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Kunpeng Liu

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18 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Efficient Post-Training Refinement of Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

Xinyuan Wang
Dongjie Wang
Wangyang Ying
Haoyue Bai
Nanxu Gong
Sixun Dong
Kunpeng Liu
Yanjie Fu

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model’s latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: (1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; (2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a +5% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Dual-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Automated Feature Generation

Wanfu Gao
Zengyao Man
Hanlin Pan
Kunpeng Liu

Feature generation involves creating new features from raw data to capture complex relationships among the original features, improving model robustness and machine learning performance. Current methods using reinforcement learning for feature generation have made feature exploration more flexible and efficient. However, several challenges remain: first, during feature expansion, a large number of redundant features are generated. When removing them, current methods only retain the best features each round, neglecting those that perform poorly initially but could improve later. Second, the state representation used by current methods fails to fully capture complex feature relationships. Third, there are significant differences between discrete and continuous features in tabular data, requiring different operations for each type. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dual-agent reinforcement learning method for feature generation. Two agents are designed: the first generates new features, and the second determines whether they should be preserved. A self-attention mechanism enhances state representation, and diverse operations distinguish interactions between discrete and continuous features. The experimental results on multiple datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Dynamic and Adaptive Feature Generation with LLM

Xinhao Zhang
Jinghan Zhang
Banafsheh Rekabdar
Yuanchun Zhou
Pengfei Wang
Kunpeng Liu

The representation of feature space is a crucial environment where data points get vectorized and embedded for subsequent modeling. Thus, the efficacy of machine learning (ML) algorithms is closely related to the quality of feature engineering. As one of the most important techniques, feature generation transforms raw data into an optimized feature space conducive to model training and further refines the space. Despite the advancements in automated feature engineering and feature generation, current methodologies often suffer from three fundamental issues: lack of explainability, limited applicability, and inflexible strategy. These shortcomings frequently hinder and limit the deployment of ML models across varied scenarios. Our research introduces a novel approach adopting large language models (LLMs) and feature-generating prompts to address these challenges. We propose a dynamic and adaptive feature generation method that enhances the interpretability of the feature generation process. Our approach broadens the applicability across various data types and tasks and offers advantages in terms of strategic flexibility. A broad range of experiments showcases that our approach is significantly superior to existing methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Graph Random Walk with Feature-Label Space Alignment: A Multi-Label Feature Selection Method

Wanfu Gao
Jun Gao
Qingqi Han
Hanlin Pan
Kunpeng Liu

The rapid growth in feature dimension may introduce implicit associations between features and labels in multi-label datasets, making the relationships between features and labels increasingly complex. Moreover, existing methods often adopt low-dimensional linear decomposition to explore the associations between features and labels. However, linear decomposition struggles to capture complex nonlinear associations and may lead to misalignment between the feature space and the label space. To address these two critical challenges, we propose innovative solutions. First, we design a random walk graph that integrates feature-feature, label-label, and feature-label relationships to accurately capture nonlinear and implicit indirect associations, while optimizing the latent representations of associations between features and labels after low-rank decomposition. Second, we align the variable spaces by leveraging low-dimensional representation coefficients, while preserving the manifold structure between the original high-dimensional multi-label data and the low-dimensional representation space. Extensive experiments and ablation studies conducted on seven benchmark datasets and three representative datasets using various evaluation metrics demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

LEKA: LLM-Enhanced Knowledge Augmentation

Xinhao Zhang
Jinghan Zhang
Fengran Mo
Dongjie Wang
Yanjie Fu
Kunpeng Liu

Humans excel in analogical learning and knowledge transfer and, more importantly, possess a unique understanding of identifying appropriate sources of knowledge. From a model's perspective, this presents a unique challenge. If models could autonomously retrieve knowledge relevant for transfer or decision-making to solve problems, they would transition from passively acquiring to actively accessing and learning from knowledge. However, filling models with knowledge is relatively straightforward—it simply requires more training and accessible knowledge bases. The more complex task is teaching models about which knowledge can be analogized and transferred. Therefore, we design a knowledge augmentation method, LEKA, for knowledge transfer that actively searches for suitable knowledge sources that can enrich the target domain's knowledge. This LEKA method extracts key information from the target domain's textual information, retrieves pertinent data from external data libraries, and harmonizes retrieved data with the target domain data in feature space and marginal probability measures. We validate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments across various domains and demonstrate significant improvements over traditional methods in automating data alignment and optimizing transfer learning outcomes.

