Yang Song

Ling Yang, Zhilin Huang, Yang Song et al.

Generating images from graph-structured inputs, such as scene graphs, is uniquely challenging due to the difficulty of aligning nodes and connections in graphs with objects and their relations in images. Most existing methods address this challenge by using scene layouts, which are image-like representations of scene graphs designed to capture the coarse structures of scene images. Because scene layouts are manually crafted, the alignment with images may not be fully optimized, causing suboptimal compliance between the generated images and the original scene graphs. To tackle this issue, we propose to learn scene graph embeddings by directly optimizing their alignment with images. Specifically, we pre-train an encoder to extract both global and local information from scene graphs that are predictive of the corresponding images, relying on two loss functions: masked autoencoding loss and contrastive loss. The former trains embeddings by reconstructing randomly masked image regions, while the latter trains embeddings to discriminate between compliant and non-compliant images according to the scene graph. Given these embeddings, we build a latent diffusion model to generate images from scene graphs. The resulting method, called SGDiff, allows for the semantic manipulation of generated images by modifying scene graph nodes and connections. On the Visual Genome and COCO-Stuff datasets, we demonstrate that SGDiff outperforms state-of-the-art methods, as measured by both the Inception Score and Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) metrics. We will release our source code and trained models at https://github.com/YangLing0818/SGDiff.

Guanyu Lin, Chen Gao, Yu Zheng et al.

In modern recommender systems, sequential recommendation leverages chronological user behaviors to make effective next-item suggestions, which suffers from data sparsity issues, especially for new users. One promising line of work is the cross-domain recommendation, which trains models with data across multiple domains to improve the performance in data-scarce domains. Recent proposed cross-domain sequential recommendation models such as PiNet and DASL have a common drawback relying heavily on overlapped users in different domains, which limits their usage in practical recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a Mixed Attention Network (MAN) with local and global attention modules to extract the domain-specific and cross-domain information. Firstly, we propose a local/global encoding layer to capture the domain-specific/cross-domain sequential pattern. Then we propose a mixed attention layer with item similarity attention, sequence-fusion attention, and group-prototype attention to capture the local/global item similarity, fuse the local/global item sequence, and extract the user groups across different domains, respectively. Finally, we propose a local/global prediction layer to further evolve and combine the domain-specific and cross-domain interests. Experimental results on two real-world datasets (each with two domains) demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model. Further study also illustrates that our proposed method and components are model-agnostic and effective, respectively. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Guanyu-Lin/MAN.

Sijie Wang, Qiyu Kang, Rui She et al.

LiDAR relocalization plays a crucial role in many fields, including robotics, autonomous driving, and computer vision. LiDAR-based retrieval from a database typically incurs high computation storage costs and can lead to globally inaccurate pose estimations if the database is too sparse. On the other hand, pose regression methods take images or point clouds as inputs and directly regress global poses in an end-to-end manner. They do not perform database matching and are more computationally efficient than retrieval techniques. We propose HypLiLoc, a new model for LiDAR pose regression. We use two branched backbones to extract 3D features and 2D projection features, respectively. We consider multi-modal feature fusion in both Euclidean and hyperbolic spaces to obtain more effective feature representations. Experimental results indicate that HypLiLoc achieves state-of-the-art performance in both outdoor and indoor datasets. We also conduct extensive ablation studies on the framework design, which demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-modal feature extraction and multi-space embedding. Our code is released at: https://github.com/sijieaaa/HypLiLoc

Yang Song, Prafulla Dhariwal, Mark Chen et al.

