Unleash the Potential of Long Semantic IDs for Generative Recommendation

Semantic ID-based generative recommendation represents items as sequences of discrete tokens, but it inherently faces a trade-off between representational expressiveness and computational efficiency. Residual Quantization (RQ)-based approaches restrict semantic IDs to be short to enable tractable sequential modeling, while Optimized Product Quantization (OPQ)-based methods compress long semantic IDs through naive rigid aggregation, inevitably discarding fine-grained semantic information. To resolve this dilemma, we propose ACERec, a novel framework that decouples the granularity gap between fine-grained tokenization and efficient sequential modeling. It employs an Attentive Token Merger to distill long expressive semantic tokens into compact latents and introduces a dedicated Intent Token serving as a dynamic prediction anchor. To capture cohesive user intents, we guide the learning process via a dual-granularity objective, harmonizing fine-grained token prediction with global item-level semantic alignment. Extensive experiments on six real-world benchmarks demonstrate that ACERec consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving an average improvement of 14.40\% in NDCG@10, effectively reconciling semantic expressiveness and computational efficiency.

When Less is More: The LLM Scaling Paradox in Context Compression

Scaling up model parameters has long been a prevalent training paradigm driven by the assumption that larger models yield superior generation capabilities. However, under lossy context compression in a compressor-decoder setup, we observe a Size-Fidelity Paradox: increasing the compressor size can lessen the faithfulness of reconstructed contexts though training loss decreases. Through extensive experiments across models from 0.6B to 90B, we coin this paradox arising from two dominant factors: 1) knowledge overwriting: larger models increasingly replace source facts with their own prior beliefs, e.g., ``the white strawberry'' $\to$ ``the red strawberry''; and 2) semantic drift: larger models tend to paraphrase or restructure content instead of reproducing it verbatim, e.g., ``Alice hit Bob'' $\to$ ``Bob hit Alice''. By holding model size fixed, we reflect on the emergent properties of compressed context representations. We show that the culprit is not parameter count itself, but the excessive semantic capacity and amplified generative uncertainty that accompany scaling. Specifically, the increased rank of context embeddings facilitates prior knowledge intrusion, whereas higher entropy over token prediction distributions promotes rewriting. Our results complement existing evaluations over context compression paradigm, underpinning a breakdown in scaling laws for faithful preservation in open-ended generation.

Attention-based UNet enabled Lightweight Image Semantic Communication System over Internet of Things

This paper studies the problem of the lightweight image semantic communication system that is deployed on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. In the considered system model, devices must use semantic communication techniques to support user behavior recognition in ultimate video service with high data transmission efficiency. However, it is computationally expensive for IoT devices to deploy semantic codecs due to the complex calculation processes of deep learning (DL) based codec training and inference. To make it affordable for IoT devices to deploy semantic communication systems, we propose an attention-based UNet enabled lightweight image semantic communication (LSSC) system, which achieves low computational complexity and small model size. In particular, we first let the LSSC system train the codec at the edge server to reduce the training computation load on IoT devices. Then, we introduce the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) to extract the image semantic features and decrease the number of downsampling layers thus reducing the floating-point operations (FLOPs). Finally, we experimentally adjust the structure of the codec and find out the optimal number of downsampling layers. Simulation results show that the proposed LSSC system can reduce the semantic codec FLOPs by 14%, and reduce the model size by 55%, with a sacrifice of 3% accuracy, compared to the baseline. Moreover, the proposed scheme can achieve a higher transmission accuracy than the traditional communication scheme in the low channel signal-to-noise (SNR) region.