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Zhong Ming

Publications and source records attributed to Zhong Ming.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

DuTri: Dual-Branch Modeling with Triadic Factorization for Multimodal Multi-Scenario Recommendation

As recommendation scenarios become increasingly diverse and multimodal information grows more prevalent, effectively modeling cross-scenario user preferences and multimodal semantics has become a critical challenge in recommender systems. When incorporating multimodal information, existing multi-scenario recommendation (MSR) methods typically treat textual and visual representations as generic input features and directly feed them into their original parameter-sharing architectures. However, this extension may not fully accommodate the different modeling requirements of collaborative and multimodal information and may not be the best modeling paradigm. Our controlled experiments show that directly adopting these architectures is not the optimal modeling approach. To this end, we propose Dual-Branch Modeling with Triadic Factorization (DuTri), a framework for multimodal multi-scenario recommendation comprising a collaborative branch and a multimodal branch. Specifically, the collaborative branch learns structured collaborative preference representations through CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition of user-scenario-item interactions and residual quantization, thereby capturing cross-scenario commonalities and scenario-specific differences. The multimodal branch leverages the learned user and scenario preferences to guide adaptive modality fusion; additionally, item-level contrastive learning aligns collaborative item preference representations with multimodal representations to facilitate effective collaboration between the two branches. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets, AntM$^2$C and Amazon, demonstrate that DuTri outperforms existing multimodal and multi-scenario recommendation baselines in overall recommendation performance, validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Towards a Unified Framework of Optimal Input-Side Dimensional Configuration for Deep CTR Prediction

Deep click-through rate (CTR) prediction has achieved substantial success through increasingly expressive feature interaction architectures. However, predictive performance also depends on how input-side information is configured before interaction modeling. Existing studies have shown that selecting informative samples, features, or embedding units can improve prediction accuracy. Nevertheless, they primarily optimize these selection mechanisms independently along a single input-side dimension, overlooking their shared basic form and the inherent dependencies across input levels, thereby limiting the effectiveness of input-side dimensional configuration. To address this issue, we propose OptIDC, a unified framework for Optimal Input-side Dimensional Configuration in deep CTR prediction. OptIDC jointly learns sample, feature, and embedding-unit level configurations within a unified framework by integrating their corresponding selection mechanisms. To explicitly coordinate selection decisions across different levels, OptIDC further introduces a selection-weighted Optimal Transport mechanism that aligns coarse- and fine-grained selections via transport over finite measures, thereby alleviating cross-level selection conflicts while preserving the semantics of each input level. Moreover, OptIDC is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into existing CTR models. Extensive experiments on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that OptIDC consistently achieves higher AUC than existing input-side selection methods, validating the effectiveness of unified input-side dimensional configuration.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

VeruSteer: Learning What to Repair Next in Verus

LLM-based verification systems repair Rust proofs by revising programs in response to Verus diagnostics. When several error types are reported, pipelines such as AutoVerus and VeruSAGE select the next repair target using a preset priority. Yet each repair changes the program and the errors that follow, so the same reported types can require different choices at different states. We present VeruSteer, which learns to select error types from the outcomes of alternative repair trajectories. It constructs repair trees offline and compares paths from the same initial program by verification success, repair rounds, and final verification progress. These comparisons supervise a selector that combines step-wise imitation with trajectory preference ranking. The selector uses self-attention over the program, verifier feedback, and earlier selections to rank the currently reported types. It replaces the default priority within a single repair trajectory, keeping the existing repair agents and adding no repair or verifier calls for selection. We evaluate VeruSteer by replaying its choices on stored AutoVerus and VeruSAGE test trees under four generation configurations. Across 1,270 test trees, VeruSteer increases verified outcomes from 185 to 194 (14.57\% to 15.28\%), gaining 12 successes and losing three for a net improvement of 0.71 percentage points. Among trees where the default fails but a recorded alternative verifies, VeruSteer succeeds on 3 of 4 AutoVerus trees and 9 of 11 VeruSAGE trees. Among trees with recorded alternatives where the default verifies, it retains success on 14 of 15 AutoVerus trees and 12 of 14 VeruSAGE trees. It also finds shorter successful trajectories and improves final progress on some trees where all recorded trajectories fail.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

VerusEval: Evaluating LLM-Generated Verus Specifications Beyond Verifier Acceptance

