Quadratic Interest Network for Multimodal Click-Through Rate Prediction

Multimodal click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a key technique in industrial recommender systems. It leverages heterogeneous modalities such as text, images, and behavioral logs to capture high-order feature interactions between users and items, thereby enhancing the system's understanding of user interests and its ability to predict click behavior. The primary challenge in this field lies in effectively utilizing the rich semantic information from multiple modalities while satisfying the low-latency requirements of online inference in real-world applications. To foster progress in this area, the Multimodal CTR Prediction Challenge Track of the WWW 2025 EReL@MIR Workshop formulates the problem into two tasks: (1) Task 1 of Multimodal Item Embedding: this task aims to explore multimodal information extraction and item representation learning methods that enhance recommendation tasks; and (2) Task 2 of Multimodal CTR Prediction: this task aims to explore what multimodal recommendation model can effectively leverage multimodal embedding features and achieve better performance. In this paper, we propose a novel model for Task 2, named Quadratic Interest Network (QIN) for Multimodal CTR Prediction. Specifically, QIN employs adaptive sparse target attention to extract multimodal user behavior features, and leverages Quadratic Neural Networks to capture high-order feature interactions. As a result, QIN achieved an AUC of 0.9798 on the leaderboard and ranked second in the competition. The model code, training logs, hyperparameter configurations, and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/salmon1802/QIN.

EmoSEM: Segment and Explain Emotion Stimuli in Visual Art

This paper focuses on a key challenge in visual art understanding: given an art image, the model pinpoints pixel regions that trigger a specific human emotion, and generates linguistic explanations for the emotional arousal. Despite recent advances in art understanding, pixel-level emotion understanding still faces a dual challenge: first, the subjectivity of emotion makes it difficult for general segmentation models like SAM to adapt to emotion-oriented segmentation tasks; and second, the abstract nature of art expression makes it difficult for captioning models to balance pixel-level semantic understanding and emotion reasoning. To solve the above problems, this paper proposes the Emotion stimuli Segmentation and Explanation Model (EmoSEM) to endow the segmentation model SAM with emotion comprehension capability. First, to enable the model to perform segmentation under the guidance of emotional intent well, we introduce an emotional prompt with a learnable mask token as the conditional input for segmentation decoding. Then, we design an emotion projector to establish the association between emotion and visual features. Next, more importantly, to address emotion-visual stimuli alignment, we develop a lightweight prefix projector, a module that fuses the learned emotional mask with the corresponding emotion into a unified representation compatible with the language model. Finally, we input the joint visual, mask, and emotional tokens into the language model and output the emotional explanations. It ensures that the generated interpretations remain semantically and emotionally coherent with the visual stimuli. The method innovatively realizes end-to-end modeling from low-level pixel features to high-level emotion interpretation, providing the first interpretable fine-grained analysis framework for artistic emotion computing. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our model.

Knowledge Distillation and Dataset Distillation of Large Language Models: Emerging Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions

The exponential growth of Large Language Models (LLMs) continues to highlight the need for efficient strategies to meet ever-expanding computational and data demands. This survey provides a comprehensive analysis of two complementary paradigms: Knowledge Distillation (KD) and Dataset Distillation (DD), both aimed at compressing LLMs while preserving their advanced reasoning capabilities and linguistic diversity. We first examine key methodologies in KD, such as task-specific alignment, rationale-based training, and multi-teacher frameworks, alongside DD techniques that synthesize compact, high-impact datasets through optimization-based gradient matching, latent space regularization, and generative synthesis. Building on these foundations, we explore how integrating KD and DD can produce more effective and scalable compression strategies. Together, these approaches address persistent challenges in model scalability, architectural heterogeneity, and the preservation of emergent LLM abilities. We further highlight applications across domains such as healthcare and education, where distillation enables efficient deployment without sacrificing performance. Despite substantial progress, open challenges remain in preserving emergent reasoning and linguistic diversity, enabling efficient adaptation to continually evolving teacher models and datasets, and establishing comprehensive evaluation protocols. By synthesizing methodological innovations, theoretical foundations, and practical insights, our survey charts a path toward sustainable, resource-efficient LLMs through the tighter integration of KD and DD principles.