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JBHI Journal 2025 Journal Article

Multi-Agent Learning for Precise and Collaborative Control of Anesthetics in TIVA

Huijie Li
Kunpeng Liu
Yide Yu
Yuejing Zhai
Anmin Hu
Jian Huo
Wuman Luo

Precise and collaborative control of multiple anesthetics in Total Intravenous Anesthesia (TIVA) is essential for ensuring patient safety and maintaining the target depth of anesthesia (DoA). However, existing automated anesthesia control methods often fail to effectively capture the complex synergistic interactions between anesthetics and lack adaptability to patient-specific physiological variability, thereby limiting their clinical applicability. To address these issues, we propose AnesMADRL, a novel Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL)-based framework that leverages the Counterfactual Multi-Agent algorithm for effective credit assignment between agents controlling propofol and remifentanil, and adopts a continuous action space to enable fine-grained dose adjustments. Furthermore, AnesMADRL integrates comprehensive patient-specific physiological indicators and employs a random forest-based simulator to generate dynamic and diverse training environments. Experimental results show that AnesMADRL significantly outperforms baseline methods and human expertise in terms of anesthetic efficiency and total drug consumption. Relative to human expertise, AnesMADRL achieves roughly twofold efficiency while reducing total dose to about one-half, highlighting its potential to enhance patient safety and optimize clinical outcomes.

IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Noise-Resistant Label Reconstruction Feature Selection for Partial Multi-Label Learning

Wanfu Gao
Hanlin Pan
Qingqi Han
Kunpeng Liu

The "Curse of dimensionality" is prevalent across various data patterns, which increases the risk of model overfitting and leads to a decline in model classification performance. However, few studies have focused on this issue in Partial Multi-label Learning (PML), where each sample is associated with a set of candidate labels, at least one of which is correct. Existing PML methods addressing this problem are mainly based on the low-rank assumption. However, low-rank assumption is difficult to be satisfied in practical situations and may lead to loss of high-dimensional information. Furthermore, we find that existing methods have poor ability to identify positive labels, which is important in real-world scenarios. In this paper, a PML feature selection method is proposed considering two important characteristics of dataset: label relationship's noise-resistance and label connectivity. Our proposed method utilizes label relationship's noise-resistance to disambiguate labels. Then the learning process is designed through the reformed low-rank assumption. Finally, representative labels are found through label connectivity, and the weight matrix is reconstructed to select features with strong identification ability to these labels. The experimental results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

RATT: A Thought Structure for Coherent and Correct LLM Reasoning

Jinghan Zhang
Xiting Wang
Weijieying Ren
Lu Jiang
Dongjie Wang
Kunpeng Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) gain substantial reasoning and decision-making capabilities from thought structures. However, existing methods such as Tree of Thought and Retrieval Augmented Thoughts often fall short in complex tasks due to the limitations of insufficient local retrieval of factual knowledge and inadequate global selection of strategies. These limitations make it challenging for these methods to balance factual accuracy and comprehensive logical optimization effectively. To address these limitations, we introduce the Retrieval Augmented Thought Tree (RATT), a novel thought structure that considers both overall logical soundness and factual correctness at each step of the thinking process. Specifically, at every point of a thought branch, RATT performs planning and lookahead to explore and evaluate multiple potential reasoning steps, and integrate the fact-checking ability of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with LLM's ability to assess overall strategy. Through this combination of factual knowledge and strategic feasibility, the RATT adjusts and integrates the thought tree structure to search for the most promising branches within the search space. This thought structure significantly enhances the model's coherence in logical inference and efficiency in decision-making, and thus increases the limit of the capacity of LLM to generate reliable inferences and decisions based on thought structures. A broad range of experiments on different types of tasks showcases that the RATT structure significantly outperforms existing methods in factual correctness and logical coherence.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Reconsidering Feature Structure Information and Latent Space Alignment in Partial Multi-label Feature Selection

