|
I am a PhD student at the School of Computing (SoC), National University of Singapore (NUS), majoring in Computer Science. I am fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Byran Hooi.
Previously, I worked as a research intern at:
Email / Github / Google Scholar / Twitter |
|
|
The big picture of my research interests lies in democratizing data intelligence to empower people and organizations to derive insights, learn and share knowledge, and build intelligence to turn data into action. Regardless of the various forms of data, understanding, generation, and interaction are the three common themes. Data understanding aims to achieve semantic understanding of various types of data; Data generation aims for automatic content generation based on users' needs; and Data interaction aims to create unparalleled user experiences working with data like recommendation or information retrieval. Specifically, I am interested in the following topics: Development of Large Language Model , Semi-structured Data Modeling & Reasoning , Knowledge Representation Learning , Causal Inference .
A few questions that drive my recent research are:
|
|
|
|
|
|
Yuan Sui, Jiaru Zou, Mengyu Zhou, Xinyi He, Lun Du, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang Preprint, 2023 Table reasoning has shown remarkable progress in a wide range of table-based tasks. This challenging task requires reasoning over both free-form natural language (NL) questions and semi-structured tabular data. However, previous table reasoning solutions suffer from significant performance degradation on ``huge'' tables. In addition, most existing methods struggle to reason over complex questions since lacking of essential information or they are scattered in different places. To alleviate the above challenges, we exploit a table provider on versatile sampling, augmentation and packing methods to achieve effective table reasoning using large language models (LLMs), which 1) decomposes the raw table into sub-table with specific rows/columns based on the rules or semantic similarity; 2) augments the table information by extracting semantic and statistical metadata from the raw table, and retrieving relevant knowledge from trustworthy knowledge sources (e.g., Wolfram Alpha, Wikipedia). 3) packs the table information with the augmented knowledge into a sequence for LLMs reasoning while balancing the token allocation trade-off. Experiment results illustrate that TAP4LLM not only demonstrates commendable performance across various tabular reasoning tasks but also serves as a systematic framework. It allows for different components as plug-ins, enhancing LLMs' understanding of structured data in diverse tabular tasks. |
|
Yuan Sui, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Shi Han and Dongmei Zhang Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM'24), Long Paper, 2023, Blog Large language models (LLMs) are becoming attractive as few-shot reasoners to solve Natural Language (NL)-related tasks. However, there is still much to learn about how well LLMs understand structured data, such as tables. While it is true that tables can be used as inputs to LLMs with serialization, there lack comprehensive studies examining whether LLMs can truly comprehend such data. In this paper, we try to understand this by designing a benchmark to evaluate the structural understanding capabilities (SUC) of LLMs. The benchmark we create includes seven tasks, each with their own unique challenges, e.g., cell lookup, row retrieval, and size detection. We run a series of evaluations on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. We discover that the performance varied depending on a number of input choices, including table input format, content order, role prompting, and partition marks. Drawing from the insights gained through the benchmark evaluations, we then propose self-augmentation for effective structural prompting, e.g., critical value / range identification using LLMs' internal knowledge. When combined with carefully chosen input choices, these structural prompting methods lead to promising improvements in LLM performance on a variety of tabular tasks, e.g., TabFact(up 2.31%), HybridQA(up 2.13%), SQA(up 2.72%), Feverous(up 0.84%), and ToTTo(up 5.68%). We believe that our benchmark and proposed prompting methods can serve as a simple yet generic selection for future research. The code and data are released in \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/StructuredLLM-76F3}. |
|
Weicheng Ma, Junhwi Kim, Yuan Sui, Chunyuan Deng, Lili Wang and Soroush Vosoughi Preprint, 2023 Cross-lingual models, which are fine-tuned only in source languages, are typically weaker than multi-lingual models, which are fine-tuned in both source and target languages. However, cross-lingual models are crucial for low-resource languages as they do not require task-specific annotated training data for these languages. This paper investigates the causes of this performance gap by providing an in-depth analysis of cross-lingual and multi-lingual Transformer models fine-tuned on two natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Our findings suggest two possible causes: multi-lingual models (1) have better text-domain consistency with target languages, and (2) are better able to extract and encode certain linguistic features that contribute to the NLU objectives in the target languages. Based on these findings, we propose and evaluate two methods for improving cross-lingual models: (1) target-language text-domain adaptation using masked language modeling and (2) feature augmentation guided by model probing. Our experiments show that applying these methods to cross-lingual models can lead to gains in performance, thus closing the performance gap between cross- and multi-lingual models. These results also provide general empirical guidance for efficient data augmentation for cross-lingual fine-tuning. |
