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5,418篇论文匹配“Sampling and Optimization”
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Phuc Nguyen, Benjamin Zelditch, Joyce Chen, Rohit K. Patra, Changshuai Wei

We present BanditLP, a scalable multi-stakeholder contextual bandit framework that unifies neural Thompson Sampling (TS) for learning objective-specific outcomes with a large-scale linear program (LP) for constrained action selection at serving time. The methodology is application-agnostic, compatible with arbitrary neural architectures, and deployable at web scale, with an LP solver capable of handling billions of variables. Experiments on public benchmarks and synthetic data show consistent gains over strong baselines. We apply this approach in LinkedIn's email marketing system and demonstrate business win, illustrating the value of integrated exploration and constrained optimization in production.

Xu Chu 0001, Angela Li, Jiaming Zhang, Wei Li 0336, Zhijie Tan, Dawei Yin 0001, Shuaiqiang Wang, Daiting Shi

Traditional search engines return uniform results for identical queries, overlooking users' personalized intents. While personalized search has been extensively studied, research on query rewriting for personalized intents has been constrained by traditional approaches like statistical co-occurrence and synonym expansion. Current work primarily addresses multi-turn dialogue scenarios in Conversational AI rather than exploring applications in large-scale search engines. This typically stems from the absence of real search scenario data and the difficulty of inferring users' intents through personalized reasoning. While Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) capabilities provide possibilities for personalized reasoning, CoT introduces additional reasoning overhead that is difficult to accept in online scenarios requiring low latency. To address this, this paper proposes PicQue (Personalized Efficient Query Rewrite), a personalized query rewriting model training pipeline aimed at achieving high accuracy with low latency. PicQue contains a two-stage training that first employs a novel Hybrid Supervised Fine-Tuning strategy to retain the model's reasoning capabilities while allowing the decoding process to skip CoT, thereby obtaining CoT's accuracy gains without increasing latency. Building on this foundation, PicQue conducts second-stage reinforcement learning using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to further improve rewriting accuracy and reduce the risk of over-rewriting. We also propose a Guided Search strategy to optimize GRPO training, alleviating the reduction in training sample utilization when all sampling rollouts are wrong. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate PicQue's effectiveness. In offline metrics, PicQue achieves over 7% improvement in rewriting accuracy compared to baseline methods and compresses up to 95% of decoding tokens. In online A/B tests, user satisfaction increases by 1.78% and query change rate decreases by 0.71%, achieving significant online gains.

Shaoqing Wang, Yingcai Ma, Kairui Fu, Ziyang Wang, Dunxian Huang, Yuliang Yan, Jian Wu 0032

Efficiently selecting relevant content from vast candidate pools is a critical challenge in modern recommender systems. Traditional methods, such as item-to-item collaborative filtering (CF) and two-tower models, often fall short in capturing the complex user-item interactions due to uniform truncation strategies and overdue user-item crossing. To address these limitations, we propose Personalized Item-to-Item (PI2I), a novel two-stage retrieval framework that enhances the personalization capabilities of CF. In the first Indexer Building Stage (IBS), we optimize the retrieval pool by relaxing truncation thresholds to maximize Hit Rate, thereby temporarily retaining more items users might be interested in. In the second Personalized Retrieval Stage (PRS), we introduce an interactive scoring model to overcome the limitations of inner product calculations, allowing for richer modeling of intricate user-item interactions. Additionally, we construct negative samples based on the trigger-target (item-to-item) relationship, ensuring consistency between offline training and online inference. Offline experiments on large-scale real-world datasets demonstrate that PI2I outperforms traditional CF methods and rivals Two-Tower models. Deployed in the ''Guess You Like'' section on Taobao, PI2I achieved a 1.05% increase in online transaction rates. In addition, we have released a large-scale recommendation dataset collected from Taobao, containing 130 million real-world user interactions used in the experiments of this paper. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PI2I/PI2I, which could serve as a valuable benchmark for the research community.

