Information extraction (IE) is a fundamental task in natural language processing (NLP), which encompasses a wide range of subtasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER), Relation Extraction (RE), and Event Extraction (EE) [1-4]. Traditionally, these tasks have been addressed by specialized models trained in task-specific datasets. However, the fragmentation of tasks and schemas has hindered the development of generalizable and scalable IE tasks. To address this limitation, recent research has focused on universal information extraction (UIE), which aims to model all IE tasks within a universal framework. A seminal work in this direction is proposed by Lu et al., which introduced a structured generation paradigm that encodes diverse IE tasks into a common semantic representation[5]. Building on this, InstructUIE[6] extended the idea by incorporating multi-task instruction tuning, enabling models to generalize across tasks via natural language instructions. With the emergence of powerful LLMs[7-11], significant advancements have been made across long-standing NLP tasks such as text classification[12-16], intent recognition[17, 18], entity linking[19-22], and beyond. Inspired by their robust performance and adaptability, researchers have explored their potential for information extraction through prompting and in-context learning learning[23, 24]. For example, CodeIE demonstrated that code generation models can serve as strong few-shot IE extractors by using structured code-like commands[25].

In this paper, we aim to enhance the robustness of Universal Information Extraction (UIE) by introducing a new benchmark dataset, a comprehensive evaluation, and a feasible solution. Existing robust benchmark datasets have two key limitations: 1) They generate only a limited range of perturbations for a single Information Extraction (IE) task, which fails to evaluate the robustness of UIE models effectively; 2) They rely on small models or handcrafted rules to generate perturbations, often resulting in unnatural adversarial examples. Considering the powerful generation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a new benchmark dataset for Robust UIE, called RUIE-Bench, which utilizes LLMs to generate more diverse and realistic perturbations across different IE tasks. Based on this dataset, we comprehensively evaluate existing UIE models and reveal that both LLM-based models and other models suffer from significant performance drops. To improve robustness and reduce training costs, we propose a data-augmentation solution that dynamically selects hard samples for iterative training based on the model's inference loss. Experimental results show that training with only \textbf{15\%} of the data leads to an average \textbf{7.5\%} relative performance improvement across three IE tasks.

The difficulty of the information extraction task lies in dealing with the task-specific label schemas and heterogeneous data structures. Recent work has proposed methods based on large language models to uniformly model different information extraction tasks. However, these existing methods are deficient in their information extraction capabilities for Chinese languages other than English. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end chat-enhanced instruction tuning framework for universal information extraction (YAYI-UIE), which supports both Chinese and English. Specifically, we utilize dialogue data and information extraction data to enhance the information extraction performance jointly. Experimental results show that our proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on Chinese datasets while also achieving comparable performance on English datasets under both supervised settings and zero-shot settings.

Universal Information Extraction (UIE) is an area of interest due to the challenges posed by varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. However, previous works have only achieved limited success by unifying a few tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE), which fall short of being authentic UIE models particularly when extracting other general schemas such as quadruples and quintuples. Additionally, these models used an implicit structural schema instructor, which could lead to incorrect links between types, hindering the model's generalization and performance in low-resource scenarios. In this paper, we redefine the authentic UIE with a formal formulation that encompasses almost all extraction schemas. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce UIE for any kind of schemas. In addition, we propose RexUIE, which is a Recursive Method with Explicit Schema Instructor for UIE. To avoid interference between different types, we reset the position ids and attention mask matrices. RexUIE shows strong performance under both full-shot and few-shot settings and achieves State-of-the-Art results on the tasks of extracting complex schemas.