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Xiangyu Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Xiangyu Zhao.

At least 217 records · Page 12Linked to original sources

Generative Auto-Bidding with Value-Guided Explorations

Auto-bidding, with its strong capability to optimize bidding decisions within dynamic and competitive online environments, has become a pivotal strategy for advertising platforms. Existing approaches typically employ rule-based strategies or Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques. However, rule-based strategies lack the flexibility to adapt to time-varying market conditions, and RL-based methods struggle to capture essential historical dependencies and observations within Markov Decision Process (MDP) frameworks. Furthermore, these approaches often face challenges in ensuring strategy adaptability across diverse advertising objectives. Additionally, as offline training methods are increasingly adopted to facilitate the deployment and maintenance of stable online strategies, the issues of documented behavioral patterns and behavioral collapse resulting from training on fixed offline datasets become increasingly significant. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel offline Generative Auto-bidding framework with Value-Guided Explorations (GAVE). GAVE accommodates various advertising objectives through a score-based Return-To-Go (RTG) module. Moreover, GAVE integrates an action exploration mechanism with an RTG-based evaluation method to explore novel actions while ensuring stability-preserving updates. A learnable value function is also designed to guide the direction of action exploration and mitigate Out-of-Distribution (OOD) problems. Experimental results on two offline datasets and real-world deployments demonstrate that GAVE outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both offline evaluations and online A/B tests. By applying the core methods of this framework, we proudly secured first place in the NeurIPS 2024 competition, 'AIGB Track: Learning Auto-Bidding Agents with Generative Models'.

cs.LG↗

Bridge the Domains: Large Language Models Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation

Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) aims to extract the preference from the user's historical interactions across various domains. Despite some progress in CDSR, two problems set the barrier for further advancements, i.e., overlap dilemma and transition complexity. The former means existing CDSR methods severely rely on users who own interactions on all domains to learn cross-domain item relationships, compromising the practicability. The latter refers to the difficulties in learning the complex transition patterns from the mixed behavior sequences. With powerful representation and reasoning abilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) are promising to address these two problems by bridging the items and capturing the user's preferences from a semantic view. Therefore, we propose an LLMs Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation model (LLM4CDSR). To obtain the semantic item relationships, we first propose an LLM-based unified representation module to represent items. Then, a trainable adapter with contrastive regularization is designed to adapt the CDSR task. Besides, a hierarchical LLMs profiling module is designed to summarize user cross-domain preferences. Finally, these two modules are integrated into the proposed tri-thread framework to derive recommendations. We have conducted extensive experiments on three public cross-domain datasets, validating the effectiveness of LLM4CDSR. We have released the code online.

cs.IR↗

PolyFootNet: Extracting Polygonal Building Footprints in Off-Nadir Remote Sensing Images

Extracting polygonal building footprints from off-nadir imagery is crucial for diverse applications. Current deep-learning-based extraction approaches predominantly rely on semantic segmentation paradigms and post-processing algorithms, limiting their boundary precision and applicability. However, existing polygonal extraction methodologies are inherently designed for near-nadir imagery and fail under the geometric complexities introduced by off-nadir viewing angles. To address these challenges, this paper introduces Polygonal Footprint Network (PolyFootNet), a novel deep-learning framework that directly outputs polygonal building footprints without requiring external post-processing steps. PolyFootNet employs a High-Quality Mask Prompter to generate precise roof masks, which guide polygonal vertex extraction in a unified model pipeline. A key contribution of PolyFootNet is introducing the Self Offset Attention mechanism, grounded in Nadaraya-Watson regression, to effectively mitigate the accuracy discrepancy observed between low-rise and high-rise buildings. This approach allows low-rise building predictions to leverage angular corrections learned from high-rise building offsets, significantly enhancing overall extraction accuracy. Additionally, motivated by the inherent ambiguity of building footprint extraction tasks, we systematically investigate alternative extraction paradigms and demonstrate that a combined approach of building masks and offsets achieves superior polygonal footprint results. Extensive experiments validate PolyFootNet's effectiveness, illustrating its promising potential as a robust, generalizable, and precise polygonal building footprint extraction method from challenging off-nadir imagery. To facilitate further research, we will release pre-trained weights of our offset prediction module at https://github.com/likaiucas/PolyFootNet.