Hua Wang 0012, Jinghao Lu, Fan Zhang 0045

Transformer-based foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in tasks such as time-series forecasting and image segmentation. However, they frequently suffer from error accumulation in multivariate long-sequence prediction and exhibit vulnerability to out-of-distribution samples in image-related tasks. Furthermore, these challenges become particularly pronounced in large-scale Web data analysis tasks, which typically involve complex temporal patterns and multimodal features. This complexity substantially increases optimization difficulty, rendering models prone to stagnation at saddle points within high-dimensional parameter spaces. To address these issues, we propose a lightweight Transformer architecture in conjunction with a novel Escape-Explore Optimizer (EEO). The optimizer enhances both exploration and generalization while effectively avoiding sharp minima and saddle-point traps. Experimental results show that, in representative Web data scenarios, our method achieves performance on par with state-of-the-art models across 11 time-series benchmark datasets and the Synapse medical image segmentation task. Moreover, it demonstrates superior generalization and stability, thereby validating its potential as a versatile cross-task foundation model for Web-scale data mining and analysis.

Hung Vinh Tran, Tong Chen 0005, Hechuan Wen, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Bin Cui 0001, Hongzhi Yin

Content-based recommendation systems (CRSs) utilize content features to predict user-item interactions, serving as essential tools for helping users navigate information-rich web services. However, ensuring the effectiveness of CRSs requires large-scale and even continuous model training to accommodate diverse user preferences, resulting in significant computational costs and resource demands. A promising approach to this challenge is coreset selection, which identifies a small but representative subset of data samples that preserves model quality while reducing training overhead. Yet, the selected coreset is vulnerable to the pervasive noise in user-item interactions, particularly when it is minimally sized. To this end, we propose Noise-aware Coreset Selection (NaCS), a specialized framework for CRSs. NaCS constructs coresets through submodular optimization based on training gradients, while simultaneously correcting noisy labels using a progressively trained model. Meanwhile, we refine the selected coreset by filtering out low-confidence samples through uncertainty quantification, thereby avoid training with unreliable interactions. Through extensive experiments, we show that NaCS produces higher-quality coresets for CRSs while achieving better efficiency than existing coreset selection techniques. Notably, NaCS recovers 93-95% of full-dataset training performance using merely 1% of the training data. The source code is available at https://github.com/chenxing1999/nacs

Shengjia Zhang, Weiqin Yang 0002, Jiawei Chen 0007, Peng Wu 0012, Yuegang Sun, Gang Wang 0055, Qihao Shi, Can Wang 0001

Recommender systems (RS) aim to retrieve a small set of items that best match individual user preferences. Naturally, RS place primary emphasis on the quality of the Top-K results rather than performance across the entire item set. However, estimating Top-K accuracy (e.g., Precision@K, Recall@K) requires determining the ranking positions of items, which imposes substantial computational overhead and poses significant challenges for optimization. In addition, RS often suffer from distribution shifts due to evolving user preferences or data biases, further complicating the task. To address these issues, we propose Talos, a loss function that is specifically designed to optimize the Top-K recommendation accuracy. Talos leverages a quantile technique that replaces the complex ranking-dependent operations into simpler comparisons between predicted scores and learned score thresholds. We further develop a sampling-based regression algorithm for efficient and accurate threshold estimation, and introduce a constraint term to maintain optimization stability by preventing score inflation. Additionally, we incorporate a tailored surrogate function to address discontinuity and enhance robustness against distribution shifts. Comprehensive theoretical analyzes and empirical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness, efficiency, convergence, and distributional robustness of Talos. The code and the additional appendix are available at https://github.com/cynthia-shengjia/WWW-2026-Talos.

