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Xiao Ding

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11 papers

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

UFO-RL: Uncertainty-Focused Optimization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning Data Selection

Yang Zhao
Kai Xiong
Xiao Ding
Li Du
Yangou Ouyang
Zhouhao Sun
Jiannan Guan
Wenbin Zhang

A primary impediment to scaling reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) training is the substantial computational cost, predominantly arising from the necessity of multi-sampling for policy optimization and evaluation. This underscores the critical yet challenging nature of efficient training data selection. Drawing inspiration from the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory, which posits that learners acquire knowledge more effectively from tasks of intermediate difficulty, we hypothesize that LLMs exhibit optimal learning from data they have not yet mastered but demonstrate the potential to comprehend. Conventional methodologies for assessing data difficulty or informativeness typically rely on computationally intensive multi-sampling or iterative procedures. To address this limitation, we introduce UFO-RL (**U**ncertainty-**F**ocused **O**ptimization for **R**einforcement **L**earning), a novel framework that employs a computationally efficient single-pass uncertainty estimation technique to identify informative training instances. This method, requiring only a single forward pass and obviating the need for iterative next-token computation, achieves a significant acceleration (up to 185$\times$) in data evaluation compared to multi-sampling approaches. UFO-RL leverages this efficient metric to select data within the model's estimated ZPD for training. Extensive experimentation across diverse LLMs and mathematical benchmarks demonstrates that training with a mere 10\% of the data, carefully selected by UFO-RL, yields performance comparable to or even surpassing that of full-data training. Furthermore, this targeted data selection results in up to a 16$\times$ reduction in overall training time, concurrently enhancing training stability and improving generalization capabilities. Thus, UFO-RL presents a practical and highly efficient strategy for scaling RL fine-tuning of LLMs by focusing learning efforts on the most informative and valuable data, thereby mitigating the computational bottlenecks associated with traditional RL training.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Link Prediction in Multilayer Networks via Cross-Network Embedding

Guojing Ren
Xiao Ding
Xiao-Ke Xu
Hai-Feng Zhang

Link prediction is a fundamental task in network analysis, with the objective of predicting missing or potential links. While existing studies have mainly concentrated on single networks, it is worth noting that numerous real-world networks exhibit interconnectedness. For example, individuals often register on various social media platforms to access diverse services, such as chatting, tweeting, blogging, and rating movies. These platforms share a subset of users and are termed multilayer networks. The interlayer links in such networks hold valuable information that provides more comprehensive insights into the network structure. To effectively exploit this complementary information and enhance link prediction in the target network, we propose a novel cross-network embedding method. This method aims to represent different networks in a shared latent space, preserving proximity within single networks as well as consistency across multilayer networks. Specifically, nodes can aggregate messages from aligned nodes in other layers. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method for link prediction in multilayer networks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Meaningful Learning: Enhancing Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models via Generic Fact Guidance

Kai Xiong
Xiao Ding
Ting Liu
Bing Qin
Dongliang Xu
Qing Yang
Hongtao Liu
Yixin Cao

Large language models (LLMs) have developed impressive performance and strong explainability across various reasoning scenarios, marking a significant stride towards mimicking human-like intelligence. Despite this, when tasked with several simple questions supported by a generic fact, LLMs often struggle to abstract and apply the generic fact to provide consistent and precise answers, revealing a deficiency in abstract reasoning abilities. This has sparked a vigorous debate about whether LLMs are genuinely reasoning or merely memorizing. In light of this, we design a preliminary study to quantify and delve into the abstract reasoning abilities of existing LLMs. Our findings reveal a substantial discrepancy between their general reasoning and abstract reasoning performances. To relieve this problem, we tailor an abstract reasoning dataset (AbsR) together with a meaningful learning paradigm to teach LLMs how to leverage generic facts for reasoning purposes. The results show that our approach not only boosts the general reasoning performance of LLMs but also makes considerable strides towards their capacity for abstract reasoning, moving beyond simple memorization or imitation to a more nuanced understanding and application of generic facts. The code is available at https: //github. com/Waste-Wood/MeanLearn.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Self-Supervised Logic Induction for Explainable Fuzzy Temporal Commonsense Reasoning

