Mingwei Tang

Rengan Xu, Junjie Yang, Yifan Xu et al.

The integration of hardware accelerators has significantly advanced the capabilities of modern recommendation systems, enabling the exploration of complex ranking paradigms previously deemed impractical. However, the GPU-based computational costs present substantial challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate our development of an efficiency-driven approach to explore these paradigms, moving beyond traditional reliance on native PyTorch modules. We address the specific challenges posed by ranking models' dependence on categorical features, which vary in length and complicate GPU utilization. We introduce Jagged Feature Interaction Kernels, a novel method designed to extract fine-grained insights from long categorical features through efficient handling of dynamically sized tensors. We further enhance the performance of attention mechanisms by integrating Jagged tensors with Flash Attention. Our novel Jagged Flash Attention achieves up to 9x speedup and 22x memory reduction compared to dense attention. Notably, it also outperforms dense flash attention, with up to 3x speedup and 53% more memory efficiency. In production models, we observe 10% QPS improvement and 18% memory savings, enabling us to scale our recommendation systems with longer features and more complex architectures.

Mingwei Tang, Jiahao Nie, Guang Yang et al.

Image fusion aims to synthesize a single high-quality image from a pair of inputs captured under challenging conditions, such as differing exposure levels or focal depths. A core challenge lies in effectively handling disparities in dynamic range and focus depth between the inputs. With the advent of vision-language models, recent methods incorporate textual descriptions as auxiliary guidance to enhance fusion quality. However, simply incorporating coarse-grained descriptions hampers the understanding of fine-grained details and poses challenges for precise cross-modal alignment. To address these limitations, we propose Multi-grained Text-guided Image Fusion (MTIF), a novel fusion paradigm with three key designs. First, it introduces multi-grained textual descriptions that separately capture fine details, structural cues, and semantic content, guiding image fusion through a hierarchical cross-modal modulation module. Second, it involves supervision signals at each granularity to facilitate alignment between visual and textual features and enhance the utility of auxiliary text. Third, it adopts a saliency-driven enrichment module to augment training data with dense semantic content, further strengthening the cross-modal modulation and alignment. Extensive experiments show that MTIF consistently outperforms previous methods on both multi-exposure and multi-focus image fusion tasks.

Mingwei Tang, Meng Liu, Hong Li et al.

In recommendation systems, high-quality user embeddings can capture subtle preferences, enable precise similarity calculations, and adapt to changing preferences over time to maintain relevance. The effectiveness of recommendation systems depends on the quality of user embedding. We propose to asynchronously learn high fidelity user embeddings for billions of users each day from sequence based multimodal user activities through a Transformer-like large scale feature learning module. The async learned user representations embeddings (ALURE) are further converted to user similarity graphs through graph learning and then combined with user realtime activities to retrieval highly related ads candidates for the ads delivery system. Our method shows significant gains in both offline and online experiments.