cs.CV↗

A Survey of Personalization: From RAG to Agent

Personalization has become an essential capability in modern AI systems, enabling customized interactions that align with individual user preferences, contexts, and goals. Recent research has increasingly concentrated on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks and their evolution into more advanced agent-based architectures within personalized settings to enhance user satisfaction. Building on this foundation, this survey systematically examines personalization across the three core stages of RAG: pre-retrieval, retrieval, and generation. Beyond RAG, we further extend its capabilities into the realm of Personalized LLM-based Agents, which enhance traditional RAG systems with agentic functionalities, including user understanding, personalized planning and execution, and dynamic generation. For both personalization in RAG and agent-based personalization, we provide formal definitions, conduct a comprehensive review of recent literature, and summarize key datasets and evaluation metrics. Additionally, we discuss fundamental challenges, limitations, and promising research directions in this evolving field. Relevant papers and resources are continuously updated at https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/Awesome-Personalized-RAG-Agent.

cs.IR↗

GLINT-RU: Gated Lightweight Intelligent Recurrent Units for Sequential Recommender Systems

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.

cs.IR↗

ZeroED: Hybrid Zero-shot Error Detection through Large Language Model Reasoning

Error detection (ED) in tabular data is crucial yet challenging due to diverse error types and the need for contextual understanding. Traditional ED methods often rely heavily on manual criteria and labels, making them labor-intensive. Large language models (LLM) can minimize human effort but struggle with errors requiring a comprehensive understanding of data context. In this paper, we propose ZeroED, a novel hybrid zero-shot error detection framework, which combines LLM reasoning ability with the manual label-based ED pipeline. ZeroED operates in four steps, i.e., feature representation, error labeling, training data construction, and detector training. Initially, to enhance error distinction, ZeroED generates rich data representations using error reason-aware binary features, pre-trained embeddings, and statistical features. Then, ZeroED employs LLM to label errors holistically through in-context learning, guided by a two-step reasoning process for detailed error detection guidelines. To reduce token costs, LLMs are applied only to representative data selected via clustering-based sampling. High-quality training data is constructed through in-cluster label propagation and LLM augmentation with verification. Finally, a classifier is trained to detect all errors. Extensive experiments on seven public datasets demonstrate that, ZeroED substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a maximum 30% improvement in F1 score and up to 90% token cost reduction.

cs.LG↗

MetaLoRA: Tensor-Enhanced Adaptive Low-Rank Fine-tuning

There has been a significant increase in the deployment of neural network models, presenting substantial challenges in model adaptation and fine-tuning. Efficient adaptation is crucial in maintaining model performance across diverse tasks and domains. While Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has emerged as a promising parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, its fixed parameter nature limits its ability to handle dynamic task requirements effectively. Adapting models to new tasks can be challenging due to the need for extensive fine-tuning. Current LoRA variants primarily focus on general parameter reduction while overlooking the importance of dynamic parameter adjustment and meta-learning capabilities. Moreover, existing approaches mainly address static adaptations, neglecting the potential benefits of task-aware parameter generation in handling diverse task distributions. To address these limitations, this Ph.D. research proposes a LoRA generation approach to model task relationships and introduces MetaLoRA, a novel parameter-efficient adaptation framework incorporating meta-learning principles. This work develops a comprehensive architecture that integrates meta-parameter generation with adaptive low-rank decomposition, enabling efficient handling of both task-specific and task-agnostic features. MetaLoRA accurately captures task patterns by incorporating meta-learning mechanisms and dynamic parameter adjustment strategies. To our knowledge, this research represents the first attempt to provide a meta-learning enhanced LoRA variant, offering improved adaptation capability while maintaining computational efficiency in model fine-tuning.

cs.LG↗

Automatic Data Repair: Are We Ready to Deploy?

