SEG:Seeds-Enhanced Iterative Refinement Graph Neural Network for Entity Alignment

Entity alignment is crucial for merging knowledge across knowledge graphs, as it matches entities with identical semantics. The standard method matches these entities based on their embedding similarities using semi-supervised learning. However, diverse data sources lead to non-isomorphic neighborhood structures for aligned entities, complicating alignment, especially for less common and sparsely connected entities. This paper presents a soft label propagation framework that integrates multi-source data and iterative seed enhancement, addressing scalability challenges in handling extensive datasets where scale computing excels. The framework uses seeds for anchoring and selects optimal relationship pairs to create soft labels rich in neighborhood features and semantic relationship data. A bidirectional weighted joint loss function is implemented, which reduces the distance between positive samples and differentially processes negative samples, taking into account the non-isomorphic neighborhood structures. Our method outperforms existing semi-supervised approaches, as evidenced by superior results on multiple datasets, significantly improving the quality of entity alignment.

Graph Contrastive Learning via Cluster-refined Negative Sampling for Semi-supervised Text Classification

Graph contrastive learning (GCL) has been widely applied to text classification tasks due to its ability to generate self-supervised signals from unlabeled data, thus facilitating model training. However, existing GCL-based text classification methods often suffer from negative sampling bias, where similar nodes are incorrectly paired as negative pairs. This can lead to over-clustering, where instances of the same class are divided into different clusters. To address the over-clustering issue, we propose an innovative GCL-based method of graph contrastive learning via cluster-refined negative sampling for semi-supervised text classification, namely ClusterText. Firstly, we combine the pre-trained model Bert with graph neural networks to learn text representations. Secondly, we introduce a clustering refinement strategy, which clusters the learned text representations to obtain pseudo labels. For each text node, its negative sample set is drawn from different clusters. Additionally, we propose a self-correction mechanism to mitigate the loss of true negative samples caused by clustering inconsistency. By calculating the Euclidean distance between each text node and other nodes within the same cluster, distant nodes are still selected as negative samples. Our proposed ClusterText demonstrates good scalable computing, as it can effectively extract important information from from a large amount of data. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of ClusterText in text classification tasks.

MCSFF: Multi-modal Consistency and Specificity Fusion Framework for Entity Alignment

Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) is essential for enhancing knowledge graphs and improving information retrieval and question-answering systems. Existing methods often focus on integrating modalities through their complementarity but overlook the specificity of each modality, which can obscure crucial features and reduce alignment accuracy. To solve this, we propose the Multi-modal Consistency and Specificity Fusion Framework (MCSFF), which innovatively integrates both complementary and specific aspects of modalities. We utilize Scale Computing's hyper-converged infrastructure to optimize IT management and resource allocation in large-scale data processing. Our framework first computes similarity matrices for each modality using modality embeddings to preserve their unique characteristics. Then, an iterative update method denoises and enhances modality features to fully express critical information. Finally, we integrate the updated information from all modalities to create enriched and precise entity representations. Experiments show our method outperforms current state-of-the-art MMEA baselines on the MMKG dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness and practical potential.

Masked Graph Learning with Recurrent Alignment for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Since Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC) can be applied to public opinion monitoring, intelligent dialogue robots, and other fields, it has received extensive research attention in recent years. Unlike traditional unimodal emotion recognition, MERC can fuse complementary semantic information between multiple modalities (e.g., text, audio, and vision) to improve emotion recognition. However, previous work ignored the inter-modal alignment process and the intra-modal noise information before multimodal fusion but directly fuses multimodal features, which will hinder the model for representation learning. In this study, we have developed a novel approach called Masked Graph Learning with Recursive Alignment (MGLRA) to tackle this problem, which uses a recurrent iterative module with memory to align multimodal features, and then uses the masked GCN for multimodal feature fusion. First, we employ LSTM to capture contextual information and use a graph attention-filtering mechanism to eliminate noise effectively within the modality. Second, we build a recurrent iteration module with a memory function, which can use communication between different modalities to eliminate the gap between modalities and achieve the preliminary alignment of features between modalities. Then, a cross-modal multi-head attention mechanism is introduced to achieve feature alignment between modalities and construct a masked GCN for multimodal feature fusion, which can perform random mask reconstruction on the nodes in the graph to obtain better node feature representation. Finally, we utilize a multilayer perceptron (MLP) for emotion recognition. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets (i.e., IEMOCAP and MELD) demonstrate that {MGLRA} outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

A Multi-view Mask Contrastive Learning Graph Convolutional Neural Network for Age Estimation

The age estimation task aims to use facial features to predict the age of people and is widely used in public security, marketing, identification, and other fields. However, the features are mainly concentrated in facial keypoints, and existing CNN and Transformer-based methods have inflexibility and redundancy for modeling complex irregular structures. Therefore, this paper proposes a Multi-view Mask Contrastive Learning Graph Convolutional Neural Network (MMCL-GCN) for age estimation. Specifically, the overall structure of the MMCL-GCN network contains a feature extraction stage and an age estimation stage. In the feature extraction stage, we introduce a graph structure to construct face images as input and then design a Multi-view Mask Contrastive Learning (MMCL) mechanism to learn complex structural and semantic information about face images. The learning mechanism employs an asymmetric siamese network architecture, which utilizes an online encoder-decoder structure to reconstruct the missing information from the original graph and utilizes the target encoder to learn latent representations for contrastive learning. Furthermore, to promote the two learning mechanisms better compatible and complementary, we adopt two augmentation strategies and optimize the joint losses. In the age estimation stage, we design a Multi-layer Extreme Learning Machine (ML-IELM) with identity mapping to fully use the features extracted by the online encoder. Then, a classifier and a regressor were constructed based on ML-IELM, which were used to identify the age grouping interval and accurately estimate the final age. Extensive experiments show that MMCL-GCN can effectively reduce the error of age estimation on benchmark datasets such as Adience, MORPH-II, and LAP-2016.

