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Zequn Sun

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9 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Answering the Unanswerable Is to Err Knowingly: Analyzing and Mitigating Abstention Failures in Large Reasoning Models

Yi Liu
Xiangyu Liu
Zequn Sun
Wei Hu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown remarkable progress on complex reasoning tasks. However, some questions posed to LRMs are inherently unanswerable, such as math problems lacking sufficient conditions. We find that LRMs continually fail to provide appropriate abstentions when confronted with these unanswerable questions. In this paper, we systematically analyze, investigate, and resolve this issue for trustworthy AI. We first conduct a detailed analysis of the distinct response behaviors of LRMs when facing unanswerable questions. Then, we show that LRMs possess sufficient cognitive capabilities to recognize the flaws in these questions. However, they fail to exhibit appropriate abstention behavior, revealing a misalignment between their internal cognition and external response. Finally, to resolve this issue, we propose a lightweight, two-stage method that combines cognitive monitoring with inference-time intervention. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the abstention rate while maintaining the reasoning performance.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

A Prompt-Based Knowledge Graph Foundation Model for Universal In-Context Reasoning

Yuanning Cui
Zequn Sun
Wei Hu

Extensive knowledge graphs (KGs) have been constructed to facilitate knowledge-driven tasks across various scenarios. However, existing work usually develops separate reasoning models for different KGs, lacking the ability to generalize and transfer knowledge across diverse KGs and reasoning settings. In this paper, we propose a prompt-based KG foundation model via in-context learning, namely KG-ICL, to achieve a universal reasoning ability. Specifically, we introduce a prompt graph centered with a query-related example fact as context to understand the query relation. To encode prompt graphs with the generalization ability to unseen entities and relations in queries, we first propose a unified tokenizer that maps entities and relations in prompt graphs to predefined tokens. Then, we propose two message passing neural networks to perform prompt encoding and KG reasoning, respectively. We conduct evaluation on 43 different KGs in both transductive and inductive settings. Results indicate that the proposed KG-ICL outperforms baselines on most datasets, showcasing its outstanding generalization and universal reasoning capabilities. The source code is accessible on GitHub: https: //github. com/nju-websoft/KG-ICL.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Enabling Abductive Learning to Exploit Knowledge Graph

Yu-Xuan Huang
Zequn Sun
Guangyao Li
Xiaobin Tian
Wang-Zhou Dai
Wei Hu
Yuan Jiang
Zhi-Hua Zhou

Most systems integrating data-driven machine learning with knowledge-driven reasoning usually rely on a specifically designed knowledge base to enable efficient symbolic inference. However, it could be cumbersome for the nonexpert end-users to prepare such a knowledge base in real tasks. Recent years have witnessed the success of large-scale knowledge graphs, which could be ideal domain knowledge resources for real-world machine learning tasks. However, these large-scale knowledge graphs usually contain much information that is irrelevant to a specific learning task. Moreover, they often contain a certain degree of noise. Existing methods can hardly make use of them because the large-scale probabilistic logical inference is usually intractable. To address these problems, we present ABductive Learning with Knowledge Graph (ABL-KG) that can automatically mine logic rules from knowledge graphs during learning, using a knowledge forgetting mechanism for filtering out irrelevant information. Meanwhile, these rules can form a logic program that enables efficient joint optimization of the machine learning model and logic inference within the Abductive Learning (ABL) framework. Experiments on four different tasks show that ABL-KG can automatically extract useful rules from large-scale and noisy knowledge graphs, and significantly improve the performance of machine learning with only a handful of labeled data.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Lifelong Embedding Learning and Transfer for Growing Knowledge Graphs

Yuanning Cui
Yuxin Wang
Zequn Sun
Wenqiang Liu
Yiqiao Jiang
Kexin Han
Wei Hu

Existing knowledge graph (KG) embedding models have primarily focused on static KGs. However, real-world KGs do not remain static, but rather evolve and grow in tandem with the development of KG applications. Consequently, new facts and previously unseen entities and relations continually emerge, necessitating an embedding model that can quickly learn and transfer new knowledge through growth. Motivated by this, we delve into an expanding field of KG embedding in this paper, i.e., lifelong KG embedding. We consider knowledge transfer and retention of the learning on growing snapshots of a KG without having to learn embeddings from scratch. The proposed model includes a masked KG autoencoder for embedding learning and update, with an embedding transfer strategy to inject the learned knowledge into the new entity and relation embeddings, and an embedding regularization method to avoid catastrophic forgetting. To investigate the impacts of different aspects of KG growth, we construct four datasets to evaluate the performance of lifelong KG embedding. Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art inductive and lifelong embedding baselines.