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate Verus contracts for Rust programs together with the proofs that establish them. Yet verifier acceptance, the common measure of success, shows only that the implementation satisfies the generated contract, so it leaves open whether the contract captures the intended behavior. Assessing specification generation therefore requires an evaluation methodology, not a single metric. We present VerusEval, a framework that evaluates generated contracts along six dimensions, including Verus-native checks for semantic triviality, validated input-output (I/O) suites, and contract equivalence, and that relates them so that the strength and blind spots of each become measurable. Evaluating 13,716 artifacts from four workflows, five LLMs, and two prompting settings on 762 tasks, we find that acceptance overstates quality: only 42.3\% of the accepted artifacts complete all three semantic checks without a flag, and across workflows and models, higher acceptance does not consistently come with more correct contracts. I/O evaluation rejects 23.6\% of the accepted artifacts, yet only 63.2\% of those that pass it are proved equivalent. Of the accepted artifacts flagged by contract comparison, 84.1\% have a rejected completeness obligation, and the direction of a failure prioritizes inspection of the generated contract or the reference; it does not by itself establish which artifact is defective. Screening and review further identify 36 candidate defects among 61 selected reference contracts, and repairing one of them makes 10 of its 11 failing artifacts equivalent. Based on these findings, we derive four actionable lessons for evaluation, generation, and benchmark maintenance.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Analysis of Prompt Lexical Sensitivity and Its Impacts on Quality

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit extreme sensitivity to surface-level prompt variations, in which minor lexical changes can trigger disproportionate performance fluctuations. Moving beyond black-box optimization and coarse-grained templates, we present the first large-scale, n-gram token-level mechanistic analysis of prompt stability, leveraging a dataset of 132,000 prompt variants. Our investigation reveals a fundamental Scaling Law of Prompt Performance Stability: higher average task performance is strongly associated with lower variance and greater robustness across prompt perturbation. We identify two core linguistic drivers underlying this robustness: (1) Domain-Specific Terminology, which tightly anchors semantic boundaries, and (2) Explicit Action Directives, which formalize reasoning trajectories. Together, these elements constrain the model's interpretative space, effectively ``locking in'' more deterministic generation behavior. Building on these insights, we introduce an automated Prompt-Refining Agent that systematically restructures input queries by injecting domain anchoring and operational constraints. Empirical evaluation shows that our approach reduces performance variance by 40.7% in code generation task, while preserving or improving mean performance. These findings provide a statistically grounded and mechanistically interpretable framework for achieving robust prompt engineering.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

FlexNPU: Transparent NPU Virtualization for Dynamic LLM Prefill-Decode Co-location

Modern AI serving increasingly relies on NPUs for conventional inference and large language model serving. However, current NPU deployments commonly expose physical devices directly to applications, which limits runtime control over scheduling and makes it difficult to adapt execution to phase-level workload behavior. This limitation is particularly evident in LLM serving, where the prefill phase is compute-intensive while the decode phase is often constrained by memory bandwidth and KV-cache accesses. Static prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation reduces phase interference, but can introduce resource imbalance and unnecessary data movement. We present FlexNPU, a transparent user-space virtualization layer for Ascend NPUs. FlexNPU interposes on AscendCL APIs and routes NPU operations through per-device daemons, decoupling unmodified from physical NPU devices without modifying model code, AI frameworks, or NPU drivers. This runtime boundary allows FlexNPU to virtualize NPU objects, control operator dispatch, and support phase-aware scheduling for LLM serving. In particular, FlexNPU enables dynamic PD co-location, which adapts scheduling between prefill and decode according to their complementary resource characteristics. We implement FlexNPU on Huawei Ascend NPUs and evaluate it with typical LLM workloads. Compared with direct NPU passthrough, FlexNPU introduces no measurable inference overhead and slightly improves throughput in some scenarios. On a 384-card Ascend 910C deployment of DeepSeek-R1, FlexNPU improves throughput over static PD disaggregation by 5.15% and 26.33%. On Qwen2.5-7B, compared with static PD co-location, FlexNPU maintains comparable throughput while reducing TTFT by over 92% across tested workloads with nearly unchanged TPOT. These results show that transparent NPU virtualization is a practical substrate for efficient and responsive LLM serving.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

FedMM: Federated Collaborative Signal Quantization for Multi-Market CTR Prediction