|
Wei Yan, Yu Shi, Zengyan Ji, Yuan Sui, Zhenzhen Tian, Wanjing Wang, Qiushi Cao Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence , 2023 (IF=8) In the manufacturing industry, a hydraulic system harnesses liquid fluid power to create powerful machines. Under the trend of Industry 4.0, the predictive maintenance of hydraulic systems is transforming to more intelligent and automated approaches that leverage the strong power of artificial intelligence and data science technologies. However, due to the knowledge-intensive and heterogeneous nature of the manufacturing domain, the data and information required for predictive maintenance are normally collected from ubiquitous sensing networks. This leads to the gap between massive heterogeneous data/information resources in hydraulic system components and the limited cognitive ability of system users. Moreover, how to capture and structure useful domain knowledge (in a machine-readable way) for solving domain-specific tasks remains an open challenge for the predictive maintenance of hydraulic systems. To address these challenges, in this paper we propose a virtual knowledge graph-based approach for the digital modeling and intelligent predictive analytics of hydraulic systems. We evaluate the functionalities and effectiveness of the proposed approach on a predictive maintenance task under real-world industrial contexts. Results show that our proposed approach is capable and feasible to be implemented for digital modeling, data access, data integration, and predictive analytics. |
|
Yuan Sui, Shanshan Feng, Huaxiang Zhang, Jian Cao, Liang Hu, Nengjun Zhu Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS), 2022 (IF=8.139) To improve the performance of knowledge graph-based question answering system (KGQA), several approaches have been developed to construct a semantic parser based on entity linking, relation identification and logical/numerical structure identification. However, existing methods arrive at answers only by maximizing the data likelihood only on the sparse or imbalanced explicit relations, ignoring the potentially large number of latent relations. It makes KGQA suffer from a high level of spurious entity relations and missing link challenge. In this paper, we propose a causal filter (CF) model for KGQA (CF-KGQA), which performs causal interference on the relation representation space to reduce the spurious relation representation in a data-driven manner, i.e., the goal of this work is to comprehensively discover disentangled latent factors to alleviate the spurious correlation problem in KGQA. The model comprises a causal pairwise aggregator (AP) and a disentangled latent factor aggregator (AC). The former filters out most spurious entity relations inconsistent to their dense groups' neighborhood, and generates a causal pairwise matrix among all the candidate relations. The latter learns the latent relation representation via an encoder-decoder on the causal pairwise matrix. It disconnects the latent factor and the causal confounder beneath the knowledge embedding space by causal intervention. To prove the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach, we test CF-KGQA and other state-of-the-art methods on four public real-world datasets. The experiments indicate that our approach outperforms the recent methods and is also less sensitive to the spurious correlation problem, thus demonstrating the robustness of CF-KGQA. |
|
Yuan Sui, Fanyang Bu, Yingting Hu, Wei Yan, Liang Zhang International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN'22), Long Paper, 2022 (oral) Nested named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify the entity boundaries and recognize categories of the named entities in a complex hierarchical sentence. Some works have been done using character-level, word-level, or lexicon-level based models. However, such researches ignore the role of the complementary annotations. In this paper, we propose a trigger-based graph neural network (Trigger-GNN) to leverage the nested NER. It obtains the complementary annotation embeddings through entity trigger encoding and semantic matching, and tackle nested entity utilizing an efficient graph message passing architecture, aggregation-update mode. We posit that using entity triggers as external annotations can add in complementary supervision signals on the whole sentences. It helps the model to learn and generalize more efficiently and cost-effectively. Experiments show that the Trigger-GNN consistently outperforms the baselines on four public NER datasets, and it can effectively alleviate the nested NER. |
|
|
|
Data,
Knowledge, and Intelligence Group
,
Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA)
Research Intern | Aug. 2022 to June. 2023 Advisor: Dr. Mengyu Zhou |
|
Minds,
Machines and Society Lab, Dartmouth College
Research Intern | June. 2022 to Feb. 2023 Advisor: Prof. Soroush Vosoughi |
|
Visual Information
Processing and Learning (VIPL)Lab, ICT,
Chinese Academy of Sciences
Research Intern | Feb. 2022 to June. 2022 Advisor: Prof. Shuhui Wang |
|
-->
|
|
Updated at Oct. 2023
Thanks Jon Barron
& Tairan He
for this amazing template.
|