Data quality is paramount in today's data-driven world, especially in the era of generative AI. Dirty data with errors and inconsistencies usually leads to flawed insights, unreliable decision-making, and biased or low-quality outputs from generative models. The study of repairing erroneous data has gained significant importance. Existing data repair algorithms differ in information utilization, problem settings, and are tested in limited scenarios. In this paper, we initially compare and summarize these algorithms using a new guided information-based taxonomy. We then systematically conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 12 mainstream data repair algorithms under the settings of various data error rates, error types, and downstream analysis tasks, assessing their error reduction performance with a novel metric. Also, we develop an effective and unified repair optimization strategy that substantially benefits the state of the arts, as empirically confirmed. We demonstrate that, the pure clean data may not necessarily yield the best performance in data analysis tasks and data is always worth repairing regardless of error rate. Based on the found observations and insights, we provide some practical guidelines for 5 scenarios and 2 main data analysis tasks. We anticipate this paper enabling researchers and users to well understand and deploy data repair algorithms in practice. Finally, we outline research challenges and promising future directions in the data repair field.

cs.DB↗

Auto Cherry-Picker: Learning from High-quality Generative Data Driven by Language

Diffusion models can generate realistic and diverse images, potentially facilitating data availability for data-intensive perception tasks. However, leveraging these models to boost performance on downstream tasks with synthetic data poses several challenges, including aligning with real data distribution, scaling synthetic sample volumes, and ensuring their quality. To bridge these gaps, we present \textbf{A}uto \textbf{C}herry-\textbf{P}icker (ACP), a novel framework that generates high-quality cross-modality training samples at scale to augment perception and multi-modal training. ACP first uses LLMs to sample descriptions and layouts based on object combinations from real data priors, eliminating the need for ground truth image captions or annotations. Next, we use an off-the-shelf controllable diffusion model to generate multiple images. Then, the generated data are refined using a comprehensively designed metric, Composite Layout and Image Score (CLIS), to ensure quality. Our customized synthetic high-quality samples boost performance in various scenarios, especially in addressing challenges associated with long-tailed distribution and imbalanced datasets. Experiment results on downstream tasks demonstrate that ACP can significantly improve the performance of existing models. In addition, we find a positive correlation between CLIS and performance gains in downstream tasks. This finding shows the potential for evaluation metrics as the role for various visual perception and MLLM tasks.

cs.CV↗

Behavior Modeling Space Reconstruction for E-Commerce Search

Delivering superior search services is crucial for enhancing customer experience and driving revenue growth. Conventionally, search systems model user behaviors by combining user preference and query item relevance statically, often through a fixed logical 'and' relationship. This paper reexamines existing approaches through a unified lens using both causal graphs and Venn diagrams, uncovering two prevalent yet significant issues: entangled preference and relevance effects, and a collapsed modeling space. To surmount these challenges, our research introduces a novel framework, DRP, which enhances search accuracy through two components to reconstruct the behavior modeling space. Specifically, we implement preference editing to proactively remove the relevance effect from preference predictions, yielding untainted user preferences. Additionally, we employ adaptive fusion, which dynamically adjusts fusion criteria to align with the varying patterns of relevance and preference, facilitating more nuanced and tailored behavior predictions within the reconstructed modeling space. Empirical validation on two public datasets and a proprietary search dataset underscores the superiority of our proposed methodology, demonstrating marked improvements in performance over existing approaches.

cs.IR↗

ECKGBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models in E-commerce Leveraging Knowledge Graph

