Xiaoyang Zheng

Qihang Zhao, Zhongbo Sun, Xiaoyang Zheng et al.

With the rise of modern search and recommendation platforms, insufficient collaborative information of cold-start items exacerbates the Matthew effect of existing platform items, challenging platform diversity and becoming a longstanding issue. Existing methods align items' side content with collaborative information to transfer collaborative signals from high-popularity items to cold-start items. However, these methods fail to account for the asymmetry between collaboration and content, nor the fine-grained differences among items. To address these issues, we propose SMILE, an item representation enhancement approach based on fused alignment of semantic IDs. Specifically, we use RQ-OPQ encoding to quantize item content and collaborative information, followed by a two-step alignment: RQ encoding transfers shared collaborative signals across items, while OPQ encoding learns differentiated information of items. Comprehensive offline experiments on large-scale industrial datasets demonstrate superiority of SMILE, and rigorous online A/B tests confirm statistically significant improvements: item CTR +1.66%, buyers +1.57%, and order volume +2.17%.

Qinyao Li, Xiaoyang Zheng, Qihang Zhao et al.

Personalized search ranking systems are critical for driving engagement and revenue in modern e-commerce and short-video platforms. While existing methods excel at estimating users' broad interests based on the filtered historical behaviors, they typically under-exploit explicit alignment between a user's real-time intent (represented by the user query) and their past actions. In this paper, we propose DiffusionGS, a novel and scalable approach powered by generative models. Our key insight is that user queries can serve as explicit intent anchors to facilitate the extraction of users' immediate interests from long-term, noisy historical behaviors. Specifically, we formulate interest extraction as a conditional denoising task, where the user's query guides a conditional diffusion process to produce a robust, user intent-aware representation from their behavioral sequence. We propose the User-aware Denoising Layer (UDL) to incorporate user-specific profiles into the optimization of attention distribution on the user's past actions. By reframing queries as intent priors and leveraging diffusion-based denoising, our method provides a powerful mechanism for capturing dynamic user interest shifts. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the superiority of DiffusionGS over state-of-the-art methods.

Xiaoyang Zheng, Xin Tan, Jie Zhou et al.

Salient object detection aims at detecting the most visually distinct objects and producing the corresponding masks. As the cost of pixel-level annotations is high, image tags are usually used as weak supervisions. However, an image tag can only be used to annotate one class of objects. In this paper, we introduce saliency subitizing as the weak supervision since it is class-agnostic. This allows the supervision to be aligned with the property of saliency detection, where the salient objects of an image could be from more than one class. To this end, we propose a model with two modules, Saliency Subitizing Module (SSM) and Saliency Updating Module (SUM). While SSM learns to generate the initial saliency masks using the subitizing information, without the need for any unsupervised methods or some random seeds, SUM helps iteratively refine the generated saliency masks. We conduct extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets. The experimental results show that our method outperforms other weakly-supervised methods and even performs comparably to some fully-supervised methods.