Abstract:Many classic opera videos exhibit poor visual quality due to the limitations of early filming equipment and long-term degradation during storage. Although real-world video super-resolution (RWVSR) has achieved significant advances in recent years, directly applying existing methods to degraded opera videos remains challenging. The difficulties are twofold. First, accurately modeling real-world degradations is complex: simplistic combinations of classical degradation kernels fail to capture the authentic noise distribution, while methods that extract real noise patches from external datasets are prone to style mismatches that introduce visual artifacts. Second, current RWVSR methods, which rely solely on degraded image features, struggle to reconstruct realistic and detailed textures due to a lack of high-level semantic guidance. To address these issues, we propose a Text-guided Dual-Branch Opera Video Super-Resolution (TextOVSR) network, which introduces two types of textual prompts to guide the super-resolution process. Specifically, degradation-descriptive text, derived from the degradation process, is incorporated into the negative branch to constrain the solution space. Simultaneously, content-descriptive text is incorporated into a positive branch and our proposed Text-Enhanced Discriminator (TED) to provide semantic guidance for enhanced texture reconstruction. Furthermore, we design a Degradation-Robust Feature Fusion (DRF) module to facilitate cross-modal feature fusion while suppressing degradation interference. Experiments on our OperaLQ benchmark show that TextOVSR outperforms state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. The code is available at https://github.com/ChangHua0/TextOVSR.
Abstract:The negative sampling strategy can effectively train collaborative filtering (CF) recommendation models based on implicit feedback by constructing positive and negative samples. However, existing methods primarily optimize the negative sampling process while neglecting the exploration of positive samples. Some denoising recommendation methods can be applied to denoise positive samples within negative sampling strategies, but they ignore temporal information. Existing work integrates sequential information during model aggregation but neglects time interval information, hindering accurate capture of users' current preferences. To address this problem, from a data perspective, we propose a novel temporal filtration-enhanced approach to construct a high-quality positive sample set. First, we design a time decay model based on interaction time intervals, transforming the original graph into a weighted user-item bipartite graph. Then, based on predefined filtering operations, the weighted user-item bipartite graph is layered. Finally, we design a layer-enhancement strategy to construct a high-quality positive sample set for the layered subgraphs. We provide theoretical insights into why TFPS can improve Recall@k and NDCG@k, and extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Additionally, TFPS can be integrated with various implicit CF recommenders or negative sampling methods to enhance its performance.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional performance but pose inherent risks of generating toxic content, restricting their safe deployment. While traditional methods (e.g., alignment) adjust output preferences, they fail to eliminate underlying toxic regions in parameters, leaving models vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Prior mechanistic studies characterize toxic regions as "toxic vectors" or "layer-wise subspaces", yet our analysis identifies critical limitations: i) Removed toxic vectors can be reconstructed via linear combinations of non-toxic vectors, demanding targeting of entire toxic subspace; ii) Contrastive objective over limited samples inject noise into layer-wise subspaces, hindering stable extraction. These highlight the challenge of identifying robust toxic subspace and removing them. Therefore, we propose GLOSS (GLobal tOxic Subspace Suppression), a lightweight method that mitigates toxicity by identifying and eliminating this global subspace from FFN parameters. Experiments on LLMs (e.g., Qwen3) show GLOSS achieves SOTA detoxification while preserving general capabilities without requiring large-scale retraining. WARNING: This paper contains context which is toxic in nature.
Abstract:Recent advances in synergizing large reasoning models (LRMs) with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have shown promising results, yet two critical challenges remain: (1) reasoning models typically operate from a single, unchallenged perspective, limiting their ability to conduct deep, self-correcting reasoning over external documents, and (2) existing training paradigms rely excessively on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. To address these issues, we propose an Reasoner-Verifier framework named Adversarial Reasoning RAG (ARR). The Reasoner and Verifier engage in reasoning on retrieved evidence and critiquing each other's logic while being guided by process-aware advantage that requires no external scoring model. This reward combines explicit observational signals with internal model uncertainty to jointly optimize reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Abstract:Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) task aims at improving contrast while restoring details and textures for images captured in low-light conditions. HVI color space has made significant progress in this task by enabling precise decoupling of chrominance and luminance. However, for the interaction of chrominance and luminance branches, substantial distributional differences between the two branches prevalent in natural images limit complementary feature extraction, and luminance errors are propagated to chrominance channels through the nonlinear parameter. Furthermore, for interaction between different chrominance branches, images with large homogeneous-color regions usually exhibit weak correlation between chrominance branches due to concentrated distributions. Traditional pixel-wise losses exploit strong inter-branch correlations for co-optimization, causing gradient conflicts in weakly correlated regions. Therefore, we propose an Inter-Chrominance and Luminance Interaction (ICLR) framework including a Dual-stream Interaction Enhancement Module (DIEM) and a Covariance Correction Loss (CCL). The DIEM improves the extraction of complementary information from two dimensions, fusion and enhancement, respectively. The CCL utilizes luminance residual statistics to penalize chrominance errors and balances gradient conflicts by constraining chrominance branches covariance. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that the proposed ICLR framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Abstract:This paper explores traversability estimation for robot navigation. A key bottleneck in traversability estimation lies in efficiently achieving reliable and robust predictions while accurately encoding both geometric and semantic information across diverse environments. We introduce Navigation via Mixture of Experts (NAVMOE), a hierarchical and modular approach for traversability estimation and local navigation. NAVMOE combines multiple specialized models for specific terrain types, each of which can be either a classical model-based or a learning-based approach that predicts traversability for specific terrain types. NAVMOE dynamically weights the contributions of different models based on the input environment through a gating network. Overall, our approach offers three advantages: First, NAVMOE enables traversability estimation to adaptively leverage specialized approaches for different terrains, which enhances generalization across diverse and unseen environments. Second, our approach significantly improves efficiency with negligible cost of solution quality by introducing a training-free lazy gating mechanism, which is designed to minimize the number of activated experts during inference. Third, our approach uses a two-stage training strategy that enables the training for the gating networks within the hybrid MoE method that contains nondifferentiable modules. Extensive experiments show that NAVMOE delivers a better efficiency and performance balance than any individual expert or full ensemble across different domains, improving cross- domain generalization and reducing average computational cost by 81.2% via lazy gating, with less than a 2% loss in path quality.
