Fuwei Zhang


2025

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Multi-level Relevance Document Identifier Learning for Generative Retrieval
Fuwei Zhang | Xiaoyu Liu | Xinyu Jia | Yingfei Zhang | Shuai Zhang | Xiang Li | Fuzhen Zhuang | Wei Lin | Zhao Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Generative Retrieval (GR) introduces a new information retrieval paradigm that directly generates unique document identifiers (DocIDs). The key challenge of GR lies in creating effective yet discrete DocIDs that preserve semantic relevance for similar documents while differentiating dissimilar ones. However, existing methods generate DocIDs solely based on the textual content of documents, which may result in DocIDs with weak semantic connections for similar documents due to variations in expression. Therefore, we propose using queries as a bridge to connect documents with varying relevance levels for learning improved DocIDs. In this paper, we propose **M**ulti-l**E**vel **R**elevance document identifier learning for **G**enerative r**E**trieval (MERGE), a novel approach that utilizes multi-level document relevance to learn high-quality DocIDs. MERGE incorporates three modules: a multi-relevance query-document alignment module to effectively align document representations with related queries, an outer-level contrastive learning module to capture binary-level relevance, and an inner-level multi-level relevance learning module to distinguish documents with different relevance levels. Our approach encodes rich hierarchical semantic information and maintains uniqueness across documents. Experimental results on real-world multilingual e-commerce search datasets demonstrate that MERGE significantly outperforms existing methods, underscoring its effectiveness. The source code is available at <https://github.com/zhangfw123/MERGE>.

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HierGR: Hierarchical Semantic Representation Enhancement for Generative Retrieval in Food Delivery Search
Fuwei Zhang | Xiaoyu Liu | Xinyu Jia | Yingfei Zhang | Zenghua Xia | Fei Jiang | Fuzhen Zhuang | Wei Lin | Zhao Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)

Food delivery search aims to quickly retrieve deliverable items that meet users’ needs, typically requiring faster and more accurate query understanding compared to traditional e-commerce search. Generative retrieval (GR), an emerging search paradigm, harnesses the advanced query understanding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to enhance the retrieval of results for complex and long-tail queries in food delivery search scenarios. However, there are still challenges in deploying GR to online scenarios: 1) **the large scale of items**; 2) **latency constraints unmet by LLM inference in online retrieval**; and 3) **strong location-based service restrictions on generated items**. To explore the application of GR in food delivery search, we optimize both offline training and online deployment, proposing **Hier**archical semantic representation enhancement for **G**enerative **R**etrieval (HierGR). Specifically, for the generation of semantic IDs, we propose an optimization method that refines the residual quantization process to generate hierarchically semantic IDs for items. Additionally, to successfully deploy on a well-known food delivery platform, we utilize the query cache mechanism and integrate the GR model with the online dense retrieval model to fulfill real-world search requirements. Online A/B testing results show that our proposed method increases **the number of online orders by 0.68%** for complex search intents. The source code is available at https://github.com/zhangfw123/HierGR.

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Should We Use a Fixed Embedding Size? Customized Dimension Sizes for Knowledge Graph Embedding
Zhanpeng Guan | Zhao Zhang | Yiqing Wu | Fuwei Zhang | Yongjun Xu
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to project entities and relations into a low-dimensional space, so as to enable Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to be effectively used by downstream AI tasks. Most existing KGs (e.g. Wikidata) suffer from the data imbalance issue, i.e., the occurrence frequencies vary significantly among different entities. Current KGE models use a fixed embedding size, leading to overfitting for low-frequency entities and underfitting for high-frequency ones. A simple method is to manually set embedding sizes based on frequency, but this is not feasible due to the complexity and the large number of entities. To this end, we propose CustomizE, which customizes embedding sizes in a data-driven way, assigning larger sizes for high-frequency entities and smaller sizes for low-frequency ones. We use bilevel optimization for stable learning of representations and sizes. It is noteworthy that our framework is universal and flexible, which is suitable for various KGE models. Experiments on link prediction tasks show its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines.