Lifeng Wang

Xiao Zhou, Luoyi Sun, Dexuan He et al.

Deep learning has enabled the development of highly robust foundation models for various pathological tasks across diverse diseases and patient cohorts. Among these models, vision-language pre-training, which leverages large-scale paired data to align pathology image and text embedding spaces, and provides a novel zero-shot paradigm for downstream tasks. However, existing models have been primarily data-driven and lack the incorporation of domain-specific knowledge, which limits their performance in cancer diagnosis, especially for rare tumor subtypes. To address this limitation, we establish a Knowledge-enhanced Pathology (KEEP) foundation model that harnesses disease knowledge to facilitate vision-language pre-training. Specifically, we first construct a disease knowledge graph (KG) that covers 11,454 human diseases with 139,143 disease attributes, including synonyms, definitions, and hypernym relations. We then systematically reorganize the millions of publicly available noisy pathology image-text pairs, into 143K well-structured semantic groups linked through the hierarchical relations of the disease KG. To derive more nuanced image and text representations, we propose a novel knowledge-enhanced vision-language pre-training approach that integrates disease knowledge into the alignment within hierarchical semantic groups instead of unstructured image-text pairs. Validated on 18 diverse benchmarks with more than 14,000 whole slide images (WSIs), KEEP achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot cancer diagnostic tasks. Notably, for cancer detection, KEEP demonstrates an average sensitivity of 89.8% at a specificity of 95.0% across 7 cancer types. For cancer subtyping, KEEP achieves a median balanced accuracy of 0.456 in subtyping 30 rare brain cancers, indicating strong generalizability for diagnosing rare tumors.

Yifan Lei, Jiahua Luo, Tingyu Jiang et al.

In large-scale advertising recommendation systems, retrieval serves as a critical component, aiming to efficiently select a subset of candidate ads relevant to user behaviors from a massive ad inventory for subsequent ranking and recommendation. The Embedding-Based Retrieval (EBR) methods modeled by the dual-tower network are widely used in the industry to maintain both retrieval efficiency and accuracy. However, the dual-tower model has significant limitations: the embeddings of users and ads interact only at the final inner product computation, resulting in insufficient feature interaction capabilities. Although DNN-based models with both user and ad as input features, allowing for early-stage interaction between these features, are introduced in the ranking stage to mitigate this issue, they are computationally infeasible for the retrieval stage. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes an efficient GPU-based feature interaction for the dual-tower network to significantly improve retrieval accuracy while substantially reducing computational costs. Specifically, we introduce a novel compressed inverted list designed for GPU acceleration, enabling efficient feature interaction computation at scale. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first framework in the industry to successfully implement Wide and Deep in a retrieval system. We apply this model to the real-world business scenarios in Tencent Advertising, and experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches in offline evaluation and has been successfully deployed to Tencent's advertising recommendation system, delivering significant online performance gains. This improvement not only validates the effectiveness of the proposed method, but also provides new practical guidance for optimizing large-scale ad retrieval systems.

Shangyu Zhang, Shijie Quan, Zhongren Wang et al.

Online advertising relies on accurate recommendation models, with recent advances using pre-trained large-scale foundation models (LFMs) to capture users' general interests across multiple scenarios and tasks. However, existing methods have critical limitations: they extract and transfer only user representations (URs), ignoring valuable item representations (IRs) and user-item cross representations (CRs); and they simply use a UR as a feature in downstream applications, which fails to bridge upstream-downstream gaps and overlooks more transfer granularities. In this paper, we propose LFM4Ads, an All-Representation Multi-Granularity transfer framework for ads recommendation. It first comprehensively transfers URs, IRs, and CRs, i.e., all available representations in the pre-trained foundation model. To effectively utilize the CRs, it identifies the optimal extraction layer and aggregates them into transferable coarse-grained forms. Furthermore, we enhance the transferability via multi-granularity mechanisms: non-linear adapters for feature-level transfer, an Isomorphic Interaction Module for module-level transfer, and Standalone Retrieval for model-level transfer. LFM4Ads has been successfully deployed in Tencent's industrial-scale advertising platform, processing tens of billions of daily samples while maintaining terabyte-scale model parameters with billions of sparse embedding keys across approximately two thousand features. Since its production deployment in Q4 2024, LFM4Ads has achieved 10+ successful production launches across various advertising scenarios, including primary ones like Weixin Moments and Channels. These launches achieve an overall GMV lift of 2.45% across the entire platform, translating to estimated annual revenue increases in the hundreds of millions of dollars.