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their capabilities across various NLP tasks. Their potential in e-commerce is also substantial, evidenced by practical implementations such as platform search, personalized recommendations, and customer service. One primary concern associated with LLMs is their factuality (e.g., hallucination), which is urgent in e-commerce due to its significant impact on user experience and revenue. Despite some methods proposed to evaluate LLMs' factuality, issues such as lack of reliability, high consumption, and lack of domain expertise leave a gap between effective assessment in e-commerce. To bridge the evaluation gap, we propose ECKGBench, a dataset specifically designed to evaluate the capacities of LLMs in e-commerce knowledge. Specifically, we adopt a standardized workflow to automatically generate questions based on a large-scale knowledge graph, guaranteeing sufficient reliability. We employ the simple question-answering paradigm, substantially improving the evaluation efficiency by the least input and output tokens. Furthermore, we inject abundant e-commerce expertise in each evaluation stage, including human annotation, prompt design, negative sampling, and verification. Besides, we explore the LLMs' knowledge boundaries in e-commerce from a novel perspective. Through comprehensive evaluations of several advanced LLMs on ECKGBench, we provide meticulous analysis and insights into leveraging LLMs for e-commerce.

cs.CL↗

Creation-MMBench: Assessing Context-Aware Creative Intelligence in MLLM

Creativity is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, involving the ability to generate novel and appropriate solutions across diverse contexts. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively evaluated for their creative capabilities, the assessment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in this domain remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Creation-MMBench, a multimodal benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the creative capabilities of MLLMs in real-world, image-based tasks. The benchmark comprises 765 test cases spanning 51 fine-grained tasks. To ensure rigorous evaluation, we define instance-specific evaluation criteria for each test case, guiding the assessment of both general response quality and factual consistency with visual inputs. Experimental results reveal that current open-source MLLMs significantly underperform compared to proprietary models in creative tasks. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that visual fine-tuning can negatively impact the base LLM's creative abilities. Creation-MMBench provides valuable insights for advancing MLLM creativity and establishes a foundation for future improvements in multimodal generative intelligence. Full data and evaluation code is released on https://github.com/open-compass/Creation-MMBench.

cs.CV↗

VisualPRM: An Effective Process Reward Model for Multimodal Reasoning

We introduce VisualPRM, an advanced multimodal Process Reward Model (PRM) with 8B parameters, which improves the reasoning abilities of existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across different model scales and families with Best-of-N (BoN) evaluation strategies. Specifically, our model improves the reasoning performance of three types of MLLMs and four different model scales. Even when applied to the highly capable InternVL2.5-78B, it achieves a 5.9-point improvement across seven multimodal reasoning benchmarks. Experimental results show that our model exhibits superior performance compared to Outcome Reward Models and Self-Consistency during BoN evaluation. To facilitate the training of multimodal PRMs, we construct a multimodal process supervision dataset VisualPRM400K using an automated data pipeline. For the evaluation of multimodal PRMs, we propose VisualProcessBench, a benchmark with human-annotated step-wise correctness labels, to measure the abilities of PRMs to detect erroneous steps in multimodal reasoning tasks. We hope that our work can inspire more future research and contribute to the development of MLLMs. Our model, data, and benchmark are released in https://internvl.github.io/blog/2025-03-13-VisualPRM/.

cs.CV↗

Dual Test-time Training for Out-of-distribution Recommender System

Deep learning has been widely applied in recommender systems, which has achieved revolutionary progress recently. However, most existing learning-based methods assume that the user and item distributions remain unchanged between the training phase and the test phase. However, the distribution of user and item features can naturally shift in real-world scenarios, potentially resulting in a substantial decrease in recommendation performance. This phenomenon can be formulated as an Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) recommendation problem. To address this challenge, we propose a novel Dual Test-Time-Training framework for OOD Recommendation, termed DT3OR. In DT3OR, we incorporate a model adaptation mechanism during the test-time phase to carefully update the recommendation model, allowing the model to specially adapt to the shifting user and item features. To be specific, we propose a self-distillation task and a contrastive task to assist the model learning both the user's invariant interest preferences and the variant user/item characteristics during the test-time phase, thus facilitating a smooth adaptation to the shifting features. Furthermore, we provide theoretical analysis to support the rationale behind our dual test-time training framework. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first work to address OOD recommendation via a test-time-training strategy. We conduct experiments on three datasets with various backbones. Comprehensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of DT3OR compared to other state-of-the-art baselines.