Chen Xu 0010, Zhipeng Yi, Ruizi Wang, Wenjie Wang 0007, Jun Xu 0001, Maarten de Rijke

Short-video applications have attracted substantial user traffic. However, these platforms also foster problematic usage patterns, commonly referred to as short-video addiction, which pose risks to both user health and the sustainable development of platforms. Prior studies on this issue have primarily relied on questionnaires or volunteer-based data collection, which are often limited by small sample sizes and population biases. In contrast, short-video platforms have large-scale behavioral data, offering a valuable foundation for analyzing addictive behaviors. To examine addiction-aware behavior patterns, we combine economic addiction theory with users' implicit behavior captured by recommendation systems. Our analysis shows that short-video addiction follows functional patterns similar to traditional forms of addictive behavior (e.g., substance abuse) and that its intensity is consistent with findings from previous social science studies. To develop a simulator that can learn and model these patterns, we introduce a novel training framework, AddictSim. To consider the personalized addiction patterns, AddictSim uses a mean-to-adapted strategy with group relative policy optimization training. Experiments on two large-scale datasets show that AddictSim consistently outperforms existing training strategies. Our simulation results show that integrating diversity-aware algorithms can mitigate addictive behaviors well.

Xianquan Wang, Zhaocheng Du, Jieming Zhu, Qinglin Jia, Zhenhua Dong, Kai Zhang 0038

Large-scale online marketplaces and recommender systems are crucial technological foundations for the development of e-commerce. In industrial recommender systems, features play a vital role as they carry essential information for downstream models. Accurate estimation of feature importance is critical, as it helps identify the most useful feature subsets from thousands of candidates for online services. Such a selection enables optimization of online performance while reducing computational burden. To address the feature selection challenges in deep learning, trainable gate-based and sensitivity-based methods have been proposed and proven effective in the industry. However, by analyzing real-world examples, we identified three bias issues that cause feature importance estimation to rely on partial model layers, samples, or gradients, ultimately leading to inaccurate feature importance estimates. We refer to these biases as layer bias, baseline bias, and approximation bias. To mitigate these biases, we propose FairFS, a fair and accurate feature selection algorithm. On one hand, FairFS directly regularizes feature importance estimation across all non-linear transformational layers to avoid layer bias. On the other hand, it employs a smooth baseline feature close to the classifier's decision boundary and an aggregated approximation method to mitigate bias issues. Extensive experiments demonstrate how FairFS mitigates these three biases and achieves state-of-the-art feature selection results.

Dezhong Yao 0002, Tongtong Liu 0006, Yuexin Shi, Zhiqiang Xu 0003

Federated Learning (FL) is increasingly adopted in edge computing scenarios, where a large number of heterogeneous clients operate under constrained or sufficient resources. The iterative training process of FL incurs considerable computation and communication overhead, which is unfriendly for resource-constrained devices. One-shot FL is a promising approach to addressing communication issues inherent in conventional FL, and model-heterogeneous FL solves the problem of diverse computing resources across clients. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively managing model-heterogeneous one-shot FL, often leading to unsatisfactory global model performance or reliance on auxiliary datasets. To address these challenges, we propose a novel FL framework named FedMHO, which leverages deep classification models on resource-sufficient clients and lightweight generative models on resource-constrained devices. On the server side, FedMHO involves a two-stage process that includes data generation and knowledge fusion. Furthermore, we introduce FedMHO-MD and FedMHO-SD to mitigate the knowledge-forgetting problem during the knowledge fusion stage, and an unsupervised data optimization solution to improve the quality of synthetic samples. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, as they outperform state-of-the-art baselines in various experimental setups.

Wei Sun, Ting Wang, Xinran Tian, Wanshun Lan, Xuhan Feng, Haoyue Li, Fangxin Wang 0001

Existing LLM-based Kubernetes diagnostic systems cannot learn from operational experience, operating on static knowledge bases without improving from past resolutions. We present MetaKube, an experience-aware LLM framework through three synergistic innovations: (1) an Episodic Pattern Memory Network (EPMN) that abstracts diagnostic patterns from historical resolutions and provides confidence-calibrated retrieval for both rapid pattern matching and guided causal exploration, (2) a meta-cognitive controller that dynamically routes between intuitive and analytical pathways based on problem familiarity, optimizing the trade-off between speed and depth, and (3) KubeLLM, a locally-deployable 8B model enhanced through domain-specific post-training on our 7,000-sample Kubernetes Fault Resolution Dataset. Evaluation on 1,873 real-world scenarios demonstrates MetaKube transforms Qwen3-8B from 50.9 to 90.5 points, approaching GPT-4.1 performance while ensuring complete data privacy. EPMN contributes 15.3% improvement through experiential learning, with continuous learning experiments showing progressive gains as the system accumulates operational knowledge. The source code and related resources are available at https://github.com/MetaKube-LLM-for-Kubernetes-Diagnosis/MetaKube.

