Wanyu Wang

Mengyang Ma, Xiaopeng Li, Wanyu Wang et al.

Transformer structures have been widely used in sequential recommender systems (SRS). However, as user interaction histories increase, computational time and memory requirements also grow. This is mainly caused by the standard attention mechanism. Although there exist many methods employing efficient attention and SSM-based models, these approaches struggle to effectively model long sequences and may exhibit unstable performance on short sequences. To address these challenges, we design a sparse attention mechanism, BlossomRec, which models both long-term and short-term user interests through attention computation to achieve stable performance across sequences of varying lengths. Specifically, we categorize user interests in recommendation systems into long-term and short-term interests, and compute them using two distinct sparse attention patterns, with the results combined through a learnable gated output. Theoretically, it significantly reduces the number of interactions participating in attention computation. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that BlossomRec, when integrated with state-of-the-art Transformer-based models, achieves comparable or even superior performance while significantly reducing memory usage, providing strong evidence of BlossomRec's efficiency and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/WWW2026_BlossomRec.

Qidong Liu, Jiaxi Hu, Yutian Xiao et al.

The recommender system (RS) has been an integral toolkit of online services. They are equipped with various deep learning techniques to model user preference based on identifier and attribute information. With the emergence of multimedia services, such as short videos, news and etc., understanding these contents while recommending becomes critical. Besides, multimodal features are also helpful in alleviating the problem of data sparsity in RS. Thus, Multimodal Recommender System (MRS) has attracted much attention from both academia and industry recently. In this paper, we will give a comprehensive survey of the MRS models, mainly from technical views. First, we conclude the general procedures and major challenges for MRS. Then, we introduce the existing MRS models according to four categories, i.e., Modality Encoder, Feature Interaction, Feature Enhancement and Model Optimization. Besides, to make it convenient for those who want to research this field, we also summarize the dataset and code resources. Finally, we discuss some promising future directions of MRS and conclude this paper. To access more details of the surveyed papers, such as implementation code, we open source a repository.

Zijian Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Qidong Liu et al.

In the era of information explosion, spatio-temporal data mining serves as a critical part of urban management. Considering the various fields demanding attention, e.g., traffic state, human activity, and social event, predicting multiple spatio-temporal attributes simultaneously can alleviate regulatory pressure and foster smart city construction. However, current research can not handle the spatio-temporal multi-attribute prediction well due to the complex relationships between diverse attributes. The key challenge lies in how to address the common spatio-temporal patterns while tackling their distinctions. In this paper, we propose an effective solution for spatio-temporal multi-attribute prediction, PromptST. We devise a spatio-temporal transformer and a parameter-sharing training scheme to address the common knowledge among different spatio-temporal attributes. Then, we elaborate a spatio-temporal prompt tuning strategy to fit the specific attributes in a lightweight manner. Through the pretrain and prompt tuning phases, our PromptST is able to enhance the specific spatio-temoral characteristic capture by prompting the backbone model to fit the specific target attribute while maintaining the learned common knowledge. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets verify that our PromptST attains state-of-the-art performance. Furthermore, we also prove PromptST owns good transferability on unseen spatio-temporal attributes, which brings promising application potential in urban computing. The implementation code is available to ease reproducibility.

Qidong Liu, Xian Wu, Wanyu Wang et al.

Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS), which model a user's interaction history to predict the next item of interest, are widely used in various applications. However, existing SRS often struggle with low-popularity items, a challenge known as the long-tail problem. This issue leads to reduced serendipity for users and diminished profits for sellers, ultimately harming the overall system. Large Language Model (LLM) has the ability to capture semantic relationships between items, independent of their popularity, making it a promising solution to this problem. In this paper, we introduce LLMEmb, a novel method leveraging LLM to generate item embeddings that enhance SRS performance. To bridge the gap between general-purpose LLM and the recommendation domain, we propose a Supervised Contrastive Fine-Tuning (SCFT) approach. This approach includes attribute-level data augmentation and a tailored contrastive loss to make LLM more recommendation-friendly. Additionally, we emphasize the importance of integrating collaborative signals into LLM-generated embeddings, for which we propose Recommendation Adaptation Training (RAT). This further refines the embeddings for optimal use in SRS. The LLMEmb-derived embeddings can be seamlessly integrated with any SRS models, underscoring the practical value. Comprehensive experiments conducted on three real-world datasets demonstrate that LLMEmb significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple SRS models. The code for our method is released online https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/LLMEmb.

Ziwei Liu, Qidong Liu, Yejing Wang et al.

In various domains, Sequential Recommender Systems (SRS) have become essential due to their superior capability to discern intricate user preferences. Typically, SRS utilize transformer-based architectures to forecast the subsequent item within a sequence. Nevertheless, the quadratic computational complexity inherent in these models often leads to inefficiencies, hindering the achievement of real-time recommendations. Mamba, a recent advancement, has exhibited exceptional performance in time series prediction, significantly enhancing both efficiency and accuracy. However, integrating Mamba directly into SRS poses several challenges. Its inherently unidirectional nature may constrain the model's capacity to capture the full context of user-item interactions, while its instability in state estimation can compromise its ability to detect short-term patterns within interaction sequences. To overcome these issues, we introduce a new framework named Selective Gated Mamba (SIGMA) for Sequential Recommendation. This framework leverages a Partially Flipped Mamba (PF-Mamba) to construct a bidirectional architecture specifically tailored to improve contextual modeling. Additionally, an input-sensitive Dense Selective Gate (DS Gate) is employed to optimize directional weights and enhance the processing of sequential information in PF-Mamba. For short sequence modeling, we have also developed a Feature Extract GRU (FE-GRU) to efficiently capture short-term dependencies. Empirical results indicate that SIGMA outperforms current models on five real-world datasets. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/ziwliu-cityu/SIMGA to ease reproducibility.

