The rapid growth of online short texts has made specialized analysis essential, as these texts are sparse and information-limited. Short text clustering (STC) is critical for automatically grouping unlabeled texts into meaningful clusters, supporting applications such as sentiment analysis, spam filtering, and social media personalization. In the context of massive online content, deep clustering seeks to uncover semantic categories by measuring distances in the representation space. Consequently, aligning clustering pseudo-labels with the true category distribution is crucial for effective self-supervised training, particularly under class imbalance and distribution skew commonly observed in web data. To address this challenge, we propose the Cluster Identification-Guided Dual Correction (CIDC) framework, which generates reliable pseudo-labels to guide deep clustering. Specifically, given cluster partitions and model-estimated class distributions, we perform Cluster Category Identification (CCI) at each training epoch to determine the most probable category for each cluster. This identification provides the foundation for the Pseudo-Label Correction (PLC) and Prototype-Based Correction (PBC) modules, which jointly enhance pseudo-label reliability and representation learning. In the PLC module, samples whose model-estimated class distributions conflict with the assigned cluster category are corrected, thereby improving semantic alignment within clusters. In the PBC module, representative and reliable prototypes are selected according to cluster categories and model predictions to guide training, further strengthening representation discriminability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIDC consistently outperforms existing methods in terms of clustering accuracy and mutual information, particularly in unsupervised settings characterized by class imbalance and noisy data.
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Table reasoning with large language models (LLMs) plays a critical role in building intelligent systems capable of understanding and analyzing tabular data. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face key limitations: their reasoning processes lacks depth and explicit multi-step reasoning, often relying solely on implicit language model understanding. In addition, their reasoning processes suffer from instability, primarily caused by model uncertainty. In this work, we propose STaR, a novel slow-thinking model that can achieve effective and stable table reasoning. To enable effective multi-step reasoning, we design a two-stage training framework consisting of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) warm-up followed by reinforced fine-tuning (RFT). Specifically, in the SFT stage, we construct a high-quality dataset through automatic self-verification. In the RFT stage, we introduce a difficulty-aware reinforcement learning mechanism to further enhance reasoning capabilities. Furthermore, to improve reasoning stability, we introduce trajectory-level uncertainty quantification, which fuses token-level confidence with answer-level consistency, enabling the selection of better reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STaR-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance on in-domain benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization to out-of-domain datasets, highlighting its potential for enhancing both effectiveness and stability in table reasoning.
Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a critical task in open-world computing scenarios, aiming to automatically classify partially labeled data by recognizing both known and novel categories. However, existing GCD methods usually suffer from inherent bias toward known categories due to the exclusive pre-training on them and the absence of labeled data of novel categories. This bias can lead to significant misclassification and clustering errors for novel categories. Although recent approaches leverage pseudo-label training and contrastive learning to address this, they still lack explicit supervision to disentangle novel and known categories, resulting in performance bottlenecks. To address these limitations, we propose an Expectation-Maximization-driven Contrastive Disentanglement (EMCD) framework designed to explicitly disentangle novel and known categories. We particularly formulate the identification of novel categories as a latent variable estimation problem. Specifically, it incorporates an EM-disentangling regularization to softly identify novel category samples and a consistency regularization to enhance generalization. In addition, we leverage dual contrastive constraints, including a cluster-sample contrastive constraint and a sample-sample contrastive contrastive, to pull close samples of novel categories while pushing apart ambiguous samples near decision boundaries. Empirical results on 3 commonly used datasets demonstrate that our model is effective and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/YWY-only/EMCD.
Zero-shot stance detection (ZSSD) aims to classify stances towards previously unseen targets without direct supervision on those topics during training. While recent approaches have explored various strategies, they often suffer from limited linguistic diversity or unstable semantic representations, restricting generalization to new domains. To address these challenges, we propose DPSD , a dynamic framework that integrates LLM-assisted data augmentation, multi-granularity feature fusion with contrastive learning, and adaptive prototype updating. Our method enriches the training data with both diverse targets and stylistically varied texts. A gate-controlled fusion mechanism combines deep contextualized features from BERT with shallow lexical patterns via TF-IDF, while contrastive learning refines the feature space by pulling similar instances closer and pushing dissimilar ones apart, thereby improving representation discriminability. Furthermore, we introduce a sliding-window prototype pool that dynamically maintains class-specific prototypes while preserving historical knowledge, ensuring stable and interpretable inference over time. We also incorporate LLM-calibrated semantic similarity as an auxiliary scorer for controlled reasoning. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets -SEM16, P-Stance, and VAST - show that DPSD achieves strong performance in various zero-shot settings, especially in cross-dataset and unseen target scenarios.