Bibo Cai
Xiao Ding
Zhouhao Sun
Bing Qin
Ting Liu
Baojun Wang
Lifeng Shang

Understanding temporal commonsense concepts, such as times of occurrence and durations is crucial for event-centric language understanding. Reasoning about such temporal concepts in a complex context requires reasoning over both the stated context and the world knowledge that underlines it. A recent study shows massive pre-trained LM still struggle with such temporal reasoning under complex contexts (e.g., dialog) because they only implicitly encode the relevant contexts and fail to explicitly uncover the underlying logical compositions for complex inference, thus may not be robust enough. In this work, we propose to augment LMs with the temporal logic induction ability, which frames the temporal reasoning by defining three modular components: temporal dependency inducer and temporal concept defuzzifier and logic validator. The former two components disentangle the explicit/implicit dependency between temporal concepts across context (before, after,...) and the specific meaning of fuzzy temporal concepts, respectively, while the validator combines the intermediate reasoning clues for robust contextual reasoning about the temporal concepts. Extensive experimental results on TIMEDIAL, a challenging dataset for temporal reasoning over dialog, show that our method, Logic Induction Enhanced Contextualized TEmporal Reasoning (LECTER), can yield great improvements over the traditional language model for temporal reasoning.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Mitigating Reporting Bias in Semi-supervised Temporal Commonsense Inference with Probabilistic Soft Logic

Bibo Cai
Xiao Ding
Bowen Chen
Li Du
Ting Liu

Acquiring high-quality temporal common sense (TCS) knowledge from free-form text is a crucial but challenging problem for event-centric natural language understanding, due to the language reporting bias problem: people rarely report the commonly observed events but highlight the special cases. For example, one may rarely report “I get up from bed in 1 minute”, but we can observe “It takes me an hour to get up from bed every morning” in text. Models directly trained upon such corpus would capture distorted TCS knowledge, which could influence the model performance. Prior work addresses this issue mainly by exploiting the interactions among temporal dimensions (e. g. , duration, temporal relation between events) in a multi-task view. However, this line of work suffers the limitation of implicit, inadequate and unexplainable interactions modeling. In this paper, we propose a novel neural-logic based Soft Logic Enhanced Event Temporal Reasoning (SLEER) model for acquiring unbiased TCS knowledge, in which the complementary relationship among dimensions are explicitly represented as logic rules and modeled by t-norm fuzzy logics. SLEER can utilize logic rules to regularize its inference process. Experimental results on four intrinsic evaluation datasets and two extrinsic datasets show the efficiency of our proposed method.

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IJCAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Guided Generation of Cause and Effect

Zhongyang Li
Xiao Ding
Ting Liu
J. Edward Hu
Benjamin Van Durme

We present a conditional text generation framework that posits sentential expressions of possible causes and effects. This framework depends on two novel resources we develop in the course of this work: a very large-scale collection of English sentences expressing causal patterns (CausalBank); and a refinement over previous work on constructing large lexical causal knowledge graphs (Cause Effect Graph). Further, we extend prior work in lexically-constrained decoding to support disjunctive positive constraints. Human assessment conﬁrms that our approach gives high-quality and diverse outputs. Finally, we use CausalBank to perform continued training of an encoder supporting a recent state-of-the-art model for causal reasoning, leading to a 3-point improvement on the COPA challenge set, with no change in model architecture.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Story Ending Prediction by Transferable BERT

Zhongyang Li
Xiao Ding
Ting Liu

Recent advances, such as GPT and BERT, have shown success in incorporating a pre-trained transformer language model and fine-tuning operation to improve downstream NLP systems. However, this framework still has some fundamental problems in effectively incorporating supervised knowledge from other related tasks. In this study, we investigate a transferable BERT (TransBERT) training framework, which can transfer not only general language knowledge from large-scale unlabeled data but also specific kinds of knowledge from various semantically related supervised tasks, for a target task. Particularly, we propose utilizing three kinds of transfer tasks, including natural language inference, sentiment classification, and next action prediction, to further train BERT based on a pre-trained model. This enables the model to get a better initialization for the target task. We take story ending prediction as the target task to conduct experiments. The final result, an accuracy of 91. 8%, dramatically outperforms previous state-of-the-art baseline methods. Several comparative experiments give some helpful suggestions on how to select transfer tasks to improve BERT.