Muyang Li, Zijian Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao et al.

Sequential recommender systems aim to predict users' next interested item given their historical interactions. However, a long-standing issue is how to distinguish between users' long/short-term interests, which may be heterogeneous and contribute differently to the next recommendation. Existing approaches usually set pre-defined short-term interest length by exhaustive search or empirical experience, which is either highly inefficient or yields subpar results. The recent advanced transformer-based models can achieve state-of-the-art performances despite the aforementioned issue, but they have a quadratic computational complexity to the length of the input sequence. To this end, this paper proposes a novel sequential recommender system, AutoMLP, aiming for better modeling users' long/short-term interests from their historical interactions. In addition, we design an automated and adaptive search algorithm for preferable short-term interest length via end-to-end optimization. Through extensive experiments, we show that AutoMLP has competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods, while maintaining linear computational complexity.

Zijian Zhang, Ze Huang, Zhiwei Hu et al.

Traffic prediction is a typical spatio-temporal data mining task and has great significance to the public transportation system. Considering the demand for its grand application, we recognize key factors for an ideal spatio-temporal prediction method: efficient, lightweight, and effective. However, the current deep model-based spatio-temporal prediction solutions generally own intricate architectures with cumbersome optimization, which can hardly meet these expectations. To accomplish the above goals, we propose an intuitive and novel framework, MLPST, a pure multi-layer perceptron architecture for traffic prediction. Specifically, we first capture spatial relationships from both local and global receptive fields. Then, temporal dependencies in different intervals are comprehensively considered. Through compact and swift MLP processing, MLPST can well capture the spatial and temporal dependencies while requiring only linear computational complexity, as well as model parameters that are more than an order of magnitude lower than baselines. Extensive experiments validated the superior effectiveness and efficiency of MLPST against advanced baselines, and among models with optimal accuracy, MLPST achieves the best time and space efficiency.

Maolin Wang, Ziting Mai, Xuhui Chen et al.

Traditional network analysis focuses on single-layer networks, real-world systems often form multilayer networks with multiple relationship types. However, existing methods typically fail to capture complex inter-layer dependencies by treating layers independently or aggregating them. To address this, we propose T-GINEE (Tensor-Based Generalized Multilayer-graph Estimating Equation), a statistical regularization framework combining tensor-based generalized estimating equations with task-specific loss to model cross-network correlations explicitly. Key innovations include: (1) CP tensor decomposition capturing structural dependencies via shared latent factors; (2) a generalized estimating equation framework modeling inter-layer correlations through working covariance matrices; and (3) a flexible link function accommodating characteristics like sparsity. Our theoretical analysis establishes consistency and asymptotic normality under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate T-GINEE's effectiveness for multilayer network analysis.

Qian Ma, Zijian Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao et al.

With the acceleration of urbanization, traffic forecasting has become an essential role in smart city construction. In the context of spatio-temporal prediction, the key lies in how to model the dependencies of sensors. However, existing works basically only consider the micro relationships between sensors, where the sensors are treated equally, and their macroscopic dependencies are neglected. In this paper, we argue to rethink the sensor's dependency modeling from two hierarchies: regional and global perspectives. Particularly, we merge original sensors with high intra-region correlation as a region node to preserve the inter-region dependency. Then, we generate representative and common spatio-temporal patterns as global nodes to reflect a global dependency between sensors and provide auxiliary information for spatio-temporal dependency learning. In pursuit of the generality and reality of node representations, we incorporate a Meta GCN to calibrate the regional and global nodes in the physical data space. Furthermore, we devise the cross-hierarchy graph convolution to propagate information from different hierarchies. In a nutshell, we propose a Hierarchical Information Enhanced Spatio-Temporal prediction method, HIEST, to create and utilize the regional dependency and common spatio-temporal patterns. Extensive experiments have verified the leading performance of our HIEST against state-of-the-art baselines. We publicize the code to ease reproducibility.

Maolin Wang, Xinjian Zhao, Wanyu Wang et al.

Recommender systems have become an essential component of many online platforms, providing personalized recommendations to users. A crucial aspect is embedding techniques that convert the high-dimensional discrete features, such as user and item IDs, into low-dimensional continuous vectors, which can enhance the recommendation performance. Embedding techniques have revolutionized the capture of complex entity relationships, generating significant research interest. This survey presents a comprehensive analysis of recent advances in recommender system embedding techniques. We examine centralized embedding approaches across matrix, sequential, and graph structures. In matrix-based scenarios, collaborative filtering generates embeddings that effectively model user-item preferences, particularly in sparse data environments. For sequential data, we explore various approaches including recurrent neural networks and self-supervised methods such as contrastive and generative learning. In graph-structured contexts, we analyze techniques like node2vec that leverage network relationships, along with applicable self-supervised methods. Our survey addresses critical scalability challenges in embedding methods and explores innovative directions in recommender systems. We introduce emerging approaches, including AutoML, hashing techniques, and quantization methods, to enhance performance while reducing computational complexity. Additionally, we examine the promising role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in embedding enhancement. Through detailed discussion of various architectures and methodologies, this survey aims to provide a thorough overview of state-of-the-art embedding techniques in recommender systems, while highlighting key challenges and future research directions.

