Bidding-Aware Retrieval for Multi-Stage Consistency in Online Advertising

Online advertising systems typically use a cascaded architecture to manage massive requests and candidate volumes, where the ranking stages allocate traffic based on eCPM (predicted CTR $\times$ Bid). With the increasing popularity of auto-bidding strategies, the inconsistency between the computationally sensitive retrieval stage and the ranking stages becomes more pronounced, as the former cannot access precise, real-time bids for the vast ad corpus. This discrepancy leads to sub-optimal platform revenue and advertiser outcomes. To tackle this problem, we propose Bidding-Aware Retrieval (BAR), a model-based retrieval framework that addresses multi-stage inconsistency by incorporating ad bid value into the retrieval scoring function. The core innovation is Bidding-Aware Modeling, incorporating bid signals through monotonicity-constrained learning and multi-task distillation to ensure economically coherent representations, while Asynchronous Near-Line Inference enables real-time updates to the embedding for market responsiveness. Furthermore, the Task-Attentive Refinement module selectively enhances feature interactions to disentangle user interest and commercial value signals. Extensive offline experiments and full-scale deployment across Alibaba's display advertising platform validated BAR's efficacy: 4.32% platform revenue increase with 22.2% impression lift for positively-operated advertisements.

UFO-RL: Uncertainty-Focused Optimization for Efficient Reinforcement Learning Data Selection

Scaling RL for LLMs is computationally expensive, largely due to multi-sampling for policy optimization and evaluation, making efficient data selection crucial. Inspired by the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory, we hypothesize LLMs learn best from data within their potential comprehension zone. Addressing the limitation of conventional, computationally intensive multi-sampling methods for data assessment, we introduce UFO-RL. This novel framework uses a computationally efficient single-pass uncertainty estimation to identify informative data instances, achieving up to 185x faster data evaluation. UFO-RL leverages this metric to select data within the estimated ZPD for training. Experiments show that training with just 10% of data selected by UFO-RL yields performance comparable to or surpassing full-data training, reducing overall training time by up to 16x while enhancing stability and generalization. UFO-RL offers a practical and highly efficient strategy for scaling RL fine-tuning of LLMs by focusing learning on valuable data.

Hybrid-Emba3D: Geometry-Aware and Cross-Path Feature Hybrid Enhanced State Space Model for Point Cloud Classification

The point cloud classification tasks face the dual challenge of efficiently extracting local geometric features while maintaining model complexity. The Mamba architecture utilizes the linear complexity advantage of state space models (SSMs) to overcome the computational bottleneck of Transformers while balancing global modeling capabilities. However, the inherent contradiction between its unidirectional dependency and the unordered nature of point clouds impedes modeling spatial correlation in local neighborhoods, thus constraining geometric feature extraction. This paper proposes Hybrid-Emba3D, a bidirectional Mamba model enhanced by geometry-feature coupling and cross-path feature hybridization. The Local geometric pooling with geometry-feature coupling mechanism significantly enhances local feature discriminative power via coordinated propagation and dynamic aggregation of geometric information between local center points and their neighborhoods, without introducing additional parameters. The designed Collaborative feature enhancer adopts dual-path hybridization, effectively handling local mutations and sparse key signals, breaking through the limitations of traditional SSM long-range modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a new SOTA classification accuracy of 95.99% on ModelNet40 with only 0.03M additional.

PAD: Phase-Amplitude Decoupling Fusion for Multi-Modal Land Cover Classification

The fusion of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) and RGB imagery for land cover classification remains challenging due to modality heterogeneity and the underutilization of spectral complementarity. Existing methods often fail to decouple shared structural features from modality-specific radiometric attributes, leading to feature conflicts and information loss. To address this issue, we propose Phase-Amplitude Decoupling (PAD), a frequency-aware framework that separates phase (modality-shared) and amplitude (modality-specific) components in the Fourier domain. Specifically, PAD consists of two key components: 1) Phase Spectrum Correction (PSC), which aligns cross-modal phase features through convolution-guided scaling to enhance geometric consistency, and 2) Amplitude Spectrum Fusion (ASF), which dynamically integrates high-frequency details and low-frequency structures using frequency-adaptive multilayer perceptrons. This approach leverages SAR's sensitivity to morphological features and RGB's spectral richness. Extensive experiments on WHU-OPT-SAR and DDHR-SK datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Our work establishes a new paradigm for physics-aware multi-modal fusion in remote sensing. The code will be available at https://github.com/RanFeng2/PAD.

