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Funing Yang

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6 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Auto Encoding Neural Process for Multi-interest Recommendation

Yiheng Jiang
Yuanbo Xu
Yongjian Yang
Funing Yang
Pengyang Wang
Chaozhuo Li

Multi-interest recommendation constantly aspires to an oracle individual preference modeling approach, that satisfies the diverse and dynamic properties. Fueled by the deep learning technology, existing neural network (NN)-based recommender systems employ single-point or multi-point interest representation strategy to realize preference modeling,and boost the recommendation performance with a remarkable margin. However, as parameterized approximate functions, NN-based methods remain deficiencies with respect to the adaptability towards distinctive preference patterns cross different users and the calibration over the individual current intent. In this paper, we revisit multi-interest recommendation with the lens of stochastic process and Bayesian inference. Specifically, we propose to learn a distribution over functions to depict the individual diverse preferences rather than a unified function to approximate preference. Subsequently, the recommendation is encouraged with the uncertainty estimation which conforms to the dynamic shifting intent. Along these lines, we establish the connection between multi-interest recommendation and neural processes by proposing NP-Rec, which realizes the flexible multiple interests modeling and uncertainty estimation, simultaneously. Empirical study on 4 real world datasets demonstrates that our NP-Rec attains superior recommendation performances to several state-of-the-art baselines, where the average improvement achieves up to 13.94%.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Graph OOD Detection via Plug-and-Play Energy-based Evaluation and Propagation

Yunxia Zhang
Mingchen Sun
Yutong Zhang
Funing Yang
Ying Wang

Existing graph neural network (GNN) methods are typically built upon the i. i. d. assumption, emphasizing the enhancement of the test performance for in-distribution (ID) data. However, there has been limited exploration of their adaptability to scenarios involving unknown distribution data. On the one hand, in real-world application scenarios, graph data often expands continuously with the acquisition of external knowledge, which means that new nodes with unknown categories may be added to the graph data. The gap between the new node distribution and the original node distribution can make existing GNN methods less effective. On the other hand, existing out-of-distribution (OOD) detection methods often rely on the softmax confidence score, which makes the OOD data suffer from overconfident posterior distributions. To address the above issues, we propose an Energy Propagation-based Graph Neural Network (EPGNN), which improves the OOD generalization ability by endowing GNN with the capacity to detect the OOD nodes in the graph. Specifically, we first construct GNN encoder to obtain node embedding that incorporates neighborhood structural information. Then, we design a plug-and-play energy-based OOD evaluator by assigning corresponding energy values to different nodes. Finally, we construct a plug-and-play structure-aware energy propagation module and joint alignment regularization, which make the node energy more flexible during the training process. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Hierarchy Knowledge Graph for Parameter-Efficient Entity Embedding

Hepeng Gao
Funing Yang
Yongjian Yang
Ying Wang

Traditional knowledge graphs (KGs) provide each entity with a unique embedding as a representation, which contains a lot of redundant information. Meanwhile, the space complexities of the KGs are positively related to the number of entities. In this work, we propose a hierarchical representation learning method, namely HRL, which is a parameter-efficient model where the number of model parameters is independent of dataset scales. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical model comprising a Meta Encoder and a Context Encoder to generate the representation of entities and relations. The Meta Encoder captures the common representations shared across entities, while the Context Encoder learns entity-specific representations. We further provide a theoretical analysis of model design by constructing a structural causal model (SCM) when completing a knowledge graph. The SCM outlines the relationships between nodes, where entity embeddings are conditioned on both common and entity-specific representations. Note that our model is designed to reduce model scale while maintaining competitive performance. We evaluate HRL on the knowledge graph completion task using three real-world datasets. The results demonstrate that HRL significantly outperforms existing parameter-efficient baselines, as well as traditional state-of-the-art baselines of similar scale.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Indirect Online Preference Optimization via Reinforcement Learning

En Wang
Xingyu Lin
Du Su
Chenfu Bao
Zhonghou Lv
Funing Yang
Yuanbo Xu
Wenbin Liu

Human preference alignment (HPA) aims to ensure Large Language Models (LLMs) responding appropriately to meet human moral and ethical requirements. Existing methods, such as RLHF and DPO, rely heavily on high-quality human annotation, which restrict the efficiency of iterative online model refinement. To address the inefficiencies of human annotation acquisition, iterated online strategy advocates the use of fine-tuned LLMs to self-generate preference data. However, this approach is prone to distribution bias, because of differences between human and model annotations, as well as modeling errors between simulators and real-world contexts. To mitigate the impact of distribution bias, we adopt the principles of adversarial training, framing a zero-sum two-player game with a protagonist agent and an adversarial agent. With the adversarial agent challenging the alignment of protagonist agent, we continuously refine the protagonist’s performance. By utilizing min-max equilibrium and Nash equilibrium strategies, we propose Indirect Online Preference Optimization (IOPO) mechanism that enables the protagonist agent to converge without bias while maintaining linear computational complexity. Extensive experiments across three real-world datasets demonstrate that IOPO outperforms state-of-the-art alignment methods in both offline and online scenarios, evidenced by standard alignment metrics and human evaluations. This innovation reduces the time required for model iterations from months to one week, alleviates distribution shifts, and significantly cuts annotation costs.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Sparse Parameterization for Epitomic Dataset Distillation

Xing Wei
Anjia Cao
Funing Yang
Zhiheng Ma

The success of deep learning relies heavily on large and diverse datasets, but the storage, preprocessing, and training of such data present significant challenges. To address these challenges, dataset distillation techniques have been proposed to obtain smaller synthetic datasets that capture the essential information of the originals. In this paper, we introduce a Sparse Parameterization for Epitomic datasEt Distillation (SPEED) framework, which leverages the concept of dictionary learning and sparse coding to distill epitomes that represent pivotal information of the dataset. SPEED prioritizes proper parameterization of the synthetic dataset and introduces techniques to capture spatial redundancy within and between synthetic images. We propose Spatial-Agnostic Epitomic Tokens (SAETs) and Sparse Coding Matrices (SCMs) to efficiently represent and select significant features. Additionally, we build a Feature-Recurrent Network (FReeNet) to generate hierarchical features with high compression and storage efficiency. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of SPEED in handling high-resolution datasets, achieving state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks and downstream applications. Our framework is compatible with a variety of dataset matching approaches, generally enhancing their performance. This work highlights the importance of proper parameterization in epitomic dataset distillation and opens avenues for efficient representation learning. Source code is available at https: //github. com/MIV-XJTU/SPEED.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Short Paper

An Extraction and Representation Pipeline for Literary Characters

Funing Yang

Readers of novels need to identify and learn about the characters as they develop an understanding of the plot. The paper presents an end-to-end automated pipeline for literary character identification and ongoing work for extracting and comparing character representations for full-length English novels. The character identification pipeline involves a named entity recognition (NER) module with F1 score of 0. 85, a coreference resolution module with F1 score of 0. 76, and a disambiguation module using both heuristic and algorithmic approaches. Ongoing work compares event extraction as well as speech extraction pipelines for literary characters representations with case studies. The paper is the first to my knowledge that combines a modular pipeline for automated character identification and representation extraction and comparisons for full-length English novels.

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