Diffusion models have significantly advanced the fields of image, audio, and video generation, but they depend on an iterative sampling process that causes slow generation. To overcome this limitation, we propose consistency models, a new family of models that generate high quality samples by directly mapping noise to data. They support fast one-step generation by design, while still allowing multistep sampling to trade compute for sample quality. They also support zero-shot data editing, such as image inpainting, colorization, and super-resolution, without requiring explicit training on these tasks. Consistency models can be trained either by distilling pre-trained diffusion models, or as standalone generative models altogether. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that they outperform existing distillation techniques for diffusion models in one- and few-step sampling, achieving the new state-of-the-art FID of 3.55 on CIFAR-10 and 6.20 on ImageNet 64x64 for one-step generation. When trained in isolation, consistency models become a new family of generative models that can outperform existing one-step, non-adversarial generative models on standard benchmarks such as CIFAR-10, ImageNet 64x64 and LSUN 256x256.

Tiange Xiang, Chaoyi Zhang, Xinyi Wang et al. · cmu

U-Net, as an encoder-decoder architecture with forward skip connections, has achieved promising results in various medical image analysis tasks. Many recent approaches have also extended U-Net with more complex building blocks, which typically increase the number of network parameters considerably. Such complexity makes the inference stage highly inefficient for clinical applications. Towards an effective yet economic segmentation network design, in this work, we propose backward skip connections that bring decoded features back to the encoder. Our design can be jointly adopted with forward skip connections in any encoder-decoder architecture forming a recurrence structure without introducing extra parameters. With the backward skip connections, we propose a U-Net based network family, namely Bi-directional O-shape networks, which set new benchmarks on multiple public medical imaging segmentation datasets. On the other hand, with the most plain architecture (BiO-Net), network computations inevitably increase along with the pre-set recurrence time. We have thus studied the deficiency bottleneck of such recurrent design and propose a novel two-phase Neural Architecture Search (NAS) algorithm, namely BiX-NAS, to search for the best multi-scale bi-directional skip connections. The ineffective skip connections are then discarded to reduce computational costs and speed up network inference. The finally searched BiX-Net yields the least network complexity and outperforms other state-of-the-art counterparts by large margins. We evaluate our methods on both 2D and 3D segmentation tasks in a total of six datasets. Extensive ablation studies have also been conducted to provide a comprehensive analysis for our proposed methods.

Jiayi Zhu, Bart Bolsterlee, Brian V. Y. Chow et al.

Semi-supervised learning has made significant progress in medical image segmentation. However, existing methods primarily utilize information acquired from a single dimensionality (2D/3D), resulting in sub-optimal performance on challenging data, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans with multiple objects and highly anisotropic resolution. To address this issue, we present a Hybrid Dual Mean-Teacher (HD-Teacher) model with hybrid, semi-supervised, and multi-task learning to achieve highly effective semi-supervised segmentation. HD-Teacher employs a 2D and a 3D mean-teacher network to produce segmentation labels and signed distance fields from the hybrid information captured in both dimensionalities. This hybrid learning mechanism allows HD-Teacher to combine the `best of both worlds', utilizing features extracted from either 2D, 3D, or both dimensions to produce outputs as it sees fit. Outputs from 2D and 3D teacher models are also dynamically combined, based on their individual uncertainty scores, into a single hybrid prediction, where the hybrid uncertainty is estimated. We then propose a hybrid regularization module to encourage both student models to produce results close to the uncertainty-weighted hybrid prediction. The hybrid uncertainty suppresses unreliable knowledge in the hybrid prediction, leaving only useful information to improve network performance further. Extensive experiments of binary and multi-class segmentation conducted on three MRI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/ThisGame42/Hybrid-Teacher.

Xiangchen Yin, Donglin Di, Lei Fan et al.

Recent methods using diffusion models have made significant progress in human image generation with various control signals such as pose priors. However, existing efforts are still struggling to generate high-quality images with consistent pose alignment, resulting in unsatisfactory output. In this paper, we propose a framework that delves into the graph relations of pose priors to provide control information for human image generation. The main idea is to establish a graph topological structure between the pose priors and latent representation of diffusion models to capture the intrinsic associations between different pose parts. A Progressive Graph Integrator (PGI) is designed to learn the spatial relationships of the pose priors with the graph structure, adopting a hierarchical strategy within an Adapter to gradually propagate information across different pose parts. Besides, a pose perception loss is introduced based on a pretrained pose estimation network to minimize the pose differences. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments conducted on the Human-Art and LAION-Human datasets clearly demonstrate that our model can achieve significant performance improvement over the latest benchmark models. The code is available at \url{https://xiangchenyin.github.io/GRPose/}.

