AgentRE: An Agent-Based Framework for Navigating Complex Information Landscapes in Relation Extraction

The relation extraction (RE) in complex scenarios faces challenges such as diverse relation types and ambiguous relations between entities within a single sentence, leading to the poor performance of pure "text-in, text-out" language models (LMs). To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose an agent-based RE framework, namely AgentRE, which fully leverages the potential of large language models (LLMs) including memory, retrieval and reflection, to achieve RE in complex scenarios. Specifically, three major modules are built in AgentRE serving as the tools to help the agent acquire and process various useful information, thereby obtaining improved RE performance. Our extensive experimental results upon two datasets in English and Chinese demonstrate our AgentRE's superior performance, especially in low-resource scenarios. Additionally, the trajectories generated by AgentRE can be refined to construct a high-quality training dataset incorporating different reasoning methods, which can be used to fine-tune smaller models. Code is available at https://github.com/Lightblues/AgentRE.

CoopASD: Cooperative Machine Anomalous Sound Detection with Privacy Concerns

Machine anomalous sound detection (ASD) has emerged as one of the most promising applications in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) due to its unprecedented efficacy in mitigating risks of malfunctions and promoting production efficiency. Previous works mainly investigated the machine ASD task under centralized settings. However, developing the ASD system under decentralized settings is crucial in practice, since the machine data are dispersed in various factories and the data should not be explicitly shared due to privacy concerns. To enable these factories to cooperatively develop a scalable ASD model while preserving their privacy, we propose a novel framework named CoopASD, where each factory trains an ASD model on its local dataset, and a central server aggregates these local models periodically. We employ a pre-trained model as the backbone of the ASD model to improve its robustness and develop specialized techniques to stabilize the model under a completely non-iid and domain shift setting. Compared with previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) models trained in centralized settings, CoopASD showcases competitive results with negligible degradation of 0.08%. We also conduct extensive ablation studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of CoopASD.

Subgoal-based Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Collaboration

Recent advancements in reinforcement learning have made significant impacts across various domains, yet they often struggle in complex multi-agent environments due to issues like algorithm instability, low sampling efficiency, and the challenges of exploration and dimensionality explosion. Hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) offers a structured approach to decompose complex tasks into simpler sub-tasks, which is promising for multi-agent settings. This paper advances the field by introducing a hierarchical architecture that autonomously generates effective subgoals without explicit constraints, enhancing both flexibility and stability in training. We propose a dynamic goal generation strategy that adapts based on environmental changes. This method significantly improves the adaptability and sample efficiency of the learning process. Furthermore, we address the critical issue of credit assignment in multi-agent systems by synergizing our hierarchical architecture with a modified QMIX network, thus improving overall strategy coordination and efficiency. Comparative experiments with mainstream reinforcement learning algorithms demonstrate the superior convergence speed and performance of our approach in both single-agent and multi-agent environments, confirming its effectiveness and flexibility in complex scenarios. Our code is open-sourced at: \url{https://github.com/SICC-Group/GMAH}.

Unleashing the Power of Data Tsunami: A Comprehensive Survey on Data Assessment and Selection for Instruction Tuning of Language Models

Instruction tuning plays a critical role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preference. Despite the vast amount of open instruction datasets, naively training a LLM on all existing instructions may not be optimal and practical. To pinpoint the most beneficial datapoints, data assessment and selection methods have been proposed in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and deep learning. However, under the context of instruction tuning, there still exists a gap in knowledge on what kind of data evaluation metrics can be employed and how they can be integrated into the selection mechanism. To bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive review on existing literature of data assessment and selection especially for instruction tuning of LLMs. We systematically categorize all applicable methods into quality-based, diversity-based, and importance-based ones where a unified, fine-grained taxonomy is structured. For each category, representative methods are elaborated to describe the landscape of relevant research. In addition, comparison between latest methods is conducted on their officially reported results to provide in-depth discussions on their limitations. Finally, we summarize the open challenges and propose the promosing avenues for future studies. All related contents are available at https://github.com/yuleiqin/fantastic-data-engineering.

Dynamic Deep Factor Graph for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

This work introduces a novel value decomposition algorithm, termed \textit{Dynamic Deep Factor Graphs} (DDFG). Unlike traditional coordination graphs, DDFG leverages factor graphs to articulate the decomposition of value functions, offering enhanced flexibility and adaptability to complex value function structures. Central to DDFG is a graph structure generation policy that innovatively generates factor graph structures on-the-fly, effectively addressing the dynamic collaboration requirements among agents. DDFG strikes an optimal balance between the computational overhead associated with aggregating value functions and the performance degradation inherent in their complete decomposition. Through the application of the max-sum algorithm, DDFG efficiently identifies optimal policies. We empirically validate DDFG's efficacy in complex scenarios, including higher-order predator-prey tasks and the StarCraft II Multi-agent Challenge (SMAC), thus underscoring its capability to surmount the limitations faced by existing value decomposition algorithms. DDFG emerges as a robust solution for MARL challenges that demand nuanced understanding and facilitation of dynamic agent collaboration. The implementation of DDFG is made publicly accessible, with the source code available at \url{https://github.com/SICC-Group/DDFG}.

