Jianghong Ma

Tianjun Wei, Jianghong Ma, Tommy W. S. Chow

Collaborative filtering (CF) is widely searched in recommendation with various types of solutions. Recent success of Graph Convolution Networks (GCN) in CF demonstrates the effectiveness of modeling high-order relationships through graphs, while repetitive graph convolution and iterative batch optimization limit their efficiency. Instead, item similarity models attempt to construct direct relationships through efficient interaction encoding. Despite their great performance, the growing item numbers result in quadratic growth in similarity modeling process, posing critical scalability problems. In this paper, we investigate the graph sampling strategy adopted in latest GCN model for efficiency improving, and identify the potential item group structure in the sampled graph. Based on this, we propose a novel item similarity model which introduces graph partitioning to restrict the item similarity modeling within each partition. Specifically, we show that the spectral information of the original graph is well in preserving global-level information. Then, it is added to fine-tune local item similarities with a new data augmentation strategy acted as partition-aware prior knowledge, jointly to cope with the information loss brought by partitioning. Experiments carried out on 4 datasets show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art GCN models with 10x speed-up and item similarity models with 95\% parameter storage savings.

Dezhao Yang, Jianghong Ma, Shanshan Feng et al.

In the information age, recommendation systems are vital for efficiently filtering information and identifying user preferences. Online social platforms have enriched these systems by providing valuable auxiliary information. Socially connected users are assumed to share similar preferences, enhancing recommendation accuracy and addressing cold start issues. However, empirical findings challenge the assumption, revealing that certain social connections can actually harm system performance. Our statistical analysis indicates a significant amount of noise in the social network, where many socially connected users do not share common interests. To address this issue, we propose an innovative \underline{I}nterest-aware \underline{D}enoising and \underline{V}iew-guided \underline{T}uning (IDVT) method for the social recommendation. The first ID part effectively denoises social connections. Specifically, the denoising process considers both social network structure and user interaction interests in a global view. Moreover, in this global view, we also integrate denoised social information (social domain) into the propagation of the user-item interactions (collaborative domain) and aggregate user representations from two domains using a gating mechanism. To tackle potential user interest loss and enhance model robustness within the global view, our second VT part introduces two additional views (local view and dropout-enhanced view) for fine-tuning user representations in the global view through contrastive learning. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets with varying noise ratios demonstrate the superiority of IDVT over state-of-the-art social recommendation methods.

Xiaolei Lu, Jianghong Ma, Haode Zhang

In natural language processing (NLP), deep neural networks (DNNs) could model complex interactions between context and have achieved impressive results on a range of NLP tasks. Prior works on feature interaction attribution mainly focus on studying symmetric interaction that only explains the additional influence of a set of words in combination, which fails to capture asymmetric influence that contributes to model prediction. In this work, we propose an asymmetric feature interaction attribution explanation model that aims to explore asymmetric higher-order feature interactions in the inference of deep neural NLP models. By representing our explanation with an directed interaction graph, we experimentally demonstrate interpretability of the graph to discover asymmetric feature interactions. Experimental results on two sentiment classification datasets show the superiority of our model against the state-of-the-art feature interaction attribution methods in identifying influential features for model predictions. Our code is available at https://github.com/StillLu/ASIV.

Dongliang Zhou, Haijun Zhang, Qun Li et al.

How to recommend outfits has gained considerable attention in both academia and industry in recent years. Many studies have been carried out regarding fashion compatibility learning, to determine whether the fashion items in an outfit are compatible or not. These methods mainly focus on evaluating the compatibility of existing outfits and rarely consider applying such knowledge to 'design' new fashion items. We propose the new task of generating complementary and compatible fashion items based on an arbitrary number of given fashion items. In particular, given some fashion items that can make up an outfit, the aim of this paper is to synthesize photo-realistic images of other, complementary, fashion items that are compatible with the given ones. To achieve this, we propose an outfit generation framework, referred to as COutfitGAN, which includes a pyramid style extractor, an outfit generator, a UNet-based real/fake discriminator, and a collocation discriminator. To train and evaluate this framework, we collected a large-scale fashion outfit dataset with over 200K outfits and 800K fashion items from the Internet. Extensive experiments show that COutfitGAN outperforms other baselines in terms of similarity, authenticity, and compatibility measurements.

Dongliang Zhou, Haijun Zhang, Jianghong Ma et al.

Outfit generation is a challenging task in the field of fashion technology, in which the aim is to create a collocated set of fashion items that complement a given set of items. Previous studies in this area have been limited to generating a unique set of fashion items based on a given set of items, without providing additional options to users. This lack of a diverse range of choices necessitates the development of a more versatile framework. However, when the task of generating collocated and diversified outfits is approached with multimodal image-to-image translation methods, it poses a challenging problem in terms of non-aligned image translation, which is hard to address with existing methods. In this research, we present FCBoost-Net, a new framework for outfit generation that leverages the power of pre-trained generative models to produce multiple collocated and diversified outfits. Initially, FCBoost-Net randomly synthesizes multiple sets of fashion items, and the compatibility of the synthesized sets is then improved in several rounds using a novel fashion compatibility booster. This approach was inspired by boosting algorithms and allows the performance to be gradually improved in multiple steps. Empirical evidence indicates that the proposed strategy can improve the fashion compatibility of randomly synthesized fashion items as well as maintain their diversity. Extensive experiments confirm the effectiveness of our proposed framework with respect to visual authenticity, diversity, and fashion compatibility.