Xiongxiao Xu, Haoran Wang 0005, Yueqing Liang, Philip S. Yu, Yue Zhao 0016, Kai Shu

Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has been a long-standing pillar problem in Web-scale systems and online infrastructures, such as service reliability monitoring, system fault diagnosis, and performance optimization. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in time series analysis, the potential of multimodal LLMs (MLLMs), particularly vision-language models, in TSAD remains largely under-explored. One natural way for humans to detect time series anomalies is through visualization and textual description. It motivates our research question: Can multimodal LLMs perform time series anomaly detection? Existing studies often oversimplify the problem by treating point-wise anomalies as special cases of range-wise ones or by aggregating point anomalies to approximate range-wise scenarios. They limit our understanding for realistic scenarios such as multi-granular anomalies and irregular time series. To address the gap, we build a VisualTimeAnomaly benchmark to comprehensively investigate zero-shot capabilities of MLLMs for TSAD, progressively from point-, range-, to variate-wise anomalies, and extends to irregular sampling conditions. Our study reveals several key insights. 1) MLLMs and traditional TSAD methods are complementary: MLLMs excel at coarse-grained anomalies while traditional methods are effective at fine-grained anomalies. 2) MLLMs are resilient to irregular time series. 3) Input time series modality changing from text to image makes information focus shift from quantitative variations to qualitative patterns while significantly reducing hallucinations. Built on the findings, we propose a MLLMs-based multi-agent framework TSAD-Agents to achieve automatic TSAD. Our framework comprises scanning, planning, detection, and checking agents that synergistically collaborate to reason, plan, and self-reflect to enable automatic TSAD. These agents adaptively invoke tools such as traditional methods and MLLMs and dynamically switch between text and image modalities to optimize detection performance.

Zenghua Liao, Jinzhi Liao, Xiang Zhao 0002

Large Language Models are rapidly emerging as web-native interfaces to social platforms. On the social web, users frequently have ambiguous and dynamic goals, making complex intent understanding—rather than single-turn execution—the cornerstone of effective human-LLM collaboration. Existing approaches attempt to clarify user intents through sequential or parallel questioning, yet they fall short of addressing the core challenge: modeling the logical dependencies among clarification questions. Inspired by the Cognitive Load Theory, we propose Prism, a novel framework for complex intent understanding that enables logically coherent and efficient intent clarification. Prism comprises four tailored modules: a complex intent decomposition module, which decomposes user intents into smaller, well-structured elements and identifies logical dependencies among them; a logical clarification generation module, which organizes clarification questions based on these dependencies to ensure coherent, low-friction interactions; an intent-aware reward module, which evaluates the quality of clarification trajectories via an intent-aware reward function and leverages Monte Carlo Sample to simulate user-LLM interactions for large-scale, high-quality training data generation; and a self-evolved intent tuning module, which iteratively refines the LLM's logical clarification capability through data-driven feedback and optimization. Prism consistently outperforms existing approaches across clarification interactions, intent execution, and cognitive load benchmarks. It achieves state-of-the-art logical consistency, reduces logical conflicts to 11.5%, increases user satisfaction by 14.4%, and decreases task completion time by 34.8%. All data and code are released.