Abstract:Session-based recommendation (SBR) is mainly based on anonymous user interaction sequences to recommend the items that the next user is most likely to click. Currently, the most popular and high-performing SBR methods primarily leverage graph neural networks (GNNs), which model session sequences as graph-structured data to effectively capture user intent. However, most GNNs-based SBR methods primarily focus on modeling the ID sequence information of session sequences, while neglecting the rich semantic information embedded within them. This limitation significantly hampers model's ability to accurately infer users' true intention. To address above challenge, this paper proposes a novel SBR approach called Integrating LLM-Derived Multi-Semantic Intent into Graph Model for Session-based Recommendation (LLM-DMsRec). The method utilizes a pre-trained GNN model to select the top-k items as candidate item sets and designs prompts along with a large language model (LLM) to infer multi-semantic intents from these candidate items. Specifically, we propose an alignment mechanism that effectively integrates the semantic intent inferred by the LLM with the structural intent captured by GNNs. Extensive experiments conducted on the Beauty and ML-1M datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can be seamlessly integrated into GNNs framework, significantly enhancing its recommendation performance.
Abstract:Underwater image restoration algorithms seek to restore the color, contrast, and appearance of a scene that is imaged underwater. They are a critical tool in applications ranging from marine ecology and aquaculture to underwater construction and archaeology. While existing pixel-domain diffusion-based image restoration approaches are effective at restoring simple scenes with limited depth variation, they are computationally intensive and often generate unrealistic artifacts when applied to scenes with complex geometry and significant depth variation. In this work we overcome these limitations by combining a novel network architecture (SLURPP) with an accurate synthetic data generation pipeline. SLURPP combines pretrained latent diffusion models -- which encode strong priors on the geometry and depth of scenes -- with an explicit scene decomposition -- which allows one to model and account for the effects of light attenuation and backscattering. To train SLURPP we design a physics-based underwater image synthesis pipeline that applies varied and realistic underwater degradation effects to existing terrestrial image datasets. This approach enables the generation of diverse training data with dense medium/degradation annotations. We evaluate our method extensively on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Notably, SLURPP is over 200X faster than existing diffusion-based methods while offering ~ 3 dB improvement in PSNR on synthetic benchmarks. It also offers compelling qualitative improvements on real-world data. Project website https://tianfwang.github.io/slurpp/.
Abstract:Simulating society with large language models (LLMs), we argue, requires more than generating plausible behavior -- it demands cognitively grounded reasoning that is structured, revisable, and traceable. LLM-based agents are increasingly used to emulate individual and group behavior -- primarily through prompting and supervised fine-tuning. Yet they often lack internal coherence, causal reasoning, and belief traceability -- making them unreliable for analyzing how people reason, deliberate, or respond to interventions. To address this, we present a conceptual modeling paradigm, Generative Minds (GenMinds), which draws from cognitive science to support structured belief representations in generative agents. To evaluate such agents, we introduce the RECAP (REconstructing CAusal Paths) framework, a benchmark designed to assess reasoning fidelity via causal traceability, demographic grounding, and intervention consistency. These contributions advance a broader shift: from surface-level mimicry to generative agents that simulate thought -- not just language -- for social simulations.
Abstract:During the finetuning stage of text generation tasks, standard cross-entropy loss treats all tokens equally. This can lead models to overemphasize high-frequency, low-information tokens, neglecting lower-frequency tokens crucial for specificity and informativeness in generated content. This paper introduces a novel loss function, Power-Law Decay Loss (PDL), specifically designed to optimize the finetuning process for text generation. The core motivation for PDL stems from observations in information theory and linguistics: the informativeness of a token is often inversely proportional to its frequency of occurrence. PDL re-weights the contribution of each token in the standard cross-entropy loss based on its frequency in the training corpus, following a power-law decay. Specifically, the weights for high-frequency tokens are reduced, while low-frequency, information-dense tokens are assigned higher weights. This mechanism guides the model during finetuning to focus more on learning and generating tokens that convey specific and unique information, thereby enhancing the quality, diversity, and informativeness of the generated text. We theoretically elaborate on the motivation and construction of PDL and discuss its potential applications and advantages across various text generation finetuning tasks, such as abstractive summarization, dialogue systems, and style transfer.