Dongliang Zhou, Haijun Zhang, Jianghong Ma et al.

Collocated clothing synthesis using generative networks has become an emerging topic in the field of fashion intelligence, as it has significant potential economic value to increase revenue in the fashion industry. In previous studies, several works have attempted to synthesize visually-collocated clothing based on a given clothing item using generative adversarial networks (GANs) with promising results. These works, however, can only accomplish the synthesis of one collocated clothing item each time. Nevertheless, users may require different clothing items to meet their multiple choices due to their personal tastes and different dressing scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel batch clothing generation framework, named BC-GAN, which is able to synthesize multiple visually-collocated clothing images simultaneously. In particular, to further improve the fashion compatibility of synthetic results, BC-GAN proposes a new fashion compatibility discriminator in a contrastive learning perspective by fully exploiting the collocation relationship among all clothing items. Our model was examined in a large-scale dataset with compatible outfits constructed by ourselves. Extensive experiment results confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed BC-GAN in comparison to state-of-the-art methods in terms of diversity, visual authenticity, and fashion compatibility.

Minglong Dong, Dongliang Zhou, Jianghong Ma et al.

Collocated clothing synthesis (CCS) has emerged as a pivotal topic in fashion technology, primarily concerned with the generation of a clothing item that harmoniously matches a given item. However, previous investigations have relied on using paired outfits, such as a pair of matching upper and lower clothing, to train a generative model for achieving this task. This reliance on the expertise of fashion professionals in the construction of such paired outfits has engendered a laborious and time-intensive process. In this paper, we introduce a new self-driven framework, named style- and texture-guided generative network (ST-Net), to synthesize collocated clothing without the necessity for paired outfits, leveraging self-supervised learning. ST-Net is designed to extrapolate fashion compatibility rules from the style and texture attributes of clothing, using a generative adversarial network. To facilitate the training and evaluation of our model, we have constructed a large-scale dataset specifically tailored for unsupervised CCS. Extensive experiments substantiate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both visual authenticity and fashion compatibility.

Xiaolei Lu, Jianghong Ma

Explainability algorithms aimed at interpreting decision-making AI systems usually consider balancing two critical dimensions: 1) \textit{faithfulness}, where explanations accurately reflect the model's inference process. 2) \textit{plausibility}, where explanations are consistent with domain experts. However, the question arises: do faithfulness and plausibility inherently conflict? In this study, through a comprehensive quantitative comparison between the explanations from the selected explainability methods and expert-level interpretations across three NLP tasks: sentiment analysis, intent detection, and topic labeling, we demonstrate that traditional perturbation-based methods Shapley value and LIME could attain greater faithfulness and plausibility. Our findings suggest that rather than optimizing for one dimension at the expense of the other, we could seek to optimize explainability algorithms with dual objectives to achieve high levels of accuracy and user accessibility in their explanations.

Junjie Li, Jianghong Ma, Xiaofeng Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models have advanced AI in applications like text-to-video generation and visual question answering. These models rely on visual encoders to convert non-text data into vectors, but current encoders either lack semantic alignment or overlook non-salient objects. We propose the Guiding Visual Encoder to Perceive Overlooked Information (GiVE) approach. GiVE enhances visual representation with an Attention-Guided Adapter (AG-Adapter) module and an Object-focused Visual Semantic Learning module. These incorporate three novel loss terms: Object-focused Image-Text Contrast (OITC) loss, Object-focused Image-Image Contrast (OIIC) loss, and Object-focused Image Discrimination (OID) loss, improving object consideration, retrieval accuracy, and comprehensiveness. Our contributions include dynamic visual focus adjustment, novel loss functions to enhance object retrieval, and the Multi-Object Instruction (MOInst) dataset. Experiments show our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Jingmao Zhang, Zhiting Zhao, Yunqi Lin et al.

The explosive growth of the video game industry has created an urgent need for recommendation systems that can scale with expanding catalogs and maintain user engagement. While prior work has explored accuracy and diversity in recommendations, existing models underutilize playtime, a rich behavioral signal unique to gaming platforms, and overlook the potential of multimodal information to enhance diversity. In this paper, we propose DP2Rec, a novel Dual-Phase Playtime-guided Recommendation model designed to jointly optimize accuracy and diversity. First, we introduce a playtime-guided interest intensity exploration module that separates strong and weak preferences via dual-beta modeling, enabling fine-grained user profiling and more accurate recommendations. Second, we present a playtime-guided multimodal random walks module that simulates player exploration using transitions guided by both playtime-derived interest similarity and multimodal semantic similarity. This mechanism preserves core preferences while promoting cross-category discovery through latent semantic associations and adaptive category balancing. Extensive experiments on a real-world game dataset show that DP2Rec outperforms existing methods in both recommendation accuracy and diversity.