Jiajun Liu 0005, Wenjun Ke 0002, Peng Wang 0004, Yao He, Ziyu Shang, Guozheng Li, Zijie Xu 0003, Ke Ji

Existing knowledge graphs (KGs) inevitably contain outdated or erroneous knowledge that needs to be removed from knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models. To address this challenge, knowledge unlearning can be applied to eliminate specific information while preserving the integrity of the remaining knowledge in KGs. Existing unlearning methods can generally be categorized into exact unlearning and approximate unlearning. However, exact unlearning requires high training costs, while approximate unlearning faces two issues when applied to KGs due to the inherent connectivity of triples: (1) It fails to fully remove targeted information, as forgetting triples can still be inferred from remaining ones. (2) It focuses on local data for specific removal, which weakens the remaining knowledge in the forgetting boundary. To address these issues, we propose GraphDPO, a novel approximate unlearning framework based on direct preference optimization (DPO). Firstly, to effectively remove forgetting triples, we reframe unlearning as a preference optimization problem, where the model is trained by DPO to prefer reconstructed alternatives over the original forgetting triples. This formulation penalizes reliance on forgettable knowledge, mitigating incomplete forgetting caused by KG connectivity. Moreover, we introduce an out-boundary sampling strategy to construct preference pairs with minimal semantic overlap, weakening the connection between forgetting and retained knowledge. Secondly, to preserve boundary knowledge, we introduce a boundary recall mechanism that replays and distills relevant information both within and across time steps. We construct eight unlearning datasets across four popular KGs with varying unlearning rates. Experiments show that GraphDPO outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by up to 10.1% in MRR_Avg and 14.0% in MRR_F1. Further analysis confirms that GraphDPO more effectively removes target knowledge while preserving surrounding context.

En Yu, Jie Lu 0001, Guangquan Zhang 0001

Real-world data streams exhibit inherent non-stationarity characterized by concept drift, posing significant challenges for adaptive learning systems. While existing methods address isolated distribution shifts, they overlook the critical co-evolution of label spaces and distributions under limited supervision and persistent uncertainty. To address this, we formalize Generalized Incremental Learning under Concept Drift (GILCD), characterizing the joint evolution of distributions and label spaces in open-environment streaming contexts, and propose a novel framework called Calibrated Source-Free Adaptation (CSFA). First, CSFA introduces a training-free prototype calibration mechanism that dynamically fuses emerging prototypes with base representations, enabling stable new-class identification without optimization overhead. Second, we design a novel source-free adaptation algorithm, i.e., Reliable Surrogate Gap Sharpness-aware (RSGS) minimization. It integrates sharpness-aware perturbation loss optimization with surrogate gap minimization, while employing entropy-based uncertainty filtering to discard unreliable samples. This mechanism ensures robust distribution alignment and mitigates generalization degradation caused by uncertainties. Thus, CSFA establishes a unified framework for stable adaptation to evolving semantics and distributions in open-world streaming scenarios. Extensive experiments validate the superior performance and effectiveness of CSFA compared to SOTA approaches.

Liang Chen, Xiaoding Wang 0001, Limei Lin, Dajin Wang, Zhiquan Liu 0001, Jie Wu 0001

The explosive growth of multimodal web data demands communication that transmits meaning rather than raw bits. Existing semantic-communication systems often fail under noise, missing modalities, and distribution shifts because they optimize surface features instead of modality-invariant knowledge. We present Grasp, a knowledge-centric framework for cross-modal communication. Grasp segments streams into semantic blocks and builds a graph over them; a lightweight Graph Neural Networks (GNN) produces schedulable, importance-weighted representations. At its core is knowledge purification : we minimize a conditional mutual information upper bound to perform a three-way disentanglement—strongly related, weakly related, and task-irrelevant components—so that only essential semantics are transmitted while non-essential factors are suppressed. To maintain synchrony, we introduce one-to-two temporal contrastive learning to achieve triple alignment of video, audio, and text despite sampling asynchrony. For efficient transmission, Grasp uses a cross-modal shared vector-quantization codebook—a discrete knowledge codebook —updated by multimodal attention. At the receiver, a soft-recovery mechanism leverages this shared knowledge to robustly reconstruct semantics under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or missing modalities, yielding graceful degradation. Across web tasks—including cross-modal retrieval and missing-modality inference—Grasp improves knowledge consistency, semantic fidelity, and downstream performance over strong baselines while maintaining low latency. These results show that communication structured around purified knowledge is key to building robust, semantic-aware systems for the modern web.