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NeurIPS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Newton–Cotes Graph Neural Networks: On the Time Evolution of Dynamic Systems

Lingbing Guo
Weiqing Wang
Zhuo Chen
Ningyu Zhang
Zequn Sun
Yixuan Lai
Qiang Zhang
Huajun Chen

Reasoning system dynamics is one of the most important analytical approaches for many scientific studies. With the initial state of a system as input, the recent graph neural networks (GNNs)-based methods are capable of predicting the future state distant in time with high accuracy. Although these methods have diverse designs in modeling the coordinates and interacting forces of the system, we show that they actually share a common paradigm that learns the integration of the velocity over the interval between the initial and terminal coordinates. However, their integrand is constant w. r. t. time. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach to predict the integration based on several velocity estimations with Newton–Cotes formulas and prove its effectiveness theoretically. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks empirically demonstrate consistent and significant improvement compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Ensemble Semi-supervised Entity Alignment via Cycle-Teaching

Kexuan Xin
Zequn Sun
Wen Hua
Bing Liu
Wei Hu
Jianfeng Qu
Xiaofang Zhou

Entity alignment is to find identical entities in different knowledge graphs. Although embedding-based entity alignment has recently achieved remarkable progress, training data insufficiency remains a critical challenge. Conventional semisupervised methods also suffer from the incorrect entity alignment in newly proposed training data. To resolve these issues, we design an iterative cycle-teaching framework for semisupervised entity alignment. The key idea is to train multiple entity alignment models (called aligners) simultaneously and let each aligner iteratively teach its successor the proposed new entity alignment. We propose a diversity-aware alignment selection method to choose reliable entity alignment for each aligner. We also design a conflict resolution mechanism to resolve the alignment conflict when combining the new alignment of an aligner and that from its teacher. Besides, considering the influence of cycle-teaching order, we elaborately design a strategy to arrange the optimal order that can maximize the overall performance of multiple aligners. The cycle-teaching process can break the limitations of each model’s learning capability and reduce the noise in new training data, leading to improved performance. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cycle-teaching framework, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art models when the training data is insufficient and the new entity alignment has much noise.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Knowledge Graph Alignment Network with Gated Multi-Hop Neighborhood Aggregation

Zequn Sun
Chengming Wang
Wei Hu
Muhao Chen
Jian Dai
Wei Zhang
Yuzhong Qu

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embedding-based entity alignment due to their capability of identifying isomorphic subgraphs. However, in real knowledge graphs (KGs), the counterpart entities usually have non-isomorphic neighborhood structures, which easily causes GNNs to yield different representations for them. To tackle this problem, we propose a new KG alignment network, namely AliNet, aiming at mitigating the non-isomorphism of neighborhood structures in an end-to-end manner. As the direct neighbors of counterpart entities are usually dissimilar due to the schema heterogeneity, AliNet introduces distant neighbors to expand the overlap between their neighborhood structures. It employs an attention mechanism to highlight helpful distant neighbors and reduce noises. Then, it controls the aggregation of both direct and distant neighborhood information using a gating mechanism. We further propose a relation loss to reﬁne entity representations. We perform thorough experiments with detailed ablation studies and analyses on ﬁve entity alignment datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of AliNet.

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IJCAI Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Multi-view Knowledge Graph Embedding for Entity Alignment

Qingheng Zhang
Zequn Sun
Wei Hu
Muhao Chen
Lingbing Guo
Yuzhong Qu

We study the problem of embedding-based entity alignment between knowledge graphs (KGs). Previous works mainly focus on the relational structure of entities. Some further incorporate another type of features, such as attributes, for refinement. However, a vast of entity features are still unexplored or not equally treated together, which impairs the accuracy and robustness of embedding-based entity alignment. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that unifies multiple views of entities to learn embeddings for entity alignment. Specifically, we embed entities based on the views of entity names, relations and attributes, with several combination strategies. Furthermore, we design some cross-KG inference methods to enhance the alignment between two KGs. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art embedding-based entity alignment methods. The selected views, cross-KG inference and combination strategies all contribute to the performance improvement.

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IJCAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Bootstrapping Entity Alignment with Knowledge Graph Embedding

Zequn Sun
Wei Hu
Qingheng Zhang
Yuzhong Qu

Embedding-based entity alignment represents different knowledge graphs (KGs) as low-dimensional embeddings and finds entity alignment by measuring the similarities between entity embeddings. Existing approaches have achieved promising results, however, they are still challenged by the lack of enough prior alignment as labeled training data. In this paper, we propose a bootstrapping approach to embedding-based entity alignment. It iteratively labels likely entity alignment as training data for learning alignment-oriented KG embeddings. Furthermore, it employs an alignment editing method to reduce error accumulation during iterations. Our experiments on real-world datasets showed that the proposed approach significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art embedding-based ones for entity alignment. The proposed alignment-oriented KG embedding, bootstrapping process and alignment editing method all contributed to the performance improvement.

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