arXiv subjects

Sen Feng

Publications and source records attributed to Sen Feng.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

How to Ask the AI: A User Perspective Survey for Large Language Model Prompting

AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), allow users to obtain instant and effective content responses simply by typing requests, such as ``plan a three-day Vienna trip'', ``solve the attached mathematical problem'', ``draft an email to inquire review progress'', etc., which are also known as LLM prompts. Crafting clear and well-structured prompts leads to more appropriate LLM feedback, which effectively bridges human-LLM interaction. Although prompting appears accessible to non-expert users, precisely organizing effective prompts is a highly systematic and skillful process, presenting potential challenges even for experienced users. This survey explores the principles, taxonomy, and organization of prompts from a user-centered perspective. Differing from the existing surveys that primarily focus on technical principles and application scenarios of LLMs, this paper provides actionable guidelines for formulating effective LLM prompts across diverse real-world tasks and specifically contributes by: 1) developing an intuitive evaluation strategy for prompt efficacy, 2) providing prompting workflow demonstrations on representative applications, and 3) maintaining a dynamically updated open-source project to ensure the core takeaways remain up-to-date. These measures lower the threshold for users to correctly understand and craft prompts that align with evolving application scenarios. This work will be maintained as a living GitHub project \href{https://github.com/Yunfan-Zhang/TAI_Guideline-Table}{\textcolor{blue}{here}}.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2026

Learning Order Forest for Qualitative-Attribute Data Clustering

Clustering is a fundamental approach to understanding data patterns, wherein the intuitive Euclidean distance space is commonly adopted. However, this is not the case for implicit cluster distributions reflected by qualitative attribute values, e.g., the nominal values of attributes like symptoms, marital status, etc. This paper, therefore, discovered a tree-like distance structure to flexibly represent the local order relationship among intra-attribute qualitative values. That is, treating a value as the vertex of the tree allows to capture rich order relationships among the vertex value and the others. To obtain the trees in a clustering-friendly form, a joint learning mechanism is proposed to iteratively obtain more appropriate tree structures and clusters. It turns out that the latent distance space of the whole dataset can be well-represented by a forest consisting of the learned trees. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the joint learning adapts the forest to the clustering task to yield accurate results. Comparisons of 10 counterparts on 12 real benchmark datasets with significance tests verify the superiority of the proposed method.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2026

One-Shot Federated Clustering of Non-Independent Completely Distributed Data

Federated Learning (FL) that extracts data knowledge while protecting the privacy of multiple clients has achieved remarkable results in distributed privacy-preserving IoT systems, including smart traffic flow monitoring, smart grid load balancing, and so on. Since most data collected from edge devices are unlabeled, unsupervised Federated Clustering (FC) is becoming increasingly popular for exploring pattern knowledge from complex distributed data. However, due to the lack of label guidance, the common Non-Independent and Identically Distributed (Non-IID) issue of clients have greatly challenged FC by posing the following problems: How to fuse pattern knowledge (i.e., cluster distribution) from Non-IID clients; How are the cluster distributions among clients related; and How does this relationship connect with the global knowledge fusion? In this paper, a more tricky but overlooked phenomenon in Non-IID is revealed, which bottlenecks the clustering performance of the existing FC approaches. That is, different clients could fragment a cluster, and accordingly, a more generalized Non-IID concept, i.e., Non-ICD (Non-Independent Completely Distributed), is derived. To tackle the above FC challenges, a new framework named GOLD (Global Oriented Local Distribution Learning) is proposed. GOLD first finely explores the potential incomplete local cluster distributions of clients, then uploads the distribution summarization to the server for global fusion, and finally performs local cluster enhancement under the guidance of the global distribution. Extensive experiments, including significance tests, ablation studies, scalability evaluations, qualitative results, etc., have been conducted to show the superiority of GOLD.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Learning Self-Growth Maps for Fast and Accurate Imbalanced Streaming Data Clustering

Streaming data clustering is a popular research topic in data mining and machine learning. Since streaming data is usually analyzed in data chunks, it is more susceptible to encounter the dynamic cluster imbalance issue. That is, the imbalance ratio of clusters changes over time, which can easily lead to fluctuations in either the accuracy or the efficiency of streaming data clustering. Therefore, we propose an accurate and efficient streaming data clustering approach to adapt the drifting and imbalanced cluster distributions. We first design a Self-Growth Map (SGM) that can automatically arrange neurons on demand according to local distribution, and thus achieve fast and incremental adaptation to the streaming distributions. Since SGM allocates an excess number of density-sensitive neurons to describe the global distribution, it can avoid missing small clusters among imbalanced distributions. We also propose a fast hierarchical merging strategy to combine the neurons that break up the relatively large clusters. It exploits the maintained SGM to quickly retrieve the intra-cluster distribution pairs for merging, which circumvents the most laborious global searching. It turns out that the proposed SGM can incrementally adapt to the distributions of new chunks, and the Self-grOwth map-guided Hierarchical merging for Imbalanced data clustering (SOHI) approach can quickly explore a true number of imbalanced clusters. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SOHI can efficiently and accurately explore cluster distributions for streaming data.

cs.LG↗