Yongzhi Li

Yang Jin, Yongzhi Li, Zehuan Yuan et al.

Spatio-Temporal video grounding (STVG) focuses on retrieving the spatio-temporal tube of a specific object depicted by a free-form textual expression. Existing approaches mainly treat this complicated task as a parallel frame-grounding problem and thus suffer from two types of inconsistency drawbacks: feature alignment inconsistency and prediction inconsistency. In this paper, we present an end-to-end one-stage framework, termed Spatio-Temporal Consistency-Aware Transformer (STCAT), to alleviate these issues. Specially, we introduce a novel multi-modal template as the global objective to address this task, which explicitly constricts the grounding region and associates the predictions among all video frames. Moreover, to generate the above template under sufficient video-textual perception, an encoder-decoder architecture is proposed for effective global context modeling. Thanks to these critical designs, STCAT enjoys more consistent cross-modal feature alignment and tube prediction without reliance on any pre-trained object detectors. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms previous state-of-the-arts with clear margins on two challenging video benchmarks (VidSTG and HC-STVG), illustrating the superiority of the proposed framework to better understanding the association between vision and natural language. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/jy0205/STCAT.

Yang Jin, Yongzhi Li, Zehuan Yuan et al.

This paper aims to establish a generic multi-modal foundation model that has the scalable capability to massive downstream applications in E-commerce. Recently, large-scale vision-language pretraining approaches have achieved remarkable advances in the general domain. However, due to the significant differences between natural and product images, directly applying these frameworks for modeling image-level representations to E-commerce will be inevitably sub-optimal. To this end, we propose an instance-centric multi-modal pretraining paradigm called ECLIP in this work. In detail, we craft a decoder architecture that introduces a set of learnable instance queries to explicitly aggregate instance-level semantics. Moreover, to enable the model to focus on the desired product instance without reliance on expensive manual annotations, two specially configured pretext tasks are further proposed. Pretrained on the 100 million E-commerce-related data, ECLIP successfully extracts more generic, semantic-rich, and robust representations. Extensive experimental results show that, without further fine-tuning, ECLIP surpasses existing methods by a large margin on a broad range of downstream tasks, demonstrating the strong transferability to real-world E-commerce applications.

Yuan Zhou, Yongzhi Li, Yanqi Dai et al.

Video-driven human reaction generation aims to synthesize 3D human motions that directly react to observed video sequences, which is crucial for building human-like interactive AI systems. However, existing methods often fail to effectively leverage video inputs to steer human reaction synthesis, resulting in reaction motions that are mismatched with the content of video sequences. We reveal that this limitation arises from a severe relational distortion between visual observations and reaction types. In light of this, we propose MuSteerNet, a simple yet effective framework that generates 3D human reactions from videos via observation-reaction mutual steering. Specifically, we first propose a Prototype Feedback Steering mechanism to mitigate relational distortion by refining visual observations with a gated delta-rectification modulator and a relational margin constraint, guided by prototypical vectors learned from human reactions. We then introduce Dual-Coupled Reaction Refinement that fully leverages rectified visual cues to further steer the refinement of generated reaction motions, thereby effectively improving reaction quality and enabling MuSteerNet to achieve competitive performance. Extensive experiments and ablation studies validate the effectiveness of our method. Code coming soon: https://github.com/zhouyuan888888/MuSteerNet.

Jun Quan, Ze Wei, Qiang Gan et al.

The conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have received extensive attention in recent years. However, most of the existing works focus on various deep learning models, which are largely limited by the requirement of large-scale human-annotated datasets. Such methods are not able to deal with the cold-start scenarios in industrial products. To alleviate the problem, we propose FORCE, a Framework Of Rule-based Conversational Recommender system that helps developers to quickly build CRS bots by simple configuration. We conduct experiments on two datasets in different languages and domains to verify its effectiveness and usability.

Ben Xue, Dan Liu, Lixiang Wang et al.

Generative recommendation has recently attracted widespread attention in industry due to its potential for scaling and stronger model capacity. However, deploying real-time generative recommendation in large-scale advertising requires designs beyond large-language-model (LLM)-style training and serving recipes. We present a production-oriented generative recommender co-designed across architecture, learning, and serving, named GR4AD (Generative Recommendation for ADdvertising). As for tokenization, GR4AD proposes UA-SID (Unified Advertisement Semantic ID) to capture complicated business information. Furthermore, GR4AD introduces LazyAR, a lazy autoregressive decoder that relaxes layer-wise dependencies for short, multi-candidate generation, preserving effectiveness while reducing inference cost, which facilitates scaling under fixed serving budgets. To align optimization with business value, GR4AD employs VSL (Value-Aware Supervised Learning) and proposes RSPO (Ranking-Guided Softmax Preference Optimization), a ranking-aware, list-wise reinforcement learning algorithm that optimizes value-based rewards under list-level metrics for continual online updates. For online inference, we further propose dynamic beam serving, which adapts beam width across generation levels and online load to control compute. Large-scale online A/B tests show up to 4.2% ad revenue improvement over an existing DLRM-based stack, with consistent gains from both model scaling and inference-time scaling. GR4AD has been fully deployed in Kuaishou advertising system with over 400 million users and achieves high-throughput real-time serving.

