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Heng Qi

Heng Qi contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

CAR: Query-Guided Confidence-Aware Reranking for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) depends on document ranking to provide useful evidence for generation, but conventional reranking methods mainly optimize query-document relevance rather than generation usefulness. A relevant document may still introduce noise, while a lower-ranked document may better reduce the generator's uncertainty. We propose CAR (Confidence-Aware Reranking), a query-guided, training-free, and plug-and-play reranking framework that uses generator confidence change as a document usefulness signal. CAR estimates confidence through the semantic consistency of multiple sampled answers under query-only and query-document conditions. Documents that significantly increase confidence are promoted, those that decrease confidence are demoted, and uncertain cases preserve the baseline order, while a query-level gate avoids unnecessary intervention on already confident queries. Experiments on four BEIR datasets show that CAR consistently improves NDCG@5 across sparse and dense retrievers, LLM-based and supervised rerankers, and four LLM backbones. Notably, CAR improves the YesNo reranker by 25.4 percent on average under Contriever retrieval, and its ranking gains strongly correlate with downstream generation F1 improvements, achieving Spearman rho = 0.964.

preprint2022arXiv

A New Perspective on the Effects of Spectrum in Graph Neural Networks

Many improvements on GNNs can be deemed as operations on the spectrum of the underlying graph matrix, which motivates us to directly study the characteristics of the spectrum and their effects on GNN performance. By generalizing most existing GNN architectures, we show that the correlation issue caused by the $unsmooth$ spectrum becomes the obstacle to leveraging more powerful graph filters as well as developing deep architectures, which therefore restricts GNNs' performance. Inspired by this, we propose the correlation-free architecture which naturally removes the correlation issue among different channels, making it possible to utilize more sophisticated filters within each channel. The final correlation-free architecture with more powerful filters consistently boosts the performance of learning graph representations. Code is available at https://github.com/qslim/gnn-spectrum.

preprint2022arXiv

Federated Unlearning via Class-Discriminative Pruning

We explore the problem of selectively forgetting categories from trained CNN classification models in the federated learning (FL). Given that the data used for training cannot be accessed globally in FL, our insights probe deep into the internal influence of each channel. Through the visualization of feature maps activated by different channels, we observe that different channels have a varying contribution to different categories in image classification. Inspired by this, we propose a method for scrubbing the model clean of information about particular categories. The method does not require retraining from scratch, nor global access to the data used for training. Instead, we introduce the concept of Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to quantize the class discrimination of channels. Channels with high TF-IDF scores have more discrimination on the target categories and thus need to be pruned to unlearn. The channel pruning is followed by a fine-tuning process to recover the performance of the pruned model. Evaluated on CIFAR10 dataset, our method accelerates the speed of unlearning by 8.9x for the ResNet model, and 7.9x for the VGG model under no degradation in accuracy, compared to retraining from scratch. For CIFAR100 dataset, the speedups are 9.9x and 8.4x, respectively. We envision this work as a complementary block for FL towards compliance with legal and ethical criteria.

preprint2022arXiv

NodeTrans: A Graph Transfer Learning Approach for Traffic Prediction

Recently, deep learning methods have made great progress in traffic prediction, but their performance depends on a large amount of historical data. In reality, we may face the data scarcity issue. In this case, deep learning models fail to obtain satisfactory performance. Transfer learning is a promising approach to solve the data scarcity issue. However, existing transfer learning approaches in traffic prediction are mainly based on regular grid data, which is not suitable for the inherent graph data in the traffic network. Moreover, existing graph-based models can only capture shared traffic patterns in the road network, and how to learn node-specific patterns is also a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel transfer learning approach to solve the traffic prediction with few data, which can transfer the knowledge learned from a data-rich source domain to a data-scarce target domain. First, a spatial-temporal graph neural network is proposed, which can capture the node-specific spatial-temporal traffic patterns of different road networks. Then, to improve the robustness of transfer, we design a pattern-based transfer strategy, where we leverage a clustering-based mechanism to distill common spatial-temporal patterns in the source domain, and use these knowledge to further improve the prediction performance of the target domain. Experiments on real-world datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.