cs.IR↗

Large Language Model Enhanced Recommender Systems: A Survey

Large Language Model (LLM) has transformative potential in various domains, including recommender systems (RS). There have been a handful of research that focuses on empowering the RS by LLM. However, previous efforts mainly focus on LLM as RS, which may face the challenge of intolerant inference costs by LLM. Recently, the integration of LLM into RS, known as LLM-Enhanced Recommender Systems (LLMERS), has garnered significant interest due to its potential to address latency and memory constraints in real-world applications. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the latest research efforts aimed at leveraging LLM to enhance RS capabilities. We identify a critical shift in the field with the move towards incorporating LLM into the online system, notably by avoiding their use during inference. Our survey categorizes the existing LLMERS approaches into three primary types based on the component of the RS model being augmented: Knowledge Enhancement, Interaction Enhancement, and Model Enhancement. We provide an in-depth analysis of each category, discussing the methodologies, challenges, and contributions of recent studies. Furthermore, we highlight several promising research directions that could further advance the field of LLMERS.

cs.IR↗

GenieBlue: Integrating both Linguistic and Multimodal Capabilities for Large Language Models on Mobile Devices

Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled their deployment on mobile devices. However, challenges persist in maintaining strong language capabilities and ensuring hardware compatibility, both of which are crucial for user experience and practical deployment efficiency. In our deployment process, we observe that existing MLLMs often face performance degradation on pure language tasks, and the current NPU platforms on smartphones do not support the MoE architecture, which is commonly used to preserve pure language capabilities during multimodal training. To address these issues, we systematically analyze methods to maintain pure language capabilities during the training of MLLMs, focusing on both training data and model architecture aspects. Based on these analyses, we propose GenieBlue, an efficient MLLM structural design that integrates both linguistic and multimodal capabilities for LLMs on mobile devices. GenieBlue freezes the original LLM parameters during MLLM training to maintain pure language capabilities. It acquires multimodal capabilities by duplicating specific transformer blocks for full fine-tuning and integrating lightweight LoRA modules. This approach preserves language capabilities while achieving comparable multimodal performance through extensive training. Deployed on smartphone NPUs, GenieBlue demonstrates efficiency and practicality for applications on mobile devices.

cs.CL↗

POI-Enhancer: An LLM-based Semantic Enhancement Framework for POI Representation Learning

POI representation learning plays a crucial role in handling tasks related to user mobility data. Recent studies have shown that enriching POI representations with multimodal information can significantly enhance their task performance. Previously, the textual information incorporated into POI representations typically involved only POI categories or check-in content, leading to relatively weak textual features in existing methods. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) trained on extensive text data have been found to possess rich textual knowledge. However leveraging such knowledge to enhance POI representation learning presents two key challenges: first, how to extract POI-related knowledge from LLMs effectively, and second, how to integrate the extracted information to enhance POI representations. To address these challenges, we propose POI-Enhancer, a portable framework that leverages LLMs to improve POI representations produced by classic POI learning models. We first design three specialized prompts to extract semantic information from LLMs efficiently. Then, the Dual Feature Alignment module enhances the quality of the extracted information, while the Semantic Feature Fusion module preserves its integrity. The Cross Attention Fusion module then fully adaptively integrates such high-quality information into POI representations and Multi-View Contrastive Learning further injects human-understandable semantic information into these representations. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework, showing significant improvements across all baseline representations.

cs.AI↗

OmniAlign-V: Towards Enhanced Alignment of MLLMs with Human Preference

Recent advancements in open-source multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have primarily focused on enhancing foundational capabilities, leaving a significant gap in human preference alignment. This paper introduces OmniAlign-V, a comprehensive dataset of 200K high-quality training samples featuring diverse images, complex questions, and varied response formats to improve MLLMs' alignment with human preferences. We also present MM-AlignBench, a human-annotated benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MLLMs' alignment with human values. Experimental results show that finetuning MLLMs with OmniAlign-V, using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) or Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), significantly enhances human preference alignment while maintaining or enhancing performance on standard VQA benchmarks, preserving their fundamental capabilities. Our datasets, benchmark, code and checkpoints have been released at https://github.com/PhoenixZ810/OmniAlign-V.

cs.CV↗