How Do Recommendation Models Amplify Popularity Bias? An Analysis from the Spectral Perspective

Recommendation Systems (RS) are often plagued by popularity bias. Specifically,when recommendation models are trained on long-tailed datasets, they not only inherit this bias but often exacerbate it. This effect undermines both the precision and fairness of RS and catalyzes the so-called Matthew Effect. Despite the widely recognition of this issue, the fundamental causes remain largely elusive. In our research, we delve deeply into popularity bias amplification. Our comprehensive theoretical and empirical investigations lead to two core insights: 1) Item popularity is memorized in the principal singular vector of the score matrix predicted by the recommendation model; 2) The dimension collapse phenomenon amplifies the impact of principal singular vector on model predictions, intensifying the popularity bias. Based on these insights, we propose a novel method to mitigate this bias by imposing penalties on the magnitude of the principal singular value. Considering the heavy computational burden in directly evaluating the gradient of the principal singular value, we develop an efficient algorithm that harnesses the inherent properties of the singular vector. Extensive experiments across seven real-world datasets and three testing scenarios have been conducted to validate the superiority of our method.

SIGformer: Sign-aware Graph Transformer for Recommendation

In recommender systems, most graph-based methods focus on positive user feedback, while overlooking the valuable negative feedback. Integrating both positive and negative feedback to form a signed graph can lead to a more comprehensive understanding of user preferences. However, the existing efforts to incorporate both types of feedback are sparse and face two main limitations: 1) They process positive and negative feedback separately, which fails to holistically leverage the collaborative information within the signed graph; 2) They rely on MLPs or GNNs for information extraction from negative feedback, which may not be effective. To overcome these limitations, we introduce SIGformer, a new method that employs the transformer architecture to sign-aware graph-based recommendation. SIGformer incorporates two innovative positional encodings that capture the spectral properties and path patterns of the signed graph, enabling the full exploitation of the entire graph. Our extensive experiments across five real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of SIGformer over state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/StupidThree/SIGformer.

Generating 6-D Trajectories for Omnidirectional Multirotor Aerial Vehicles in Cluttered Environments

As fully-actuated systems, omnidirectional multirotor aerial vehicles (OMAVs) have more flexible maneuverability and advantages in aggressive flight in cluttered environments than traditional underactuated MAVs. %Due to the high dimensionality of configuration space, making the designed trajectory generation algorithm efficient is challenging. This paper aims to achieve safe flight of OMAVs in cluttered environments. Considering existing static obstacles, an efficient optimization-based framework is proposed to generate 6-D $SE(3)$ trajectories for OMAVs. Given the kinodynamic constraints and the 3D collision-free region represented by a series of intersecting convex polyhedra, the proposed method finally generates a safe and dynamically feasible 6-D trajectory. First, we parameterize the vehicle's attitude into a free 3D vector using stereographic projection to eliminate the constraints inherent in the $SO(3)$ manifold, while the complete $SE(3)$ trajectory is represented as a 6-D polynomial in time without inherent constraints. The vehicle's shape is modeled as a cuboid attached to the body frame to achieve whole-body collision evaluation. Then, we formulate the origin trajectory generation problem as a constrained optimization problem. The original constrained problem is finally transformed into an unconstrained one that can be solved efficiently. To verify the proposed framework's performance, simulations and real-world experiments based on a tilt-rotor hexarotor aerial vehicle are carried out.

Distributionally Robust Graph-based Recommendation System

With the capacity to capture high-order collaborative signals, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful methods in Recommender Systems (RS). However, their efficacy often hinges on the assumption that training and testing data share the same distribution (a.k.a. IID assumption), and exhibits significant declines under distribution shifts. Distribution shifts commonly arises in RS, often attributed to the dynamic nature of user preferences or ubiquitous biases during data collection in RS. Despite its significance, researches on GNN-based recommendation against distribution shift are still sparse. To bridge this gap, we propose Distributionally Robust GNN (DR-GNN) that incorporates Distributional Robust Optimization (DRO) into the GNN-based recommendation. DR-GNN addresses two core challenges: 1) To enable DRO to cater to graph data intertwined with GNN, we reinterpret GNN as a graph smoothing regularizer, thereby facilitating the nuanced application of DRO; 2) Given the typically sparse nature of recommendation data, which might impede robust optimization, we introduce slight perturbations in the training distribution to expand its support. Notably, while DR-GNN involves complex optimization, it can be implemented easily and efficiently. Our extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of DR-GNN against three typical distribution shifts. The code is available at https://github.com/WANGBohaO-jpg/DR-GNN.

Knowledge Translation: A New Pathway for Model Compression

Deep learning has witnessed significant advancements in recent years at the cost of increasing training, inference, and model storage overhead. While existing model compression methods strive to reduce the number of model parameters while maintaining high accuracy, they inevitably necessitate the re-training of the compressed model or impose architectural constraints. To overcome these limitations, this paper presents a novel framework, termed \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{T}ranslation (KT), wherein a ``translation'' model is trained to receive the parameters of a larger model and generate compressed parameters. The concept of KT draws inspiration from language translation, which effectively employs neural networks to convert different languages, maintaining identical meaning. Accordingly, we explore the potential of neural networks to convert models of disparate sizes, while preserving their functionality. We propose a comprehensive framework for KT, introduce data augmentation strategies to enhance model performance despite restricted training data, and successfully demonstrate the feasibility of KT on the MNIST dataset. Code is available at \url{https://github.com/zju-SWJ/KT}.

