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Shangbin Feng

Shangbin Feng contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

6 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Beyond Semantic Similarity: Rethinking Retrieval for Agentic Search via Direct Corpus Interaction

Modern retrieval systems, whether lexical or semantic, expose a corpus through a fixed similarity interface that compresses access into a single top-k retrieval step before reasoning. This abstraction is efficient, but for agentic search, it becomes a bottleneck: exact lexical constraints, sparse clue conjunctions, local context checks, and multi-step hypothesis refinement are difficult to implement by calling a conventional off-the-shelf retriever, and evidence filtered out early cannot be recovered by stronger downstream reasoning. Agentic tasks further exacerbate this limitation because they require agents to orchestrate multiple steps, including discovering intermediate entities, combining weak clues, and revising the plan after observing partial evidence. To tackle the limitation, we study direct corpus interaction (DCI), where an agent searches the raw corpus directly with general-purpose terminal tools (e.g., grep, file reads, shell commands, lightweight scripts), without any embedding model, vector index, or retrieval API. This approach requires no offline indexing and adapts naturally to evolving local corpora. Across IR benchmarks and end-to-end agentic search tasks, this simple setup substantially outperforms strong sparse, dense, and reranking baselines on several BRIGHT and BEIR datasets, and attains strong accuracy on BrowseComp-Plus and multi-hop QA without relying on any conventional semantic retriever. Our results indicate that as language agents become stronger, retrieval quality depends not only on reasoning ability but also on the resolution of the interface through which the model interacts with the corpus, with which DCI opens a broader interface-design space for agentic search.

preprint2024arXiv

Can Language Models Solve Graph Problems in Natural Language?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for a variety of tasks with implicit graphical structures, such as planning in robotics, multi-hop question answering or knowledge probing, structured commonsense reasoning, and more. While LLMs have advanced the state-of-the-art on these tasks with structure implications, whether LLMs could explicitly process textual descriptions of graphs and structures, map them to grounded conceptual spaces, and perform structured operations remains underexplored. To this end, we propose NLGraph (Natural Language Graph), a comprehensive benchmark of graph-based problem solving designed in natural language. NLGraph contains 29,370 problems, covering eight graph reasoning tasks with varying complexity from simple tasks such as connectivity and shortest path up to complex problems such as maximum flow and simulating graph neural networks. We evaluate LLMs (GPT-3/4) with various prompting approaches on the NLGraph benchmark and find that 1) language models do demonstrate preliminary graph reasoning abilities, 2) the benefit of advanced prompting and in-context learning diminishes on more complex graph problems, while 3) LLMs are also (un)surprisingly brittle in the face of spurious correlations in graph and problem settings. We then propose Build-a-Graph Prompting and Algorithmic Prompting, two instruction-based approaches to enhance LLMs in solving natural language graph problems. Build-a-Graph and Algorithmic prompting improve the performance of LLMs on NLGraph by 3.07% to 16.85% across multiple tasks and settings, while how to solve the most complicated graph reasoning tasks in our setup with language models remains an open research question. The NLGraph benchmark and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Arthur-Heng/NLGraph.

preprint2022arXiv

AHEAD: A Triple Attention Based Heterogeneous Graph Anomaly Detection Approach

Graph anomaly detection on attributed networks has become a prevalent research topic due to its broad applications in many influential domains. In real-world scenarios, nodes and edges in attributed networks usually display distinct heterogeneity, i.e. attributes of different types of nodes show great variety, different types of relations represent diverse meanings. Anomalies usually perform differently from the majority in various perspectives of heterogeneity in these networks. However, existing graph anomaly detection approaches do not leverage heterogeneity in attributed networks, which is highly related to anomaly detection. In light of this problem, we propose AHEAD: a heterogeneity-aware unsupervised graph anomaly detection approach based on the encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, for the encoder, we design three levels of attention, i.e. attribute level, node type level, and edge level attentions to capture the heterogeneity of network structure, node properties and information of a single node, respectively. In the decoder, we exploit structure, attribute, and node type reconstruction terms to obtain an anomaly score for each node. Extensive experiments show the superiority of AHEAD on several real-world heterogeneous information networks compared with the state-of-arts in the unsupervised setting. Further experiments verify the effectiveness and robustness of our triple attention, model backbone, and decoder in general.

preprint2022arXiv

KCD: Knowledge Walks and Textual Cues Enhanced Political Perspective Detection in News Media

Political perspective detection has become an increasingly important task that can help combat echo chambers and political polarization. Previous approaches generally focus on leveraging textual content to identify stances, while they fail to reason with background knowledge or leverage the rich semantic and syntactic textual labels in news articles. In light of these limitations, we propose KCD, a political perspective detection approach to enable multi-hop knowledge reasoning and incorporate textual cues as paragraph-level labels. Specifically, we firstly generate random walks on external knowledge graphs and infuse them with news text representations. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to jointly model news content as well as semantic, syntactic and entity cues in news articles. Finally, we adopt relational graph neural networks for graph-level representation learning and conduct political perspective detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. We further examine the effect of knowledge walks and textual cues and how they contribute to our approach's data efficiency.

preprint2022arXiv

KGAP: Knowledge Graph Augmented Political Perspective Detection in News Media

Identifying political perspectives in news media has become an important task due to the rapid growth of political commentary and the increasingly polarized political ideologies. Previous approaches focus on textual content and leave out the rich social and political context that is essential in the perspective detection process. To address this limitation, we propose KGAP, a political perspective detection method that incorporates external domain knowledge. Specifically, we construct a political knowledge graph to serve as domain-specific external knowledge. We then construct heterogeneous information networks to represent news documents, which jointly model news text and external knowledge. Finally, we adopt relational graph neural networks and conduct political perspective detection as graph-level classification. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently achieves the best performance on two real-world perspective detection benchmarks. Ablation studies further bear out the necessity of external knowledge and the effectiveness of our graph-based approach.

preprint2022arXiv

Legislator Representation Learning with Social Context and Expert Knowledge

Modeling the ideological perspectives of political actors is an essential task in computational political science with applications in many downstream tasks. Existing approaches are generally limited to textual data and voting records, while they neglect the rich social context and valuable expert knowledge for holistic evaluation. In this paper, we propose a representation learning framework of political actors that jointly leverages social context and expert knowledge. Specifically, we retrieve and extract factual statements about legislators to leverage social context information. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to incorporate social context and use relational graph neural networks to learn legislator representations. Finally, we train our model with three objectives to align representation learning with expert knowledge, model ideological stance consistency, and simulate the echo chamber phenomenon. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our learned representations successfully advance the state-of-the-art in three downstream tasks. Further analysis proves the correlation between learned legislator representations and various socio-political factors, as well as bearing out the necessity of social context and expert knowledge in modeling political actors.