Jin Huang

Mohammad Mehdi Rastikerdar, Jin Huang, Shiwei Fang et al.

While existing strategies to execute deep learning-based classification on low-power platforms assume the models are trained on all classes of interest, this paper posits that adopting context-awareness i.e. narrowing down a classification task to the current deployment context consisting of only recent inference queries can substantially enhance performance in resource-constrained environments. We propose a new paradigm, CACTUS, for scalable and efficient context-aware classification where a micro-classifier recognizes a small set of classes relevant to the current context and, when context change happens (e.g., a new class comes into the scene), rapidly switches to another suitable micro-classifier. CACTUS features several innovations, including optimizing the training cost of context-aware classifiers, enabling on-the-fly context-aware switching between classifiers, and balancing context switching costs and performance gains via simple yet effective switching policies. We show that CACTUS achieves significant benefits in accuracy, latency, and compute budget across a range of datasets and IoT platforms.

Heng Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Zijun Liu et al.

Text-attributed graphs are widely used across domains, offering rich opportunities for zero-shot learning via graph-text alignment. However, existing methods struggle with tasks requiring fine-grained pattern recognition, particularly on heterophilic graphs. Through empirical and theoretical analysis, we identify an \textbf{over-abstraction problem}: current approaches operate at excessively large hyperbolic radii, compressing multi-scale structural information into uniform high-level abstractions. This abstraction-induced information loss obscures critical local patterns essential for accurate predictions. By analyzing embeddings in hyperbolic space, we demonstrate that optimal graph learning requires \textbf{faithful preservation} of fine-grained structural details, better retained by representations positioned closer to the origin. To address this, we propose \textbf{H4G}, a framework that systematically reduces embedding radii using learnable block-diagonal scaling matrices and Möbius matrix multiplication. This approach restores access to fine-grained patterns while maintaining global receptive ability with minimal computational overhead. Experiments show H4G achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance with \textbf{12.8\%} improvement on heterophilic graphs and \textbf{8.4\%} on homophilic graphs, confirming that radius reduction enables faithful multi-scale representation for advancing zero-shot graph learning.

Nianchang Huang, Yang Yang, Ruida Xi et al.

Toward desirable saliency prediction, the types and numbers of inputs for a salient object detection (SOD) algorithm may dynamically change in many real-life applications. However, existing SOD algorithms are mainly designed or trained for one particular type of inputs, failing to be generalized to other types of inputs. Consequentially, more types of SOD algorithms need to be prepared in advance for handling different types of inputs, raising huge hardware and research costs. Differently, in this paper, we propose a new type of SOD task, termed Arbitrary Modality SOD (AM SOD). The most prominent characteristics of AM SOD are that the modality types and modality numbers will be arbitrary or dynamically changed. The former means that the inputs to the AM SOD algorithm may be arbitrary modalities such as RGB, depths, or even any combination of them. While, the latter indicates that the inputs may have arbitrary modality numbers as the input type is changed, e.g. single-modality RGB image, dual-modality RGB-Depth (RGB-D) images or triple-modality RGB-Depth-Thermal (RGB-D-T) images. Accordingly, a preliminary solution to the above challenges, ı.e. a modality switch network (MSN), is proposed in this paper. In particular, a modality switch feature extractor (MSFE) is first designed to extract discriminative features from each modality effectively by introducing some modality indicators, which will generate some weights for modality switching. Subsequently, a dynamic fusion module (DFM) is proposed to adaptively fuse features from a variable number of modalities based on a novel Transformer structure. Finally, a new dataset, named AM-XD, is constructed to facilitate research on AM SOD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our AM SOD method can effectively cope with changes in the type and number of input modalities for robust salient object detection.

Jin Huang, Harrie Oosterhuis, Maarten de Rijke

User interactions with recommender systems (RSs) are affected by user selection bias, e.g., users are more likely to rate popular items (popularity bias) or items that they expect to enjoy beforehand (positivity bias). Methods exist for mitigating the effects of selection bias in user ratings on the evaluation and optimization of RSs. However, these methods treat selection bias as static, despite the fact that the popularity of an item may change drastically over time and the fact that user preferences may also change over time. We focus on the age of an item and its effect on selection bias and user preferences. Our experimental analysis reveals that the rating behavior of users on the MovieLens dataset is better captured by methods that consider effects from the age of item on bias and preferences. We theoretically show that in a dynamic scenario in which both the selection bias and user preferences are dynamic, existing debiasing methods are no longer unbiased. To address this limitation, we introduce DebiAsing in the dyNamiC scEnaRio (DANCER), a novel debiasing method that extends the inverse propensity scoring debiasing method to account for dynamic selection bias and user preferences. Our experimental results indicate that DANCER improves rating prediction performance compared to debiasing methods that incorrectly assume that selection bias is static in a dynamic scenario. To the best of our knowledge, DANCER is the first debiasing method that accounts for dynamic selection bias and user preferences in RSs.

Zi-Yuan Hu, Jin Huang, Zhi-Hong Deng et al.

Collaborative Filtering (CF) based recommendation methods have been widely studied, which can be generally categorized into two types, i.e., representation learning-based CF methods and matching function learning-based CF methods. Representation learning tries to learn a common low dimensional space for the representations of users and items. In this case, a user and item match better if they have higher similarity in that common space. Matching function learning tries to directly learn the complex matching function that maps user-item pairs to matching scores. Although both methods are well developed, they suffer from two fundamental flaws, i.e., the representation learning resorts to applying a dot product which has limited expressiveness on the latent features of users and items, while the matching function learning has weakness in capturing low-rank relations. To overcome such flaws, we propose a novel recommendation model named Balanced Collaborative Filtering Network (BCFNet), which has the strengths of the two types of methods. In addition, an attention mechanism is designed to better capture the hidden information within implicit feedback and strengthen the learning ability of the neural network. Furthermore, a balance module is designed to alleviate the over-fitting issue in DNNs. Extensive experiments on eight real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Wayne Xin Zhao, Gaole He, Hongjian Dou et al.

To develop a knowledge-aware recommender system, a key data problem is how we can obtain rich and structured knowledge information for recommender system (RS) items. Existing datasets or methods either use side information from original recommender systems (containing very few kinds of useful information) or utilize private knowledge base (KB). In this paper, we present the first public linked KB dataset for recommender systems, named KB4Rec v1.0, which has linked three widely used RS datasets with the popular KB Freebase. Based on our linked dataset, we first preform some interesting qualitative analysis experiments, in which we discuss the effect of two important factors (i.e. popularity and recency) on whether a RS item can be linked to a KB entity. Finally, we present the comparison of several knowledge-aware recommendation algorithms on our linked dataset.