Search-based recommendation is one of the most critical application scenarios in e-commerce platforms. Users' complex search contexts—such as spatiotemporal factors, historical interactions, and current query's information—constitute an essential part of their decision-making, reflecting implicit preferences that complement explicit query terms. Modeling such rich contextual signals and their intricate associations with candidate items remains a key challenge. Although numerous efforts have been devoted to building more effective search methods, existing approaches still show limitations in integrating contextual information, which hinders their ability to fully capture user intent. To address these challenges, we propose a context-aware reasoning-enhanced generative search framework for better understanding the complicated context. Specifically, the framework first unifies heterogeneous user and item contexts into textual representations or text-based semantic identifiers and aligns them. To overcome the lack of explicit reasoning trajectories, we introduce a self-evolving post-training paradigm that iteratively combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to progressively enhance the model's reasoning capability. In addition, we identify potential biases in existing RL algorithms when applied to search scenarios and present a debiased variant of GRPO to improve ranking performance. Extensive experiments on search log data collected from a real-world e-commerce platform demonstrate that our approach achieves superior performance compared with strong baselines, validating its effectiveness for search-based recommendation.
From Prediction to Understanding: Leveraging Reasoning in Large Language Model-based Recommendations
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown great promise in sequential recommendation. Existing methods typically transform users' historical interactions into textual sequences and then feed these sequences into LLMs to generate recommended items. However, since the output of LLMs is limited to recommendations, the models must analyze user interactions and infer user preferences implicitly. This implicit approach constrains the expressive reasoning abilities of LLMs. Moreover, as the output of LLMs consists solely of recommended items, the resulting recommendations lack explainability. To address these issues, we propose RE2, which enables LLMs to explicitly generate reasoning content before providing recommendations. Making the reasoning process explicit helps elicit the reasoning abilities of LLMs and simultaneously enhances the explainability of recommendation results. RE2 consists of three steps: (1) Reasoning Collection, which collects reasoning data by guiding LLMs to generate both reasoning content and recommended items for each interaction sequence. (2) Pattern Imitation, which leverages the collected data to train LLMs via supervised fine-tuning to imitate the pattern of first generating reasoning content and then providing recommendations. (3) Pattern Internalization, which further internalizes this reasoning-and-recommendation pattern and enhances both recommendation performance and the rationality of the reasoning content through reinforcement learning. RE2 can be implemented under both the self-distillation and teacher-distillation frameworks, without requiring external user metadata such as user reviews. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of RE2 in improving recommendation performance and in generating high-quality reasoning content. Furthermore, we show that RE2 can mitigate popularity bias while maintaining recommendation accuracy to some extent. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/zhiyuanc2001/RE2.
Personalized Learning Path Planning (PLPP) aims to design adaptive learning paths that align with individual goals. While large language models (LLMs) show potential in personalizing learning experiences, existing approaches often lack mechanisms for goal-aligned planning. We introduce Pxplore, a novel framework for PLPP that integrates a reinforcement-based training paradigm and an LLM-driven educational architecture. We design a structured learner state model and an automated reward function that transforms abstract objectives into computable signals. We train the policy combining supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), and deploy it within a real-world learning platform. Extensive experiments validate Pxplore's effectiveness in producing coherent, personalized, and goal-driven learning paths. We release our code and dataset at https://github.com/Pxplore/pxplore-algo.
