Hy-Tracker: A Novel Framework for Enhancing Efficiency and Accuracy of Object Tracking in Hyperspectral Videos

Hyperspectral object tracking has recently emerged as a topic of great interest in the remote sensing community. The hyperspectral image, with its many bands, provides a rich source of material information of an object that can be effectively used for object tracking. While most hyperspectral trackers are based on detection-based techniques, no one has yet attempted to employ YOLO for detecting and tracking the object. This is due to the presence of multiple spectral bands, the scarcity of annotated hyperspectral videos, and YOLO's performance limitation in managing occlusions, and distinguishing object in cluttered backgrounds. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel framework called Hy-Tracker, which aims to bridge the gap between hyperspectral data and state-of-the-art object detection methods to leverage the strengths of YOLOv7 for object tracking in hyperspectral videos. Hy-Tracker not only introduces YOLOv7 but also innovatively incorporates a refined tracking module on top of YOLOv7. The tracker refines the initial detections produced by YOLOv7, leading to improved object-tracking performance. Furthermore, we incorporate Kalman-Filter into the tracker, which addresses the challenges posed by scale variation and occlusion. The experimental results on hyperspectral benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Hy-Tracker in accurately tracking objects across frames.

Which Matters Most in Making Fund Investment Decisions? A Multi-granularity Graph Disentangled Learning Framework

In this paper, we highlight that both conformity and risk preference matter in making fund investment decisions beyond personal interest and seek to jointly characterize these aspects in a disentangled manner. Consequently, we develop a novel M ulti-granularity Graph Disentangled Learning framework named MGDL to effectively perform intelligent matching of fund investment products. Benefiting from the well-established fund graph and the attention module, multi-granularity user representations are derived from historical behaviors to separately express personal interest, conformity and risk preference in a fine-grained way. To attain stronger disentangled representations with specific semantics, MGDL explicitly involve two self-supervised signals, i.e., fund type based contrasts and fund popularity. Extensive experiments in offline and online environments verify the effectiveness of MGDL.

One Model for All: Large Language Models are Domain-Agnostic Recommendation Systems

The purpose of sequential recommendation is to utilize the interaction history of a user and predict the next item that the user is most likely to interact with. While data sparsity and cold start are two challenges that most recommender systems are still facing, many efforts are devoted to utilizing data from other domains, called cross-domain methods. However, general cross-domain methods explore the relationship between two domains by designing complex model architecture, making it difficult to scale to multiple domains and utilize more data. Moreover, existing recommendation systems use IDs to represent item, which carry less transferable signals in cross-domain scenarios, and user cross-domain behaviors are also sparse, making it challenging to learn item relationship from different domains. These problems hinder the application of multi-domain methods to sequential recommendation. Recently, large language models (LLMs) exhibit outstanding performance in world knowledge learning from text corpora and general-purpose question answering. Inspired by these successes, we propose a simple but effective framework for domain-agnostic recommendation by exploiting the pre-trained LLMs (namely LLM-Rec). We mix the user's behavior across different domains, and then concatenate the title information of these items into a sentence and model the user's behaviors with a pre-trained language model. We expect that by mixing the user's behaviors across different domains, we can exploit the common knowledge encoded in the pre-trained language model to alleviate the problems of data sparsity and cold start problems. Furthermore, we are curious about whether the latest technical advances in nature language processing (NLP) can transfer to the recommendation scenarios.

Towards Anytime Fine-tuning: Continually Pre-trained Language Models with Hypernetwork Prompt

Continual pre-training has been urgent for adapting a pre-trained model to a multitude of domains and tasks in the fast-evolving world. In practice, a continually pre-trained model is expected to demonstrate not only greater capacity when fine-tuned on pre-trained domains but also a non-decreasing performance on unseen ones. In this work, we first investigate such anytime fine-tuning effectiveness of existing continual pre-training approaches, concluding with unanimously decreased performance on unseen domains. To this end, we propose a prompt-guided continual pre-training method, where we train a hypernetwork to generate domain-specific prompts by both agreement and disagreement losses. The agreement loss maximally preserves the generalization of a pre-trained model to new domains, and the disagreement one guards the exclusiveness of the generated hidden states for each domain. Remarkably, prompts by the hypernetwork alleviate the domain identity when fine-tuning and promote knowledge transfer across domains. Our method achieved improvements of 3.57% and 3.4% on two real-world datasets (including domain shift and temporal shift), respectively, demonstrating its efficacy.

Prompt-augmented Temporal Point Process for Streaming Event Sequence

Neural Temporal Point Processes (TPPs) are the prevalent paradigm for modeling continuous-time event sequences, such as user activities on the web and financial transactions. In real-world applications, event data is typically received in a \emph{streaming} manner, where the distribution of patterns may shift over time. Additionally, \emph{privacy and memory constraints} are commonly observed in practical scenarios, further compounding the challenges. Therefore, the continuous monitoring of a TPP to learn the streaming event sequence is an important yet under-explored problem. Our work paper addresses this challenge by adopting Continual Learning (CL), which makes the model capable of continuously learning a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting under realistic constraints. Correspondingly, we propose a simple yet effective framework, PromptTPP\footnote{Our code is available at {\small \url{ https://github.com/yanyanSann/PromptTPP}}}, by integrating the base TPP with a continuous-time retrieval prompt pool. The prompts, small learnable parameters, are stored in a memory space and jointly optimized with the base TPP, ensuring that the model learns event streams sequentially without buffering past examples or task-specific attributes. We present a novel and realistic experimental setup for modeling event streams, where PromptTPP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance across three real user behavior datasets.

