Feng Jiang

Wenliang Zhong, Weizhi An, Feng Jiang et al.

Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) involves retrieving a target image based on a composed query of an image paired with text that specifies modifications or changes to the visual reference. CIR is inherently an instruction-following task, as the model needs to interpret and apply modifications to the image. In practice, due to the scarcity of annotated data in downstream tasks, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) is desirable. While existing ZS-CIR models based on CLIP have shown promising results, their capability in interpreting and following modification instructions remains limited. Some research attempts to address this by incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these approaches still face challenges in effectively integrating multimodal information and instruction understanding. To tackle above challenges, we propose a novel embedding method utilizing an instruction-tuned Multimodal LLM (MLLM) to generate composed representation, which significantly enhance the instruction following capability for a comprehensive integration between images and instructions. Nevertheless, directly applying MLLMs introduces a new challenge since MLLMs are primarily designed for text generation rather than embedding extraction as required in CIR. To address this, we introduce a two-stage training strategy to efficiently learn a joint multimodal embedding space and further refining the ability to follow modification instructions by tuning the model in a triplet dataset similar to the CIR format. Extensive experiments on four public datasets: FashionIQ, CIRR, GeneCIS, and CIRCO demonstrates the superior performance of our model, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines by a significant margin. Codes are available at the GitHub repository.

Yushang Zhao, Haotian Lyu, Yike Peng et al.

The incessant advent of online services demands high speed and efficient recommender systems (ReS) that can maintain real-time performance along with processing very complex user-item interactions. The present study, therefore, considers computational bottlenecks involved in hybrid Graph Neural Network (GNN) and Large Language Model (LLM)-based ReS with the aim optimizing their inference latency and training efficiency. An extensive methodology was used: hybrid GNN-LLM integrated architecture-optimization strategies(quantization, LoRA, distillation)-hardware acceleration (FPGA, DeepSpeed)-all under R 4.4.2. Experimental improvements were significant, with the optimal Hybrid + FPGA + DeepSpeed configuration reaching 13.6% more accuracy (NDCG@10: 0.75) at 40-60ms of latency, while LoRA brought down training time by 66% (3.8 hours) in comparison to the non-optimized baseline. Irrespective of domain, such as accuracy or efficiency, it can be established that hardware-software co-design and parameter-efficient tuning permit hybrid models to outperform GNN or LLM approaches implemented independently. It recommends the use of FPGA as well as LoRA for real-time deployment. Future work should involve federated learning along with advanced fusion architectures for better scalability and privacy preservation. Thus, this research marks the fundamental groundwork concerning next-generation ReS balancing low-latency response with cutting-edge personalization.

Yuwei Miao, Yuzhi Guo, Hehuan Ma et al.

Exploring the functions of genes and gene products is crucial to a wide range of fields, including medical research, evolutionary biology, and environmental science. However, discovering new functions largely relies on expensive and exhaustive wet lab experiments. Existing methods of automatic function annotation or prediction mainly focus on protein function prediction with sequence, 3D-structures or protein family information. In this study, we propose to tackle the gene function prediction problem by exploring Gene Ontology graph and annotation with BERT (GoBERT) to decipher the underlying relationships among gene functions. Our proposed novel function prediction task utilizes existing functions as inputs and generalizes the function prediction to gene and gene products. Specifically, two pre-train tasks are designed to jointly train GoBERT to capture both explicit and implicit relations of functions. Neighborhood prediction is a self-supervised multi-label classification task that captures the explicit function relations. Specified masking and recovering task helps GoBERT in finding implicit patterns among functions. The pre-trained GoBERT possess the ability to predict novel functions for various gene and gene products based on known functional annotations. Extensive experiments, biological case studies, and ablation studies are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our proposed GoBERT.