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Deqing Yang

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8 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

ComLQ: Benchmarking Complex Logical Queries in Information Retrieval

Ganlin Xu
Zhitao Yin
LingHao Zhang
Jiaqing Liang
Weijia Lu
Xiaodong Zhang
Zhifei Yang
Sihang Jiang

Information retrieval (IR) systems play a critical role in navigating information overload across various applications. Existing IR benchmarks primarily focus on simple queries that are semantically analogous to single- and multi-hop relations, overlooking complex logical queries involving first-order logic operations such as conjunction (∧), disjunction (∨), and negation (¬). Thus, these benchmarks can not be used to sufficiently evaluate the performance of IR models on complex queries in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) to construct a new IR dataset ComLQ for Complex Logical Queries, which comprises 2,909 queries and 11,251 candidate passages. A key challenge in constructing the dataset lies in capturing the underlying logical structures within unstructured text. Therefore, by designing the subgraph-guided prompt with the subgraph indicator, an LLM (such as GPT-4o) is guided to generate queries with specific logical structures based on selected passages. All query-passage pairs in ComLQ are ensured structure conformity and evidence distribution through expert annotation. To better evaluate whether retrievers can handle queries with negation, we further propose a new evaluation metric, Log-Scaled Negation Consistency (LSNC@K). As a supplement to standard relevance-based metrics (such as nDCG and mAP), LSNC@K measures whether top-K retrieved passages violate negation conditions in queries. Our experimental results under zero-shot settings demonstrate existing retrieval models' limited performance on complex logical queries, especially on queries with negation, exposing their inferior capabilities of modeling exclusion. In summary, our ComLQ offers a comprehensive and fine-grained exploration, paving the way for future research on complex logical queries in IR.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Accelerated Evolving Set Processes for Local PageRank Computation

Binbin Huang
Luo Luo
Yanghua Xiao
Deqing Yang
Baojian Zhou

This work proposes a novel framework based on nested evolving set processes to accelerate Personalized PageRank (PPR) computation. At each stage of the process, we employ a localized inexact proximal point iteration to solve a simplified linear system. We show that the time complexity of such localized methods is upper bounded by $\min\{\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(R^2/\epsilon^2), \tilde{\mathcal{O}}(m)\}$ to obtain an $\epsilon$-approximation of the PPR vector, where $m$ denotes the number of edges in the graph and $R$ is a constant defined via nested evolving set processes. Furthermore, the algorithms induced by our framework require solving only $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\sqrt{\alpha})$ such linear systems, where $\alpha$ is the damping factor. When $1/\epsilon^2\ll m$, this implies the existence of an algorithm that computes an $\epsilon$-approximation of the PPR vector with an overall time complexity of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(R^2 / (\sqrt{\alpha}\epsilon^2))$, independent of the underlying graph size. Our result resolves an open conjecture from existing literature. Experimental results on real-world graphs validate the efficiency of our methods, demonstrating significant convergence in the early stages.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ARIA: Training Language Agents with Intention-driven Reward Aggregation

Ruihan Yang
Yikai Zhang
Aili Chen
Xintao Wang
Jiangjie Chen
Siyu Yuan
Deqing Yang
Yanghua Xiao

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to perform complex reasoning and decision-making through free-form language interactions. However, in open-ended language action environments (e. g. , negotiation or question-asking games), the action space can be formulated as a joint distribution over tokens, resulting in an extremely large and combinatorial action space. Sampling actions in such a space can lead to extreme reward sparsity, which brings large reward variance, hindering effective reinforcement learning (RL). To address this, we propose ARIA, a method that A ggregates R ewards in I ntention space to enable efficient and effective language A gents training. ARIA aims to project natural language actions from the high-dimensional joint token distribution space into a low-dimensional intention space, where semantically similar actions are clustered and assigned shared rewards. This intention-aware reward aggregation reduces reward variance by densifying reward signals, fostering efficient and effective policy optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARIA not only significantly reduces gradient variance, but also delivers substantial performance gains of average 9. 95% across four downstream tasks (e. g. , negotiation and text-based games), consistently outperforming strong offline and online RL baselines.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

The Lighthouse of Language: Enhancing LLM Agents via Critique-Guided Improvement

Ruihan Yang
Fanghua Ye
Jian Li
Siyu Yuan
Yikai Zhang
Zhaopeng Tu
Xiaolong Li
Deqing Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance. In contrast, natural language feedback better aligns with the generative capabilities of LLMs, providing richer and more actionable suggestions. However, parsing and implementing this feedback effectively can be challenging for LLM-based agents. In this work, we introduce Critique-Guided Improvement (CGI), a novel two-player framework, comprising an actor model that explores an environment and a critic model that generates detailed nature language feedback. By training the critic to produce fine-grained assessments and actionable revisions, and the actor to utilize these critiques, our approach promotes more robust exploration of alternative strategies while avoiding local optima. Experiments in three interactive environments show that CGI outperforms existing baselines by a substantial margin. Notably, even a small critic model surpasses GPT-4 in feedback quality. The resulting actor achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the power of explicit iterative guidance to enhance decision-making in LLM-based agents.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Faster Local Solvers for Graph Diffusion Equations