Kai Zhao, Qiyu Kang, Yang Song et al.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) are vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, including those that affect both node features and graph topology. This paper investigates GNNs derived from diverse neural flows, concentrating on their connection to various stability notions such as BIBO stability, Lyapunov stability, structural stability, and conservative stability. We argue that Lyapunov stability, despite its common use, does not necessarily ensure adversarial robustness. Inspired by physics principles, we advocate for the use of conservative Hamiltonian neural flows to construct GNNs that are robust to adversarial attacks. The adversarial robustness of different neural flow GNNs is empirically compared on several benchmark datasets under a variety of adversarial attacks. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that GNNs leveraging conservative Hamiltonian flows with Lyapunov stability substantially improve robustness against adversarial perturbations. The implementation code of experiments is available at https://github.com/zknus/NeurIPS-2023-HANG-Robustness.

Ruixiang Feng, Zhenwei An, Yuntao Wen et al.

Answer verification methods are widely employed in language model training pipelines spanning data curation, evaluation, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While prior work focus on developing unified verifiers applicable across multiple reasoning scenarios, significant challenges remain in computation-oriented scientific domains, such as algebraic equivalence checking and physical constant substitution. In this paper, we introduce \model, a tool-augmented verifier that leverages external executors to perform precise computations and symbolic simplifications. \model enables robust verification that goes beyond simple semantic matching. We propose a novel two-stage pipeline, which begin with cold-start fine-tuning and followed by multi-turn reinforcement learning with tool integration. Extensive experiments conducted on STEM subjects, general QA, and long-form reasoning tasks demonstrates strong generalization of \model. The results shows that the \model achieves state-of-the-art performance on VerifyBench-Hard and SCI-Bench. And we also employ our \model in RLVR as a reward model, the results show that it consistently outperforms both rubric-based and model-based verifiers on AIME'24 and AIME'25, demonstrating strong potential to enhance reasoning capabilities of LLM. Our model is released at \hyperlink{https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B}{https://huggingface.co/Nanbeige/CoSineVerifier-Tool-4B}.

Yang Song, Prafulla Dhariwal

Consistency models are a nascent family of generative models that can sample high quality data in one step without the need for adversarial training. Current consistency models achieve optimal sample quality by distilling from pre-trained diffusion models and employing learned metrics such as LPIPS. However, distillation limits the quality of consistency models to that of the pre-trained diffusion model, and LPIPS causes undesirable bias in evaluation. To tackle these challenges, we present improved techniques for consistency training, where consistency models learn directly from data without distillation. We delve into the theory behind consistency training and identify a previously overlooked flaw, which we address by eliminating Exponential Moving Average from the teacher consistency model. To replace learned metrics like LPIPS, we adopt Pseudo-Huber losses from robust statistics. Additionally, we introduce a lognormal noise schedule for the consistency training objective, and propose to double total discretization steps every set number of training iterations. Combined with better hyperparameter tuning, these modifications enable consistency models to achieve FID scores of 2.51 and 3.25 on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet $64\times 64$ respectively in a single sampling step. These scores mark a 3.5$\times$ and 4$\times$ improvement compared to prior consistency training approaches. Through two-step sampling, we further reduce FID scores to 2.24 and 2.77 on these two datasets, surpassing those obtained via distillation in both one-step and two-step settings, while narrowing the gap between consistency models and other state-of-the-art generative models.