Xikai Zhang, Yongzhi Li, Likang Xiao et al.

Reinforcement learning has become a cornerstone for aligning and unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large-scale models. At its core, the training loop of GRPO and its variants alternates between rollout sampling and policy update. Unlike supervised learning, where each gradient step is anchored to an explicit ground-truth target, the optimal gradient direction for updating model parameters in this setting is not known a priori; the high-quality rollouts drawn during the sampling stage therefore act as the implicit "teacher" that guides every parameter update. However, GRPO adopt a simple sampling scheme that conditions all rollouts on the same original prompt. When a task lies beyond the policy model's current capability, this sampling scheme rarely yields a high-quality rollout, leaving the policy model without a meaningful gradient direction when updating its parameters, which causes training to stall. To address this issue, we propose FBOS-RL, a Feedback-Driven Bi-Objective Synergistic reinforcement learning framework. Specifically, we let the model perform Feedback-Guided Exploration Enhancement based on the feedback provided by the environment, and on top of this we design two mutually reinforcing training objectives: Exploitation-oriented Policy Alignment(EPA) and Exploration-oriented Capability Cultivation(ECC). Extensive experiments demonstrate that EPA and ECC can mutually reinforce each other, forming a positive flywheel effect that significantly improves both the training efficiency and the final performance ceiling of reinforcement learning. Specifically, under an identical number of rollouts, FBOS-RL learns substantially faster than GRPO and feedback-based baselines and ultimately attains a higher performance ceiling, while exhibiting higher policy entropy and lower gradient norms throughout training.

Yuyang You, Yongzhi Li, Jiahui Li et al.

Video generation has recently emerged as a central task in the field of generative AI. However, the substantial computational cost inherent in video synthesis makes model distillation a critical technique for efficient deployment. Despite its significance, there is a scarcity of methods specifically designed for video diffusion models. Prevailing approaches often directly adapt image distillation techniques, which frequently lead to artifacts such as oversaturation, temporal inconsistency, and mode collapse. To address these challenges, we propose a novel distillation framework tailored specifically for video diffusion models. Its core innovations include: (1) an adaptive regression loss that dynamically adjusts spatial supervision weights to prevent artifacts arising from excessive distribution shifts; (2) a temporal regularization loss to counteract temporal collapse, promoting smooth and physically plausible sampling trajectories; and (3) an inference-time frame interpolation strategy that reduces sampling overhead while preserving perceptual quality. Extensive experiments and ablation studies on the VBench and VBench2 benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves stable few-step video synthesis, significantly enhancing perceptual fidelity and motion realism. It consistently outperforms existing distillation baselines across multiple metrics.

Milton Zhou, Sizhong Qin, Yongzhi Li et al.

Short-form videos have become a primary medium for digital advertising, requiring scalable and efficient content creation. However, current workflows and AI tools remain disjoint and modality-specific, leading to high production costs and low overall efficiency. To address this issue, we propose AutoCut, an end-to-end advertisement video editing framework based on multimodal discretization and controllable editing. AutoCut employs dedicated encoders to extract video and audio features, then applies residual vector quantization to discretize them into unified tokens aligned with textual representations, constructing a shared video-audio-text token space. Built upon a foundation model, we further develop a multimodal large language model for video editing through combined multimodal alignment and supervised fine-tuning, supporting tasks covering video selection and ordering, script generation, and background music selection within a unified editing framework. Finally, a complete production pipeline converts the predicted token sequences into deployable long video outputs. Experiments on real-world advertisement datasets show that AutoCut reduces production cost and iteration time while substantially improving consistency and controllability, paving the way for scalable video creation.

Zhengjian Yao, Yongzhi Li, Xinyuan Gao et al.

We present "Narrative Weaver", a novel framework that addresses a fundamental challenge in generative AI: achieving multi-modal controllable, long-range, and consistent visual content generation. While existing models excel at generating high-fidelity short-form visual content, they struggle to maintain narrative coherence and visual consistency across extended sequences - a critical limitation for real-world applications such as filmmaking and e-commerce advertising. Narrative Weaver introduces the first holistic solution that seamlessly integrates three essential capabilities: fine-grained control, automatic narrative planning, and long-range coherence. Our architecture combines a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) for high-level narrative planning with a novel fine-grained control module featuring a dynamic Memory Bank that prevents visual drift. To enable practical deployment, we develop a progressive, multi-stage training strategy that efficiently leverages existing pre-trained models, achieving state-of-the-art performance even with limited training data. Recognizing the absence of suitable evaluation benchmarks, we construct and release the E-commerce Advertising Video Storyboard Dataset (EAVSD) - the first comprehensive dataset for this task, containing over 330K high-quality images with rich narrative annotations. Through extensive experiments across three distinct scenarios (controllable multi-scene generation, autonomous storytelling, and e-commerce advertising), we demonstrate our method's superiority while opening new possibilities for AI-driven content creation.