Context-Aware Weakly Supervised Image Manipulation Localization with SAM Refinement

Malicious image manipulation poses societal risks, increasing the importance of effective image manipulation detection methods. Recent approaches in image manipulation detection have largely been driven by fully supervised approaches, which require labor-intensive pixel-level annotations. Thus, it is essential to explore weakly supervised image manipulation localization methods that only require image-level binary labels for training. However, existing weakly supervised image manipulation methods overlook the importance of edge information for accurate localization, leading to suboptimal localization performance. To address this, we propose a Context-Aware Boundary Localization (CABL) module to aggregate boundary features and learn context-inconsistency for localizing manipulated areas. Furthermore, by leveraging Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and Segment Anything Model (SAM), we introduce the CAM-Guided SAM Refinement (CGSR) module to generate more accurate manipulation localization maps. By integrating two modules, we present a novel weakly supervised framework based on a dual-branch Transformer-CNN architecture. Our method achieves outstanding localization performance across multiple datasets.

Improving LLM-based Document-level Machine Translation with Multi-Knowledge Fusion

Recent studies in prompting large language model (LLM) for document-level machine translation (DMT) primarily focus on the inter-sentence context by flatting the source document into a long sequence. This approach relies solely on the sequence of sentences within the document. However, the complexity of document-level sequences is greater than that of shorter sentence-level sequences, which may limit LLM's ability in DMT when only this single-source knowledge is used. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach by incorporating multiple sources of knowledge, including both the document summarization and entity translation, to enhance the performance of LLM-based DMT. Given a source document, we first obtain its summarization and translation of entities via LLM as the additional knowledge. We then utilize LLMs to generate two translations of the source document by fusing these two single knowledge sources, respectively. Finally, recognizing that different sources of knowledge may aid or hinder the translation of different sentences, we refine and rank the translations by leveraging a multi-knowledge fusion strategy to ensure the best results. Experimental results in eight document-level translation tasks show that our approach achieves an average improvement of 0.8, 0.6, and 0.4 COMET scores over the baseline without extra knowledge for LLaMA3-8B-Instruct, Mistral-Nemo-Instruct, and GPT-4o-mini, respectively.

Variational Bayesian Personalized Ranking

Recommendation systems have found extensive applications across diverse domains. However, the training data available typically comprises implicit feedback, manifested as user clicks and purchase behaviors, rather than explicit declarations of user preferences. This type of training data presents three main challenges for accurate ranking prediction: First, the unobservable nature of user preferences makes likelihood function modeling inherently difficult. Second, the resulting false positives (FP) and false negatives (FN) introduce noise into the learning process, disrupting parameter learning. Third, data bias arises as observed interactions tend to concentrate on a few popular items, exacerbating the feedback loop of popularity bias. To address these issues, we propose Variational BPR, a novel and easily implementable learning objective that integrates key components for enhancing collaborative filtering: likelihood optimization, noise reduction, and popularity debiasing. Our approach involves decomposing the pairwise loss under the ELBO-KL framework and deriving its variational lower bound to establish a manageable learning objective for approximate inference. Within this bound, we introduce an attention-based latent interest prototype contrastive mechanism, replacing instance-level contrastive learning, to effectively reduce noise from problematic samples. The process of deriving interest prototypes implicitly incorporates a flexible hard sample mining strategy, capable of simultaneously identifying hard positive and hard negative samples. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this hard sample mining strategy promotes feature distribution uniformity, thereby alleviating popularity bias. Empirically, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Variational BPR on popular backbone recommendation models. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/liubin06/VariationalBPR