Cheng Wu, Chaokun Wang, Jingcao Xu et al.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated promising results on exploiting node representations for many downstream tasks through supervised end-to-end training. To deal with the widespread label scarcity issue in real-world applications, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) is leveraged to train GNNs with limited or even no labels by maximizing the mutual information between nodes in its augmented views generated from the original graph. However, the distribution of graphs remains unconsidered in view generation, resulting in the ignorance of unseen edges in most existing literature, which is empirically shown to be able to improve GCL's performance in our experiments. To this end, we propose to incorporate graph generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn the distribution of views for GCL, in order to i) automatically capture the characteristic of graphs for augmentations, and ii) jointly train the graph GAN model and the GCL model. Specifically, we present GACN, a novel Generative Adversarial Contrastive learning Network for graph representation learning. GACN develops a view generator and a view discriminator to generate augmented views automatically in an adversarial style. Then, GACN leverages these views to train a GNN encoder with two carefully designed self-supervised learning losses, including the graph contrastive loss and the Bayesian personalized ranking Loss. Furthermore, we design an optimization framework to train all GACN modules jointly. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets show that GACN is able to generate high-quality augmented views for GCL and is superior to twelve state-of-the-art baseline methods. Noticeably, our proposed GACN surprisingly discovers that the generated views in data augmentation finally conform to the well-known preferential attachment rule in online networks.

Jiahao Zhu, Daizong Liu, Pan Zhou et al.

Temporal sentence grounding (TSG) aims to identify the temporal boundary of a specific segment from an untrimmed video by a sentence query. All existing works first utilize a sparse sampling strategy to extract a fixed number of video frames and then conduct multi-modal interactions with query sentence for reasoning. However, we argue that these methods have overlooked two indispensable issues: 1) Boundary-bias: The annotated target segment generally refers to two specific frames as corresponding start and end timestamps. The video downsampling process may lose these two frames and take the adjacent irrelevant frames as new boundaries. 2) Reasoning-bias: Such incorrect new boundary frames also lead to the reasoning bias during frame-query interaction, reducing the generalization ability of model. To alleviate above limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Siamese Sampling and Reasoning Network (SSRN) for TSG, which introduces a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames to enrich and refine the new boundaries. Specifically, a reasoning strategy is developed to learn the inter-relationship among these frames and generate soft labels on boundaries for more accurate frame-query reasoning. Such mechanism is also able to supplement the absent consecutive visual semantics to the sampled sparse frames for fine-grained activity understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SSRN on three challenging datasets.

Zihua Si, Lin Guan, ZhongXiang Sun et al.

The significance of modeling long-term user interests for CTR prediction tasks in large-scale recommendation systems is progressively gaining attention among researchers and practitioners. Existing work, such as SIM and TWIN, typically employs a two-stage approach to model long-term user behavior sequences for efficiency concerns. The first stage rapidly retrieves a subset of sequences related to the target item from a long sequence using a search-based mechanism namely the General Search Unit (GSU), while the second stage calculates the interest scores using the Exact Search Unit (ESU) on the retrieved results. Given the extensive length of user behavior sequences spanning the entire life cycle, potentially reaching up to 10^6 in scale, there is currently no effective solution for fully modeling such expansive user interests. To overcome this issue, we introduced TWIN-V2, an enhancement of TWIN, where a divide-and-conquer approach is applied to compress life-cycle behaviors and uncover more accurate and diverse user interests. Specifically, a hierarchical clustering method groups items with similar characteristics in life-cycle behaviors into a single cluster during the offline phase. By limiting the size of clusters, we can compress behavior sequences well beyond the magnitude of 10^5 to a length manageable for online inference in GSU retrieval. Cluster-aware target attention extracts comprehensive and multi-faceted long-term interests of users, thereby making the final recommendation results more accurate and diverse. Extensive offline experiments on a multi-billion-scale industrial dataset and online A/B tests have demonstrated the effectiveness of TWIN-V2. Under an efficient deployment framework, TWIN-V2 has been successfully deployed to the primary traffic that serves hundreds of millions of daily active users at Kuaishou.