Xiangxiang Chen 0002, Peixin Zhang 0001, Jun Sun 0001, Jin Song Dong 0001, Wenhai Wang, Jingyi Wang 0004

Quantization is widely used to enable local deployment of large language models (LLMs) on resource-constrained devices. Recent work (e.g., QuRA) shows quantization can be exploited via rounding manipulation to implant backdoors. However, such an attack has been evaluated only on small models and does not directly apply to LLMs due to three key constraints: (1) limited poisoning data from small, task-agnostic calibration sets; (2) layer-wise quantization restricting adversarial access to global representations; and (3) lack of gradient access in quantization pipelines, blocking gradient-based attacks. We propose LLMQuA, a practical quantization-phase backdoor attack tailored to the LLM setting. LLMQuA (i) injects backdoors via data-efficient knowledge editing with few source–target token pairs, (ii) optimizes quantization parameters layer-locally to preserve activation distributions, and (iii) operates without gradient access by directly distorting quantized weights to reprogram token semantics. We evaluate LLMQuA on representative LLMs and two important attack scenarios: evasion of content moderation and causing systematic refusal of benign user queries. Empirically, LLMQuA reduces model moderation accuracy by up to 67.91% on correctly classified samples and induces refusal-to-answer behavior for over 90% of targeted queries, while degrading overall model utility by only a negligible margin on average. Finally, when tested against a range of deployment-phase defenses, many defenses fail to reliably detect LLMQuA or require substantially increased computational or operational costs to mitigate it. These results expose a practical, low-overhead supply-chain threat to quantized LLM deployments and motivate the need for deployment-aware integrity checks in LLM quantization workflows.

Kaehyun Um, Kyuhwan Yeom, Haerim Yang, Minyoung Choi, Hyeongjun Yang, Kyong-Ho Lee

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, yet hallucinate on knowledge-intensive tasks. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mitigates this issue by grounding answers in external sources, e.g., knowledge graphs (KGs). However, existing KG-based RAG approaches rely on semantics-unaware path sampling and are weakly aligned with KG reasoning objectives, which limits further accuracy gains. They also feed retrieved paths directly into the reasoner without organizing them into answer-centered reasoning paths, hindering small LLMs' ability to leverage the retrieved knowledge. Furthermore, prior works predominantly rely on large LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT/GPT-4) or assume backbones above 7B parameters, leaving sub-7B models underexplored. We address this gap with RPO-RAG, the first KG-based RAG framework specifically designed for small LLMs, to the best of our knowledge. RPO-RAG introduces three key innovations: (1) a query-path semantic sampling strategy that provides informative supervisory signals; (2) a relation-aware preference optimization that aligns training with intermediate KG reasoning signals (e.g., relation); and (3) an answer-centered prompt design that organizes entities and reasoning paths in an interpretable format. Extensive experiments on two benchmark Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) datasets, WebQSP and CWQ, demonstrate that RPO-RAG effectively bridges the performance gap between small and large language models. On WebQSP, it improves F1 by up to 8.8%, reflecting enhanced answer precision, while on CWQ it achieves new state-of-the-art results among models under 8B parameters in both Hit and F1. Overall, RPO-RAG substantially improves the reasoning capability of small LLMs—even under 3B parameters—highlighting their potential for resource-efficient and practical on-device KGQA applications.

