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Chengqiang Lu

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8 papers

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

RAG-IGBench: Innovative Evaluation for RAG-based Interleaved Generation in Open-domain Question Answering

Rongyang Zhang
Yuqing Huang
Chengqiang Lu
Qimeng Wang
Yan Gao
Yao Hu
Yin Xu
Wei Wang

In real-world scenarios, providing user queries with visually enhanced responses can considerably benefit understanding and memory, underscoring the great value of interleaved image-text generation. Despite recent progress, like the visual autoregressive model that unifies text and image processing in a single transformer architecture, generating high-quality interleaved content remains challenging. Moreover, evaluations of these interleaved sequences largely remain underexplored, with existing benchmarks often limited by unimodal metrics that inadequately assess the intricacies of combined image-text outputs. To address these issues, we present RAG-IGBench, a thorough benchmark designed specifically to evaluate the task of Interleaved Generation based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG-IG) in open-domain question answering. RAG-IG integrates multimodal large language models (MLLMs) with retrieval mechanisms, enabling the models to access external image-text information for generating coherent multimodal content. Distinct from previous datasets, RAG-IGBench draws on the latest publicly available content from social platforms and introduces innovative evaluation metrics that measure the quality of text and images, as well as their consistency. Through extensive experiments with state-of-the-art MLLMs (both open-source and proprietary) on RAG-IGBench, we provide an in-depth analysis examining the capabilities and limitations of these models. Additionally, we validate our evaluation metrics by demonstrating their high correlation with human assessments. Models fine-tuned on RAG-IGBench's training set exhibit improved performance across multiple benchmarks, confirming both the quality and practical utility of our dataset. Our benchmark is available at https: //github. com/zry13/RAG-IGBench.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Wide-Horizon Thinking and Simulation-Based Evaluation for Real-World LLM Planning with Multifaceted Constraints

Dongjie Yang
Chengqiang Lu
Qimeng Wang
Xinbei Ma
Yan Gao
Yao Hu
Hai Zhao

Unlike reasoning, which often entails a deep sequence of deductive steps, complex real-world planning is characterized by the need to synthesize a broad spectrum of parallel and potentially conflicting information and constraints. For example, in travel planning scenarios, it requires the integration of diverse real-world information and user preferences. While LLMs show promise, existing methods with long-horizon thinking struggle with handling multifaceted constraints, leading to suboptimal solutions. Motivated by the challenges of real-world travel planning, this paper introduces the Multiple Aspects of Planning (MAoP), empowering LLMs with "wide-horizon thinking" to solve planning problems with multifaceted constraints. Instead of direct planning, MAoP leverages the strategist to conduct pre-planning from various aspects and provide the planning blueprint for planners, enabling strong inference-time scalability by scaling aspects to consider various constraints. In addition, existing benchmarks for multi-constraint planning are flawed because they assess constraints in isolation, ignoring causal dependencies within the constraints, e. g, travel planning, where past activities dictate future itinerary. To address this, we propose Travel-Sim, an agent-based benchmark assessing plans via real-world simulation, thereby inherently resolving these causal dependencies. This paper advances LLM capabilities in complex planning and offers novel insights for evaluating sophisticated scenarios through simulation.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) show promising results for graph tasks. However, existing GNNs' generalization ability will degrade when there exist distribution shifts between testing and training graph data. The fundamental reason for the severe degeneration is that most GNNs are designed based on the I.I.D hypothesis. In such a setting, GNNs tend to exploit subtle statistical correlations existing in the training set for predictions, even though it is a spurious correlation. In this paper, we study the problem of the generalization ability of GNNs on Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) settings. To solve this problem, we propose the Learning to Reweight for Generalizable Graph Neural Network (L2R-GNN) to enhance the generalization ability for achieving satisfactory performance on unseen testing graphs that have different distributions with training graphs. We propose a novel nonlinear graph decorrelation method, which can substantially improve the out-of-distribution generalization ability and compares favorably to previous methods in restraining the over-reduced sample size. The variables of graph representation are clustered based on the stability of their correlations, and graph decorrelation method learns weights to remove correlations between the variables of different clusters rather than any two variables. Besides, we introduce an effective stochastic algorithm based on bi-level optimization for the L2R-GNN framework, which enables simultaneously learning the optimal weights and GNN parameters, and avoids the over-fitting issue. Experiments show that L2R-GNN greatly outperforms baselines on various graph prediction benchmarks under distribution shifts.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Vript: A Video Is Worth Thousands of Words

Dongjie Yang
Suyuan Huang
Chengqiang Lu
Xiaodong Han
Haoxin Zhang
Yan Gao
Yao Hu
Hai Zhao

Advancements in multimodal learning, particularly in video understanding and generation, require high-quality video-text datasets for improved model performance. Vript addresses this issue with a meticulously annotated corpus of 12K high-resolution videos, offering detailed, dense, and script-like captions for over 420K clips. Each clip has a caption of ~145 words, which is over 10x longer than most video-text datasets. Unlike captions only documenting static content in previous datasets, we enhance video captioning to video scripting by documenting not just the content, but also the camera operations, which include the shot types (medium shot, close-up, etc) and camera movements (panning, tilting, etc). By utilizing the Vript, we explore three training paradigms of aligning more text with the video modality rather than clip-caption pairs. This results in Vriptor, a top-performing video captioning model among open-source models, comparable to GPT-4V in performance. Vriptor is also a powerful model capable of end-to-end generation of dense and detailed captions for long videos. Moreover, we introduce Vript-Hard, a benchmark consisting of three video understanding tasks that are more challenging than existing benchmarks: Vript-HAL is the first benchmark evaluating action and object hallucinations in video LLMs, Vript-RR combines reasoning with retrieval resolving question ambiguity in long-video QAs, and Vript-ERO is a new task to evaluate the temporal understanding of events in long videos rather than actions in short videos in previous works. All code, models, and datasets are available in https: //github. com/mutonix/Vript.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