Jingcao Xu, Chaokun Wang, Cheng Wu et al.

Modern recommender systems often deal with a variety of user interactions, e.g., click, forward, purchase, etc., which requires the underlying recommender engines to fully understand and leverage multi-behavior data from users. Despite recent efforts towards making use of heterogeneous data, multi-behavior recommendation still faces great challenges. Firstly, sparse target signals and noisy auxiliary interactions remain an issue. Secondly, existing methods utilizing self-supervised learning (SSL) to tackle the data sparsity neglect the serious optimization imbalance between the SSL task and the target task. Hence, we propose a Multi-Behavior Self-Supervised Learning (MBSSL) framework together with an adaptive optimization method. Specifically, we devise a behavior-aware graph neural network incorporating the self-attention mechanism to capture behavior multiplicity and dependencies. To increase the robustness to data sparsity under the target behavior and noisy interactions from auxiliary behaviors, we propose a novel self-supervised learning paradigm to conduct node self-discrimination at both inter-behavior and intra-behavior levels. In addition, we develop a customized optimization strategy through hybrid manipulation on gradients to adaptively balance the self-supervised learning task and the main supervised recommendation task. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the consistent improvements obtained by MBSSL over ten state-of-the art (SOTA) baselines. We release our model implementation at: https://github.com/Scofield666/MBSSL.git.

Yu Zheng, Chen Gao, Jianxin Chang et al.

Modeling user's long-term and short-term interests is crucial for accurate recommendation. However, since there is no manually annotated label for user interests, existing approaches always follow the paradigm of entangling these two aspects, which may lead to inferior recommendation accuracy and interpretability. In this paper, to address it, we propose a Contrastive learning framework to disentangle Long and Short-term interests for Recommendation (CLSR) with self-supervision. Specifically, we first propose two separate encoders to independently capture user interests of different time scales. We then extract long-term and short-term interests proxies from the interaction sequences, which serve as pseudo labels for user interests. Then pairwise contrastive tasks are designed to supervise the similarity between interest representations and their corresponding interest proxies. Finally, since the importance of long-term and short-term interests is dynamically changing, we propose to adaptively aggregate them through an attention-based network for prediction. We conduct experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets for e-commerce and short-video recommendation. Empirical results show that our CLSR consistently outperforms all state-of-the-art models with significant improvements: GAUC is improved by over 0.01, and NDCG is improved by over 4%. Further counterfactual evaluations demonstrate that stronger disentanglement of long and short-term interests is successfully achieved by CLSR. The code and data are available at https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/CLSR.

Zhongxiang Sun, Xiaoxue Zang, Kai Zheng et al.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models are designed to incorporate external knowledge, reducing hallucinations caused by insufficient parametric (internal) knowledge. However, even with accurate and relevant retrieved content, RAG models can still produce hallucinations by generating outputs that conflict with the retrieved information. Detecting such hallucinations requires disentangling how Large Language Models (LLMs) utilize external and parametric knowledge. Current detection methods often focus on one of these mechanisms or without decoupling their intertwined effects, making accurate detection difficult. In this paper, we investigate the internal mechanisms behind hallucinations in RAG scenarios. We discover hallucinations occur when the Knowledge FFNs in LLMs overemphasize parametric knowledge in the residual stream, while Copying Heads fail to effectively retain or integrate external knowledge from retrieved content. Based on these findings, we propose ReDeEP, a novel method that detects hallucinations by decoupling LLM's utilization of external context and parametric knowledge. Our experiments show that ReDeEP significantly improves RAG hallucination detection accuracy. Additionally, we introduce AARF, which mitigates hallucinations by modulating the contributions of Knowledge FFNs and Copying Heads.

Teng Shi, Jun Xu, Xiao Zhang et al.

