeng Jin | Linfeng Song | Haitao Mi | Yongfeng Zhang | Dong Yu
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 11

Pretrained natural language processing (NLP) models have achieved high overall performance, but they still make systematic errors. Instead of manual error analysis, research on slice detection models (SDMs), which automatically identify underperforming groups of datapoints, has caught escalated attention in Computer Vision for both understanding model behaviors and providing insights for future model training and designing. However, little research on SDMs and quantitative evaluation of their effectiveness have been conducted on NLP tasks. Our paper fills the gap by proposing a benchmark named “Discover, Explain, Improve (DEIm)” for classification NLP tasks along with a new SDM Edisa. Edisa discovers coherent and underperforming groups of datapoints; DEIm then unites them under human-understandable concepts and provides comprehensive evaluation tasks and corresponding quantitative metrics. The evaluation in DEIm shows that Edisa can accurately select error-prone datapoints with informative semantic features that summarize error patterns. Detecting difficult datapoints directly boosts model performance without tuning any original model parameters, showing that discovered slices are actionable for users.1

2022

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Improving Personalized Explanation Generation through Visualization
Shijie Geng | Zuohui Fu | Yingqiang Ge | Lei Li | Gerard de Melo | Yongfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In modern recommender systems, there are usually comments or reviews from users that justify their ratings for different items. Trained on such textual corpus, explainable recommendation models learn to discover user interests and generate personalized explanations. Though able to provide plausible explanations, existing models tend to generate repeated sentences for different items or empty sentences with insufficient details. This begs an interesting question: can we immerse the models in a multimodal environment to gain proper awareness of real-world concepts and alleviate above shortcomings? To this end, we propose a visually-enhanced approach named METER with the help of visualization generation and text–image matching discrimination: the explainable recommendation model is encouraged to visualize what it refers to while incurring a penalty if the visualization is incongruent with the textual explanation. Experimental results and a manual assessment demonstrate that our approach can improve not only the text quality but also the diversity and explainability of the generated explanations.

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System 1 + System 2 = Better World: Neural-Symbolic Chain of Logic Reasoning
Wenyue Hua | Yongfeng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Logical reasoning is a challenge for many current NLP neural network models since it requires more than the ability of learning informative representations from data. Inspired by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science — which proposes that human cognition process involves two stages: an intuitive, unconscious and fast process relying on perception calledSystem 1, and a logical, conscious and slow process performing complex reasoning called System 2 — we leverage neural logic reasoning (System 2) on top of the representation learning models (System 1), which conducts explicit neural-based differentiable logical reasoning on top of the representations learned by the base neural models. Based on experiments on the commonsense knowledge graph completion task, we show that the two-system architecture always improves from its System 1 model alone. Experiments also show that both the rule-driven logical regularizer and the data-driven value regularizer are important and the performance improvement is marginal without the two regularizers, which indicates that learning from both logical prior and training data is important for reasoning tasks.

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Data-Efficient Concept Extraction from Pre-trained Language Models for Commonsense Explanation Generation
Yanbo Fang | Yongfeng Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Predicting the key explanation concept is essential for generating commonsense explanations. This paper introduces a method to predict the concept from pre-trained language models for commonsense explanation generation. Our experiment found that adopting a language model as the concept extractor and fine-tuning it with 20% training data can improve the quality and accuracy of the generated explanations over multiple evaluation metrics. Compared with conventional methods that search concepts over knowledge graphs, our method does not require the preparation and training models to search through knowledge graphs. To better understand the results from pre-trained language models, we also designed a metric to evaluate the retrieved concepts. Through analysis and experiments, we show the correlation between this metric and the performance of the generators, and we also show the importance of attaching concepts for generating high-quality sentences.

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Assessing Combinational Generalization of Language Models in Biased Scenarios
Yanbo Fang | Zuohui Fu | Xin Dong | Yongfeng Zhang | Gerard de Melo
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In light of the prominence of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) across numerous downstream tasks, shedding light on what they learn is an important endeavor. Whereas previous work focuses on assessing in-domain knowledge, we evaluate the generalization ability in biased scenarios through component combinations where it could be easy for the PLMs to learn shortcuts from the training corpus. This would lead to poor performance on the testing corpus, which is combinationally reconstructed from the training components. The results show that PLMs are able to overcome such distribution shifts for specific tasks and with sufficient data. We further find that overfitting can lead the models to depend more on biases for prediction, thus hurting the combinational generalization ability of PLMs.

2021

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Personalized Transformer for Explainable Recommendation
Lei Li | Yongfeng Zhang | Li Chen
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Personalization of natural language generation plays a vital role in a large spectrum of tasks, such as explainable recommendation, review summarization and dialog systems. In these tasks, user and item IDs are important identifiers for personalization. Transformer, which is demonstrated with strong language modeling capability, however, is not personalized and fails to make use of the user and item IDs since the ID tokens are not even in the same semantic space as the words. To address this problem, we present a PErsonalized Transformer for Explainable Recommendation (PETER), on which we design a simple and effective learning objective that utilizes the IDs to predict the words in the target explanation, so as to endow the IDs with linguistic meanings and to achieve personalized Transformer. Besides generating explanations, PETER can also make recommendations, which makes it a unified model for the whole recommendation-explanation pipeline. Extensive experiments show that our small unpretrained model outperforms fine-tuned BERT on the generation task, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, which highlights the importance and the nice utility of our design.

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Faithfully Explainable Recommendation via Neural Logic Reasoning
Yaxin Zhu | Yikun Xian | Zuohui Fu | Gerard de Melo | Yongfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Knowledge graphs (KG) have become increasingly important to endow modern recommender systems with the ability to generate traceable reasoning paths to explain the recommendation process. However, prior research rarely considers the faithfulness of the derived explanations to justify the decision-making process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that models and evaluates faithfully explainable recommendation under the framework of KG reasoning. Specifically, we propose neural logic reasoning for explainable recommendation (LOGER) by drawing on interpretable logical rules to guide the path-reasoning process for explanation generation. We experiment on three large-scale datasets in the e-commerce domain, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method in delivering high-quality recommendations as well as ascertaining the faithfulness of the derived explanation.

2020

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A Representation Learning Approach to Animal Biodiversity Conservation
Meet Mukadam | Mandhara Jayaram | Yongfeng Zhang
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Generating knowledge from natural language data has aided in solving many artificial intelligence problems. Vector representations of words have been the driving force behind the majority of natural language processing tasks. This paper develops a novel approach for predicting the conservation status of animal species using custom generated scientific name embeddings. We use two different vector embeddings generated using representation learning on Wikipedia text and animal taxonomy data. We generate name embeddings for all species in the animal kingdom using unsupervised learning and build a model on the IUCN Red List dataset to classify species into endangered or least-concern. To our knowledge, this is the first work that makes use of learnt features instead of handcrafted features for this task and achieves competitive results. Based on the high confidence results of our model, we also predict the conservation status of data deficient species whose conservation status is still unknown and thus steering more focus towards them for protection. These embeddings have also been made publicly available here. We believe this will greatly help in solving various downstream tasks and further advance research in the cross-domain involving natural language processing, conservation biology, and life sciences.