ProtGNN: Towards Self-Explaining Graph Neural Networks

Zaixi Zhang
Qi Liu
Hao Wang
Chengqiang Lu
Cheekong Lee

Despite the recent progress in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), it remains challenging to explain the predictions made by GNNs. Existing explanation methods mainly focus on post-hoc explanations where another explanatory model is employed to provide explanations for a trained GNN. The fact that post-hoc methods fail to reveal the original reasoning process of GNNs raises the need of building GNNs with built-in interpretability. In this work, we propose Prototype Graph Neural Network (ProtGNN), which combines prototype learning with GNNs and provides a new perspective on the explanations of GNNs. In ProtGNN, the explanations are naturally derived from the case-based reasoning process and are actually used during classification. The prediction of Prot- GNN is obtained by comparing the inputs to a few learned prototypes in the latent space. Furthermore, for better interpretability and higher efficiency, a novel conditional subgraph sampling module is incorporated to indicate which part of the input graph is most similar to each prototype in Prot- GNN+. Finally, we evaluate our method on a wide range of datasets and perform concrete case studies. Extensive results show that ProtGNN and ProtGNN+ can provide inherent interpretability while achieving accuracy on par with the noninterpretable counterparts.

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IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

GraphMI: Extracting Private Graph Data from Graph Neural Networks

Zaixi Zhang
Qi Liu
Zhenya Huang
Hao Wang
Chengqiang Lu
Chuanren Liu
Enhong Chen

As machine learning becomes more widely used for critical applications, the need to study its implications in privacy becomes urgent. Given access to the target model and auxiliary information, model inversion attack aims to infer sensitive features of the training dataset, which leads to great privacy concerns. Despite its success in the grid domain, directly applying model inversion techniques on non grid domains such as graph achieves poor attack performance due to the difficulty to fully exploit the intrinsic properties of graphs and attributes of graph nodes used in GNN models. To bridge this gap, we present Graph Model Inversion attack, which aims to infer edges of the training graph by inverting Graph Neural Networks, one of the most popular graph analysis tools. Specifically, the projected gradient module in our method can tackle the discreteness of graph edges while preserving the sparsity and smoothness of graph features. Moreover, a well designed graph autoencoder module can efficiently exploit graph topology, node attributes, and target model parameters. With the proposed method, we study the connection between model inversion risk and edge influence and show that edges with greater influence are more likely to be recovered. Extensive experiments over several public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We also show that differential privacy in its canonical form can hardly defend our attack while preserving decent utility.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Motif-based Graph Self-Supervised Learning for Molecular Property Prediction

Zaixi Zhang
Qi Liu
Hao Wang
Chengqiang Lu
Chee-Kong Lee

Predicting molecular properties with data-driven methods has drawn much attention in recent years. Particularly, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various molecular generation and prediction tasks. In cases where labeled data is scarce, GNNs can be pre-trained on unlabeled molecular data to first learn the general semantic and structural information before being finetuned for specific tasks. However, most existing self-supervised pretraining frameworks for GNNs only focus on node-level or graph-level tasks. These approaches cannot capture the rich information in subgraphs or graph motifs. For example, functional groups (frequently-occurred subgraphs in molecular graphs) often carry indicative information about the molecular properties. To bridge this gap, we propose Motif-based Graph Self-supervised Learning (MGSSL) by introducing a novel self-supervised motif generation framework for GNNs. First, for motif extraction from molecular graphs, we design a molecule fragmentation method that leverages a retrosynthesis-based algorithm BRICS and additional rules for controlling the size of motif vocabulary. Second, we design a general motif-based generative pretraining framework in which GNNs are asked to make topological and label predictions. This generative framework can be implemented in two different ways, i. e. , breadth-first or depth-first. Finally, to take the multi-scale information in molecular graphs into consideration, we introduce a multi-level self-supervised pre-training. Extensive experiments on various downstream benchmark tasks show that our methods outperform all state-of-the-art baselines.

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AAAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Molecular Property Prediction: A Multilevel Quantum Interactions Modeling Perspective

Chengqiang Lu
Qi Liu
Chao Wang
Zhenya Huang
Peize Lin
Lixin He

Predicting molecular properties (e. g. , atomization energy) is an essential issue in quantum chemistry, which could speed up much research progress, such as drug designing and substance discovery. Traditional studies based on density functional theory (DFT) in physics are proved to be time-consuming for predicting large number of molecules. Recently, the machine learning methods, which consider much rule-based information, have also shown potentials for this issue. However, the complex inherent quantum interactions of molecules are still largely underexplored by existing solutions. In this paper, we propose a generalizable and transferable Multilevel Graph Convolutional neural Network (MGCN) for molecular property prediction. Specifically, we represent each molecule as a graph to preserve its internal structure. Moreover, the well-designed hierarchical graph neural network directly extracts features from the conformation and spatial information followed by the multilevel interactions. As a consequence, the multilevel overall representations can be utilized to make the prediction. Extensive experiments on both datasets of equilibrium and off-equilibrium molecules demonstrate the effectiveness of our model. Furthermore, the detailed results also prove that MGCN is generalizable and transferable for the prediction.

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