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Ziyi Cao

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3 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Sparse Attention Across Multiple-Context KV Cache

Ziyi Cao
Qingyi Si
Jingbin Zhang
Bingquan Liu

Large language models face significant cost challenges in long-sequence inference. To address this, reusing historical Key-Value (KV) Cache for improved inference efficiency has become a mainstream approach. Recent advances further enhance throughput by sparse attention mechanisms to select the most relevant KV Cache, thereby reducing sequence length. However, such techniques are limited to single-context scenarios, where historical KV Cache is computed sequentially with causal-attention dependencies. In retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenarios, where retrieved documents as context are unknown beforehand, each document’s KV Cache is computed and stored independently (termed multiple-context KV Cache), lacking cross-attention between contexts. This renders existing methods ineffective. Although prior work partially recomputes multiple-context KV Cache to mitigate accuracy loss from missing cross-attention, it requires retaining all KV Cache throughout, failing to reduce memory overhead. This paper presents SamKV, the first exploration of attention sparsification for multiple-context KV Cache. Specifically, SamKV takes into account the complementary information of other contexts when sparsifying one context, and then locally recomputes the sparsified information. Experiments demonstrate that our method compresses sequence length to 15% without accuracy degradation compared with full-recomputation baselines, significantly boosting throughput in multi-context RAG scenarios.

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

VBF++: Variational Bayesian Fusion with Context-Aware Priors and Recommendation-Guided Adversarial Refinement for Multimodal Video Recommendation

Ziyi Cao
Rui Liu
Yong Chen

Multimodal video recommendation systems face fundamental challenges in determining optimal fusion strategies across diverse content types and user preferences. Existing methods suffer from two critical limitations: (1) their fusion strategies are guided by context-agnostic priors that ignore the semantic structure of content, assuming the same simple distribution (typically a standard multivariate Gaussian prior) governs optimal fusion for all video types, and (2) their optimization objectives, particularly the Evidence Lower Bound (ELBO), are misaligned with the final recommendation goal, optimizing for feature reconstruction rather than ranking performance. To address these fundamental issues, this work proposes VBF++, a novel framework that introduces context-aware structured priors and recommendation-guided adversarial refinement. First, the method designs context-aware priors that learn cluster-specific distributions based on video semantic categories, replacing uninformative priors with structured, content-aware prior distributions. Second, it introduces a Recommendation-Guided Adversarial Refinement (RAR) paradigm that explicitly steers the learning process towards generating recommendation-optimal fusion strategies, resolving the objective misalignment inherent in variational learning. Enhanced with domain-adaptive meta-learning, extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate consistent improvements of 4.7-8.3 percent in Precision@10 over state-of-the-art methods. Analysis reveals that learned fusion strategies exhibit semantically meaningful patterns, prioritizing visual features for action content, acoustic information for music videos, and textual descriptions for documentary material.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

RPA: Reasoning Path Augmentation in Iterative Retrieving for Multi-Hop QA

Ziyi Cao
Bingquan Liu
Shaobo Li

Multi-hop questions are associated with a series of justifications, and one needs to obtain the answers by following the reasoning path (RP) that orders the justifications adequately. So reasoning path retrieval becomes a critical preliminary stage for multi-hop Question Answering (QA). Within the RP, two fundamental challenges emerge for better performance: (i) what the order of the justifications in the RP should be, and (ii) what if the wrong justification has been in the path. In this paper, we propose Reasoning Path Augmentation (RPA), which uses reasoning path reordering and augmentation to handle the above two challenges, respectively. Reasoning path reordering restructures the reasoning by targeting the easier justification first but difficult one later, in which the difficulty is determined by the overlap between query and justifications since the higher overlap means more lexical relevance and easier searchable. Reasoning path augmentation automatically generates artificial RPs, in which the distracted justifications are inserted to aid the model recover from the wrong justification. We build RPA with a naive pre-trained model and evaluate RPA on the QASC and MultiRC datasets. The evaluation results demonstrate that RPA outperforms previously published reasoning path retrieval methods, showing the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Moreover, we present detailed experiments on how the orders of justifications and the percent of augmented paths affect the question- answering performance, revealing the importance of polishing RPs and the necessity of augmentation.

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