Yu Xie

Yudi Xie, Weichen Huang, Esther Alter et al.

Studies of the functional role of the primate ventral visual stream have traditionally focused on object categorization, often ignoring -- despite much prior evidence -- its role in estimating "spatial" latents such as object position and pose. Most leading ventral stream models are derived by optimizing networks for object categorization, which seems to imply that the ventral stream is also derived under such an objective. Here, we explore an alternative hypothesis: Might the ventral stream be optimized for estimating spatial latents? And a closely related question: How different -- if at all -- are representations learned from spatial latent estimation compared to categorization? To ask these questions, we leveraged synthetic image datasets generated by a 3D graphic engine and trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to estimate different combinations of spatial and category latents. We found that models trained to estimate just a few spatial latents achieve neural alignment scores comparable to those trained on hundreds of categories, and the spatial latent performance of models strongly correlates with their neural alignment. Spatial latent and category-trained models have very similar -- but not identical -- internal representations, especially in their early and middle layers. We provide evidence that this convergence is partly driven by non-target latent variability in the training data, which facilitates the implicit learning of representations of those non-target latents. Taken together, these results suggest that many training objectives, such as spatial latents, can lead to similar models aligned neurally with the ventral stream. Thus, one should not assume that the ventral stream is optimized for object categorization only. As a field, we need to continue to sharpen our measures of comparing models to brains to better understand the functional roles of the ventral stream.

Yu Xie, Xingkai Ren, Ying Qi et al.

Traditional recommendation systems often grapple with "filter bubbles", underutilization of external knowledge, and a disconnect between model optimization and business policy iteration. To address these limitations, this paper introduces RecLLM-R1, a novel recommendation framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and drawing inspiration from the DeepSeek R1 methodology. The framework initiates by transforming user profiles, historical interactions, and multi-faceted item attributes into LLM-interpretable natural language prompts through a carefully engineered data construction process. Subsequently, a two-stage training paradigm is employed: the initial stage involves Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) to imbue the LLM with fundamental recommendation capabilities. The subsequent stage utilizes Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a reinforcement learning technique, augmented with a Chain-of-Thought (CoT) mechanism. This stage guides the model through multi-step reasoning and holistic decision-making via a flexibly defined reward function, aiming to concurrently optimize recommendation accuracy, diversity, and other bespoke business objectives. Empirical evaluations on a real-world user behavior dataset from a large-scale social media platform demonstrate that RecLLM-R1 significantly surpasses existing baseline methods across a spectrum of evaluation metrics, including accuracy, diversity, and novelty. It effectively mitigates the filter bubble effect and presents a promising avenue for the integrated optimization of recommendation models and policies under intricate business goals.