P-ICL: Point In-Context Learning for Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models

In recent years, the rise of large language models (LLMs) has made it possible to directly achieve named entity recognition (NER) without any demonstration samples or only using a few samples through in-context learning (ICL). However, standard ICL only helps LLMs understand task instructions, format and input-label mapping, but neglects the particularity of the NER task itself. In this paper, we propose a new prompting framework P-ICL to better achieve NER with LLMs, in which some point entities are leveraged as the auxiliary information to recognize each entity type. With such significant information, the LLM can achieve entity classification more precisely. To obtain optimal point entities for prompting LLMs, we also proposed a point entity selection method based on K-Means clustering. Our extensive experiments on some representative NER benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed strategies in P-ICL and point entity selection.

Negation Triplet Extraction with Syntactic Dependency and Semantic Consistency

Previous works of negation understanding mainly focus on negation cue detection and scope resolution, without identifying negation subject which is also significant to the downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new negation triplet extraction (NTE) task which aims to extract negation subject along with negation cue and scope. To achieve NTE, we devise a novel Syntax&Semantic-Enhanced Negation Extraction model, namely SSENE, which is built based on a generative pretrained language model (PLM) {of Encoder-Decoder architecture} with a multi-task learning framework. Specifically, the given sentence's syntactic dependency tree is incorporated into the PLM's encoder to discover the correlations between the negation subject, cue and scope. Moreover, the semantic consistency between the sentence and the extracted triplet is ensured by an auxiliary task learning. Furthermore, we have constructed a high-quality Chinese dataset NegComment based on the users' reviews from the real-world platform of Meituan, upon which our evaluations show that SSENE achieves the best NTE performance compared to the baselines. Our ablation and case studies also demonstrate that incorporating the syntactic information helps the PLM's recognize the distant dependency between the subject and cue, and the auxiliary task learning is helpful to extract the negation triplets with more semantic consistency.

ToNER: Type-oriented Named Entity Recognition with Generative Language Model

In recent years, the fine-tuned generative models have been proven more powerful than the previous tagging-based or span-based models on named entity recognition (NER) task. It has also been found that the information related to entities, such as entity types, can prompt a model to achieve NER better. However, it is not easy to determine the entity types indeed existing in the given sentence in advance, and inputting too many potential entity types would distract the model inevitably. To exploit entity types' merit on promoting NER task, in this paper we propose a novel NER framework, namely ToNER based on a generative model. In ToNER, a type matching model is proposed at first to identify the entity types most likely to appear in the sentence. Then, we append a multiple binary classification task to fine-tune the generative model's encoder, so as to generate the refined representation of the input sentence. Moreover, we add an auxiliary task for the model to discover the entity types which further fine-tunes the model to output more accurate results. Our extensive experiments on some NER benchmarks verify the effectiveness of our proposed strategies in ToNER that are oriented towards entity types' exploitation.

CARSS: Cooperative Attention-guided Reinforcement Subpath Synthesis for Solving Traveling Salesman Problem

This paper introduces CARSS (Cooperative Attention-guided Reinforcement Subpath Synthesis), a novel approach to address the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) by leveraging cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). CARSS decomposes the TSP solving process into two distinct yet synergistic steps: "subpath generation" and "subpath merging." In the former, a cooperative MARL framework is employed to iteratively generate subpaths using multiple agents. In the latter, these subpaths are progressively merged to form a complete cycle. The algorithm's primary objective is to enhance efficiency in terms of training memory consumption, testing time, and scalability, through the adoption of a multi-agent divide and conquer paradigm. Notably, attention mechanisms play a pivotal role in feature embedding and parameterization strategies within CARSS. The training of the model is facilitated by the independent REINFORCE algorithm. Empirical experiments reveal CARSS's superiority compared to single-agent alternatives: it demonstrates reduced GPU memory utilization, accommodates training graphs nearly 2.5 times larger, and exhibits the potential for scaling to even more extensive problem sizes. Furthermore, CARSS substantially reduces testing time and optimization gaps by approximately 50% for TSP instances of up to 1000 vertices, when compared to standard decoding methods.

FedNC: A Secure and Efficient Federated Learning Method Inspired by Network Coding

Federated Learning (FL) is a promising distributed learning mechanism which still faces two major challenges, namely privacy breaches and system efficiency. In this work, we reconceptualize the FL system from the perspective of network information theory, and formulate an original FL communication framework, FedNC, which is inspired by Network Coding (NC). The main idea of FedNC is mixing the information of the local models by making random linear combinations of the original packets, before uploading for further aggregation. Due to the benefits of the coding scheme, both theoretical and experimental analysis indicate that FedNC improves the performance of traditional FL in several important ways, including security, throughput, and robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework where NC is introduced in FL. As FL continues to evolve within practical network frameworks, more applications and variants can be further designed based on FedNC.