Andong Lu, Wanyu Wang, Chenglong Li et al.

Existing RGBT tracking methods often design various interaction models to perform cross-modal fusion of each layer, but can not execute the feature interactions among all layers, which plays a critical role in robust multimodal representation, due to large computational burden. To address this issue, this paper presents a novel All-layer multimodal Interaction Network, named AINet, which performs efficient and effective feature interactions of all modalities and layers in a progressive fusion Mamba, for robust RGBT tracking. Even though modality features in different layers are known to contain different cues, it is always challenging to build multimodal interactions in each layer due to struggling in balancing interaction capabilities and efficiency. Meanwhile, considering that the feature discrepancy between RGB and thermal modalities reflects their complementary information to some extent, we design a Difference-based Fusion Mamba (DFM) to achieve enhanced fusion of different modalities with linear complexity. When interacting with features from all layers, a huge number of token sequences (3840 tokens in this work) are involved and the computational burden is thus large. To handle this problem, we design an Order-dynamic Fusion Mamba (OFM) to execute efficient and effective feature interactions of all layers by dynamically adjusting the scan order of different layers in Mamba. Extensive experiments on four public RGBT tracking datasets show that AINet achieves leading performance against existing state-of-the-art methods.

Yexiong Lin, Jia Shi, Shanshan Ye et al.

Flow matching has emerged as a powerful generative framework, with recent few-step methods achieving remarkable inference acceleration. However, we identify a critical yet overlooked limitation: these models suffer from severe diversity degradation, concentrating samples on dominant modes while neglecting rare but valid variations of the target distribution. We trace this degradation to averaging distortion: when trained with MSE objectives, class-conditional flows learn a frequency-weighted mean over intra-class sub-modes, causing the model to over-represent high-density modes while systematically neglecting low-density ones. To address this, we propose SubFlow, Sub-mode Conditioned Flow Matching, which eliminates averaging distortion by decomposing each class into fine-grained sub-modes via semantic clustering and conditioning the flow on sub-mode indices. Each conditioned sub-distribution is approximately unimodal, so the learned flow accurately targets individual modes with no averaging distortion, restoring full mode coverage in a single inference step. Crucially, SubFlow is entirely plug-and-play: it integrates seamlessly into existing one-step models such as MeanFlow and Shortcut Models without any architectural modifications. Extensive experiments on ImageNet-256 demonstrate that SubFlow yields substantial gains in generation diversity (Recall) while maintaining competitive image quality (FID), confirming its broad applicability across different one-step generation frameworks. Project page: https://yexionglin.github.io/subflow.

Maolin Wang, Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang et al.

Tensor network structure search (TN-SS) aims to automatically discover optimal network topologies and rank configurations for efficient tensor decomposition in high-dimensional data representation. Despite recent advances, existing TN-SS methods face significant limitations in computational tractability, structure adaptivity, and optimization robustness across diverse tensor characteristics. They struggle with three key challenges: single-scale optimization missing multi-scale structures, discrete search spaces hindering smooth structure evolution, and separated structure-parameter optimization causing computational inefficiency. We propose RGTN (Renormalization Group guided Tensor Network search), a physics-inspired framework transforming TN-SS via multi-scale renormalization group flows. Unlike fixed-scale discrete search methods, RGTN uses dynamic scale-transformation for continuous structure evolution across resolutions. Its core innovation includes learnable edge gates for optimization-stage topology modification and intelligent proposals based on physical quantities like node tension measuring local stress and edge information flow quantifying connectivity importance. Starting from low-complexity coarse scales and refining to finer ones, RGTN finds compact structures while escaping local minima via scale-induced perturbations. Extensive experiments on light field data, high-order synthetic tensors, and video completion tasks show RGTN achieves state-of-the-art compression ratios and runs 4-600$\times$ faster than existing methods, validating the effectiveness of our physics-inspired approach.

Bowen Yu, Maolin Wang, Sheng Zhang et al.

Distilling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from large language models into compact student models presents a fundamental challenge: teacher rationales are often too verbose for smaller models to faithfully reproduce. Existing approaches either compress reasoning into single-step, losing the interpretability that makes CoT valuable. We present a three-stage curriculum learning framework that addresses this capacity mismatch through progressive skill acquisition. First, we establish structural understanding via masked shuffled reconstruction. Second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on masked completion tasks, enabling the model to discover its own balance between accuracy and brevity. Third, we identify persistent failure cases and guide the student to internalize teacher knowledge through targeted rewriting, again optimized with GRPO. Experiments on GSM8K demonstrate that our approach enables Qwen2.5-3B-Base to achieve an 11.29 percent accuracy improvement while reducing output length by 27.4 percent, surpassing both instruction-tuned variants and prior distillation methods.

Yuqing Fu, Yimin Deng, Wanyu Wang et al.

Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) aims to answer questions that require multi-step reasoning. It presents two key challenges: generating correct reasoning paths in response to the complex user queries, and accurately retrieving essential knowledge in the face of potential limitations in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on prompt-based methods to generate reasoning paths, which are further combined with traditional sparse or dense retrieval to produce the final answer. However, the generation of reasoning paths commonly lacks effective control over the generative process, thus leading the reasoning astray. Meanwhile, the retrieval methods over-rely on knowledge matching or similarity scores rather than evaluating the practical utility of the information, resulting in retrieving homogeneous or non-useful information. Therefore, we propose a Structured Entity-Aware Retrieval with Chain-of-Reasoning Navigator framework named SEARCH-R. Specifically, SEARCH-R trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator, which is able to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model. Moreover, a novel dependency tree-based retrieval is designed to evaluate the informational contribution of the document quantitatively. Extensive experiments on three challenging multi-hop datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/ACL2026_SEARCH-R.

Andong Lu, Wanyu Wang, Chenglong Li et al.

Multi-modal feature fusion as a core investigative component of RGBT tracking emerges numerous fusion studies in recent years. However, existing RGBT tracking methods widely adopt fixed fusion structures to integrate multi-modal feature, which are hard to handle various challenges in dynamic scenarios. To address this problem, this work presents a novel \emph{A}ttention-based \emph{F}usion rou\emph{ter} called AFter, which optimizes the fusion structure to adapt to the dynamic challenging scenarios, for robust RGBT tracking. In particular, we design a fusion structure space based on the hierarchical attention network, each attention-based fusion unit corresponding to a fusion operation and a combination of these attention units corresponding to a fusion structure. Through optimizing the combination of attention-based fusion units, we can dynamically select the fusion structure to adapt to various challenging scenarios. Unlike complex search of different structures in neural architecture search algorithms, we develop a dynamic routing algorithm, which equips each attention-based fusion unit with a router, to predict the combination weights for efficient optimization of the fusion structure. Extensive experiments on five mainstream RGBT tracking datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed AFter against state-of-the-art RGBT trackers. We release the code in https://github.com/Alexadlu/AFter.

Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Xiangyu Zhao et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in complex reasoning tasks, but their safety and robustness in reasoning processes remain underexplored. Existing attacks on LLM reasoning are constrained by specific settings or lack of imperceptibility, limiting their feasibility and generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose the Stepwise rEasoning Error Disruption (SEED) attack, which subtly injects errors into prior reasoning steps to mislead the model into producing incorrect subsequent reasoning and final answers. Unlike previous methods, SEED is compatible with zero-shot and few-shot settings, maintains the natural reasoning flow, and ensures covert execution without modifying the instruction. Extensive experiments on four datasets across four different models demonstrate SEED's effectiveness, revealing the vulnerabilities of LLMs to disruptions in reasoning processes. These findings underscore the need for greater attention to the robustness of LLM reasoning to ensure safety in practical applications. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/SEED-Attack.

Yuhao Wang, Junwei Pan, Pengyue Jia et al.

Sequential Recommendation (SR) aims to leverage the sequential patterns in users' historical interactions to accurately track their preferences. However, the primary reliance of existing SR methods on collaborative data results in challenges such as the cold-start problem and sub-optimal performance. Concurrently, despite the proven effectiveness of large language models (LLMs), their integration into commercial recommender systems is impeded by issues such as high inference latency, incomplete capture of all distribution statistics, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we introduce a novel Pre-train, Align, and Disentangle (PAD) framework to enhance SR models with LLMs. In particular, we initially pre-train both the SR and LLM models to obtain collaborative and textual embeddings. Subsequently, we propose a characteristic recommendation-anchored alignment loss using multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy with Gaussian kernels. Lastly, a triple-experts architecture, comprising aligned and modality-specific experts with disentangled embeddings, is fine-tuned in a frequency-aware manner. Experimental results on three public datasets validate the efficacy of PAD, indicating substantial enhancements and compatibility with various SR backbone models, particularly for cold items. The code and datasets are accessible for reproduction at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/PAD.

Maolin Wang, Tianshuo Wei, Sheng Zhang et al.

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has emerged as a powerful approach for automating neural network design. However, existing NAS methods face critical limitations in real-world deployments: architectures lack adaptability across scenarios, each deployment context requires costly separate searches, and performance consistency across diverse platforms remains challenging. We propose DANCE (Dynamic Architectures with Neural Continuous Evolution), which reformulates architecture search as a continuous evolution problem through learning distributions over architectural components. DANCE introduces three key innovations: a continuous architecture distribution enabling smooth adaptation, a unified architecture space with learned selection gates for efficient sampling, and a multi-stage training strategy for effective deployment optimization. Extensive experiments across five datasets demonstrate DANCE's effectiveness. Our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art NAS approaches in terms of accuracy while significantly reducing search costs. Under varying computational constraints, DANCE maintains robust performance while smoothly adapting architectures to different hardware requirements. The code and appendix can be found at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/DANCE.

Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yejing Wang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The release of open-source LLMs like LLaMA and Qwen has triggered the development of numerous fine-tuned models tailored for various tasks and languages. In this paper, we explore an important question: is it possible to combine these specialized models to create a unified model with multi-task capabilities. We introduces Hierarchical Iterative Merging (Hi-Merging), a training-free method for unifying different specialized LLMs into a single model. Specifically, Hi-Merging employs model-wise and layer-wise pruning and scaling, guided by contribution analysis, to mitigate parameter conflicts. Extensive experiments on multiple-choice and question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English validate Hi-Merging's ability for multi-task learning. The results demonstrate that Hi-Merging consistently outperforms existing merging techniques and surpasses the performance of models fine-tuned on combined datasets in most scenarios. Code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/Hi-Merging.

Pengyue Jia, Hailan Yang, Shuchang Liu et al.

List-wise reranking arranges a request-specific pool of candidate items into an ordered slate that maximizes user satisfaction. Existing generative rerankers fall into two paradigms: Autoregressive (AR) rerankers construct the slate left to right and capture inter-item dependencies in the exposure list, but they suffer from error propagation because early mistakes affect subsequent slots. Non-autoregressive (NAR) rerankers predict all slots in parallel and avoid error propagation, but they weaken inter-item interaction modeling under a slot independence assumption. This raises a central question: is there a unified architecture that combines the strengths of both paradigms and delivers stronger reranking performance? We answer this question with UniRank, a unified list-wise reranking framework whose inference time variants recover AR and NAR rerankers as special cases. UniRank integrates bidirectional slate modeling into an iterative denoising process and fills the most confident slot at each step. To instantiate this framework for reranking, we introduce the Task Grounded Diffusion Interface (TGD), which performs denoising at the item level and restricts prediction to the request-specific candidate pool. TGD aggregates each item's semantic tokens into a single item embedding and scores each slot directly against the candidate pool. Experiments on Amazon Books, MovieLens-1M, and an industrial short video dataset show that UniRank consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Online A/B tests on a real-world industrial platform further validate its effectiveness, yielding significant improvements of +0.159% in user average app-time and +1.016% in share-rate.

Xiao Han, Zimo Zhao, Wanyu Wang et al.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have emphasized the critical role of fine-tuning (FT) techniques in adapting LLMs to specific tasks, especially when retraining from scratch is computationally infeasible. Fine-tuning enables LLMs to leverage task- or domain-specific data, producing models that more effectively meet the requirements of targeted applications. However, conventional FT approaches often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and suboptimal data efficiency, limiting their real-world applicability. To address these challenges, this paper proposes \textbf{DEAL}, a novel framework that integrates Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) with a continuous fine-tuning strategy. By incorporating knowledge retention and adaptive parameter update modules, the framework mitigates the limitations of existing FT methods while maintaining efficiency. Experiments on 15 diverse datasets show that DEAL consistently outperforms baseline methods, yielding substantial gains in task accuracy and resource efficiency. These findings demonstrate the potential of our approach to advance continual adaptation in LLMs by enhancing task performance while improving resource efficiency. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/zzm-black/DEAL-Continuous-Low-Rank-Fine-Tuning.

Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) require continuous updates to maintain accurate and current knowledge as the world evolves. While existing knowledge editing approaches offer various solutions for knowledge updating, they often struggle with sequential editing scenarios and harm the general capabilities of the model, thereby significantly hampering their practical applicability. This paper proposes a two-stage framework combining robust supervised fine-tuning (R-SFT) with model merging for knowledge editing. Our method first fine-tunes the LLM to internalize new knowledge fully, then merges the fine-tuned model with the original foundation model to preserve newly acquired knowledge and general capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing methods in sequential editing while better preserving the original performance of the model, all without requiring any architectural changes. Code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/MM4KE.

Pengyue Jia, Yejing Wang, Zhaocheng Du et al.

Deep Recommender Systems (DRS) are increasingly dependent on a large number of feature fields for more precise recommendations. Effective feature selection methods are consequently becoming critical for further enhancing the accuracy and optimizing storage efficiencies to align with the deployment demands. This research area, particularly in the context of DRS, is nascent and faces three core challenges. Firstly, variant experimental setups across research papers often yield unfair comparisons, obscuring practical insights. Secondly, the existing literature's lack of detailed analysis on selection attributes, based on large-scale datasets and a thorough comparison among selection techniques and DRS backbones, restricts the generalizability of findings and impedes deployment on DRS. Lastly, research often focuses on comparing the peak performance achievable by feature selection methods, an approach that is typically computationally infeasible for identifying the optimal hyperparameters and overlooks evaluating the robustness and stability of these methods. To bridge these gaps, this paper presents ERASE, a comprehensive bEnchmaRk for feAture SElection for DRS. ERASE comprises a thorough evaluation of eleven feature selection methods, covering both traditional and deep learning approaches, across four public datasets, private industrial datasets, and a real-world commercial platform, achieving significant enhancement. Our code is available online for ease of reproduction.

Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu et al. · tencent-ai

Model editing aims to precisely alter the behaviors of large language models (LLMs) in relation to specific knowledge, while leaving unrelated knowledge intact. This approach has proven effective in addressing issues of hallucination and outdated information in LLMs. However, the potential of using model editing to modify knowledge in the medical field remains largely unexplored, even though resolving hallucination is a pressing need in this area. Our observations indicate that current methods face significant challenges in dealing with specialized and complex knowledge in medical domain. Therefore, we propose MedLaSA, a novel Layer-wise Scalable Adapter strategy for medical model editing. MedLaSA harnesses the strengths of both adding extra parameters and locate-then-edit methods for medical model editing. We utilize causal tracing to identify the association of knowledge in neurons across different layers, and generate a corresponding scale set from the association value for each piece of knowledge. Subsequently, we incorporate scalable adapters into the dense layers of LLMs. These adapters are assigned scaling values based on the corresponding specific knowledge, which allows for the adjustment of the adapter's weight and rank. The more similar the content, the more consistent the scale between them. This ensures precise editing of semantically identical knowledge while avoiding impact on unrelated knowledge. To evaluate the editing impact on the behaviours of LLMs, we propose two model editing studies for medical domain: (1) editing factual knowledge for medical specialization and (2) editing the explanatory ability for complex knowledge. We build two novel medical benchmarking datasets and introduce a series of challenging and comprehensive metrics. Extensive experiments on medical LLMs demonstrate the editing efficiency of MedLaSA, without affecting unrelated knowledge.

Guoqiang Zou, Wanyu Wang, Hao Zheng et al.

Serving large language models (LLMs) on accelerators with poor random-access bandwidth (e.g., LPDDR5-based) is limited by current memory managers. Static pre-allocation wastes memory, while fine-grained paging (e.g., PagedAttention) is ill-suited due to high random-access costs. Existing HBM-centric solutions do not exploit the characteristics of random-access-constrained memory (RACM) accelerators like Cambricon MLU370. We present ODMA, an on-demand memory allocation framework for RACM. ODMA addresses distribution drift and heavy-tailed requests by coupling a lightweight length predictor with dynamic bucket partitioning and a large-bucket safeguard. Boundaries are periodically updated from live traces to maximize utilization. On Alpaca and Google-NQ, ODMA improves prediction accuracy of prior work significantly (e.g., from 82.68% to 93.36%). Serving DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B on Cambricon MLU370-X4, ODMA raises memory utilization from 55.05% to 72.45% and improves RPS and TPS by 29% and 27% over static baselines. This demonstrates that hardware-aware allocation unlocks efficient LLM serving on RACM platforms.

Langming Liu, Wanyu Wang, Xiangyu Zhao et al.

Recommender systems play a pivotal role across practical scenarios, showcasing remarkable capabilities in user preference modeling. However, the centralized learning paradigm predominantly used raises serious privacy concerns. The federated recommender system (FedRS) addresses this by updating models on clients, while a central server orchestrates training without accessing private data. Existing FedRS approaches, however, face unresolved challenges, including non-convex optimization, vulnerability, potential privacy leakage risk, and communication inefficiency. This paper addresses these challenges by reformulating the federated recommendation problem as a convex optimization issue, ensuring convergence to the global optimum. Based on this, we devise a novel method, RFRec, to tackle this optimization problem efficiently. In addition, we propose RFRecF, a highly efficient version that incorporates non-uniform stochastic gradient descent to improve communication efficiency. In user preference modeling, both methods learn local and global models, collaboratively learning users' common and personalized interests under the federated learning setting. Moreover, both methods significantly enhance communication efficiency, robustness, and privacy protection, with theoretical support. Comprehensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets demonstrate RFRec and RFRecF's superior performance compared to diverse baselines.

Langming Liu, Wanyu Wang, Chi Zhang et al.

Online advertising in recommendation platforms has gained significant attention, with a predominant focus on channel recommendation and budget allocation strategies. However, current offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods face substantial challenges when applied to sparse advertising scenarios, primarily due to severe overestimation, distributional shifts, and overlooking budget constraints. To address these issues, we propose MTORL, a novel multi-task offline RL model that targets two key objectives. First, we establish a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework specific to the nuances of advertising. Then, we develop a causal state encoder to capture dynamic user interests and temporal dependencies, facilitating offline RL through conditional sequence modeling. Causal attention mechanisms are introduced to enhance user sequence representations by identifying correlations among causal states. We employ multi-task learning to decode actions and rewards, simultaneously addressing channel recommendation and budget allocation. Notably, our framework includes an automated system for integrating these tasks into online advertising. Extensive experiments on offline and online environments demonstrate MTORL's superiority over state-of-the-art methods.

Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Nan Wang et al.

Despite substantial advancements in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, current safety mechanisms remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks. We hypothesize that this vulnerability stems from distributional discrepancies between alignment-oriented prompts and malicious prompts. To investigate this, we introduce LogiBreak, a novel and universal black-box jailbreak method that leverages logical expression translation to circumvent LLM safety systems. By converting harmful natural language prompts into formal logical expressions, LogiBreak exploits the distributional gap between alignment data and logic-based inputs, preserving the underlying semantic intent and readability while evading safety constraints. We evaluate LogiBreak on a multilingual jailbreak dataset spanning three languages, demonstrating its effectiveness across various evaluation settings and linguistic contexts.

Yuwen He, Wei Wang, Wanyu Wang et al.