Recently, the personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate content that aligns with individual user preferences has garnered widespread attention. Personalized Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which retrieves relevant documents from the user's history to reflect their preferences and enhance LLM generation, is one commonly used approach for personalization. However, existing personalized RAG methods do not consider that the histories of similar users can also assist in personalized generation for the current user, meaning that collaborative information between users can also benefit personalized generation. Inspired by the application of collaborative filtering in recommender systems, we propose a method called CFRAG, which adapts Collaborative Filtering to RAG for personalized text generation. However, this presents two challenges: (1)~how to incorporate collaborative information without explicit user similarity labels? (2)~how to retrieve documents that support personalized LLM generation? For Challenge 1, we use contrastive learning to train user embeddings to retrieve similar users and introduce collaborative information. For Challenge 2, we design a personalized retriever and reranker to retrieve the top-$k$ documents from these users' histories. We take into account the user's preference during retrieval and reranking. Then we leverage feedback from the LLM to fine-tune the personalized retriever and reranker, enabling them to retrieve documents that meet the personalized generation needs of the LLM. Experimental results on the Language Model Personalization (LaMP) benchmark validate the effectiveness of CFRAG. Further analysis confirms the importance of incorporating collaborative information.

Yiping Liu, Mengxiao Zhang, Jiamou Liu et al.

Machine learning (ML) models have become essential tools in various scenarios. Their effectiveness, however, hinges on a substantial volume of data for satisfactory performance. Model marketplaces have thus emerged as crucial platforms bridging model consumers seeking ML solutions and data owners possessing valuable data. These marketplaces leverage model trading mechanisms to properly incentive data owners to contribute their data, and return a well performing ML model to the model consumers. However, existing model trading mechanisms often assume the data owners are willing to share their data before being paid, which is not reasonable in real world. Given that, we propose a novel mechanism, named Structural Importance based Model Trading (SIMT) mechanism, that assesses the data importance and compensates data owners accordingly without disclosing the data. Specifically, SIMT procures feature and label data from data owners according to their structural importance, and then trains a graph neural network for model consumers. Theoretically, SIMT ensures incentive compatible, individual rational and budget feasible. The experiments on five popular datasets validate that SIMT consistently outperforms vanilla baselines by up to $40\%$ in both MacroF1 and MicroF1.

Kepu Zhang, Zhongxiang Sun, Xiao Zhang et al.

In search scenarios, user experience can be hindered by erroneous queries due to typos, voice errors, or knowledge gaps. Therefore, query correction is crucial for search engines. Current correction models, usually small models trained on specific data, often struggle with queries beyond their training scope or those requiring contextual understanding. While the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a potential solution, they are still limited by their pre-training data and inference cost, particularly for complex queries, making them not always effective for query correction. To tackle these, we propose Trigger$^3$, a large-small model collaboration framework that integrates the traditional correction model and LLM for query correction, capable of adaptively choosing the appropriate correction method based on the query and the correction results from the traditional correction model and LLM. Trigger$^3$ first employs a correction trigger to filter out correct queries. Incorrect queries are then corrected by the traditional correction model. If this fails, an LLM trigger is activated to call the LLM for correction. Finally, for queries that no model can correct, a fallback trigger decides to return the original query. Extensive experiments demonstrate Trigger$^3$ outperforms correction baselines while maintaining efficiency.

Zhongxiang Sun, Zihua Si, Xiaoxue Zang et al.

