Understanding and reasoning with abstractive information from the visual modality presents significant challenges for current multi-modal large language models (MLLMs). Among the various forms of abstractive information, Multi-Modal Relational Knowledge (MMRK), which represents abstract relational structures between multi-modal entities using node-edge formats, remains largely under-explored. In particular, STructured and Abstractive Reasoning (STAR) on such data has received little attention from the research community. To bridge the dual gaps in large-scale high-quality data and capability enhancement methodologies, this paper makes the following key contributions: (i). An automatic STAR data engine to synthesize images with MMRK to build multi-modal instructions with reliable chain-of-thought thinking for various STAR tasks and (ii). A comprehsive two-stage training framework, accompanied by knowledge-informed GRPO and a suite of evaluation protocols tailored to different STAR tasks. Based upon these contributions, we introduce STAR-64K, a dataset comprising 64K high-quality multi-modal instruction samples, and conduct experiments across 8 open-source MLLMs. Experimental results show that our two-stage enhancement framework enables smaller 3B/7B models to significantly outperform GPT-4o in STAR. Additionally, we provide in-depth analysis regarding the effectiveness of various designs, data transferability, and scalability.

Question answering (QA) with reference texts is a classic application scenario for large language models (LLMs), where high standards for the credibility and traceability of generated answers are crucial. Many existing approaches focus on generating multi-level citations linked to specific references within the answer, making it verifiable and trustworthy. However, they often overlook key challenges such as citation granularity, the awareness of unknown information, and the adoption of effective training strategies. In this paper, we introduce Knowledge-informed Citation (KFC), which addresses these issues through a novel data construction pipeline, a new benchmark, and an innovative training strategy. With approximately 42K samples spanning 19 distinct domains, KFC includes both traditional citations referencing known entity-level information and specialized citations referring to unknown knowledge in the given question. This structure provides a more granular approach to citations, guiding the model to recognize and explicitly indicate unknown information, thus enhancing the quality and credibility of the response. Additionally, we propose a self-correction paradigm, Self-KFC, designed to fine-tune LLMs by refining poorly cited answers into more accurate ones, making it particularly suitable for citation-dependent scenarios. We present comprehensive experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of Self-KFC on the KFC benchmark.

The rise of Multi-modal Pre-training highlights the necessity for a unified Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph (MMKG) representation learning framework. Such a framework is essential for embedding structured knowledge into multi-modal Large Language Models effectively, alleviating issues like knowledge misconceptions and multi-modal hallucinations. In this work, we explore the efficacy of models in accurately embedding entities within MMKGs through two pivotal tasks: Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion (MKGC) and Multi-modal Entity Alignment (MMEA). Building on this foundation, we propose a novel SNAG method that utilizes a Transformer-based architecture equipped with modality-level noise masking to robustly integrate multi-modal entity features in KGs. By incorporating specific training objectives for both MKGC and MMEA, our approach achieves SOTA performance across a total of ten datasets, demonstrating its versatility. Moreover, SNAG can not only function as a standalone model but also enhance other existing methods, providing stable performance improvements. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zjukg/SNAG.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in text generation within current NLP research. However, the lack of factual accuracy is still a dark cloud hanging over the LLM skyscraper. Structural knowledge prompting (SKP) is a prominent paradigm to integrate external knowledge into LLMs by incorporating structural representations, achieving state-of-the-art results in many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods often focus on specific problems, lacking a comprehensive exploration of the generalization and capability boundaries of SKP. This paper aims to evaluate and rethink the generalization capability of the SKP paradigm from four perspectives including Granularity, Transferability, Scalability, and Universality. To provide a thorough evaluation, we introduce a novel multi-granular, multi-level benchmark called SUBARU, consisting of 9 different tasks with varying levels of granularity and difficulty. Through extensive experiments, we draw key conclusions regarding the generalization of SKP, offering insights to guide the future development and extension of the SKP paradigm.

Despite recent successes in natural language processing and computer vision, Transformer faces scalability issues when processing graphs, e.g., computing the full node-to-node attention on knowledge graphs (KGs) with million of entities is still infeasible. The existing methods mitigate this problem by considering only the local neighbors, sacrificing the Transformer’s ability to attend to elements at any distance. This paper proposes a new Transformer architecture called Dual-Encoding Transformer (DET). DET comprises a structural encoder to aggregate information from nearby neighbors, and a semantic encoder to seek for semantically relevant nodes. We adopt a semantic neighbor search approach inspired by multiple sequence alignment (MSA) algorithms used in biological sciences. By stacking the two encoders alternately, similar to the MSA Transformer for protein representation, our method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art attention-based methods on complex relational graphs like KGs and citation networks. Additionally, DET remains competitive for smaller graphs such as molecules.

Embedding-based methods have attracted increasing attention in recent entity alignment (EA) studies. Although great promise they can offer, there are still several limitations. The most notable is that they identify the aligned entities based on cosine similarity, ignoring the semantics underlying the embeddings themselves. Furthermore, these methods are shortsighted, heuristically selecting the closest entity as the target and allowing multiple entities to match the same candidate. To address these limitations, we model entity alignment as a sequential decision-making task, in which an agent sequentially decides whether two entities are matched or mismatched based on their representation vectors. The proposed reinforcement learning (RL)-based entity alignment framework can be flexibly adapted to most embedding-based EA methods. The experimental results demonstrate that it consistently advances the performance of several state-of-the-art methods, with a maximum improvement of 31.1% on Hits@1.