Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP), a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.

A Chinese Prompt Attack Dataset for LLMs with Evil Content

Large Language Models (LLMs) present significant priority in text understanding and generation. However, LLMs suffer from the risk of generating harmful contents especially while being employed to applications. There are several black-box attack methods, such as Prompt Attack, which can change the behaviour of LLMs and induce LLMs to generate unexpected answers with harmful contents. Researchers are interested in Prompt Attack and Defense with LLMs, while there is no publicly available dataset to evaluate the abilities of defending prompt attack. In this paper, we introduce a Chinese Prompt Attack Dataset for LLMs, called CPAD. Our prompts aim to induce LLMs to generate unexpected outputs with several carefully designed prompt attack approaches and widely concerned attacking contents. Different from previous datasets involving safety estimation, We construct the prompts considering three dimensions: contents, attacking methods and goals, thus the responses can be easily evaluated and analysed. We run several well-known Chinese LLMs on our dataset, and the results show that our prompts are significantly harmful to LLMs, with around 70% attack success rate. We will release CPAD to encourage further studies on prompt attack and defense.

MEDOE: A Multi-Expert Decoder and Output Ensemble Framework for Long-tailed Semantic Segmentation

Long-tailed distribution of semantic categories, which has been often ignored in conventional methods, causes unsatisfactory performance in semantic segmentation on tail categories. In this paper, we focus on the problem of long-tailed semantic segmentation. Although some long-tailed recognition methods (e.g., re-sampling/re-weighting) have been proposed in other problems, they can probably compromise crucial contextual information and are thus hardly adaptable to the problem of long-tailed semantic segmentation. To address this issue, we propose MEDOE, a novel framework for long-tailed semantic segmentation via contextual information ensemble-and-grouping. The proposed two-sage framework comprises a multi-expert decoder (MED) and a multi-expert output ensemble (MOE). Specifically, the MED includes several "experts". Based on the pixel frequency distribution, each expert takes the dataset masked according to the specific categories as input and generates contextual information self-adaptively for classification; The MOE adopts learnable decision weights for the ensemble of the experts' outputs. As a model-agnostic framework, our MEDOE can be flexibly and efficiently coupled with various popular deep neural networks (e.g., DeepLabv3+, OCRNet, and PSPNet) to improve their performance in long-tailed semantic segmentation. Experimental results show that the proposed framework outperforms the current methods on both Cityscapes and ADE20K datasets by up to 1.78% in mIoU and 5.89% in mAcc.

Hierarchical Topological Ordering with Conditional Independence Test for Limited Time Series

Learning directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to identify causal relations underlying observational data is crucial but also poses significant challenges. Recently, topology-based methods have emerged as a two-step approach to discovering DAGs by first learning the topological ordering of variables and then eliminating redundant edges, while ensuring that the graph remains acyclic. However, one limitation is that these methods would generate numerous spurious edges that require subsequent pruning. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we propose an improvement to topology-based methods by introducing limited time series data, consisting of only two cross-sectional records that need not be adjacent in time and are subject to flexible timing. By incorporating conditional instrumental variables as exogenous interventions, we aim to identify descendant nodes for each variable. Following this line, we propose a hierarchical topological ordering algorithm with conditional independence test (HT-CIT), which enables the efficient learning of sparse DAGs with a smaller search space compared to other popular approaches. The HT-CIT algorithm greatly reduces the number of edges that need to be pruned. Empirical results from synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed HT-CIT algorithm.

Bridging the Gap: Neural Collapse Inspired Prompt Tuning for Generalization under Class Imbalance

Large-scale vision-language (V-L) models have demonstrated remarkable generalization capabilities for downstream tasks through prompt tuning. However, their performance suffers significantly in the presence of class imbalance, a common issue in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we investigate the effects of class imbalance on the generalization performance of V-L models and extend Neural Collapse phenomenon to these models, revealing the geometric reasons behind the impact of class imbalance on their generalization ability. To address this problem, we propose Neural Collapse based Prompt Tuning (NPT), a novel method that optimizes prompts so that both text and image features satisfy the same simplex ETF structure. NPT incorporates two regularization terms, geometric de-biasing and multi-modal isomorphism, to enhance the robustness of V-L models under class imbalance conditions while maintaining their generalization capabilities. Our comprehensive experiments show that NPT outperforms existing prompt learning techniques across 11 diverse image recognition datasets, achieving an absolute average gain of 2.63\% for novel classes and 2.47\% for harmonic mean when facing imbalanced data.