Recent research on query generation has focused on using Large Language Models (LLMs), which despite bringing state-of-the-art performance, also introduce issues with hallucinations in the generated queries. In this work, we introduce relevance hallucination and factuality hallucination as a new typology for hallucination problems brought by query generation based on LLMs. We propose an effective way to separate content from form in LLM-generated queries, which preserves the factual knowledge extracted and integrated from the inputs and compiles the syntactic structure, including function words, using the powerful linguistic capabilities of the LLM. Specifically, we introduce a model-agnostic and training-free method that turns the Large Language Model into a Pointer-Generator (LargePiG), where the pointer attention distribution leverages the LLM's inherent attention weights, and the copy probability is derived from the difference between the vocabulary distribution of the model's high layers and the last layer. To validate the effectiveness of LargePiG, we constructed two datasets for assessing the hallucination problems in query generation, covering both document and video scenarios. Empirical studies on various LLMs demonstrated the superiority of LargePiG on both datasets. Additional experiments also verified that LargePiG could reduce hallucination in large vision language models and improve the accuracy of document-based question-answering and factuality evaluation tasks.

Yang Song, Lin Wang

3D object detection is an important task that has been widely applied in autonomous driving. To perform this task, a new trend is to fuse multi-modal inputs, i.e., LiDAR and camera. Under such a trend, recent methods fuse these two modalities by unifying them in the same 3D space. However, during direct fusion in a unified space, the drawbacks of both modalities (LiDAR features struggle with detailed semantic information and the camera lacks accurate 3D spatial information) are also preserved, diluting semantic and spatial awareness of the final unified representation. To address the issue, this letter proposes a novel bidirectional complementary LiDAR-camera fusion framework, called BiCo-Fusion that can achieve robust semantic- and spatial-aware 3D object detection. The key insight is to fuse LiDAR and camera features in a bidirectional complementary way to enhance the semantic awareness of the LiDAR and the 3D spatial awareness of the camera. The enhanced features from both modalities are then adaptively fused to build a semantic- and spatial-aware unified representation. Specifically, we introduce Pre-Fusion consisting of a Voxel Enhancement Module (VEM) to enhance the semantic awareness of voxel features from 2D camera features and Image Enhancement Module (IEM) to enhance the 3D spatial awareness of camera features from 3D voxel features. We then introduce Unified Fusion (U-Fusion) to adaptively fuse the enhanced features from the last stage to build a unified representation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our BiCo-Fusion against the prior arts. Project page: https://t-ys.github.io/BiCo-Fusion/.

Zihua Si, Zhongxiang Sun, Xiao Zhang et al.

Modern online service providers such as online shopping platforms often provide both search and recommendation (S&R) services to meet different user needs. Rarely has there been any effective means of incorporating user behavior data from both S&R services. Most existing approaches either simply treat S&R behaviors separately, or jointly optimize them by aggregating data from both services, ignoring the fact that user intents in S&R can be distinctively different. In our paper, we propose a Search-Enhanced framework for the Sequential Recommendation (SESRec) that leverages users' search interests for recommendation, by disentangling similar and dissimilar representations within S&R behaviors. Specifically, SESRec first aligns query and item embeddings based on users' query-item interactions for the computations of their similarities. Two transformer encoders are used to learn the contextual representations of S&R behaviors independently. Then a contrastive learning task is designed to supervise the disentanglement of similar and dissimilar representations from behavior sequences of S&R. Finally, we extract user interests by the attention mechanism from three perspectives, i.e., the contextual representations, the two separated behaviors containing similar and dissimilar interests. Extensive experiments on both industrial and public datasets demonstrate that SESRec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models. Empirical studies further validate that SESRec successfully disentangle similar and dissimilar user interests from their S&R behaviors.

Zihua Si, Xueran Han, Xiao Zhang et al.

