Wei Chen

Weihao Shen, Wei Chen, Fuwei Zhang et al.

Generative Recommendation (GR) formulates recommendation as autoregressive generation over discrete semantic identifiers (IDs). Although recent multimodal GR methods improve semantic ID construction with visual and textual information, they typically require item-level paired observations, restricting tokenization to the intersection of modality availability. Moreover, incorporating unpaired observations is nontrivial because small representation shifts may cross quantization boundaries and produce incompatible identifier sequences. To address this challenge, we propose \textbf{Unpair}ed Modality-Agnostic \textbf{G}enerative \textbf{R}ecommendation (UnpairGR), which learns a unified semantic-ID space from paired, image-only, and text-only observations. UnpairGR confines modality-specific processing to lightweight input projections while sharing the subsequent Transformer and residual codebooks across all observation conditions. Paired observations establish a reliability-guided cross-modal consensus, whereas unimodal observations directly refine the same representations and codes. The learned tokenizer is then fixed to provide stationary targets for a single autoregressive recommender, without feature imputation, modality-specific codebooks, or fallback mappings. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that UnpairGR consistently improves recommendation performance under both fully observed and incomplete-observation settings.

Weihao Shen, Wei Chen, Fuwei Zhang et al.

Compositional e-commerce queries express multiple requirements that must hold jointly, yet existing rerankers collapse these constraints into aggregate relevance and often promote topical near misses over feasible products. In this paper, we introduce REAlign, a novel requirement-evidence-aligned reranking framework that explicitly connects typed query requirements with visible evidence. REAlign distinguishes satisfied, violated, and unsupported conditions, constructs requirement-targeted contrasts that expose failure modes, and optimizes duplicate-free partial rankings through Requirement-Aware Group-Relative Policy Optimization. Its list utility preserves relevance while incorporating requirement satisfaction, evidence support, material violations, and output validity. Experiments on two fixed-pool e-commerce benchmarks show consistent improvements over strong supervised and policy-optimization baselines under matched training budgets, with fewer violations among top-ranked candidates and larger gains at shallow ranks. Controlled ablations confirm the complementary value of requirement modeling, evidence grounding, and decomposed optimization.

Mengmeng Zhu, Yuxuan Sun, Wei Chen et al.

The deployment of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) in autonomous driving (AD) systems is constrained by on-board computing power, restricting vehicles to small VLMs (SVLMs) with limited perception and reasoning capabilities. Infrastructure-assisted AD alleviates this resource constraint by enabling collaboration with large VLMs (LVLMs) at edge servers. However, in dynamic vehicular environments, the utility of sensory data for downstream tasks decays rapidly, making timeliness of information a critical concern. To balance the accuracy gains of LVLMs with their latency-induced timeliness degradation, we develop a Timeliness-Aware Large-Small VLM Collaboration (TALSC) framework. Specifically, we first model the Age of Information (AoI) evolution for VLM inference and characterize the coupling among AoI, token length, and task performance to formulate a general timeliness metric. Building on this, we propose the TALSC online scheduling algorithm. Since scheduling decisions have a delayed impact on future timeliness metric and the output token number is unknown at scheduling time, we design a Lyapunov drift-plus-estimated-penalty algorithm and provides a guaranteed performance. In simulation, we first conduct a case study to derive a fitted timeliness metric based on nuScenes dataset, and further show that TALSC outperforms baselines under various communication and computing settings, achieving up to a 12.6\% normalized improvement in Micro-F1 score compared with the best-performing baseline.

Wei Chen, Giacomo Dimarco, Lorenzo Pareschi

Efficient uncertainty quantification for kinetic equations with random inputs is challenging because it requires repeated simulations of high-dimensional models, such as the Boltzmann, Landau, and related collisional equations, whose computational cost can quickly become prohibitive. Multifidelity control variates address this difficulty by coupling a small number of high-fidelity simulations with many evaluations of lower-complexity reduced models. In this work, we analyze the case in which the reduced model is replaced by a neural surrogate rather than evaluated through a classical numerical scheme. We show that the resulting estimator remains unbiased and that the change in the optimal variance induced by the neural approximation is controlled by the error between the exact low-fidelity observable and its neural approximation. This estimate is then combined with residual stability estimates for inhomogeneous Fokker--Planck and Bhatnagar--Gross--Krook surrogates. We also extend the analysis to several control variates and to an asymptotic-preserving (AP) hierarchy containing the limiting Euler observable. In the fluid limit, the optimal hierarchical variance converges to the variance associated with the limiting Euler control, while the contribution of the intermediate kinetic correction vanishes. Numerical tests based on micro--macro neural surrogates illustrate the predicted variance stability and the behavior of the AP hierarchy.