Shihao Liu
2026
Temporal Evidence Chain for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering with Large Language Models
Shihao Liu | Xiaofei Zhou | Bo Wang | Geyuan Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Shihao Liu | Xiaofei Zhou | Bo Wang | Geyuan Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (TKGQA) aims to answer temporal questions using knowledge from Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs).Existing LLM-based TKGQA methods typically utilize RAG-based or Agent-based paradigms, yet both struggle to construct reliable temporal evidence chains. RAG-based approaches primarily rely on semantic retrieval to fetch question-relevant contexts but overlook the structural dependencies within TKGs, leading to broken evidence chains, whereas iterative agents are prone to error propagation during multi-step reasoning.To address these limitations, we propose TECQA, a framework designed to construct temporal evidence chains for LLM reasoning. Firstly, TECQA employs structure-guided subgraph retrieval to capture structural dependencies and intermediate reasoning paths. Subsequently, it utilizes a k-nearest temporal neighbor pruning strategy to filter irrelevant noise while strictly preserving the continuous local history surrounding critical events. Finally, the retained temporal neighbors are serialized by temporal proximity to explicitly reconstruct a coherent temporal evidence chain. Extensive experiments on MultiTQ and CronQuestions demonstrate that TECQA achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming strong baselines by 45.3% particularly on complex queries. Code is available at https://github.com/SimonsLiu/TECQA.
SDC-LoRA: Singular-Subspace Drift Controlled LoRA to Mitigate Knowledge Forgetting
Geyuan Zhang | Xiaofei Zhou | Shihao Liu | Jingyuan Tian | Jizheng Ma
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Geyuan Zhang | Xiaofei Zhou | Shihao Liu | Jingyuan Tian | Jizheng Ma
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Knowledge forgetting is a central challenge when adapting LLMs to new tasks. Prior studies indicate that pretrained knowledge is concentrated in the principal singular subspace of pretrained weight W0; so recent Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) variants initialize LoRA in the minor subspace to steer early updates away from principal directions and mitigate forgetting. However, we observe that during fine-tuning, the update direction progressively shifts from the minor to the principal subspace, which is called as Singular-subspace Drift (SD), thereby allocating more energy to the directions that carry pretrained knowledge and leaving a persistent risk of forgetting. To address this issue, we propose Singular-subspace Drift Controlled LoRA (SDC-LoRA), which constrains the growth of update energy in the principal singular subspace of W0 and thus mitigate SD. SDC-LoRA proposes Principal Subspace Energy-Controlled Learning, using Spectral Calibration factor 𝛾sc to selectively downscale gradients along the principal singular subspace of W0 while keeping minor-subspace updates unchanged. Across extensive experiments with LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-Chat on MetaMathQA and CodeFeedback, SDC-LoRA mitigates forgetting on MMLU, TruthfulQA, and HellaSwag while matching or improving GSM8K and HumanEval, offering a practical route to adapt LLMs without sacrificing prior knowledge.
2025
Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Hengran Zhang | Minghao Tang | Keping Bi | Jiafeng Guo | Shihao Liu | Daiting Shi | Dawei Yin | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Hengran Zhang | Minghao Tang | Keping Bi | Jiafeng Guo | Shihao Liu | Daiting Shi | Dawei Yin | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
This paper explores the use of large language models (LLMs) for annotating document utility in training retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, aiming to reduce dependence on costly human annotations. We address the gap between retrieval relevance and generative utility by employing LLMs to annotate document utility. To effectively utilize multiple positive samples per query, we introduce a novel loss that maximizes their summed marginal likelihood. Using the Qwen-2.5-32B model, we annotate utility on the MS MARCO dataset and conduct retrieval experiments on MS MARCO and BEIR, as well as RAG experiments on MS MARCO QA, NQ, and HotpotQA. Our results show that LLM-generated annotations enhance out-of-domain retrieval performance and improve RAG outcomes compared to models trained solely on human annotations or downstream QA metrics. Furthermore, combining LLM annotations with just 20% of human labels achieves performance comparable to using full human annotations. Our study offers a comprehensive approach to utilizing LLM annotations for initializing QA systems on new corpora.
RACQC: Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chinese Query Correction
Jinbo Su | Lingzhe Gao | Wei Li | Shihao Liu | Haojie Lei | Xinyi Wang | Yuanzhao Guo | Ke Wang | Daiting Shi | Dawei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Jinbo Su | Lingzhe Gao | Wei Li | Shihao Liu | Haojie Lei | Xinyi Wang | Yuanzhao Guo | Ke Wang | Daiting Shi | Dawei Yin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
In web search scenarios, erroneous queries frequently degrade users’ experience through irrelevant results, underscoring the pivotal role of Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) systems. Although large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across many tasks, they face critical challenges in the CSC scenario: (1) poor generalization to rare entities in open-domain searches, and (2) failure to adapt to temporal entity variations due to static parameters, resulting in serious over-correction issues. To tackle this, we present RACQC, a Chinese Query Correction system with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-task learning. Specifically, our approach (1) integrates dynamic knowledge retrieval through entity-centric RAG to address rare entities and innovatively proposes an entity-title collaborative corpus, and (2) employs contrastive correction tasks to mitigate LLM over-correction tendencies. Furthermore, we propose MDCQC, a Multi-Domain Chinese Query Correction benchmark to test the model’s entity correction capabilities. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that RACQC significantly outperforms existing baselines in CSC tasks. Specifically, RACQC achieves a maximum improvement of +9.92% on the search scenario benchmark and +3.2% on the general-domain dataset under the F1 metric.