Hanlin Pan
Kunpeng Liu
Wanfu Gao

The purpose of partial multi-label feature selection is to select the most representative feature subset, where the data comes from partial multi-label datasets that have label ambiguity issues. For label disambiguation, previous methods mainly focus on utilizing the information inside the labels and the relationship between the labels and features. However, the information existing in the feature space is rarely considered, especially in partial multi-label scenarios where the noises is considered to be concentrated in the label space while the feature information is correct. This paper proposes a method based on latent space alignment, which uses the information mined in feature space to disambiguate in latent space through the structural consistency between labels and features. In addition, previous methods overestimate the consistency of features and labels in the latent space after convergence. We comprehensively consider the similarity of latent space projections to feature space and label space, and propose new feature selection term. This method also significantly improves the positive label identification ability of the selected features. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method.

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IJCAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Two-Stage Feature Generation with Transformer and Reinforcement Learning

Wanfu Gao
Zengyao Man
Zebin He
Yuhao Tang
Jun Gao
Kunpeng Liu

Feature generation is a critical step in machine learning, aiming to enhance model performance by capturing complex relationships within the data and generating meaningful new features. Traditional feature generation methods heavily rely on domain expertise and manual intervention, making the process labor-intensive and challenging to adapt to different scenarios. Although automated feature generation techniques address these issues to some extent, they often face challenges such as feature redundancy, inefficiency in feature space exploration, and limited adaptability to diverse datasets and tasks. To address these problems, we propose a Two-Stage Feature Generation (TSFG) framework, which integrates a Transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). The encoder-decoder model in TSFG leverages the Transformer’s self-attention mechanism to efficiently represent and transform features, capturing complex dependencies within the data. PPO further enhances TSFG by dynamically adjusting the feature generation strategy based on task-specific feedback, optimizing the process for improved performance and adaptability. TSFG dynamically generates high-quality feature sets, significantly improving the predictive performance of machine learning models. Experimental results demonstrate that TSFG outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in terms of feature quality and adaptability.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Uncertainty-Aware Global-View Reconstruction for Multi-View Multi-Label Feature Selection

Pingting Hao
Kunpeng Liu
Wanfu Gao

In recent years, multi-view multi-label learning (MVML) has gained popularity due to its close resemblance to real-world scenarios. However, the challenge of selecting informative features to ensure both performance and efficiency remains a significant question in MVML. Existing methods often extract information separately from the consistency part and the complementary part, which may result in noise due to unclear segmentation. In this paper, we propose a unified model constructed from the perspective of global-view reconstruction. Additionally, while feature selection methods can discern the importance of features, they typically overlook the uncertainty of samples, which is prevalent in realistic scenarios. To address this, we incorporate the perception of sample uncertainty during the reconstruction process to enhance trustworthiness. Thus, the global-view is reconstructed through the graph structure between samples, sample confidence, and the view relationship. The accurate mapping is established between the reconstructed view and the label matrix. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method on multi-view datasets.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Double-Layer Hybrid-Label Identification Feature Selection for Multi-View Multi-Label Learning

Pingting Hao
Kunpeng Liu
Wanfu Gao

Multi-view multi-label feature selection aims to select informative features where the data are collected from multiple sources with multiple interdependent class labels. For fully exploiting multi-view information, most prior works mainly focus on the common part in the ideal circumstance. However, the inconsistent part hidden in each view, including noises and specific elements, may affect the quality of mapping between labels and feature representations. Meanwhile, ignoring the specific part might lead to a suboptimal result, as each label is supposed to possess specific characteristics of its own. To deal with the double problems in multi-view multi-label feature selection, we propose a unified loss function which is a totally splitting structure for observed labels as hybrid labels that is, common labels, view-to-all specific labels and noisy labels, and the view-to-all specific labels further splits into several specific labels of each view. The proposed method simultaneously considers the consistency and complementarity of different views. Through exploring the feature weights of hybrid labels, the mapping relationships between labels and features can be established sequentially based on their attributes. Additionally, the interrelatedness among hybrid labels is also investigated and injected into the function. Specific to the specific labels of each view, we construct the novel regularization paradigm incorporating logic operations. Finally, the convergence of the result is proved after applying the multiplicative update rules. Experiments on six datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our method compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Point of Interest Recommendation

Yanan Xiao
Lu Jiang
Kunpeng Liu
Yuanbo Xu
Pengyang Wang
Minghao Yin

With the increasing popularity of location-based services, accurately recommending points of interest (POIs) has become a critical task. Although existing technologies are proficient in processing time-series data, they fall short when it comes to accommodating the diversity and dynamism in users' POI selections, particularly in extracting key signals from complex historical behaviors. To address this challenge, we introduced the Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Preprocessing Framework (HRL-PRP), a framework that can be integrated into existing recommendation models to effectively optimize user profiles. The HRL-PRP framework employs a two-tiered decision-making process, where the high-level process determines the necessity of modifying profiles, and the low-level process focuses on selecting POIs within the profiles. Through evaluations on multiple real-world datasets, we have demonstrated that HRL-PRP surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in various recommendation performance metrics.

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IJCAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

TFWT: Tabular Feature Weighting with Transformer

Xinhao Zhang
Zaitian Wang
Lu Jiang
Wanfu Gao
Pengfei Wang
Kunpeng Liu

In this paper, we propose a novel feature weighting method to address the limitation of existing feature processing methods for tabular data. Typically the existing methods assume equal importance across all samples and features in one dataset. This simplified processing methods overlook the unique contributions of each feature, and thus may miss important feature information. As a result, it leads to suboptimal performance in complex datasets with rich features. To address this problem, we introduce Tabular Feature Weighting with Transformer, a novel feature weighting approach for tabular data. Our method adopts Transformer to capture complex feature dependencies and contextually assign appropriate weights to discrete and continuous features. Besides, we employ a reinforcement learning strategy to further fine-tune the weighting process. Our extensive experimental results across various real-world datasets and diverse downstream tasks show the effectiveness of TFWT and highlight the potential for enhancing feature weighting in tabular data analysis.

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TIST Journal 2023 Journal Article

Reinforced Explainable Knowledge Concept Recommendation in MOOCs

Lu Jiang
Kunpeng Liu
Yibin Wang
Dongjie Wang
Pengyang Wang
Yanjie Fu
Minghao Yin

In this article, we study knowledge concept recommendation in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in an explainable manner. Knowledge concepts, composing course units (e.g., videos) in MOOCs, refer to topics and skills that students are expected to master. Compared to traditional course recommendation in MOOCs, knowledge concepts recommendation has drawn more attention because students’ interests over knowledge concepts can better revealstudents’ real intention in a more refined granularity. However, there are three unique challenges in knowledge concept recommendation: (1) How to design an appropriate data structure to capture complex relationships between knowledge concepts, course units, and other participants (e.g., students, teachers)? (2) How to model interactions between students and knowledge concepts? (3) How to make explainable recommendation results to students? To tackle these challenges, we formulate the knowledge concept recommendation as a reinforcement learning task integrated with MOOC knowledge graph (KG). Specifically, we first construct MOOC KG as the environment to capture all the relationships and behavioral histories by considering all the entities (e.g., students, teachers, videos, courses, and knowledge concepts) on the MOOC provider. Then, to model the interactions between students and knowledge concepts, we train an agent to mimic students’ learning behavioral patterns facing the complex environment. Moreover, to provide explainable recommendation results, we generate recommended knowledge concepts in the format of a path from MOOC KG to indicate semantic reasons. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a real-world MOOC dataset to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

IJCAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Feature and Instance Joint Selection: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective

Wei Fan
Kunpeng Liu
Hao Liu
Hengshu Zhu
Hui Xiong
Yanjie Fu

Feature selection and instance selection are two important techniques of data processing. However, such selections have mostly been studied separately, while existing work towards the joint selection conducts feature/instance selection coarsely; thus neglecting the latent fine-grained interaction between feature space and instance space. To address this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning solution to accomplish the joint selection task and simultaneously capture the interaction between the selection of each feature and each instance. In particular, a sequential-scanning mechanism is designed as action strategy of agents and a collaborative-changing environment is used to enhance agent collaboration. In addition, an interactive paradigm introduces prior selection knowledge to help agents for more efficient exploration. Finally, extensive experiments on real-world datasets have demonstrated improved performances.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Reinforced Imitative Graph Representation Learning for Mobile User Profiling: An Adversarial Training Perspective

Dongjie Wang
Pengyang Wang
Kunpeng Liu
Yuanchun Zhou
Charles E Hughes
Yanjie Fu

In this paper, we study the problem of mobile user profiling, which is a critical component for quantifying users’ characteristics in the human mobility modeling pipeline. Human mobility is a sequential decision-making process dependent on the users’ dynamic interests. With accurate user profiles, the predictive model can perfectly reproduce users’ mobility trajectories. In the reverse direction, once the predictive model can imitate users’ mobility patterns, the learned user profiles are also optimal. Such intuition motivates us to propose an imitation-based mobile user profiling framework by exploiting reinforcement learning, in which the agent is trained to precisely imitate users’ mobility patterns for optimal user profiles. Specifically, the proposed framework includes two modules: (1) representation module, that produces state combining user profiles and spatio-temporal context in real-time; (2) imitation module, where Deep Qnetwork (DQN) imitates the user behavior (action) based on the state that is produced by the representation module. However, there are two challenges in running the framework effectively. First, epsilon-greedy strategy in DQN makes use of the exploration-exploitation trade-off by randomly pick actions with the epsilon probability. Such randomness feeds back to the representation module, causing the learned user profiles unstable. To solve the problem, we propose an adversarial training strategy to guarantee the robustness of the representation module. Second, the representation module updates users’ profiles in an incremental manner, requiring integrating the temporal effects of user profiles. Inspired by Longshort Term Memory (LSTM), we introduce a gated mechanism to incorporate new and old user characteristics into the user profile. In the experiment, we evaluate our proposed framework on real-world datasets. The extensive experimental results validate the superiority of our method comparing to baseline algorithms.

IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Exploiting Mutual Information for Substructure-aware Graph Representation Learning

Pengyang Wang
Yanjie Fu
Yuanchun Zhou
Kunpeng Liu
Xiaolin Li
Kien Hua

In this paper, we design and evaluate a new substructure-aware Graph Representation Learning (GRL) approach. GRL aims to map graph structure information into low-dimensional representations. While extensive efforts have been made for modeling global and/or local structure information, GRL can be improved by substructure information. Some recent studies exploit adversarial learning to incorporate substructure awareness, but hindered by unstable convergence. This study will address the major research question: is there a better way to integrate substructure awareness into GRL? As subsets of the graph structure, interested substructures (i. e. , subgraph) are unique and representative for differentiating graphs, leading to the high correlation between the representation of the graph-level structure and substructures. Since mutual information (MI) is to evaluate the mutual dependence between two variables, we develop a MI inducted substructure-aware GRL method. We decompose the GRL pipeline into two stages: (1) node-level, where we introduce to maximize MI between the original and learned representation by the intuition that the original and learned representation should be highly correlated; (2) graph-level, where we preserve substructures by maximizing MI between the graph-level structure and substructure representation. Finally, we present extensive experimental results to demonstrate the improved performances of our method with real-world data.

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