StyleRetoucher: Generalized Portrait Image Retouching with GAN Priors

Creating fine-retouched portrait images is tedious and time-consuming even for professional artists. There exist automatic retouching methods, but they either suffer from over-smoothing artifacts or lack generalization ability. To address such issues, we present StyleRetoucher, a novel automatic portrait image retouching framework, leveraging StyleGAN's generation and generalization ability to improve an input portrait image's skin condition while preserving its facial details. Harnessing the priors of pretrained StyleGAN, our method shows superior robustness: a). performing stably with fewer training samples and b). generalizing well on the out-domain data. Moreover, by blending the spatial features of the input image and intermediate features of the StyleGAN layers, our method preserves the input characteristics to the largest extent. We further propose a novel blemish-aware feature selection mechanism to effectively identify and remove the skin blemishes, improving the image skin condition. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations validate the great generalization capability of our method. Further experiments show StyleRetoucher's superior performance to the alternative solutions in the image retouching task. We also conduct a user perceptive study to confirm the superior retouching performance of our method over the existing state-of-the-art alternatives.

Mesh-Guided Neural Implicit Field Editing

Neural implicit fields have emerged as a powerful 3D representation for reconstructing and rendering photo-realistic views, yet they possess limited editability. Conversely, explicit 3D representations, such as polygonal meshes, offer ease of editing but may not be as suitable for rendering high-quality novel views. To harness the strengths of both representations, we propose a new approach that employs a mesh as a guiding mechanism in editing the neural radiance field. We first introduce a differentiable method using marching tetrahedra for polygonal mesh extraction from the neural implicit field and then design a differentiable color extractor to assign colors obtained from the volume renderings to this extracted mesh. This differentiable colored mesh allows gradient back-propagation from the explicit mesh to the implicit fields, empowering users to easily manipulate the geometry and color of neural implicit fields. To enhance user control from coarse-grained to fine-grained levels, we introduce an octree-based structure into its optimization. This structure prioritizes the edited regions and the surface part, making our method achieve fine-grained edits to the neural implicit field and accommodate various user modifications, including object additions, component removals, specific area deformations, and adjustments to local and global colors. Through extensive experiments involving diverse scenes and editing operations, we have demonstrated the capabilities and effectiveness of our method. Our project page is: \url{https://cassiepython.github.io/MNeuEdit/}

Fast ODE-based Sampling for Diffusion Models in Around 5 Steps

Sampling from diffusion models can be treated as solving the corresponding ordinary differential equations (ODEs), with the aim of obtaining an accurate solution with as few number of function evaluations (NFE) as possible. Recently, various fast samplers utilizing higher-order ODE solvers have emerged and achieved better performance than the initial first-order one. However, these numerical methods inherently result in certain approximation errors, which significantly degrades sample quality with extremely small NFE (e.g., around 5). In contrast, based on the geometric observation that each sampling trajectory almost lies in a two-dimensional subspace embedded in the ambient space, we propose Approximate MEan-Direction Solver (AMED-Solver) that eliminates truncation errors by directly learning the mean direction for fast diffusion sampling. Besides, our method can be easily used as a plugin to further improve existing ODE-based samplers. Extensive experiments on image synthesis with the resolution ranging from 32 to 256 demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. With only 5 NFE, we achieve 7.14 FID on CIFAR-10, 13.75 FID on ImageNet 64$\times$64, and 12.79 FID on LSUN Bedroom. Our code is available at https://github.com/zhyzhouu/amed-solver.

Dynamic Dense Graph Convolutional Network for Skeleton-based Human Motion Prediction

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) which typically follows a neural message passing framework to model dependencies among skeletal joints has achieved high success in skeleton-based human motion prediction task. Nevertheless, how to construct a graph from a skeleton sequence and how to perform message passing on the graph are still open problems, which severely affect the performance of GCN. To solve both problems, this paper presents a Dynamic Dense Graph Convolutional Network (DD-GCN), which constructs a dense graph and implements an integrated dynamic message passing. More specifically, we construct a dense graph with 4D adjacency modeling as a comprehensive representation of motion sequence at different levels of abstraction. Based on the dense graph, we propose a dynamic message passing framework that learns dynamically from data to generate distinctive messages reflecting sample-specific relevance among nodes in the graph. Extensive experiments on benchmark Human 3.6M and CMU Mocap datasets verify the effectiveness of our DD-GCN which obviously outperforms state-of-the-art GCN-based methods, especially when using long-term and our proposed extremely long-term protocol.

CDR: Conservative Doubly Robust Learning for Debiased Recommendation

In recommendation systems (RS), user behavior data is observational rather than experimental, resulting in widespread bias in the data. Consequently, tackling bias has emerged as a major challenge in the field of recommendation systems. Recently, Doubly Robust Learning (DR) has gained significant attention due to its remarkable performance and robust properties. However, our experimental findings indicate that existing DR methods are severely impacted by the presence of so-called Poisonous Imputation, where the imputation significantly deviates from the truth and becomes counterproductive. To address this issue, this work proposes Conservative Doubly Robust strategy (CDR) which filters imputations by scrutinizing their mean and variance. Theoretical analyses show that CDR offers reduced variance and improved tail bounds.In addition, our experimental investigations illustrate that CDR significantly enhances performance and can indeed reduce the frequency of poisonous imputation.