Quantitatively Measuring and Contrastively Exploring Heterogeneity for Domain Generalization

Domain generalization (DG) is a prevalent problem in real-world applications, which aims to train well-generalized models for unseen target domains by utilizing several source domains. Since domain labels, i.e., which domain each data point is sampled from, naturally exist, most DG algorithms treat them as a kind of supervision information to improve the generalization performance. However, the original domain labels may not be the optimal supervision signal due to the lack of domain heterogeneity, i.e., the diversity among domains. For example, a sample in one domain may be closer to another domain, its original label thus can be the noise to disturb the generalization learning. Although some methods try to solve it by re-dividing domains and applying the newly generated dividing pattern, the pattern they choose may not be the most heterogeneous due to the lack of the metric for heterogeneity. In this paper, we point out that domain heterogeneity mainly lies in variant features under the invariant learning framework. With contrastive learning, we propose a learning potential-guided metric for domain heterogeneity by promoting learning variant features. Then we notice the differences between seeking variance-based heterogeneity and training invariance-based generalizable model. We thus propose a novel method called Heterogeneity-based Two-stage Contrastive Learning (HTCL) for the DG task. In the first stage, we generate the most heterogeneous dividing pattern with our contrastive metric. In the second stage, we employ an invariance-aimed contrastive learning by re-building pairs with the stable relation hinted by domains and classes, which better utilizes generated domain labels for generalization learning. Extensive experiments show HTCL better digs heterogeneity and yields great generalization performance.

Generalized Universal Domain Adaptation with Generative Flow Networks

We introduce a new problem in unsupervised domain adaptation, termed as Generalized Universal Domain Adaptation (GUDA), which aims to achieve precise prediction of all target labels including unknown categories. GUDA bridges the gap between label distribution shift-based and label space mismatch-based variants, essentially categorizing them as a unified problem, guiding to a comprehensive framework for thoroughly solving all the variants. The key challenge of GUDA is developing and identifying novel target categories while estimating the target label distribution. To address this problem, we take advantage of the powerful exploration capability of generative flow networks and propose an active domain adaptation algorithm named GFlowDA, which selects diverse samples with probabilities proportional to a reward function. To enhance the exploration capability and effectively perceive the target label distribution, we tailor the states and rewards, and introduce an efficient solution for parent exploration and state transition. We also propose a training paradigm for GUDA called Generalized Universal Adversarial Network (GUAN), which involves collaborative optimization between GUAN and GFlowNet. Theoretical analysis highlights the importance of exploration, and extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of GFlowDA.

RexUIE: A Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for Universal Information Extraction

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) is an area of interest due to the challenges posed by varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. However, previous works have only achieved limited success by unifying a few tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE), which fall short of being authentic UIE models particularly when extracting other general schemas such as quadruples and quintuples. Additionally, these models used an implicit structural schema instructor, which could lead to incorrect links between types, hindering the model's generalization and performance in low-resource scenarios. In this paper, we redefine the authentic UIE with a formal formulation that encompasses almost all extraction schemas. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce UIE for any kind of schemas. In addition, we propose RexUIE, which is a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for UIE. To avoid interference between different types, we reset the position ids and attention mask matrices. RexUIE shows strong performance under both full-shot and few-shot settings and achieves State-of-the-Art results on the tasks of extracting complex schemas.

Universal Domain Adaptation via Compressive Attention Matching

Universal domain adaptation (UniDA) aims to transfer knowledge from the source domain to the target domain without any prior knowledge about the label set. The challenge lies in how to determine whether the target samples belong to common categories. The mainstream methods make judgments based on the sample features, which overemphasizes global information while ignoring the most crucial local objects in the image, resulting in limited accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a Universal Attention Matching (UniAM) framework by exploiting the self-attention mechanism in vision transformer to capture the crucial object information. The proposed framework introduces a novel Compressive Attention Matching (CAM) approach to explore the core information by compressively representing attentions. Furthermore, CAM incorporates a residual-based measurement to determine the sample commonness. By utilizing the measurement, UniAM achieves domain-wise and category-wise Common Feature Alignment (CFA) and Target Class Separation (TCS). Notably, UniAM is the first method utilizing the attention in vision transformer directly to perform classification tasks. Extensive experiments show that UniAM outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on various benchmark datasets.

IDEAL: Toward High-efficiency Device-Cloud Collaborative and Dynamic Recommendation System

Recommendation systems have shown great potential to solve the information explosion problem and enhance user experience in various online applications, which recently present two emerging trends: (i) Collaboration: single-sided model trained on-cloud (separate learning) to the device-cloud collaborative recommendation (collaborative learning). (ii) Real-time Dynamic: the network parameters are the same across all the instances (static model) to adaptive network parameters generation conditioned on the real-time instances (dynamic model). The aforementioned two trends enable the device-cloud collaborative and dynamic recommendation, which deeply exploits the recommendation pattern among cloud-device data and efficiently characterizes different instances with different underlying distributions based on the cost of frequent device-cloud communication. Despite promising, we argue that most of the communications are unnecessary to request the new parameters of the recommendation system on the cloud since the on-device data distribution are not always changing. To alleviate this issue, we designed a Intelligent DEvice-Cloud PArameter Request ModeL (IDEAL) that can be deployed on the device to calculate the request revenue with low resource consumption, so as to ensure the adaptive device-cloud communication with high revenue. We envision a new device intelligence learning task to implement IDEAL by detecting the data out-of-domain. Moreover, we map the user's real-time behavior to a normal distribution, the uncertainty is calculated by the multi-sampling outputs to measure the generalization ability of the device model to the current user behavior. Our experimental study demonstrates IDEAL's effectiveness and generalizability on four public benchmarks, which yield a higher efficient device-cloud collaborative and dynamic recommendation paradigm.