Joint Channel Estimation and Signal Detection for MIMO-OFDM: A Novel Data-Aided Approach with Reduced Computational Overhead

The acquisition of channel state information (CSI) is essential in MIMO-OFDM communication systems. Data-aided enhanced receivers, by incorporating domain knowledge, effectively mitigate performance degradation caused by imperfect CSI, particularly in dynamic wireless environments. However, existing methodologies face notable challenges: they either refine channel estimates within MIMO subsystems separately, which proves ineffective due to deviations from assumptions regarding the time-varying nature of channels, or fully exploit the time-frequency characteristics but incur significantly high computational overhead due to dimensional concatenation. To address these issues, this study introduces a novel data-aided method aimed at reducing complexity, particularly suited for fast-fading scenarios in fifth-generation (5G) and beyond networks. We derive a general form of a data-aided linear minimum mean-square error (LMMSE)-based algorithm, optimized for iterative joint channel estimation and signal detection. Additionally, we propose a computationally efficient alternative to this algorithm, which achieves comparable performance with significantly reduced complexity. Empirical evaluations reveal that our proposed algorithms outperform several state-of-the-art approaches across various MIMO-OFDM configurations, pilot sequence lengths, and in the presence of time variability. Comparative analysis with basis expansion model-based iterative receivers highlights the superiority of our algorithms in achieving an effective trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity.

CSMF: Cascaded Selective Mask Fine-Tuning for Multi-Objective Embedding-Based Retrieval

Multi-objective embedding-based retrieval (EBR) has become increasingly critical due to the growing complexity of user behaviors and commercial objectives. While traditional approaches often suffer from data sparsity and limited information sharing between objectives, recent methods utilizing a shared network alongside dedicated sub-networks for each objective partially address these limitations. However, such methods significantly increase the model parameters, leading to an increased retrieval latency and a limited ability to model causal relationships between objectives. To address these challenges, we propose the Cascaded Selective Mask Fine-Tuning (CSMF), a novel method that enhances both retrieval efficiency and serving performance for multi-objective EBR. The CSMF framework selectively masks model parameters to free up independent learning space for each objective, leveraging the cascading relationships between objectives during the sequential fine-tuning. Without increasing network parameters or online retrieval overhead, CSMF computes a linearly weighted fusion score for multiple objective probabilities while supporting flexible adjustment of each objective's weight across various recommendation scenarios. Experimental results on real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of CSMF, and online experiments validate its significant practical value.

SteerMusic: Enhanced Musical Consistency for Zero-shot Text-Guided and Personalized Music Editing

Music editing is an important step in music production, which has broad applications, including game development and film production. Most existing zero-shot text-guided methods rely on pretrained diffusion models by involving forward-backward diffusion processes for editing. However, these methods often struggle to maintain the music content consistency. Additionally, text instructions alone usually fail to accurately describe the desired music. In this paper, we propose two music editing methods that enhance the consistency between the original and edited music by leveraging score distillation. The first method, SteerMusic, is a coarse-grained zero-shot editing approach using delta denoising score. The second method, SteerMusic+, enables fine-grained personalized music editing by manipulating a concept token that represents a user-defined musical style. SteerMusic+ allows for the editing of music into any user-defined musical styles that cannot be achieved by the text instructions alone. Experimental results show that our methods outperform existing approaches in preserving both music content consistency and editing fidelity. User studies further validate that our methods achieve superior music editing quality. Audio examples are available on https://steermusic.pages.dev/.

