Chao Wang

Shengzhe Zhang, Liyi Chen, Dazhong Shen et al.

Multi-modal sequential recommendation (SR) leverages multi-modal data to learn more comprehensive item features and user preferences than traditional SR methods, which has become a critical topic in both academia and industry. Existing methods typically focus on enhancing multi-modal information utility through adaptive modality fusion to capture the evolving of user preference from user-item interaction sequences. However, most of them overlook the interference caused by redundant interest-irrelevant information contained in rich multi-modal data. Additionally, they primarily rely on implicit temporal information based solely on chronological ordering, neglecting explicit temporal signals that could more effectively represent dynamic user interest over time. To address these limitations, we propose a Hierarchical time-aware Mixture of experts for multi-modal Sequential Recommendation (HM4SR) with a two-level Mixture of Experts (MoE) and a multi-task learning strategy. Specifically, the first MoE, named Interactive MoE, extracts essential user interest-related information from the multi-modal data of each item. Then, the second MoE, termed Temporal MoE, captures user dynamic interests by introducing explicit temporal embeddings from timestamps in modality encoding. To further address data sparsity, we propose three auxiliary supervision tasks: sequence-level category prediction (CP) for item feature understanding, contrastive learning on ID (IDCL) to align sequence context with user interests, and placeholder contrastive learning (PCL) to integrate temporal information with modalities for dynamic interest modeling. Extensive experiments on four public datasets verify the effectiveness of HM4SR compared to several state-of-the-art approaches.

Fangliang Bai, Jinchao Liu, Xiaojuan Liu et al.

Recent work showed neural-network-based approaches to reconstructing images from compressively sensed measurements offer significant improvements in accuracy and signal compression. Such methods can dramatically boost the capability of computational imaging hardware. However, to date, there have been two major drawbacks: (1) the high-precision real-valued sensing patterns proposed in the majority of existing works can prove problematic when used with computational imaging hardware such as a digital micromirror sampling device and (2) the network structures for image reconstruction involve intensive computation, which is also not suitable for hardware deployment. To address these problems, we propose a novel hardware-friendly solution based on mixed-weights neural networks for computational imaging. In particular, learned binary-weight sensing patterns are tailored to the sampling device. Moreover, we proposed a recursive network structure for low-resolution image sampling and high-resolution reconstruction scheme. It reduces both the required number of measurements and reconstruction computation by operating convolution on small intermediate feature maps. The recursive structure further reduced the model size, making the network more computationally efficient when deployed with the hardware. Our method has been validated on benchmark datasets and achieved the state of the art reconstruction accuracy. We tested our proposed network in conjunction with a proof-of-concept hardware setup.

Yaghoub Rahimi, Chao Wang, Hongbo Dong et al.

In this paper, we study the ratio of the $L_1 $ and $L_2 $ norms, denoted as $L_1/L_2$, to promote sparsity. Due to the non-convexity and non-linearity, there has been little attention to this scale-invariant model. Compared to popular models in the literature such as the $L_p$ model for $p\in(0,1)$ and the transformed $L_1$ (TL1), this ratio model is parameter free. Theoretically, we present a strong null space property (sNSP) and prove that any sparse vector is a local minimizer of the $L_1 /L_2 $ model provided with this sNSP condition. Computationally, we focus on a constrained formulation that can be solved via the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Experiments show that the proposed approach is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods in sparse recovery. In addition, a variant of the $L_1/L_2$ model to apply on the gradient is also discussed with a proof-of-concept example of the MRI reconstruction.