Online platforms such as Amazon and Netflix serve users across multiple countries and regions, underscoring the importance of multi-market recommendation (MMR). Most MMR methods adopt a pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm, in which a unified model is first trained on centralized, global data and subsequently adapted to specific markets. However, this approach ignores the privacy of market data. While traditional federated learning preserves privacy, it typically aims to obtain a global model by aggregating model parameters and does not account for significant market heterogeneity. Additionally, because ID spaces are disjoint across markets, embedding-based aggregation strategies become ineffective. To overcome these challenges, we propose a federated collaborative signal quantization (FedMM) method for multi-market click-through rate (CTR) prediction. Our core idea leverages a discrete codebook mechanism to achieve privacy-preserving transmission and align disjoint ID spaces. We further employ a hierarchical codebook structure to capture cross-market shared patterns and market-specific characteristics. Specifically, we deploy a residual quantized variational autoencoder (RQ-VAE) with a dual-layer codebook mechanism for each market to quantize collaborative embeddings. The first layer utilizes a global federated codebook, updated via aggregation to capture universally shared collaborative patterns, while the second layer maintains a local codebook to learn market-specific semantics. Finally, the learned discrete codes, which integrate both general and specific collaborative signals, are incorporated into downstream CTR models to enhance prediction accuracy across all markets. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that FedMM significantly improves recommendation performance with privacy guarantees.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

HSUGA: LLM-Enhanced Recommendation with Hierarchical Semantic Understanding and Group-Aware Alignment

Large language model (LLM)-enhanced sequential recommendation typically aims to improve two core components: user semantic embedding extraction and utilization. Despite promising results, existing methods still have two limitations: 1) In the extraction stage, most methods directly input long interaction sequence fragments into LLM for preference summarization. However, excessively long sequences increase inference difficulty, making it challenging to reliably infer accurate user embeddings. 2) In the utilization stage, most methods employ the same semantic embedding utilization strategy for all users, neglecting the differences caused by user activity levels, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these issues, we propose HSUGA, which introduces a simple yet effective plugin for each of the two core components: Hierarchical Semantic Understanding (HSU) and Group-Aware Alignment (GAA). HSU performs a staged two-phase preference mining and models preference evolution through constrained editing operations, thereby improving the reliability of user semantic extraction. GAA adjusts the intensity of semantic utilization based on user activity levels, providing weaker alignment for active users and stronger guidance for users with sparse historical data. Finally, extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and compatibility of HSUGA.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

Large Language Models for Multilingual Code Intelligence: A Survey

Large language models have transformed AI-assisted software engineering, but current research remains biased toward high-resource languages such as Python, with weaker performance in languages like Rust and OCaml. Since real-world systems are inherently polyglot, robust multilingual code intelligence is crucial. This survey focuses on two key tasks: multilingual code generation from shared natural-language requirements, and multilingual code translation that preserves semantics across languages. It reviews representative methods, benchmarks, and evaluation metrics, and highlights challenges and opportunities for trustworthy cross-language generalization.

cs.SE↗
arXiv2026

Behavior-Aware Dual-Channel Preference Learning for Heterogeneous Sequential Recommendation

Heterogeneous sequential recommendation (HSR) aims to learn dynamic behavior dependencies from the diverse behaviors of user-item interactions to facilitate precise sequential recommendation. Despite many efforts yielding promising achievements, there are still challenges in modeling heterogeneous behavior data. One significant issue is the inherent sparsity of a real-world data, which can weaken the recommendation performance. Although auxiliary behaviors (e.g., clicks) partially address this problem, they inevitably introduce some noise, and the sparsity of the target behavior (e.g., purchases) remains unresolved. Additionally, contrastive learning-based augmentation in existing methods often focuses on a single behavior type, overlooking fine-grained user preferences and losing valuable information. To address these challenges, we have meticulously designed a behavior-aware dual-channel preference learning framework (BDPL). This framework begins with the construction of customized behavior-aware subgraphs to capture personalized behavior transition relationships, followed by a novel cascade-structured graph neural network to aggregate node context information. We then model and enhance user representations through a preference-level contrastive learning paradigm, considering both long-term and short-term preferences. Finally, we fuse the overall preference information using an adaptive gating mechanism to predict the next item the user will interact with under the target behavior. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our BDPL over the state-of-the-art models.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

