Guanhua Zhang


2026

N-ary knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer missing components in facts with multiple entities under distinct semantic roles, commonly formulated as a knowledge hypergraph link prediction task. Most embedding-based approaches score individual hyperedges relying on enriched structural representations, but overlook intermediate propagation states containing complementary local and global structural evidence. Despite their capability to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) representations for the classical KGC task, large language models (LLMs) struggle with hypergraph structure involving multiple facts, while current hypergraph QA methods only provide LLMs with a single query signal rather than path-level evidence. These limitations hinder the transferability of existing methods, especially those leveraging LLMs, to solve the knowledge hypergraph link prediction problem. To bridge this gap, we propose HyperCoT, a structure-aware approach that models multi-hop structural reasoning as a depth-sensitive progressive evidence accumulation process. It constructs a Graphical Chain-of-Thought (Graph-CoT) by aggregating role-aware hyperedge states along strongly correlated reasoning paths, and injects the resulting path-level structural evidence into each token in query and candidate entities to prompt LLMs. Experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that HyperCoT consistently outperforms strong n-ary KGC baselines, particularly in high arity and structural sparsity scenarios, meanwhile yielding interpretable multi-hop reasoning traces.

2024

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success, their vulnerability to adversarial perturbations, including recent jailbreak attacks, has raised considerable concerns. However, the increasing size of these models and their limited access make improving their robustness a challenging task. Among various defense strategies, randomized smoothing has shown great potential for LLMs, as it does not require full access to the model’s parameters or fine-tuning via adversarial training. However, randomized smoothing involves adding noise to the input before model prediction, and the final model’s robustness largely depends on the model’s performance on these noise-corrupted data. Its effectiveness is often limited by the model’s sub-optimal performance on noisy data. To address this issue, we propose to leverage the multitasking nature of LLMs to first denoise the noisy inputs and then to make predictions based on these denoised versions. We call this procedure self-denoised smoothing. Unlike previous denoised smoothing techniques in computer vision, which require training a separate model to enhance the robustness of LLMs, our method offers significantly better efficiency and flexibility. Our experimental results indicate that our method surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in defending against adversarial attacks for both downstream tasks and human alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/SelfDenoise.

2020

With the recent proliferation of the use of text classifications, researchers have found that there are certain unintended biases in text classification datasets. For example, texts containing some demographic identity-terms (e.g., “gay”, “black”) are more likely to be abusive in existing abusive language detection datasets. As a result, models trained with these datasets may consider sentences like “She makes me happy to be gay” as abusive simply because of the word “gay.” In this paper, we formalize the unintended biases in text classification datasets as a kind of selection bias from the non-discrimination distribution to the discrimination distribution. Based on this formalization, we further propose a model-agnostic debiasing training framework by recovering the non-discrimination distribution using instance weighting, which does not require any extra resources or annotations apart from a pre-defined set of demographic identity-terms. Experiments demonstrate that our method can effectively alleviate the impacts of the unintended biases without significantly hurting models’ generalization ability.

2019

Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) has gained substantial attention from both academics and the industry, and rich public datasets contribute a lot to this process. However, biased datasets can also hurt the generalization performance of trained models and give untrustworthy evaluation results. For many NLSM datasets, the providers select some pairs of sentences into the datasets, and this sampling procedure can easily bring unintended pattern, i.e., selection bias. One example is the QuoraQP dataset, where some content-independent naive features are unreasonably predictive. Such features are the reflection of the selection bias and termed as the “leakage features.” In this paper, we investigate the problem of selection bias on six NLSM datasets and find that four out of them are significantly biased. We further propose a training and evaluation framework to alleviate the bias. Experimental results on QuoraQP suggest that the proposed framework can improve the generalization ability of trained models, and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions.