DeblurDiNAT: A Lightweight and Effective Transformer for Image Deblurring

Blurry images may contain local and global non-uniform artifacts, which complicate the deblurring process and make it more challenging to achieve satisfactory results. Recently, Transformers generate improved deblurring outcomes than existing CNN architectures. However, the large model size and long inference time are still two bothersome issues which have not been fully explored. To this end, we propose DeblurDiNAT, a compact encoder-decoder Transformer which efficiently restores clean images from real-world blurry ones. We adopt an alternating dilation factor structure with the aim of global-local feature learning. Also, we observe that simply using self-attention layers in networks does not always produce good deblurred results. To solve this problem, we propose a channel modulation self-attention (CMSA) block, where a cross-channel learner (CCL) is utilized to capture channel relationships. In addition, we present a divide and multiply feed-forward network (DMFN) allowing fast feature propagation. Moreover, we design a lightweight gated feature fusion (LGFF) module, which performs controlled feature merging. Comprehensive experimental results show that the proposed model, named DeblurDiNAT, provides a favorable performance boost without introducing noticeable computational costs over the baseline, and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on several image deblurring datasets. Compared to nearest competitors, our space-efficient and time-saving method demonstrates a stronger generalization ability with 3%-68% fewer parameters and produces deblurred images that are visually closer to the ground truth.

Mamba4Rec: Towards Efficient Sequential Recommendation with Selective State Space Models

Sequential recommendation aims to estimate the dynamic user preferences and sequential dependencies among historical user behaviors. Although Transformer-based models have proven to be effective for sequential recommendation, they suffer from the inference inefficiency problem stemming from the quadratic computational complexity of attention operators, especially for long-range behavior sequences. Inspired by the recent success of state space models (SSMs), we propose Mamba4Rec, which is the first work to explore the potential of selective SSMs for efficient sequential recommendation. Built upon the basic Mamba block which is a selective SSM with an efficient hardware-aware parallel algorithm, we incorporate a series of sequential modeling techniques to further promote the model performance and meanwhile maintain the inference efficiency. Experiments on two public datasets demonstrate that Mamba4Rec is able to well address the effectiveness-efficiency dilemma, and defeat both RNN- and attention-based baselines in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Towards Symmetry-Aware Generation of Periodic Materials

We consider the problem of generating periodic materials with deep models. While symmetry-aware molecule generation has been studied extensively, periodic materials possess different symmetries, which have not been completely captured by existing methods. In this work, we propose SyMat, a novel material generation approach that can capture physical symmetries of periodic material structures. SyMat generates atom types and lattices of materials through generating atom type sets, lattice lengths and lattice angles with a variational auto-encoder model. In addition, SyMat employs a score-based diffusion model to generate atom coordinates of materials, in which a novel symmetry-aware probabilistic model is used in the coordinate diffusion process. We show that SyMat is theoretically invariant to all symmetry transformations on materials and demonstrate that SyMat achieves promising performance on random generation and property optimization tasks.