Dongcheon Lee, Ji-Yeon Park, Hye-Yoon Baek, Jimyeung Seo, Seyeong Kim, Byungkook Oh

Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) leverages struc- tured knowledge graphs for reliable reasoning. Graph-based Retrieval- Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses the incompleteness and hallucination issues of Large Language Models (LLMs) by retrieving query-relevant subgraphs. However, existing approaches rely on single-intent semantic retrieval, compressing queries into single representations and optimizing each query independently. This leads to narrow triple selection that omits complementary information. While multi-intent retrieval diversification addresses this limitation, it faces critical challenges: (1) semantic diversification does not guarantee reasoning performance, and (2) co-selection frequency across intents does not ensure reasoning benefit. We propose Topic-Adaptive Retrieval Diversification (TARD), based on end-to-end optimization via generation feedback. TARD adaptively extracts multiple topic-based intents through neural topic modeling and employs a Gumbel-Softmax differentiable sampling to enable joint optimization. Supervised fine-tuning aligns the topic-adaptive multi-intent selector and triple scorer with reasoning performance to achieve beneficial consensus patterns. Adaptive direct preference optimization trains the generator to utilize relevant consensus while ignoring uninformative patterns. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ show that TARD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/leedongcheon/TARD.

Junsheng Wang, Tiantian Gong, Yeyun Wu, Liyan Zhang 0001

Domain-adaptive hashing enhances discriminative hash representations by transferring knowledge from a label-rich source domain to a label-scarce target domain. It has attracted significant attention due to its ability to enable efficient cross-domain retrieval without requiring target domain labels. However, existing methods generally assume that source domain labels are completely accurate. In practice, labels obtained via web crawling or crowdsourcing often contain varying degrees of noise, which hampers semantic alignment and aggravates domain shift. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel method termed Evidential Learning and Progressive Alignment (ELPA) for domain-adaptive hashing. This method comprises two key modules: the Uncertainty-aware Noise Separation (UNS) and the Progressive Cross-domain Alignment (PCA). In the UNS, we exploit the belief and uncertainty masses obtained from the evidential learning model and utilize the posterior probabilities of a Gaussian Mixture Model to effectively distinguish clean samples from noisy ones. In PCA, we introduce a progressive partial optimal transport mechanism that prioritizes pseudo-label generation for well-aligned target samples, thereby gradually achieving class-level and global-level cross-domain alignment. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmark datasets with various noise ratios demonstrate that ELPA consistently surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods, exhibiting superior robustness and generalization capability.

Jihao Zhao, Daixuan Li, Pengfei Li, Shuaishuai Zu, Biao Qin, Hongyan Liu 0002

The effectiveness upper bound of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is fundamentally constrained by the semantic integrity and information granularity of text chunks in its knowledge base. Moreover, domain documents are characterized by dense terminology and strong contextual dependencies, which exacerbate the semantic fragmentation of text chunks, thereby making it difficult to efficiently utilize their key information. To address these challenges, this paper proposes QChunker, which restructures the RAG paradigm from retrieval-augmentation to understanding-retrieval-augmentation. Firstly, QChunker models the text chunking as a composite task of text segmentation and knowledge completion to ensure the logical coherence and integrity of text chunks. Drawing inspiration from Hal Gregersen's ''Questions Are the Answer'' theory, we design a multi-agent debate framework comprising four specialized components: a question outline generator, text segmenter, integrity reviewer, and knowledge completer. This framework operates on the principle that questions serve as catalysts for profound insights. Through this pipeline, we successfully construct a high-quality dataset of 45K entries and transfer this capability to small language models. Additionally, to handle long evaluation chains and low efficiency in existing chunking evaluation methods, which overly rely on downstream QA tasks, we introduce a novel direct evaluation metric, ChunkScore. Both theoretical and experimental validations demonstrate that ChunkScore can directly and efficiently discriminate the quality of text chunks. Furthermore, during the text segmentation phase, we utilize document outlines for multi-path sampling to generate multiple candidate chunks and select the optimal solution employing ChunkScore. Extensive experimental results across four heterogeneous domains exhibit that QChunker effectively resolves aforementioned issues by providing RAG with more logically coherent and information-rich text chunks. Notably, this study also establishes a small-domain QA dataset concerning hazardous chemical safety, which fully reveals the significant value of RAG in specialized domains and the generalization capability of the QChunker framework.