Efficient Long-distance Latent Relation-aware Graph Neural Network for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversations

The task of multi-modal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) aims to analyze the genuine emotional state of each utterance based on the multi-modal information in the conversation, which is crucial for conversation understanding. Existing methods focus on using graph neural networks (GNN) to model conversational relationships and capture contextual latent semantic relationships. However, due to the complexity of GNN, existing methods cannot efficiently capture the potential dependencies between long-distance utterances, which limits the performance of MERC. In this paper, we propose an Efficient Long-distance Latent Relation-aware Graph Neural Network (ELR-GNN) for multi-modal emotion recognition in conversations. Specifically, we first use pre-extracted text, video and audio features as input to Bi-LSTM to capture contextual semantic information and obtain low-level utterance features. Then, we use low-level utterance features to construct a conversational emotion interaction graph. To efficiently capture the potential dependencies between long-distance utterances, we use the dilated generalized forward push algorithm to precompute the emotional propagation between global utterances and design an emotional relation-aware operator to capture the potential semantic associations between different utterances. Furthermore, we combine early fusion and adaptive late fusion mechanisms to fuse latent dependency information between speaker relationship information and context. Finally, we obtain high-level discourse features and feed them into MLP for emotion prediction. Extensive experimental results show that ELR-GNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark datasets IEMOCAP and MELD, with running times reduced by 52\% and 35\%, respectively.

Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation: Addressing Long-Tail Challenges in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of capabilities from larger teacher LLMs to more compact student models. Particularly, sequence-level KD, which distills rationale-based reasoning processes instead of merely final outcomes, shows great potential in enhancing students' reasoning capabilities. However, current methods struggle with sequence level KD under long-tailed data distributions, adversely affecting generalization on sparsely represented domains. We introduce the Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation (BalDistill) framework, which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget. By dynamically selecting representative head domain examples and synthesizing tail domain examples, BalDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models.

Teaching-Assistant-in-the-Loop: Improving Knowledge Distillation from Imperfect Teacher Models in Low-Budget Scenarios

There is increasing interest in distilling task-specific knowledge from large language models (LLM) to smaller student models. Nonetheless, LLM distillation presents a dual challenge: 1) there is a high cost associated with querying the teacher LLM, such as GPT-4, for gathering an ample number of demonstrations; 2) the teacher LLM might provide imperfect outputs with a negative impact on the student's learning process. To enhance sample efficiency within resource-constrained, imperfect teacher scenarios, we propose a three-component framework leveraging three signal types. The first signal is the student's self-consistency (consistency of student multiple outputs), which is a proxy of the student's confidence. Specifically, we introduce a ``teaching assistant'' (TA) model to assess the uncertainty of both the student's and the teacher's outputs via confidence scoring, which serves as another two signals for student training. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage training schema to first warm up the student with a small proportion of data to better utilize student's signal. Experiments have shown the superiority of our proposed framework for four complex reasoning tasks. On average, our proposed two-stage framework brings a relative improvement of up to 20.79% compared to fine-tuning without any signals across datasets.

Revisiting Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation from the Perspective of Graph Spectrum

Efficiently capturing consistent and complementary semantic features in a multimodal conversation context is crucial for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (MERC). Existing methods mainly use graph structures to model dialogue context semantic dependencies and employ Graph Neural Networks (GNN) to capture multimodal semantic features for emotion recognition. However, these methods are limited by some inherent characteristics of GNN, such as over-smoothing and low-pass filtering, resulting in the inability to learn long-distance consistency information and complementary information efficiently. Since consistency and complementarity information correspond to low-frequency and high-frequency information, respectively, this paper revisits the problem of multimodal emotion recognition in conversation from the perspective of the graph spectrum. Specifically, we propose a Graph-Spectrum-based Multimodal Consistency and Complementary collaborative learning framework GS-MCC. First, GS-MCC uses a sliding window to construct a multimodal interaction graph to model conversational relationships and uses efficient Fourier graph operators to extract long-distance high-frequency and low-frequency information, respectively. Then, GS-MCC uses contrastive learning to construct self-supervised signals that reflect complementarity and consistent semantic collaboration with high and low-frequency signals, thereby improving the ability of high and low-frequency information to reflect real emotions. Finally, GS-MCC inputs the collaborative high and low-frequency information into the MLP network and softmax function for emotion prediction. Extensive experiments have proven the superiority of the GS-MCC architecture proposed in this paper on two benchmark data sets.

The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education

Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic factors, preventing teachers from getting timely and frequent feedback. Different from prior research that mostly focuses on low-inference instructional practices on a singular basis, this paper presents the first study that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in two distinct educational settings: in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. This is also the first study that applies NLP to measure a teaching practice that is widely acknowledged to be particularly effective for students with special needs. We confront two challenges inherent in NLP-based instructional analysis, including noisy and long input data and highly skewed distributions of human ratings. Our results suggest that pretrained Language Models (PLMs) demonstrate performances comparable to the agreement level of human raters for variables that are more discrete and require lower inference, but their efficacy diminishes with more complex teaching practices. Interestingly, using only teachers' utterances as input yields strong results for student-centered variables, alleviating common concerns over the difficulty of collecting and transcribing high-quality student speech data in in-person teaching settings. Our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of current NLP techniques in the education domain, opening avenues for further exploration.