Web service administrators must ensure the stability of multiple systems by promptly detecting anomalies in Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Achieving the goal of ''train once, infer across scenarios'' remains a fundamental challenge for time series anomaly detection models. Beyond improving zero-shot generalization, such models must also flexibly handle sequences of varying lengths during inference—ranging from one hour to one week—without retraining. Conventional approaches rely on sliding-window encoding and self-supervised learning, which restrict inference to fixed length inputs. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot capabilities across general domains. However, when applied to time series data, they face inherent limitations due to context length. To address this issue, we propose ViTs, a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based framework that converts time series curves into visual representations. By rescaling time series images, temporal dependencies are preserved while maintaining a consistent input size, thereby enabling efficient processing of arbitrarily long sequences without context constraints. Training VLMs for this purpose introduces unique challenges, primarily due to the scarcity of aligned time series image–text data. To overcome this, we employ an evolutionary algorithm to automatically generate thousands of high-quality image–text pairs and design a three-stage training pipeline consisting of: (1) time series knowledge injection, (2) anomaly detection enhancement, and (3) anomaly reasoning refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ViTs substantially enhance the ability of VLMs to understand and detect anomalies in time series data. All datasets and code will be publicly released at: https://github.com/Uni-WangZexin/ViTs.
Accurate travel time estimation (TTE) plays a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems. However, it remains challenging due to heterogeneous data sources and complex traffic dynamics. Moreover, traditional approaches typically convert trajectory data into fixed-length representations. This overlooks the inherent variability of real-world motion patterns, often resulting in information loss and redundancy. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the Multimodal Dynamic Trajectory Integration (MDTI) framework--a novel multimodal trajectory representation learning approach that integrates GPS sequences, grid trajectories, and road network constraints to enhance the performance of TTE. MDTI employs modality-specific encoders and a multimodal fusion module to capture complementary spatial, temporal, and topological semantics, while a dynamic trajectory modeling mechanism adaptively regulates information density for trajectories of varying lengths. Two self-supervised pretraining objectives, named contrastive alignment and masked language modeling, further strengthen multimodal consistency and contextual understanding. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MDTI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming its robustness and strong generalization abilities. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/City-Computing/MDTI.
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.
LLM-based empathetic dialogue systems enhance agents' emotional support capabilities. Previous approaches primarily relied on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to extract key dialogue cues and further strengthened the agent's sensitivity to these signals through supervised fine-tuning. However, such methods overly depend on the information extraction capability of LLMs, leading to unstable reasoning and limited interpretability. To simultaneously improve an agent's ability to proactively explore solutions through rational reasoning while attending to users' sensitive emotions via empathetic understanding, we propose Neuro-Sym Supporter, a hybrid decision-making emotional support agent that integrates symbolic reasoning with deep learning. This model combines rational inference with emotional empathy, enabling the agent to generate supportive responses that balance logic and emotion. Specifically, we introduce Sym-Mind, a differentiable logic-based reasoning framework for emotional support strategy selection, which unifies interpretability with stable performance. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms multiple competitive baselines in both automatic and human evaluations, validating its effectiveness.
Text classification is a crucial and fundamental task in web content mining. Compared with the previous learning paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning by cross entropy loss, the recently proposed supervised contrastive learning approach has received tremendous attention due to its powerful feature learning capability and robustness. Although several studies have incorporated this technique for text classification, some limitations remain. First, many text datasets are imbalanced, and the learning mechanism of supervised contrastive learning is sensitive to data imbalance, which may harm the model's performance. Moreover, these models leverage separate classification branches with cross entropy and supervised contrastive learning branches without explicit mutual guidance. To this end, we propose a novel model named SharpReCL for imbalanced text classification tasks. First, we obtain the prototype vector of each class in the balanced classification branch to act as a representation of each class. Then, by further explicitly leveraging the prototype vectors, we construct a proper and sufficient target sample set with the same size for each class to perform the supervised contrastive learning procedure. The empirical results show the effectiveness of our model, which even outperforms popular large language models across several datasets. Our code is available https://github.com/KEAML-JLU/SharpReCL
Mixing services run on blockchain trading systems, enhancing the transaction privacy of blockchain users. Yet, in recent years, the mixing services provide fertile ground for concealing illicit fund flows. Therefore, security experts make great efforts to find an effective de-anonymization of mixing services. Unfortunately, current de-anonymization technologies are constrained by a fundamental issue, i.e., the lack of a comprehensive, extensive, and reliably labeled benchmark dataset. To address this problem, we propose a new method for acquiring mixing transaction data. We design and implement a method named TGweaver, which actively executes the complete mixing workflow within a simulated blockchain environment. Furthermore, to enhance the realism of the dataset, we introduce a ''behavioral fingerprint'' mapping strategy. Ultimately, the proposed dataset includes over 891K transactions, scaling existing benchmark sizes by 2 to 4 orders of magnitude. In experiments, we use the proposed data to systematically evaluate existing de-anonymization techniques. Experimental results reveal that the current mixing address linking methods, based on heuristic rules, lacks generalization capability in complex scenarios, exhibiting low precision. In contrast, the methods utilizing supervised learning demonstrate significant advantages.