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IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Constructing Narrative Event Evolutionary Graph for Script Event Prediction

Zhongyang Li
Xiao Ding
Ting Liu

Script event prediction requires a model to predict the subsequent event given an existing event context. Previous models based on event pairs or event chains cannot make full use of dense event connections, which may limit their capability of event prediction. To remedy this, we propose constructing an event graph to better utilize the event network information for script event prediction. In particular, we first extract narrative event chains from large quantities of news corpus, and then construct a narrative event evolutionary graph (NEEG) based on the extracted chains. NEEG can be seen as a knowledge base that describes event evolutionary principles and patterns. To solve the inference problem on NEEG, we present a scaled graph neural network (SGNN) to model event interactions and learn better event representations. Instead of computing the representations on the whole graph, SGNN processes only the concerned nodes each time, which makes our model feasible to large-scale graphs. By comparing the similarity between input context event representations and candidate event representations, we can choose the most reasonable subsequent event. Experimental results on widely used New York Times corpus demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods, by using standard multiple choice narrative cloze evaluation.

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IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Domain Adaptation via Tree Kernel Based Maximum Mean Discrepancy for User Consumption Intention Identification

Xiao Ding
Bibo Cai
Ting Liu
Qiankun Shi

Identifying user consumption intention from social media is of great interests to downstream applications. Since such task is domain-dependent, deep neural networks have been applied to learn transferable features for adapting models from a source domain to a target domain. A basic idea to solve this problem is reducing the distribution difference between the source domain and the target domain such that the transfer error can be bounded. However, the feature transferability drops dramatically in higher layers of deep neural networks with increasing domain discrepancy. Hence, previous work has to use a few target domain annotated data to train domain-specific layers. In this paper, we propose a deep transfer learning framework for consumption intention identification, to reduce the data bias and enhance the transferability in domain-specific layers. In our framework, the representation of the domain-specific layer is mapped to a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, where the mean embeddings of different domain distributions can be explicitly matched. By using an optimal tree kernel method for measuring the mean embedding matching, the domain discrepancy can be effectively reduced. The framework can learn transferable features in a completely unsupervised manner with statistical guarantees. Experimental results on five different domain datasets show that our approach dramatically outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, and it is general enough to be applied to more scenarios. The source code and datasets can be found at http: //ir. hit. edu. cn/$\scriptsize{\sim}$xding/index\_english. htm.

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IJCAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Deep Learning for Event-Driven Stock Prediction

Xiao Ding
Yue Zhang
Ting Liu
Junwen Duan

We propose a deep learning method for eventdriven stock market prediction. First, events are extracted from news text, and represented as dense vectors, trained using a novel neural tensor network. Second, a deep convolutional neural network is used to model both short-term and long-term influences of events on stock price movements. Experimental results show that our model can achieve nearly 6% improvements on S&P 500 index prediction and individual stock prediction, respectively, compared to state-of-the-art baseline methods. In addition, market simulation results show that our system is more capable of making profits than previously reported systems trained on S&P 500 stock historical data.

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AAAI Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Mining User Consumption Intention from Social Media Using Domain Adaptive Convolutional Neural Network

Xiao Ding
Ting Liu
Junwen Duan
Jian-Yun Nie

Social media platforms are often used by people to express their needs and desires. Such data offer great opportunities to identify users’ consumption intention from user-generated contents, so that better tailored products or services can be recommended. However, there have been few efforts on mining commercial intents from social media contents. In this paper, we investigate the use of social media data to identify consumption intentions for individuals. We develop a Consumption Intention Mining Model (CIMM) based on convolutional neural network (CNN), for identifying whether the user has a consumption intention. The task is domain-dependent, and learning CNN requires a large number of annotated instances, which can be available only in some domains. Hence, we investigate the possibility of transferring the CNN mid-level sentence representation learned from one domain to another by adding an adaptation layer. To demonstrate the effectiveness of CIMM, we conduct experiments on two domains. Our results show that CIMM offers a powerful paradigm for effectively identifying users’ consumption intention based on their social media data. Moreover, our results also confirm that the CNN learned in one domain can be effectively transferred to another domain. This suggests that a great potential for our model to significantly increase effectiveness of product recommendations and targeted advertising.

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