Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation for Dynamic Few-shot Text Classification

Text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing, pivotal to various applications such as query optimization, data integration, and schema matching. While neural network-based models, such as CNN and BERT, have demonstrated remarkable performance in text classification, their effectiveness heavily relies on abundant labeled training data. This dependency makes these models less effective in dynamic few-shot text classification, where labeled data is scarce, and target labels frequently evolve based on application needs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise due to their extensive pretraining and contextual understanding. Current approaches provide LLMs with text inputs, candidate labels, and additional side information (e.g., descriptions) to predict text labels. However, their effectiveness is hindered by the increased input size and the noise introduced through side information processing. To address these limitations, we propose a graph-based online retrieval-augmented generation framework, namely GORAG, for dynamic few-shot text classification. GORAG constructs and maintains an adaptive information graph by extracting side information across all target texts, rather than treating each input independently. It employs a weighted edge mechanism to prioritize the importance and reliability of extracted information and dynamically retrieves relevant context using a minimum-cost spanning tree tailored for each text input. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that GORAG outperforms existing approaches by providing more comprehensive and accurate contextual information.

GLFC: Unified Global-Local Feature and Contrast Learning with Mamba-Enhanced UNet for Synthetic CT Generation from CBCT

Generating synthetic Computed Tomography (CT) images from Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) is desirable for improving the image quality of CBCT. Existing synthetic CT (sCT) generation methods using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Transformers often face difficulties in effectively capturing both global and local features and contrasts for high-quality sCT generation. In this work, we propose a Global-Local Feature and Contrast learning (GLFC) framework for sCT generation. First, a Mamba-Enhanced UNet (MEUNet) is introduced by integrating Mamba blocks into the skip connections of a high-resolution UNet for effective global and local feature learning. Second, we propose a Multiple Contrast Loss (MCL) that calculates synthetic loss at different intensity windows to improve quality for both soft tissues and bone regions. Experiments on the SynthRAD2023 dataset demonstrate that GLFC improved the SSIM of sCT from 77.91% to 91.50% compared with the original CBCT, and significantly outperformed several existing methods for sCT generation. The code is available at https://github.com/intelland/GLFC

Revisiting Graph Neural Networks on Graph-level Tasks: Comprehensive Experiments, Analysis, and Improvements

Graphs are essential data structures for modeling complex interactions in domains such as social networks, molecular structures, and biological systems. Graph-level tasks, which predict properties or classes for the entire graph, are critical for applications, such as molecular property prediction and subgraph counting. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown promise in these tasks, but their evaluations are often limited to narrow datasets, tasks, and inconsistent experimental setups, restricting their generalizability. To address these limitations, we propose a unified evaluation framework for graph-level GNNs. This framework provides a standardized setting to evaluate GNNs across diverse datasets, various graph tasks (e.g., graph classification and regression), and challenging scenarios, including noisy, imbalanced, and few-shot graphs. Additionally, we propose a novel GNN model with enhanced expressivity and generalization capabilities. Specifically, we enhance the expressivity of GNNs through a $k$-path rooted subgraph approach, enabling the model to effectively count subgraphs (e.g., paths and cycles). Moreover, we introduce a unified graph contrastive learning algorithm for graphs across diverse domains, which adaptively removes unimportant edges to augment graphs, thereby significantly improving generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance against fourteen effective baselines across twenty-seven graph datasets, establishing it as a robust and generalizable model for graph-level tasks.

STARFormer: A Novel Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Reorganization Transformer of FMRI for Brain Disorder Diagnosis

Many existing methods that use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) classify brain disorders, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), often overlook the integration of spatial and temporal dependencies of the blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals, which may lead to inaccurate or imprecise classification results. To solve this problem, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Aggregation eorganization ransformer (STARFormer) that effectively captures both spatial and temporal features of BOLD signals by incorporating three key modules. The region of interest (ROI) spatial structure analysis module uses eigenvector centrality (EC) to reorganize brain regions based on effective connectivity, highlighting critical spatial relationships relevant to the brain disorder. The temporal feature reorganization module systematically segments the time series into equal-dimensional window tokens and captures multiscale features through variable window and cross-window attention. The spatio-temporal feature fusion module employs a parallel transformer architecture with dedicated temporal and spatial branches to extract integrated features. The proposed STARFormer has been rigorously evaluated on two publicly available datasets for the classification of ASD and ADHD. The experimental results confirm that the STARFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple evaluation metrics, providing a more accurate and reliable tool for the diagnosis of brain disorders and biomedical research. The codes will be available at: https://github.com/NZWANG/STARFormer.

E2EDiff: Direct Mapping from Noise to Data for Enhanced Diffusion Models

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful framework for generative modeling, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various tasks. However, they face several inherent limitations, including a training-sampling gap, information leakage in the progressive noising process, and the inability to incorporate advanced loss functions like perceptual and adversarial losses during training. To address these challenges, we propose an innovative end-to-end training framework that aligns the training and sampling processes by directly optimizing the final reconstruction output. Our method eliminates the training-sampling gap, mitigates information leakage by treating the training process as a direct mapping from pure noise to the target data distribution, and enables the integration of perceptual and adversarial losses into the objective. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as COCO30K and HW30K demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms traditional diffusion models, achieving superior results in terms of FID and CLIP score, even with reduced sampling steps. These findings highlight the potential of end-to-end training to advance diffusion-based generative models toward more robust and efficient solutions.