Lens flares arise from light reflection and refraction within sensor arrays, whose diverse types include glow, veiling glare, reflective flare and so on. Existing methods are specialized for one specific type only, and overlook the simultaneous occurrence of multiple typed lens flares, which is common in the real-world, e.g. coexistence of glow and displacement reflections from the same light source. These co-occurring lens flares cannot be effectively resolved by the simple combination of individual flare removal methods, since these coexisting flares originates from the same light source and are generated simultaneously within the same sensor array, exhibit a complex interdependence rather than simple additive relation. To model this interdependent flare relationship, our Nighttime Lens Flare Formation model is the first attempt to learn the intrinsic physical relationship between flares on the imaging plane. Building on this physical model, we introduce a solution to this joint flare removal task named Self-supervised Generation-based Lens Flare Removal Network (SGLFR-Net), which is self-supervised without pre-training. Specifically, the nighttime glow is detangled in PSF Rendering Network(PSFR-Net) based on PSF Rendering Prior, while the reflective flare is modelled in Texture Prior Based Reflection Flare Removal Network (TPRR-Net). Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in both joint and individual glare removal tasks.

Kai Yang, Yuqi Huang, Junheng Tao et al.

Modeling 3D dynamics is a fundamental problem in multi-body systems across scientific and engineering domains and has important practical implications in trajectory prediction and simulation. While recent GNN-based approaches have achieved strong performance by enforcing geometric symmetries, encoding high-order features or incorporating neural-ODE mechanics, they typically depend on explicitly observed structures and inherently fail to capture the unobserved interactions that are crucial to complex physical behaviors and dynamics mechanism. In this paper, we propose PAINET, a principled SE(3)-equivariant neural architecture for learning all-pair interactions in multi-body systems. The model comprises: (1) a novel physics-inspired attention network derived from the minimization trajectory of an energy function, and (2) a parallel decoder that preserves equivariance while enabling efficient inference. Empirical results on diverse real-world benchmarks, including human motion capture, molecular dynamics, and large-scale protein simulations, show that PAINET consistently outperforms recently proposed models, yielding 4.7% to 41.5% error reductions in 3D dynamics prediction with comparable computation costs in terms of time and memory.

Andong Lu, Yuanzhi Guo, Wanyu Wang et al.

Current RGBT tracking methods often overlook the impact of fusion location on mitigating modality gap, which is key factor to effective tracking. Our analysis reveals that shallower fusion yields smaller distribution gap. However, the limited discriminative power of shallow networks hard to distinguish task-relevant information from noise, limiting the potential of pixel-level fusion. To break shallow limits, we propose a novel \textbf{T}ask-driven \textbf{P}ixel-level \textbf{F}usion network, named \textbf{TPF}, which unveils the power of pixel-level fusion in RGBT tracking through a progressive learning framework. In particular, we design a lightweight Pixel-level Fusion Adapter (PFA) that exploits Mamba's linear complexity to ensure real-time, low-latency RGBT tracking. To enhance the fusion capabilities of the PFA, our task-driven progressive learning framework first utilizes adaptive multi-expert distillation to inherits fusion knowledge from state-of-the-art image fusion models, establishing robust initialization, and then employs a decoupled representation learning scheme to achieve task-relevant information fusion. Moreover, to overcome appearance variations between the initial template and search frames, we presents a nearest-neighbor dynamic template updating scheme, which selects the most reliable frame closest to the current search frame as the dynamic template. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TPF significantly outperforms existing most of advanced trackers on four public RGBT tracking datasets. The code will be released upon acceptance.

Bowen Liu, Pengyue Jia, Wanyu Wang et al.

The primary objective of cross-view UAV geolocalization is to identify the exact spatial coordinates of drone-captured imagery by aligning it with extensive, geo-referenced satellite databases. Current approaches typically extract features independently from each perspective and rely on basic heuristics to compute similarity, thereby failing to explicitly capture the essential interactions between different views. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel, plug-and-play ranking architecture designed to explicitly perform joint relational modeling for improved UAV-to-satellite image matching. By harnessing the capabilities of a Large Vision-Language Model (LVLM), our framework effectively learns the deep visual-semantic correlations linking UAV and satellite imagery. Furthermore, we present a novel relational-aware loss function to optimize the training phase. By employing soft labels, this loss provides fine-grained supervision that avoids overly penalizing near-positive matches, ultimately boosting both the model's discriminative power and training stability. Comprehensive evaluations across various baseline architectures and standard benchmarks reveal that the proposed method substantially boosts the retrieval accuracy of existing models, yielding superior performance even under highly demanding conditions.

Xiaopeng Li, Yuanjin Zheng, Wanyu Wang et al.

Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to align model outputs with individual user preferences, a crucial capability for user-centric applications. However, the prevalent approach of fine-tuning a separate module for each user faces two major limitations: (1) storage costs scale linearly with the number of users, rendering the method unscalable; and (2) fine-tuning a static model from scratch often yields suboptimal performance for users with sparse data. To address these challenges, we propose MTA, a Merge-then-Adapt framework for PLLMs. MTA comprises three key stages. First, we construct a shared Meta-LoRA Bank by selecting anchor users and pre-training meta-personalization traits within meta-LoRA modules. Second, to ensure scalability and enable dynamic personalization combination beyond static models, we introduce an Adaptive LoRA Fusion stage. This stage retrieves and dynamically merges the most relevant anchor meta-LoRAs to synthesize a user-specific one, thereby eliminating the need for user-specific storage and supporting more flexible personalization. Third, we propose a LoRA Stacking for Few-Shot Personalization stage, which applies an additional ultra-low-rank, lightweight LoRA module on top of the merged LoRA. Fine-tuning this module enables effective personalization under few-shot settings. Extensive experiments on the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing SOTA methods across multiple tasks.