OddGridBench: Exposing the Lack of Fine-Grained Visual Discrepancy Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of vision language tasks. However, their ability in low-level visual perception, particularly in detecting fine-grained visual discrepancies, remains underexplored and lacks systematic analysis. In this work, we introduce OddGridBench, a controllable benchmark for evaluating the visual discrepancy sensitivity of MLLMs. OddGridBench comprises over 1,400 grid-based images, where a single element differs from all others by one or multiple visual attributes such as color, size, rotation, or position. Experiments reveal that all evaluated MLLMs, including open-source families such as Qwen3-VL and InternVL3.5, and proprietary systems like Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5, perform far below human levels in visual discrepancy detection. We further propose OddGrid-GRPO, a reinforcement learning framework that integrates curriculum learning and distance-aware reward. By progressively controlling the difficulty of training samples and incorporating spatial proximity constraints into the reward design, OddGrid-GRPO significantly enhances the model's fine-grained visual discrimination ability. We hope OddGridBench and OddGrid-GRPO will lay the groundwork for advancing perceptual grounding and visual discrepancy sensitivity in multimodal intelligence. Code and dataset are available at https://wwwtttjjj.github.io/OddGridBench/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

M3SR: Multi-Scale Multi-Perceptual Mamba for Efficient Spectral Reconstruction

The Mamba architecture has been widely applied to various low-level vision tasks due to its exceptional adaptability and strong performance. Although the Mamba architecture has been adopted for spectral reconstruction, it still faces the following two challenges: (1) Single spatial perception limits the ability to fully understand and analyze hyperspectral images; (2) Single-scale feature extraction struggles to capture the complex structures and fine details present in hyperspectral images. To address these issues, we propose a multi-scale, multi-perceptual Mamba architecture for the spectral reconstruction task, called M3SR. Specifically, we design a multi-perceptual fusion block to enhance the ability of the model to comprehensively understand and analyze the input features. By integrating the multi-perceptual fusion block into a U-Net structure, M3SR can effectively extract and fuse global, intermediate, and local features, thereby enabling accurate reconstruction of hyperspectral images at multiple scales. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed M3SR outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods while incurring a lower computational cost.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Towards Multi-Behavior Multi-Task Recommendation via Behavior-informed Graph Embedding Learning

Multi-behavior recommendation (MBR) aims to improve the performance w.r.t. the target behavior (i.e., purchase) by leveraging auxiliary behaviors (e.g., click, favourite). However, in real-world scenarios, a recommendation method often needs to process different types of behaviors and generate personalized lists for each task (i.e., each behavior type). Such a new recommendation problem is referred to as multi-behavior multi-task recommendation (MMR). So far, the most powerful MBR methods usually model multi-behavior interactions using a cascading graph paradigm. Although significant progress has been made in optimizing the performance of the target behavior, it often neglects the performance of auxiliary behaviors. To compensate for the deficiencies of the cascading paradigm, we propose a novel solution for MMR, i.e., behavior-informed graph embedding learning (BiGEL). Specifically, we first obtain a set of behavior-aware embeddings by using a cascading graph paradigm. Subsequently, we introduce three key modules to improve the performance of the model. The cascading gated feedback (CGF) module enables a feedback-driven optimization process by integrating feedback from the target behavior to refine the auxiliary behaviors preferences. The global context enhancement (GCE) module integrates the global context to maintain the user's overall preferences, preventing the loss of key preferences due to individual behavior graph modeling. Finally, the contrastive preference alignment (CPA) module addresses the potential changes in user preferences during the cascading process by aligning the preferences of the target behaviors with the global preferences through contrastive learning. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our BiGEL compared with ten very competitive methods.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Automated Information Flow Selection for Multi-scenario Multi-task Recommendation

Multi-scenario multi-task recommendation (MSMTR) systems must address recommendation demands across diverse scenarios while simultaneously optimizing multiple objectives, such as click-through rate and conversion rate. Existing MSMTR models typically consist of four information units: scenario-shared, scenario-specific, task-shared, and task-specific networks. These units interact to generate four types of relationship information flows, directed from scenario-shared or scenario-specific networks to task-shared or task-specific networks. However, these models face two main limitations: 1) They often rely on complex architectures, such as mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks, which increase the complexity of information fusion, model size, and training cost. 2) They extract all available information flows without filtering out irrelevant or even harmful content, introducing potential noise. Regarding these challenges, we propose a lightweight Automated Information Flow Selection (AutoIFS) framework for MSMTR. To tackle the first issue, AutoIFS incorporates low-rank adaptation (LoRA) to decouple the four information units, enabling more flexible and efficient information fusion with minimal parameter overhead. To address the second issue, AutoIFS introduces an information flow selection network that automatically filters out invalid scenario-task information flows based on model performance feedback. It employs a simple yet effective pruning function to eliminate useless information flows, thereby enhancing the impact of key relationships and improving model performance. Finally, we evaluate AutoIFS and confirm its effectiveness through extensive experiments on two public benchmark datasets and an online A/B test.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