A Survey on Large Language Model Acceleration based on KV Cache Management

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized a wide range of domains such as natural language processing, computer vision, and multi-modal tasks due to their ability to comprehend context and perform logical reasoning. However, the computational and memory demands of LLMs, particularly during inference, pose significant challenges when scaling them to real-world, long-context, and real-time applications. Key-Value (KV) cache management has emerged as a critical optimization technique for accelerating LLM inference by reducing redundant computations and improving memory utilization. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of KV cache management strategies for LLM acceleration, categorizing them into token-level, model-level, and system-level optimizations. Token-level strategies include KV cache selection, budget allocation, merging, quantization, and low-rank decomposition, while model-level optimizations focus on architectural innovations and attention mechanisms to enhance KV reuse. System-level approaches address memory management, scheduling, and hardware-aware designs to improve efficiency across diverse computing environments. Additionally, the survey provides an overview of both text and multimodal datasets and benchmarks used to evaluate these strategies. By presenting detailed taxonomies and comparative analyses, this work aims to offer useful insights for researchers and practitioners to support the development of efficient and scalable KV cache management techniques, contributing to the practical deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. The curated paper list for KV cache management is in: \href{https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/Awesome-KV-Cache-Management}{https://github.com/TreeAI-Lab/Awesome-KV-Cache-Management}.

STAHGNet: Modeling Hybrid-grained Heterogenous Dependency Efficiently for Traffic Prediction

Traffic flow prediction plays a critical role in the intelligent transportation system, and it is also a challenging task because of the underlying complex Spatio-temporal patterns and heterogeneities evolving across time. However, most present works mostly concentrate on solely capturing Spatial-temporal dependency or extracting implicit similarity graphs, but the hybrid-granularity evolution is ignored in their modeling process. In this paper, we proposed a novel data-driven end-to-end framework, named Spatio-Temporal Aware Hybrid Graph Network (STAHGNet), to couple the hybrid-grained heterogeneous correlations in series simultaneously through an elaborately Hybrid Graph Attention Module (HGAT) and Coarse-granularity Temporal Graph (CTG) generator. Furthermore, an automotive feature engineering with domain knowledge and a random neighbor sampling strategy is utilized to improve efficiency and reduce computational complexity. The MAE, RMSE, and MAPE are used for evaluation metrics. Tested on four real-life datasets, our proposal outperforms eight classical baselines and four state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods (e.g., MAE 14.82 on PeMSD3; MAE 18.92 on PeMSD4). Besides, extensive experiments and visualizations verify the effectiveness of each component in STAHGNet. In terms of computational cost, STAHGNet saves at least four times the space compared to the previous SOTA models. The proposed model will be beneficial for more efficient TFP as well as intelligent transport system construction.

Privacy in Fine-tuning Large Language Models: Attacks, Defenses, and Future Directions

Fine-tuning has emerged as a critical process in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for specific downstream tasks, enabling these models to achieve state-of-the-art performance across various domains. However, the fine-tuning process often involves sensitive datasets, introducing privacy risks that exploit the unique characteristics of this stage. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of privacy challenges associated with fine-tuning LLMs, highlighting vulnerabilities to various privacy attacks, including membership inference, data extraction, and backdoor attacks. We further review defense mechanisms designed to mitigate privacy risks in the fine-tuning phase, such as differential privacy, federated learning, and knowledge unlearning, discussing their effectiveness and limitations in addressing privacy risks and maintaining model utility. By identifying key gaps in existing research, we highlight challenges and propose directions to advance the development of privacy-preserving methods for fine-tuning LLMs, promoting their responsible use in diverse applications.

Learned Data Compression: Challenges and Opportunities for the Future

Compressing integer keys is a fundamental operation among multiple communities, such as database management (DB), information retrieval (IR), and high-performance computing (HPC). Recent advances in \emph{learned indexes} have inspired the development of \emph{learned compressors}, which leverage simple yet compact machine learning (ML) models to compress large-scale sorted keys. The core idea behind learned compressors is to \emph{losslessly} encode sorted keys by approximating them with \emph{error-bounded} ML models (e.g., piecewise linear functions) and using a \emph{residual array} to guarantee accurate key reconstruction. While the concept of learned compressors remains in its early stages of exploration, our benchmark results demonstrate that an SIMD-optimized learned compressor can significantly outperform state-of-the-art CPU-based compressors. Drawing on our preliminary experiments, this vision paper explores the potential of learned data compression to enhance critical areas in DBMS and related domains. Furthermore, we outline the key technical challenges that existing systems must address when integrating this emerging methodology.

SMARTCAL: An Approach to Self-Aware Tool-Use Evaluation and Calibration

The tool-use ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) has a profound impact on a wide range of industrial applications. However, LLMs' self-control and calibration capability in appropriately using tools remains understudied. The problem is consequential as it raises potential risks of degraded performance and poses a threat to the trustworthiness of the models. In this paper, we conduct a study on a family of state-of-the-art LLMs on three datasets with two mainstream tool-use frameworks. Our study reveals the tool-abuse behavior of LLMs, a tendency for models to misuse tools with overconfidence. We also find that this is a common issue regardless of model capability. Accordingly, we propose a novel approach, \textit{SMARTCAL}, to mitigate the observed issues, and our results show an average of 8.6 percent increase in the QA performance and a 21.6 percent decrease in Expected Calibration Error (ECE) compared to baseline models.