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Hongshen Chen

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9 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

RESTL: Reinforcement Learning Guided by Multi-Aspect Rewards for Signal Temporal Logic Transformation

Yue Fang
Zhi Jin
Jie An
Hongshen Chen
Xiaohong Chen
Naijun Zhan

Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is a powerful formal language for specifying real-time specifications of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Transforming specifications written in natural language into STL formulas automatically has attracted increasing attention. Existing rule-based methods depend heavily on rigid pattern matching and domain-specific knowledge, limiting their generalizability and scalability. Recently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) of large language models (LLMs) has been successfully applied to transform natural language into STL. However, the lack of fine-grained supervision on atomic proposition correctness, semantic fidelity, and formula readability often leads SFT-based methods to produce formulas misaligned with the intended meaning. To address these issues, we propose RESTL, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for the transformation from natural language to STL. RESTL introduces multiple independently trained reward models that provide fine-grained, multi-faceted feedback from four perspectives, i.e., atomic proposition consistency, semantic alignment, formula succinctness, and symbol matching. These reward models are trained with a curriculum learning strategy to improve their feedback accuracy, and their outputs are aggregated into a unified signal that guides the optimization of the STL generator via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experimental results demonstrate that RESTL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both automatic metrics and human evaluations.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Collaborative Group Learning

Shaoxiong Feng
Hongshen Chen
Xuancheng Ren
Zhuoye Ding
Kan Li
Xu Sun

Collaborative learning has successfully applied knowledge transfer to guide a pool of small student networks towards robust local minima. However, previous approaches typically struggle with drastically aggravated student homogenization when the number of students rises. In this paper, we propose Collaborative Group Learning, an efficient framework that aims to diversify the feature representation and conduct an effective regularization. Intuitively, similar to the human group study mechanism, we induce students to learn and exchange different parts of course knowledge as collaborative groups. First, each student is established by randomly routing on a modular neural network, which facilitates flexible knowledge communication between students due to random levels of representation sharing and branching. Second, to resist the student homogenization, students first compose diverse feature sets by exploiting the inductive bias from subsets of training data, and then aggregate and distill different complementary knowledge by imitating a random subgroup of students at each time step. Overall, the above mechanisms are beneficial for maximizing the student population to further improve the model generalization without sacrificing computational efficiency. Empirical evaluations on both image and text tasks indicate that our method significantly outperforms various state-of-the-art collaborative approaches whilst enhancing computational efficiency.

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IJCAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Improving Sequential Recommendation Consistency with Self-Supervised Imitation

Xu Yuan
Hongshen Chen
Yonghao Song
Xiaofang Zhao
Zhuoye Ding

Most sequential recommendation models capture the features of consecutive items in a user-item interaction history. Though effective, their representation expressiveness is still hindered by the sparse learning signals. As a result, the sequential recommender is prone to make inconsistent predictions. In this paper, we propose a model, SSI, to improve sequential recommendation consistency with Self-Supervised Imitation. Precisely, we extract the consistency knowledge by utilizing three self-supervised pre-training tasks, where temporal consistency and persona consistency capture user-interaction dynamics in terms of the chronological order and persona sensitivities, respectively. Furthermore, to provide the model with a global perspective, global session consistency is introduced by maximizing the mutual information among global and local interaction sequences. Finally, to comprehensively take advantage of all three independent aspects of consistency-enhanced knowledge, we establish an integrated imitation learning framework. The consistency knowledge is effectively internalized and transferred to the student model by imitating the conventional prediction logit as well as the consistency-enhanced item representations. In addition, the flexible self-supervised imitation framework can also benefit other student recommenders. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that SSI effectively outperforms the state-of-the-art sequential recommendation methods.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Probing Product Description Generation via Posterior Distillation

Haolan Zhan
Hainan Zhang
Hongshen Chen
Lei Shen
Zhuoye Ding
Yongjun Bao
Weipeng Yan
Yanyan Lan

In product description generation (PDG), the user-cared aspect is critical for the recommendation system, which can not only improve user’s experiences but also obtain more clicks. High-quality customer reviews can be considered as an ideal source to mine user-cared aspects. However, in reality, a large number of new products (known as long-tailed commodities) cannot gather sufficient amount of customer reviews, which brings a big challenge in the product description generation task. Existing works tend to generate the product description solely based on item information, i. e. , product attributes or title words, which leads to tedious contents and cannot attract customers effectively. To tackle this problem, we propose an adaptive posterior network based on Transformer architecture that can utilize user-cared information from customer reviews. Specifically, we first extend the selfattentive Transformer encoder to encode product titles and attributes. Then, we apply an adaptive posterior distillation module to utilize useful review information, which integrates user-cared aspects to the generation process. Finally, we apply a Transformer-based decoding phase with copy mechanism to automatically generate the product description. Besides, we also collect a large-scare Chinese product description dataset to support our work and further research in this field. Experimental results show that our model is superior to traditional generative models in both automatic indicators and human evaluation.