Self-Supervised Representation Learning with ID-Content Modality Alignment for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation (SR) models often capture user preferences based on the historically interacted item IDs, which usually obtain sub-optimal performance when the interaction history is limited. Content-based sequential recommendation has recently emerged as a promising direction that exploits items' textual and visual features to enhance preference learning. However, there are still three key challenges: (i) how to reduce the semantic gap between different content modality representations; (ii) how to jointly model user behavior preferences and content preferences; and (iii) how to design an effective training strategy to align ID representations and content representations. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model, self-supervised representation learning with ID-Content modality alignment, named SICSRec. Firstly, we propose a LLM-driven sample construction method and develop a supervised fine-tuning approach to align item-level modality representations. Secondly, we design a novel Transformer-based sequential model, where an ID-modality sequence encoder captures user behavior preferences, a content-modality sequence encoder learns user content preferences, and a mix-modality sequence decoder grasps the intrinsic relationship between these two types of preferences. Thirdly, we propose a two-step training strategy with a content-aware contrastive learning task to align modality representations and ID representations, which decouples the training process of content modality dependency and item collaborative dependency. Extensive experiments conducted on four public video streaming datasets demonstrate our SICSRec outperforms the state-of-the-art ID-modality sequential recommenders and content-modality sequential recommenders by 8.04% on NDCG@5 and 6.62% on NDCD@10 on average, respectively.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2025

VisNumBench: Evaluating Number Sense of Multimodal Large Language Models

Can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) develop an intuitive number sense similar to humans? Targeting this problem, we introduce Visual Number Benchmark (VisNumBench) to evaluate the number sense abilities of MLLMs across a wide range of visual numerical tasks. VisNumBench consists of about 1,900 multiple-choice question-answer pairs derived from both synthetic and real-world visual data, covering seven visual numerical attributes and four types of visual numerical estimation tasks. Our experiments on VisNumBench led to the following key findings: (i) The 17 MLLMs we tested, including open-source models such as Qwen2.5-VL and InternVL2.5, as well as proprietary models like GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash, perform significantly below human levels in number sense-related tasks. (ii) Multimodal mathematical models and multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) models did not exhibit significant improvements in number sense abilities. (iii) Stronger MLLMs with larger parameter sizes and broader general abilities demonstrate modest gains in number sense abilities. We believe VisNumBench will serve as a valuable resource for the research community, encouraging further advancements in enhancing MLLMs' number sense abilities. Code and dataset are available at https://wwwtttjjj.github.io/VisNumBench/.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2025

A Survey on Sequential Recommendation

Different from most conventional recommendation problems, sequential recommendation focuses on learning users' preferences by exploiting the internal order and dependency among the interacted items, which has received significant attention from both researchers and practitioners. In recent years, we have witnessed great progress and achievements in this field, necessitating a new survey. In this survey, we study the SR problem from a new perspective (i.e., the construction of an item's properties), and summarize the most recent techniques used in sequential recommendation such as pure ID-based SR, SR with side information, multi-modal SR, generative SR, LLM-powered SR, ultra-long SR and data-augmented SR. Moreover, we introduce some frontier research topics in sequential recommendation, e.g., open-domain SR, data-centric SR, could-edge collaborative SR, continuous SR, SR for good, and explainable SR. We believe that our survey could be served as a valuable roadmap for readers in this field.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2024

Lossless and Privacy-Preserving Graph Convolution Network for Federated Item Recommendation

Graph neural network (GNN) has emerged as a state-of-the-art solution for item recommendation. However, existing GNN-based recommendation methods rely on a centralized storage of fragmented user-item interaction sub-graphs and training on an aggregated global graph, which will lead to privacy concerns. As a response, some recent works develop GNN-based federated recommendation methods by exploiting decentralized and fragmented user-item sub-graphs in order to preserve user privacy. However, due to privacy constraints, the graph convolution process in existing federated recommendation methods is incomplete compared with the centralized counterpart, causing a degradation of the recommendation performance. In this paper, we propose a novel lossless and privacy-preserving graph convolution network (LP-GCN), which fully completes the graph convolution process with decentralized user-item interaction sub-graphs while ensuring privacy. It is worth mentioning that its performance is equivalent to that of the non-federated (i.e., centralized) counterpart. Moreover, we validate its effectiveness through both theoretical analysis and empirical studies. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show that our LP-GCN outperforms the existing federated recommendation methods. The code will be publicly available once the paper is accepted.

cs.IR↗