Machine-learning based recommender systems(RSs) has become an effective means to help people automatically discover their interests. Existing models often represent the rich information for recommendation, such as items, users, and contexts, as embedding vectors and leverage them to predict users' feedback. In the view of causal analysis, the associations between these embedding vectors and users' feedback are a mixture of the causal part that describes why an item is preferred by a user, and the non-causal part that merely reflects the statistical dependencies between users and items, for example, the exposure mechanism, public opinions, display position, etc. However, existing RSs mostly ignored the striking differences between the causal parts and non-causal parts when using these embedding vectors. In this paper, we propose a model-agnostic framework named IV4Rec that can effectively decompose the embedding vectors into these two parts, hence enhancing recommendation results. Specifically, we jointly consider users' behaviors in search scenarios and recommendation scenarios. Adopting the concepts in causal analysis, we embed users' search behaviors as instrumental variables (IVs), to help decompose original embedding vectors in recommendation, i.e., treatments. IV4Rec then combines the two parts through deep neural networks and uses the combined results for recommendation. IV4Rec is model-agnostic and can be applied to a number of existing RSs such as DIN and NRHUB. Experimental results on both public and proprietary industrial datasets demonstrate that IV4Rec consistently enhances RSs and outperforms a framework that jointly considers search and recommendation.

Yiyu Liu, Qian Liu, Yu Tian et al.

Recently, micro-video sharing platforms such as Kuaishou and Tiktok have become a major source of information for people's lives. Thanks to the large traffic volume, short video lifespan and streaming fashion of these services, it has become more and more pressing to improve the existing recommender systems to accommodate these challenges in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we propose a novel concept-aware denoising graph neural network (named CONDE) for micro-video recommendation. CONDE consists of a three-phase graph convolution process to derive user and micro-video representations: warm-up propagation, graph denoising and preference refinement. A heterogeneous tripartite graph is constructed by connecting user nodes with video nodes, and video nodes with associated concept nodes, extracted from captions and comments of the videos. To address the noisy information in the graph, we introduce a user-oriented graph denoising phase to extract a subgraph which can better reflect the user's preference. Despite the main focus of micro-video recommendation in this paper, we also show that our method can be generalized to other types of tasks. Therefore, we also conduct empirical studies on a well-known public E-commerce dataset. The experimental results suggest that the proposed CONDE achieves significantly better recommendation performance than the existing state-of-the-art solutions.

Jianxin Chang, Chen Gao, Yu Zheng et al.

Sequential recommendation aims to leverage users' historical behaviors to predict their next interaction. Existing works have not yet addressed two main challenges in sequential recommendation. First, user behaviors in their rich historical sequences are often implicit and noisy preference signals, they cannot sufficiently reflect users' actual preferences. In addition, users' dynamic preferences often change rapidly over time, and hence it is difficult to capture user patterns in their historical sequences. In this work, we propose a graph neural network model called SURGE (short for SeqUential Recommendation with Graph neural nEtworks) to address these two issues. Specifically, SURGE integrates different types of preferences in long-term user behaviors into clusters in the graph by re-constructing loose item sequences into tight item-item interest graphs based on metric learning. This helps explicitly distinguish users' core interests, by forming dense clusters in the interest graph. Then, we perform cluster-aware and query-aware graph convolutional propagation and graph pooling on the constructed graph. It dynamically fuses and extracts users' current activated core interests from noisy user behavior sequences. We conduct extensive experiments on both public and proprietary industrial datasets. Experimental results demonstrate significant performance gains of our proposed method compared to state-of-the-art methods. Further studies on sequence length confirm that our method can model long behavioral sequences effectively and efficiently.

Yao Zhu, Hongzhi Liu, Zhonghai Wu et al.

Incompleteness is a common problem for existing knowledge graphs (KGs), and the completion of KG which aims to predict links between entities is challenging. Most existing KG completion methods only consider the direct relation between nodes and ignore the relation paths which contain useful information for link prediction. Recently, a few methods take relation paths into consideration but pay less attention to the order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning. In addition, these path-based models always ignore nonlinear contributions of path features for link prediction. To solve these problems, we propose a novel KG completion method named OPTransE. Instead of embedding both entities of a relation into the same latent space as in previous methods, we project the head entity and the tail entity of each relation into different spaces to guarantee the order of relations in the path. Meanwhile, we adopt a pooling strategy to extract nonlinear and complex features of different paths to further improve the performance of link prediction. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model OPTransE performs better than state-of-the-art methods.