Xikai Zhang, Bo Wang, Likang Xiao et al.

Although large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides across various tasks, they still face significant challenges in complex reasoning and planning. For example, even with carefully designed prompts and prior information explicitly provided, GPT-4o achieves only a 7% Final Pass Rate on the TravelPlanner dataset in the sole-planning mode. Similarly, even in the thinking mode, Qwen3-8B-Instruct and DeepSeek-R1-671B, only achieve Final Pass Rates of 5.9% and 40%, respectively. Although well-organized Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) can offer improved collective reasoning, they often suffer from high reasoning costs due to multi-round internal interactions, long per-response latency, and difficulties in end-to-end training. To address these challenges, we propose a general and scalable framework called IMAGINE, short for Integrating Multi-Agent System into One Model. This framework not only integrates the reasoning and planning capabilities of MAS into a single, compact model, but also significantly surpass the capabilities of the MAS through a simple end-to-end training. Through this pipeline, a single small-scale model is not only able to acquire the structured reasoning and planning capabilities of a well-organized MAS but can also significantly outperform it. Experimental results demonstrate that, when using Qwen3-8B-Instruct as the base model and training it with our method, the model achieves an 82.7% Final Pass Rate on the TravelPlanner benchmark, far exceeding the 40% of DeepSeek-R1-671B, while maintaining a much smaller model size.

Yongzhi Li, Saining Zhang, Yibing Chen et al.

Personalized image generation aims to faithfully preserve a reference subject's identity while adapting to diverse text prompts. Existing optimization-based methods ensure high fidelity but are computationally expensive, while learning-based approaches offer efficiency at the cost of entangled representations influenced by nuisance factors. We introduce SpotDiff, a novel learning-based method that extracts subject-specific features by spotting and disentangling interference. Leveraging a pre-trained CLIP image encoder and specialized expert networks for pose and background, SpotDiff isolates subject identity through orthogonality constraints in the feature space. To enable principled training, we introduce SpotDiff10k, a curated dataset with consistent pose and background variations. Experiments demonstrate that SpotDiff achieves more robust subject preservation and controllable editing than prior methods, while attaining competitive performance with only 10k training samples.

Jun Quan, Meng Yang, Qiang Gan et al.

Rule-based dialogue management is still the most popular solution for industrial task-oriented dialogue systems for their interpretablility. However, it is hard for developers to maintain the dialogue logic when the scenarios get more and more complex. On the other hand, data-driven dialogue systems, usually with end-to-end structures, are popular in academic research and easier to deal with complex conversations, but such methods require plenty of training data and the behaviors are less interpretable. In this paper, we propose a method to leverages the strength of both rule-based and data-driven dialogue managers (DM). We firstly introduce the DM of Carina Dialog System (CDS, an advanced industrial dialogue system built by Microsoft). Then we propose the "model-trigger" design to make the DM trainable thus scalable to scenario changes. Furthermore, we integrate pre-trained models and empower the DM with few-shot capability. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and strong few-shot capability of our method.

Xinyu Weng, Yongzhi Li, Lu Chi et al.

Steganography represents the art of unobtrusively concealing a secrete message within some cover data. The key scope of this work is about visual steganography techniques that hide a full-sized color image / video within another. A majority of existing works are devoted to the image case, where both secret and cover data are images. We empirically validate that image steganography model does not naturally extend to the video case (i.e., hiding a video into another video), mainly because it completely ignores the temporal redundancy within consecutive video frames. Our work proposes a novel solution to the problem of video steganography. The technical contributions are two-fold: first, the residual between two consecutive frames tends to zero at most pixels. Hiding such highly-sparse data is significantly easier than hiding the original frames. Motivated by this fact, we propose to explicitly consider inter-frame residuals rather than blindly applying image steganography model on every video frame. Specifically, our model contains two branches, one of which is specially designed for hiding inter-frame difference into a cover video frame and the other instead hides the original secret frame. A simple thresholding method determines which branch a secret video frame shall choose. When revealing the concealed secret video, two decoders are devised, revealing difference or frame respectively. Second, we develop the model based on deep convolutional neural networks, which is the first of its kind in the literature of video steganography. In experiments, comprehensive evaluations are conducted to compare our model with both classic least significant bit (LSB) method and pure image steganography models. All results strongly suggest that the proposed model enjoys advantages over previous methods. We also carefully investigate key factors in the success of our deep video steganography model.