FairACE: Achieving Degree Fairness in Graph Neural Networks via Contrastive and Adversarial Group-Balanced Training

Fairness has been a significant challenge in graph neural networks (GNNs) since degree biases often result in un-equal prediction performance among nodes with varying degrees. Existing GNN models focus on prediction accuracy, frequently overlooking fairness across different degree groups. To addressthis issue, we propose a novel GNN framework, namely Fairness- Aware Asymmetric Contrastive Ensemble (FairACE), which inte-grates asymmetric contrastive learning with adversarial training to improve degree fairness. FairACE captures one-hop local neighborhood information and two-hop monophily similarity to create fairer node representations and employs a degree fairness regulator to balance performance between high-degree and low-degree nodes. During model training, a novel group-balanced fairness loss is proposed to minimize classification disparities across degree groups. In addition, we also propose a novel fairness metric, the Accuracy Distribution Gap (ADG), which can quantitatively assess and ensure equitable performance across different degree-based node groups. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that FairACE significantly improves degree fairness metrics while maintaining competitive accuracy in comparison to the state-of-the-art GNN models.

Nemotron-H: A Family of Accurate and Efficient Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Models

As inference-time scaling becomes critical for enhanced reasoning capabilities, it is increasingly becoming important to build models that are efficient to infer. We introduce Nemotron-H, a family of 8B and 56B/47B hybrid Mamba-Transformer models designed to reduce inference cost for a given accuracy level. To achieve this goal, we replace the majority of self-attention layers in the common Transformer model architecture with Mamba layers that perform constant computation and require constant memory per generated token. We show that Nemotron-H models offer either better or on-par accuracy compared to other similarly-sized state-of-the-art open-sourced Transformer models (e.g., Qwen-2.5-7B/72B and Llama-3.1-8B/70B), while being up to 3$\times$ faster at inference. To further increase inference speed and reduce the memory required at inference time, we created Nemotron-H-47B-Base from the 56B model using a new compression via pruning and distillation technique called MiniPuzzle. Nemotron-H-47B-Base achieves similar accuracy to the 56B model, but is 20% faster to infer. In addition, we introduce an FP8-based training recipe and show that it can achieve on par results with BF16-based training. This recipe is used to train the 56B model. All Nemotron-H models will be released, with support in Hugging Face, NeMo, and Megatron-LM.

Probability Density Geodesics in Image Diffusion Latent Space

Diffusion models indirectly estimate the probability density over a data space, which can be used to study its structure. In this work, we show that geodesics can be computed in diffusion latent space, where the norm induced by the spatially-varying inner product is inversely proportional to the probability density. In this formulation, a path that traverses a high density (that is, probable) region of image latent space is shorter than the equivalent path through a low density region. We present algorithms for solving the associated initial and boundary value problems and show how to compute the probability density along the path and the geodesic distance between two points. Using these techniques, we analyze how closely video clips approximate geodesics in a pre-trained image diffusion space. Finally, we demonstrate how these techniques can be applied to training-free image sequence interpolation and extrapolation, given a pre-trained image diffusion model.

GARF: Learning Generalizable 3D Reassembly for Real-World Fractures

3D reassembly is a challenging spatial intelligence task with broad applications across scientific domains. While large-scale synthetic datasets have fueled promising learning-based approaches, their generalizability to different domains is limited. Critically, it remains uncertain whether models trained on synthetic datasets can generalize to real-world fractures where breakage patterns are more complex. To bridge this gap, we propose GARF, a generalizable 3D reassembly framework for real-world fractures. GARF leverages fracture-aware pretraining to learn fracture features from individual fragments, with flow matching enabling precise 6-DoF alignments. At inference time, we introduce one-step preassembly, improving robustness to unseen objects and varying numbers of fractures. In collaboration with archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and ornithologists, we curate Fractura, a diverse dataset for vision and learning communities, featuring real-world fracture types across ceramics, bones, eggshells, and lithics. Comprehensive experiments have shown our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets, achieving 82.87\% lower rotation error and 25.15\% higher part accuracy. This sheds light on training on synthetic data to advance real-world 3D puzzle solving, demonstrating its strong generalization across unseen object shapes and diverse fracture types.