Web tracking is increasingly pervasive, raising serious concerns about user privacy and security. Among existing techniques, pixel tracking is particularly stealthy and cost-effective, embedding invisible images that exfiltrate user activities to third-party servers. Current defenses, including filter list blocking and conventional machine learning, often fail to capture the cross-site associations that enable pixel tracking to evade detection. To address this limitation, we introduce TGNN, a framework that formulates pixel tracking detection as an edge classification task on a Tracking Directed Graph (TDG), which models third-party associations across websites. TGNN encodes HTTP traffic into structured quadruples and learns both semantic features and interaction patterns. To overcome the scarcity of reliable labels, we propose a large language model (LLM)-based annotation method that leverages minimal expert supervision to produce high-quality labels, significantly improving detection. Experiments conducted on traffic from the Alexa top-10K websites demonstrate that TGNN substantially outperforms existing baselines, while the LLM-based annotation achieves accuracy comparable to expert curation. Our large-scale measurement reveals that at least 16.74% of websites engage in pixel tracking via major third-party infrastructures, establishing cross-domain tracking as a pervasive practice in the wild and indicating a potential privacy threat in the modern Web ecosystem.
SketchMind: Understanding Abstract Sketches with MLLMs for Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval
Fine-Grained Sketch-Based Image Retrieval (FG-SBIR) aims to retrieve images that accurately correspond to abstract hand-drawn sketches, requiring the model to understand sparse and abstract visual cues. Existing methods tend to rely on convolutional networks or metric learning to align sketch and image features, often overlooking the inherent abstraction and semantic ambiguity present in sketches. This limitation results in an insufficient understanding of fine-grained visual details. To address this challenge, we propose SketchMind, a novel method that leverages Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to enhance abstract sketch understanding in FG-SBIR. Specifically, we use MLLMs to generate auxiliary textual descriptions based on the given sketches via a Visual Question Answering (VQA) strategy. To effectively incorporate these descriptions, we construct a graph structure with the sketch as the central node and the generated texts as peripheral nodes. A graph attention scheme is employed to perform uncertainty-aware feature fusion, enabling the model to suppress noisy or irrelevant textual information. Furthermore, to enhance both inter- and intra-modal fine-grained alignment, we design a Multi-scale Cross-modal Jigsaw Matching module in combination with a self-supervised learning strategy, which captures local and global visual correspondences across modalities more effectively. Extensive experiments on three benchmark FG-SBIR datasets demonstrate that SketchMind achieves superior performance over existing state-of-the-art methods, proving its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/li1changxing/MLLM_FG_SBIR/.
Reasoning over structured graphs remains a fundamental challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when scaling to large graphs. Existing approaches typically follow the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) paradigm: first retrieving subgraphs relevant to the query and then generating answers conditioned on the retrieved subgraphs. However, such two-phase pipelines often struggle to faithfully incorporate graph structure, since the generation process is ultimately constrained by the quality and completeness of the retrieved subgraph. Although many advanced retrievers have been proposed recently to mitigate this issue, they are usually tailored to the training graphs and generalize poorly to unseen graphs, which limits their practical applicability. In this work, we propose Reasoning by Exploration (RoE), a novel approach that unifies retrieval and generation by framing reasoning over graphs as a process of graph exploration. At each step, the LLM selects candidate nodes and edges to explore, gradually constructing reasoning paths and generating answers along the way. To enable effective exploration, RoE is trained in two stages: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on gold reasoning paths, followed by reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance exploration effectiveness and generalization. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that RoE achieves substantial overall improvements over baselines, while also generalizing effectively to unseen graphs. The code can be found at https://github.com/haoyuhan1/RoE.