Ziwei Liu, Qidong Liu, Wanyu Wang et al.

Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) has been proposed to enrich user-item interactions by incorporating information from various domains. Despite current progress, the imbalance issue and transition issue hinder further development of CDSR. The former one presents a phenomenon that the interactions in one domain dominate the entire behavior, leading to difficulty in capturing the domain-specific features in the other domain. The latter points to the difficulty in capturing users' cross-domain preferences within the mixed interaction sequence, resulting in poor next-item prediction performance for specific domains. With world knowledge and powerful reasoning ability, Large Language Models (LLMs) partially alleviate the above issues by performing as a generator and an encoder. However, current LLMs-enhanced CDSR methods are still under exploration, which fail to recognize the irrelevant noise and rough profiling problems. Thus, to make peace with the aforementioned challenges, we proposed an LLMs Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation with Dual-phase Training ({LLM-EDT}). To address the imbalance issue while introducing less irrelevant noise, we first propose the transferable item augmenter to adaptively generate possible cross-domain behaviors for users. Then, to alleviate the transition issue, we introduce a dual-phase training strategy to empower the domain-specific thread with a domain-shared background. As for the rough profiling problem, we devise a domain-aware profiling module to summarize the user's preference in each domain and adaptively aggregate them to generate comprehensive user profiles. The experiments on three public datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed LLM-EDT. To ease reproducibility, we have released the detailed code online at {https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLM-EDT-583F}.

Jieke Lin, Wanyu Wang, Longxiang Yin et al.

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, such as autonomous robots and intelligent vehicles, are increasingly reliant on diverse heterogeneous accelerators (e.g., GPGPUs, NPUs, FPGAs) to meet stringent real-time processing and energy-efficiency demands. However, the proliferation of vendor-specific proprietary communication libraries creates significant interoperability barriers, hindering seamless collaboration between different accelerator types and leading to suboptimal resource utilization and performance bottlenecks in distributed AI workloads. This paper introduces KAITIAN, a novel distributed communication framework designed to bridge this gap. KAITIAN provides a unified abstraction layer that intelligently integrates vendor-optimized communication libraries for intra-group efficiency with general-purpose communication protocols for inter-group interoperability. Crucially, it incorporates a load-adaptive scheduling mechanism that dynamically balances computational tasks across heterogeneous devices based on their real-time performance characteristics. Implemented as an extension to PyTorch and rigorously evaluated on a testbed featuring NVIDIA GPUs and Cambricon MLUs, KAITIAN demonstrates significant improvements in resource utilization and scalability for distributed training tasks. Experimental results show that KAITIAN can accelerate training time by up to 42% compared to baseline homogeneous systems, while incurring minimal communication overhead (2.8--4.3%) and maintaining model accuracy. KAITIAN paves the way for more flexible and powerful heterogeneous computing in complex embodied AI applications.

Sheng Zhang, Maolin Wang, Wanyu Wang et al.

Transformer-based models have gained significant traction in sequential recommender systems (SRSs) for their ability to capture user-item interactions effectively. However, these models often suffer from high computational costs and slow inference. Meanwhile, existing efficient SRS approaches struggle to embed high-quality semantic and positional information into latent representations. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces GLINT-RU, a lightweight and efficient SRS leveraging a single-layer dense selective Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) module to accelerate inference. By incorporating a dense selective gate, GLINT-RU adaptively captures temporal dependencies and fine-grained positional information, generating high-quality latent representations. Additionally, a parallel mixing block infuses fine-grained positional features into user-item interactions, enhancing both recommendation quality and efficiency. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that GLINT-RU achieves superior prediction accuracy and inference speed, outperforming baselines based on RNNs, Transformers, MLPs, and SSMs. These results establish GLINT-RU as a powerful and efficient solution for SRSs.

Maolin Wang, Yu Pan, Zenglin Xu et al.

Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) hold a pivotal role in modeling event sequences across diverse domains, including social networking and e-commerce, and have significantly contributed to the advancement of recommendation systems and information retrieval strategies. Through the analysis of events such as user interactions and transactions, TPPs offer valuable insights into behavioral patterns, facilitating the prediction of future trends. However, accurately forecasting future events remains a formidable challenge due to the intricate nature of these patterns. The integration of Neural Networks with TPPs has ushered in the development of advanced deep TPP models. While these models excel at processing complex and nonlinear temporal data, they encounter limitations in modeling intensity functions, grapple with computational complexities in integral computations, and struggle to capture long-range temporal dependencies effectively. In this study, we introduce the CuFun model, representing a novel approach to TPPs that revolves around the Cumulative Distribution Function (CDF). CuFun stands out by uniquely employing a monotonic neural network for CDF representation, utilizing past events as a scaling factor. This innovation significantly bolsters the model's adaptability and precision across a wide range of data scenarios. Our approach addresses several critical issues inherent in traditional TPP modeling: it simplifies log-likelihood calculations, extends applicability beyond predefined density function forms, and adeptly captures long-range temporal patterns. Our contributions encompass the introduction of a pioneering CDF-based TPP model, the development of a methodology for incorporating past event information into future event prediction, and empirical validation of CuFun's effectiveness through extensive experimentation on synthetic and real-world datasets.