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IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Exemplar Guided Neural Dialogue Generation

Hengyi Cai
Hongshen Chen
Yonghao Song
Xiaofang Zhao
Dawei Yin

Humans benefit from previous experiences when taking actions. Similarly, related examples from the training data also provide exemplary information for neural dialogue models when responding to a given input message. However, effectively fusing such exemplary information into dialogue generation is non-trivial: useful exemplars are required to be not only literally-similar, but also topic-related with the given context. Noisy exemplars impair the neural dialogue models understanding the conversation topics and even corrupt the response generation. To address the issues, we propose an exemplar guided neural dialogue generation model where exemplar responses are retrieved in terms of both the text similarity and the topic proximity through a two-stage exemplar retrieval model. In the first stage, a small subset of conversations is retrieved from a training set given a dialogue context. These candidate exemplars are then finely ranked regarding the topical proximity to choose the best-matched exemplar response. To further induce the neural dialogue generation model consulting the exemplar response and the conversation topics more faithfully, we introduce a multi-source sampling mechanism to provide the dialogue model with both local exemplary semantics and global topical guidance during decoding. Empirical evaluations on a large-scale conversation dataset show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of both the quantitative metrics and human evaluations.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Learning from Easy to Complex: Adaptive Multi-Curricula Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation

Hengyi Cai
Hongshen Chen
Cheng Zhang
Yonghao Song
Xiaofang Zhao
Yangxi Li
Dongsheng Duan
Dawei Yin

Current state-of-the-art neural dialogue systems are mainly data-driven and are trained on human-generated responses. However, due to the subjectivity and open-ended nature of human conversations, the complexity of training dialogues varies greatly. The noise and uneven complexity of query-response pairs impede the learning efﬁciency and effects of the neural dialogue generation models. What is more, so far, there are no uniﬁed dialogue complexity measurements, and the dialogue complexity embodies multiple aspects of attributes— speciﬁcity, repetitiveness, relevance, etc. Inspired by human behaviors of learning to converse, where children learn from easy dialogues to complex ones and dynamically adjust their learning progress, in this paper, we ﬁrst analyze ﬁve dialogue attributes to measure the dialogue complexity in multiple perspectives on three publicly available corpora. Then, we propose an adaptive multi-curricula learning framework to schedule a committee of the organized curricula. The framework is established upon the reinforcement learning paradigm, which automatically chooses different curricula at the evolving learning process according to the learning status of the neural dialogue generation model. Extensive experiments conducted on ﬁve state-of-the-art models demonstrate its learning efﬁciency and effectiveness with respect to 13 automatic evaluation metrics and human judgments.

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IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Modeling Topical Relevance for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation

Hainan Zhang
Yanyan Lan
Liang Pang
Hongshen Chen
Zhuoye Ding
Dawei Yin

Topic drift is a common phenomenon in multi-turn dialogue. Therefore, an ideal dialogue generation models should be able to capture the topic information of each context, detect the relevant context, and produce appropriate responses accordingly. However, existing models usually use word or sentence level similarities to detect the relevant contexts, which fail to well capture the topical level relevance. In this paper, we propose a new model, named STAR-BTM, to tackle this problem. Firstly, the Biterm Topic Model is pre-trained on the whole training dataset. Then, the topic level attention weights are computed based on the topic representation of each context. Finally, the attention weights and the topic distribution are utilized in the decoding process to generate the corresponding responses. Experimental results on both Chinese customer services data and English Ubuntu dialogue data show that STAR-BTM significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Posterior-GAN: Towards Informative and Coherent Response Generation with Posterior Generative Adversarial Network

Shaoxiong Feng
Hongshen Chen
Kan Li
Dawei Yin

Neural conversational models learn to generate responses by taking into account the dialog history. These models are typically optimized over the query-response pairs with a maximum likelihood estimation objective. However, the queryresponse tuples are naturally loosely coupled, and there exist multiple responses that can respond to a given query, which leads the conversational model learning burdensome. Besides, the general dull response problem is even worsened when the model is confronted with meaningless response training instances. Intuitively, a high-quality response not only responds to the given query but also links up to the future conversations, in this paper, we leverage the queryresponse-future turn triples to induce the generated responses that consider both the given context and the future conversations. To facilitate the modeling of these triples, we further propose a novel encoder-decoder based generative adversarial learning framework, Posterior Generative Adversarial Network (Posterior-GAN), which consists of a forward and a backward generative discriminator to cooperatively encourage the generated response to be informative and coherent by two complementary assessment perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively boosts the informativeness and coherence of the generated response on both automatic and human evaluation, which veriﬁes the advantages of considering two assessment perspectives.

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IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Learning Tag Dependencies for Sequence Tagging

Yuan Zhang
Hongshen Chen
Yihong Zhao
Qun Liu
Dawei Yin

Sequence tagging is the basis for multiple applications in natural language processing. Despite successes in learning long term token sequence dependencies with neural network, tag dependencies are rarely considered previously. Sequence tagging actually possesses complex dependencies and interactions among the input tokens and the output tags. We propose a novel multi-channel model, which handles different ranges of token-tag dependencies and their interactions simultaneously. A tag LSTM is augmented to manage the output tag dependencies and word-tag interactions, while three mechanisms are presented to efficiently incorporate token context representation and tag dependency. Extensive experiments on part-of-speech tagging and named entity recognition tasks show that the proposed model outperforms the BiLSTM-CRF baseline by effectively incorporating the tag dependency feature.

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