Jiahe Bai
Baojian Zhou
Deqing Yang
Yanghua Xiao

Efficient computation of graph diffusion equations (GDEs), such as Personalized PageRank, Katz centrality, and the Heat kernel, is crucial for clustering, training neural networks, and many other graph-related problems. Standard iterative methods require accessing the whole graph per iteration, making them time-consuming for large-scale graphs. While existing local solvers approximate diffusion vectors through heuristic local updates, they often operate sequentially and are typically designed for specific diffusion types, limiting their applicability. Given that diffusion vectors are highly localizable, as measured by the participation ratio, this paper introduces a novel framework for approximately solving GDEs using a local diffusion process. This framework reveals the suboptimality of existing local solvers. Furthermore, our approach effectively localizes standard iterative solvers by designing simple and provably sublinear time algorithms. These new local solvers are highly parallelizable, making them well-suited for implementation on GPUs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in quickly obtaining approximate diffusion vectors, achieving up to a hundred-fold speed improvement, and its applicability to large-scale dynamic graphs. Our framework could also facilitate more efficient local message-passing mechanisms for GNNs.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Iterative Methods via Locally Evolving Set Process

Baojian Zhou
Yifan Sun
Reza Babanezhad Harikandeh
Xingzhi Guo
Deqing Yang
Yanghua Xiao

Given the damping factor $\alpha$ and precision tolerance $\epsilon$, \citet{andersen2006local} introduced Approximate Personalized PageRank (APPR), the \textit{de facto local method} for approximating the PPR vector, with runtime bounded by $\Theta(1/(\alpha\epsilon))$ independent of the graph size. Recently, Fountoulakis \& Yang asked whether faster local algorithms could be developed using $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/(\sqrt{\alpha}\epsilon))$ operations. By noticing that APPR is a local variant of Gauss-Seidel, this paper explores the question of *whether standard iterative solvers can be effectively localized*. We propose to use the *locally evolving set process*, a novel framework to characterize the algorithm locality, and demonstrate that many standard solvers can be effectively localized. Let $\overline{\operatorname{vol}}{ (\mathcal S_t)}$ and $\overline{\gamma_t}$ be the running average of volume and the residual ratio of active nodes $\textstyle \mathcal{S_t}$ during the process. We show $\overline{\operatorname{vol}}{ (\mathcal S_t)}/\overline{\gamma_t} \leq 1/\epsilon$ and prove APPR admits a new runtime bound $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\overline{\operatorname{vol}}(\mathcal S_t)/(\alpha\overline{\gamma_t}))$ mirroring the actual performance. Furthermore, when the geometric mean of residual reduction is $\Theta(\sqrt{\alpha})$, then there exists $c \in (0, 2)$ such that the local Chebyshev method has runtime $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\overline{\operatorname{vol}}(\mathcal{S_t})/(\sqrt{\alpha}(2-c)))$ without the monotonicity assumption. Numerical results confirm the efficiency of this novel framework and show up to a hundredfold speedup over corresponding standard solvers on real-world graphs.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Convolutional Gaussian Embeddings for Personalized Recommendation with Uncertainty

Junyang Jiang
Deqing Yang
Yanghua Xiao
Chenlu Shen

Most of existing embedding based recommendation models use embeddings (vectors) to represent users and items which contain latent features of users and items. Each of such embeddings corresponds to a single fixed point in low-dimensional space, thus fails to precisely represent the users/items with uncertainty which are often observed in recommender systems. Addressing this problem, we propose a unified deep recommendation framework employing Gaussian embeddings, which are proven adaptive to uncertain preferences exhibited by some users, resulting in better user representations and recommendation performance. Furthermore, our framework adopts Monte-Carlo sampling and convolutional neural networks to compute the correlation between the objective user and the candidate item, based on which precise recommendations are achieved. Our extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets not only justify that our proposed Gaussian embeddings capture the uncertainty of users very well, but also demonstrate its superior performance over the state-of-the-art recommendation models.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Relation Extraction Using Supervision from Topic Knowledge of Relation Labels

Haiyun Jiang
Li Cui
Zhe Xu
Deqing Yang
Jindong Chen
Chenguang Li
Jingping Liu
Jiaqing Liang

Explicitly exploring the semantics of a relation is significant for high-accuracy relation extraction, which is, however, not fully studied in previous work. In this paper, we mine the topic knowledge of a relation to explicitly represent the semantics of this relation, and model relation extraction as a matching problem. That is, the matching score between a sentence and a candidate relation is predicted for an entity pair. To this end, we propose a deep matching network to precisely model the semantic similarity between a sentence-relation pair. Besides, the topic knowledge also allows us to derive the importance information of samples as well as two knowledge-guided negative sampling strategies in the training process. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed framework and observe improvements in AUC of 11. 5% and max F1 of 5. 4% over the baselines with state-of-the-art performance.

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