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.
Cross-modal retrieval is a fundamental task in multimedia understanding, aimed at querying samples with similar semantics in one modality (e.g., text) using another modality (e.g., image). Existing methods merely focus on point-to-point comparisons between individual samples, while overlooking the widely present many-to-many structural relationships in real-world scenarios. However, the many-to-many relationships formed by multiple samples sharing similar semantics are crucial for effectively achieving semantic alignment and accurately constructing shared semantic representations. To address this, we propose a novel hypergraph-based cross-modal retrieval approach, which explicitly establishes many-to-many associations between multiple samples using a label-driven hypergraph construction mechanism, combined with differentiated hyperedge weighting. Additionally, to avoid the limitation of information interaction direction imposed by traditional unidirectional cross-attention mechanisms, we design a bidirectional cross-attention structure, with image and text as separate query sources, to achieve symmetric semantic enhancement between modalities. The resulting joint image-text representations are then mapped as hypergraph vertices, further enhancing the model's ability to align cross-modal semantics. Since constructing a global hypergraph on a large-scale sample set would incur high computational cost, we introduce global label co-occurrence frequency to supervise the batch-level hypergraph construction, enhancing the local graph's ability to capture global semantics. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark cross-modal retrieval datasets.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively mitigates hallucinations and knowledge gaps in Large Language Models (LLMs) for knowledge-intensive tasks by incorporating external web-based knowledge. However, when integrating diverse yet potentially conflicting web-sourced information, RAG systems are prone to knowledge conflicts that manifest as incorrect or inconsistent model behaviors, ultimately leading to unreliable responses. To address this challenge, this paper proposes Conflict-Aware RAG, a general training framework that leverages the model's inherent conflict-sensing capability to build a more robust RAG system via phased optimization. At the core of this framework lies ConScore, a conflict signal that quantifies the model's awareness of potential knowledge conflicts by comparing generative probabilities across distinct knowledge sources. This signal then guides both the construction of training data and a multi-stage optimization workflow: In the Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) stage, conflict features are employed to select representative distracting documents, laying the groundwork for core RAG capabilities; in the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) stage, high-quality preference pairs are constructed using the conflict signal to boost the model's robustness against distracting knowledge; and in the Reranking stage, conflict confidence and information gain are integrated to synergistically optimize the collaboration mechanism between the retriever and LLM. Experiments on six knowledge-intensive question answering (QA) datasets demonstrate that Conflict-Aware RAG significantly outperforms mainstream baselines. Further ablation studies and quantitative analyses validate the method's stability and generalization, laying the foundation for robust RAG systems.
Single-expert fake news detectors, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Large Language Models (LLMs), increasingly struggle to counter the diversifying camouflage tactics of modern adversaries, which range from semantic (e.g., mimicking writing styles) to structural (e.g., manipulating propagation paths). To address this, existing methods attempt to build a hybrid model by sequentially incorporating GNNs and LLMs; however, such hybridization blurs the distinction between experts and prevents critical cross-validation. In addition, existing methods rely heavily on vast labeled data, which is costly to acquire, particularly for fake news samples. In this paper, we propose a Semi-supervised Mixture of Experts framework for Fake news detection, namely S2MOE-F. The core idea of S2MOE-F is to establish a robust defense against multifaceted camouflage by cross-validating the complementary judgments of two independent experts, GNN and LLM. On the one hand, S2MOE-F drives experts' judgments by using a One-Class Classification (OCC) objective, which constrains true news within a compact hypersphere and identifies samples outside this boundary as fake, reducing reliance on scarce fake news labels. On the other hand, S2MOE-F generates high-confidence pseudo-labels based on consensus or divergence between experts to exploit abundant unlabeled data. In addition, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL)-based routing policy that dynamically determines the dominant expert for input samples without explicit supervision. Finally, we design a disentangled masked Transformer to ensure experts' specialization by reducing inter-expert redundancy. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets sourced from Web platforms and social media demonstrate the superior performance of S2MOE-F.