Large Language Models Are Universal Recommendation Learners

In real-world recommender systems, different tasks are typically addressed using supervised learning on task-specific datasets with carefully designed model architectures. We demonstrate that large language models (LLMs) can function as universal recommendation learners, capable of handling multiple tasks within a unified input-output framework, eliminating the need for specialized model designs. To improve the recommendation performance of LLMs, we introduce a multimodal fusion module for item representation and a sequence-in-set-out approach for efficient candidate generation. When applied to industrial-scale data, our LLM achieves competitive results with expert models elaborately designed for different recommendation tasks. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that recommendation outcomes are highly sensitive to text input, highlighting the potential of prompt engineering in optimizing industrial-scale recommender systems.

Post-Training Quantization for 3D Medical Image Segmentation: A Practical Study on Real Inference Engines

Quantizing deep neural networks ,reducing the precision (bit-width) of their computations, can remarkably decrease memory usage and accelerate processing, making these models more suitable for large-scale medical imaging applications with limited computational resources. However, many existing methods studied "fake quantization", which simulates lower precision operations during inference, but does not actually reduce model size or improve real-world inference speed. Moreover, the potential of deploying real 3D low-bit quantization on modern GPUs is still unexplored. In this study, we introduce a real post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that successfully implements true 8-bit quantization on state-of-the-art (SOTA) 3D medical segmentation models, i.e., U-Net, SegResNet, SwinUNETR, nnU-Net, UNesT, TransUNet, ST-UNet,and VISTA3D. Our approach involves two main steps. First, we use TensorRT to perform fake quantization for both weights and activations with unlabeled calibration dataset. Second, we convert this fake quantization into real quantization via TensorRT engine on real GPUs, resulting in real-world reductions in model size and inference latency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively performs 8-bit quantization on GPUs without sacrificing model performance. This advancement enables the deployment of efficient deep learning models in medical imaging applications where computational resources are constrained. The code and models have been released, including U-Net, TransUNet pretrained on the BTCV dataset for abdominal (13-label) segmentation, UNesT pretrained on the Whole Brain Dataset for whole brain (133-label) segmentation, and nnU-Net, SegResNet, SwinUNETR and VISTA3D pretrained on TotalSegmentator V2 for full body (104-label) segmentation. https://github.com/hrlblab/PTQ.

SurvAttack: Black-Box Attack On Survival Models through Ontology-Informed EHR Perturbation

Survival analysis (SA) models have been widely studied in mining electronic health records (EHRs), particularly in forecasting the risk of critical conditions for prioritizing high-risk patients. However, their vulnerability to adversarial attacks is much less explored in the literature. Developing black-box perturbation algorithms and evaluating their impact on state-of-the-art survival models brings two benefits to medical applications. First, it can effectively evaluate the robustness of models in pre-deployment testing. Also, exploring how subtle perturbations would result in significantly different outcomes can provide counterfactual insights into the clinical interpretation of model prediction. In this work, we introduce SurvAttack, a novel black-box adversarial attack framework leveraging subtle clinically compatible, and semantically consistent perturbations on longitudinal EHRs to degrade survival models' predictive performance. We specifically develop a greedy algorithm to manipulate medical codes with various adversarial actions throughout a patient's medical history. Then, these adversarial actions are prioritized using a composite scoring strategy based on multi-aspect perturbation quality, including saliency, perturbation stealthiness, and clinical meaningfulness. The proposed adversarial EHR perturbation algorithm is then used in an efficient SA-specific strategy to attack a survival model when estimating the temporal ranking of survival urgency for patients. To demonstrate the significance of our work, we conduct extensive experiments, including baseline comparisons, explainability analysis, and case studies. The experimental results affirm our research's effectiveness in illustrating the vulnerabilities of patient survival models, model interpretation, and ultimately contributing to healthcare quality.