Learning Harmonized Representations for Speculative SamplingLefan Zhang, Xiaodan Wang, Yanhua Huang et al.
Speculative sampling is a promising approach to accelerate the decoding stage for Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent advancements that leverage target LLM's contextual information, such as hidden states and KV cache, have shown significant practical improvements. However, these approaches suffer from inconsistent context between training and decoding. We also observe another discrepancy between the training and decoding objectives in existing speculative sampling methods. In this work, we propose a solution named HArmonized Speculative Sampling (HASS) that learns harmonized representations to address these issues. HASS accelerates the decoding stage without adding inference overhead through harmonized objective distillation and harmonized context alignment. Experiments on four LLaMA models demonstrate that HASS achieves 2.81x-4.05x wall-clock time speedup ratio averaging across three datasets, surpassing EAGLE-2 by 8%-20%. The code is available at https://github.com/HArmonizedSS/HASS.
CineTechBench: A Benchmark for Cinematographic Technique Understanding and GenerationXinran Wang, Songyu Xu, Xiangxuan Shan et al.
Cinematography is a cornerstone of film production and appreciation, shaping mood, emotion, and narrative through visual elements such as camera movement, shot composition, and lighting. Despite recent progress in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and video generation models, the capacity of current models to grasp and reproduce cinematographic techniques remains largely uncharted, hindered by the scarcity of expert-annotated data. To bridge this gap, we present CineTechBench, a pioneering benchmark founded on precise, manual annotation by seasoned cinematography experts across key cinematography dimensions. Our benchmark covers seven essential aspects-shot scale, shot angle, composition, camera movement, lighting, color, and focal length-and includes over 600 annotated movie images and 120 movie clips with clear cinematographic techniques. For the understanding task, we design question answer pairs and annotated descriptions to assess MLLMs' ability to interpret and explain cinematographic techniques. For the generation task, we assess advanced video generation models on their capacity to reconstruct cinema-quality camera movements given conditions such as textual prompts or keyframes. We conduct a large-scale evaluation on 15+ MLLMs and 5+ video generation models. Our results offer insights into the limitations of current models and future directions for cinematography understanding and generation in automatically film production and appreciation. The code and benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/PRIS-CV/CineTechBench.
2.3IRMar 2
IDProxy: Cold-Start CTR Prediction for Ads and Recommendation at Xiaohongshu with Multimodal LLMsYubin Zhang, Haiming Xu, Guillaume Salha-Galvan et al.
Click-through rate (CTR) models in advertising and recommendation systems rely heavily on item ID embeddings, which struggle in item cold-start settings. We present IDProxy, a solution that leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to generate proxy embeddings from rich content signals, enabling effective CTR prediction for new items without usage data. These proxies are explicitly aligned with the existing ID embedding space and are optimized end-to-end under CTR objectives together with the ranking model, allowing seamless integration into existing large-scale ranking pipelines. Offline experiments and online A/B tests demonstrate the effectiveness of IDProxy, which has been successfully deployed in both Content Feed and Display Ads features of Xiaohongshu's Explore Feed, serving hundreds of millions of users daily.