Jiang Zhong

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

MIRAGE: Scaling Test-Time Inference with Parallel Graph-Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Chains

• Kaiwen Wei
• Rui Shan
• Dongsheng Zou
• Jianzhong Yang
• Bi Zhao
• Junnan Zhu
• Jiang Zhong

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown significant progress in test-time scaling through chain-of-thought prompting. Current approaches like search-o1 integrate retrieval augmented generation (RAG) into multi-step reasoning processes but rely on a single, linear reasoning path while incorporating unstructured textual information in a flat, context-agnostic manner. As a result, these approaches can lead to error accumulation throughout the reasoning chain, which significantly limits its effectiveness in medical question-answering (QA) tasks where both accuracy and traceability are critical requirements. To address these challenges, we propose MIRAGE (Multi-path Inference with Retrieval-Augmented Graph Exploration), a novel test-time scalable reasoning framework that performs dynamic multi-path inference over structured medical knowledge graphs. Specifically, MIRAGE 1) decomposes complex queries into entity-grounded sub-questions, 2) executes parallel inference paths, 3) retrieves evidence adaptively via neighbor expansion and multi-hop traversal, and 4) integrates answers using cross-path verification to resolve contradictions. Experiments on three medical QA benchmarks (GenMedGPT-5k, CMCQA, and ExplainCPE) show that MIRAGE consistently outperforms GPT-4o, Tree-of-Thought variants, and other retrieval-augmented baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. Additionally, MIRAGE improves interpretability by generating explicit reasoning chains that trace each factual claim to concrete paths within the knowledge graph, making it especially suitable for complex medical reasoning scenarios.

TCS Journal 2024 Journal Article

Land use and land cover change simulation enhanced by asynchronous communicating cellular automata

• Qin Lei
• Hong Jin
• Jia Lee
• Jiang Zhong

AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Modeling Adaptive Inter-Task Feature Interactions via Sentiment-Aware Contrastive Learning for Joint Aspect-Sentiment Prediction

• Wei Chen
• Yuxuan Liu
• Zhao Zhang
• Fuzhen Zhuang
• Jiang Zhong

Aspect prediction (AP) and sentiment prediction (SP) are representative applications in fine-grained sentiment anal- ysis. They can be considered as sequential tasks, where AP identifies mentioned aspects in a sentence, and SP infers fine-grained sentiments for these aspects. Recent models perform the aspect-sentiment prediction in a joint man-ner, but heavily rely on the feature interactions of aspect and sentiment. One drawback is that they ignore correlation strength varies between aspect features and sentiment fea- tures across different sentences, and employ a fixed feature interaction strategy may limit effective knowledge transfer across tasks. To tackle this issue, in this paper, we propose an Adaptive Inter-task Feature Interaction framework, AIFI, for joint aspect-sentiment prediction. Specifically, we introduce a novel contrast-based alignment method based on contrastive learning. Our approach considers the AP-specific and SP-specific representations of a given sentence as a positive pair, while representation of another random sentence serves as a negative example. Moreover, we propose an inter-task feature correlation network to predict the contrast strength, which is determined by the temperature coefficient in the InfoNCE loss. This dynamic correlation adjustment enhances model’s ability to capture proper feature interactions more efficiently. Experimental results on three datasets validate the effectiveness of our approach.

ECAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Deep Interactions-Boosted Embeddings for Link Prediction on Knowledge Graph

• Hong Yin
• Jiang Zhong
• Qizhu Dai

Link prediction for Knowledge Graphs (KGs) aims to predict missing links between entities. Previous works have utilized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn specific embeddings of entities and relations. However, these works only consider the linear aggregation of neighbors and do not consider interactions among neighbors, resulting in the neglect of partial indicating information. To address this issue, we propose Deep Interactions-boosted Embeddings (DInBE) which encodes interaction information to enrich the entity representations. To obtain interaction information, we disentangle the representation behind entities to learn diverse disentangled representations for each entity. Then, we learn intra-interactions among neighboring entities in the same component and inter-interactions among different components based on these disentangled representations. With the help of interaction information, our model generates more expressive representations. In addition, we propose a relation-aware scoring mechanism to select useful components based on the given query. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in the link prediction task, and this verifies the effectiveness of exploring interactions and adaptive scoring.

ECAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Enhancing Document-Level Relation Extraction with Relation-Specific Entity Representation and Evidence Sentence Augmentation

• Qizhu Dai
• Jiang Zhong
• Wei Zhu
• Chen Wang 0074
• Hong Yin
• Qin Lei
• Xue Li 0001
• Rongzhen Li

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is an important task in natural language processing, with applications in knowledge graph construction, question answering, and biomedical text analysis. However, existing approaches to DocRE have limitations in predicting relations between entities using fixed entity representations, which can lead to inaccurate results. In this paper, we propose a novel DocRE model that addresses these limitations by using a relation-specific entity representation method and evidence sentence augmentation. Our model uses evidence sentence augmentation to identify top-k evidence sentences for each relation and a relation-specific entity representation method that aggregates the importance of entity mentions using an attention mechanism. These two components work together to capture the context of each entity mention in relation to the specific relation being predicted and select evidence sentences that support accurate relation identification. Finally, we re-predicts entity relations based on the evidence sentences, called relationship reordering module. This module re-predicts entity relationships based on the predicted set of evidence sentences to form k sets of relationship predictions, and then averages these k+1 sets of results to obtain the final relationship predictions. Experimental results on the DocRED dataset demonstrate that our proposed model achieves an F1 score of 62. 84% and an lgn F1 score of 60. 79%, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

TIST Journal 2022 Journal Article

Gray-Box Shilling Attack: An Adversarial Learning Approach

• Zongwei Wang
• Min Gao
• Jundong Li
• Junwei Zhang
• Jiang Zhong

Recommender systems are essential components of many information services, which aim to find relevant items that match user preferences. Several studies have shown that shilling attacks can significantly weaken the robustness of recommender systems by injecting fake user profiles. Traditional shilling attacks focus on creating hand-engineered fake user profiles, but these profiles can be detected effortlessly by advanced detection methods. Adversarial learning, which has emerged in recent years, can be leveraged to generate powerful and intelligent attack models. To this end, in this article we explore potential risks of recommender systems and shed light on a gray-box shilling attack model based on generative adversarial networks, named GSA-GANs. Specifically, we aim to generate fake user profiles that can achieve two goals: unnoticeable and offensive. Toward these goals, there are several challenges that we need to address: (1) learning complex user behaviors from user-item rating data, and (2) adversely influencing the recommendation results without knowing the underlying recommendation algorithms. To tackle these challenges, two essential GAN modules are respectively designed to make generated fake profiles more similar to real ones and harmful to recommendation results. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed GSA-GANs framework outperforms baseline models in attack effectiveness, transferability, and camouflage. In the end, we also provide several possible defensive strategies against GSA-GANs. The exploration and analysis in our work will contribute to the defense research of recommender systems.