Rethinking Memory and Communication Cost for Efficient Large Language Model Training

As model sizes and training datasets continue to increase, large-scale model training frameworks reduce memory consumption by various sharding techniques. However, the huge communication overhead reduces the training efficiency, especially in public cloud environments with varying network bandwidths. In this paper, we rethink the impact of memory consumption and communication overhead on the training speed of large language model, and propose a memory-communication balanced \underline{Pa}rtial \underline{R}edundancy \underline{O}ptimizer (PaRO). PaRO reduces the amount and frequency of inter-group communication by grouping GPU clusters and introducing minor intra-group memory redundancy, thereby improving the training efficiency of the model. Additionally, we propose a Hierarchical Overlapping Ring (HO-Ring) communication topology to enhance communication efficiency between nodes or across switches in large model training. Our experiments demonstrate that the HO-Ring algorithm improves communication efficiency by 32.6\% compared to the traditional Ring algorithm. Compared to the baseline ZeRO, PaRO significantly improves training throughput by 1.2x-2.6x and achieves a near-linear scalability. Therefore, the PaRO strategy provides more fine-grained options for the trade-off between memory consumption and communication overhead in different training scenarios.

Long-tail Augmented Graph Contrastive Learning for Recommendation

Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) has demonstrated promising results for recommender systems, as they can effectively leverage high-order relationship. However, these methods usually encounter data sparsity issue in real-world scenarios. To address this issue, GCN-based recommendation methods employ contrastive learning to introduce self-supervised signals. Despite their effectiveness, these methods lack consideration of the significant degree disparity between head and tail nodes. This can lead to non-uniform representation distribution, which is a crucial factor for the performance of contrastive learning methods. To tackle the above issue, we propose a novel Long-tail Augmented Graph Contrastive Learning (LAGCL) method for recommendation. Specifically, we introduce a learnable long-tail augmentation approach to enhance tail nodes by supplementing predicted neighbor information, and generate contrastive views based on the resulting augmented graph. To make the data augmentation schema learnable, we design an auto drop module to generate pseudo-tail nodes from head nodes and a knowledge transfer module to reconstruct the head nodes from pseudo-tail nodes. Additionally, we employ generative adversarial networks to ensure that the distribution of the generated tail/head nodes matches that of the original tail/head nodes. Extensive experiments conducted on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the significant improvement in performance of our model over the state-of-the-arts. Further analyses demonstrate the uniformity of learned representations and the superiority of LAGCL on long-tail performance. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/im0qianqian/LAGCL

Enhancing Event Sequence Modeling with Contrastive Relational Inference

Neural temporal point processes(TPPs) have shown promise for modeling continuous-time event sequences. However, capturing the interactions between events is challenging yet critical for performing inference tasks like forecasting on event sequence data. Existing TPP models have focused on parameterizing the conditional distribution of future events but struggle to model event interactions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages Neural Relational Inference (NRI) to learn a relation graph that infers interactions while simultaneously learning the dynamics patterns from observational data. Our approach, the Contrastive Relational Inference-based Hawkes Process (CRIHP), reasons about event interactions under a variational inference framework. It utilizes intensity-based learning to search for prototype paths to contrast relationship constraints. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in capturing event interactions for event sequence modeling tasks.

AntM$^{2}$C: A Large Scale Dataset For Multi-Scenario Multi-Modal CTR Prediction

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial issue in recommendation systems. There has been an emergence of various public CTR datasets. However, existing datasets primarily suffer from the following limitations. Firstly, users generally click different types of items from multiple scenarios, and modeling from multiple scenarios can provide a more comprehensive understanding of users. Existing datasets only include data for the same type of items from a single scenario. Secondly, multi-modal features are essential in multi-scenario prediction as they address the issue of inconsistent ID encoding between different scenarios. The existing datasets are based on ID features and lack multi-modal features. Third, a large-scale dataset can provide a more reliable evaluation of models, fully reflecting the performance differences between models. The scale of existing datasets is around 100 million, which is relatively small compared to the real-world CTR prediction. To address these limitations, we propose AntM$^{2}$C, a Multi-Scenario Multi-Modal CTR dataset based on industrial data from Alipay. Specifically, AntM$^{2}$C provides the following advantages: 1) It covers CTR data of 5 different types of items, providing insights into the preferences of users for different items, including advertisements, vouchers, mini-programs, contents, and videos. 2) Apart from ID-based features, AntM$^{2}$C also provides 2 multi-modal features, raw text and image features, which can effectively establish connections between items with different IDs. 3) AntM$^{2}$C provides 1 billion CTR data with 200 features, including 200 million users and 6 million items. It is currently the largest-scale CTR dataset available. Based on AntM$^{2}$C, we construct several typical CTR tasks and provide comparisons with baseline methods. The dataset homepage is available at https://www.atecup.cn/home.

WeaverBird: Empowering Financial Decision-Making with Large Language Model, Knowledge Base, and Search Engine

We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a result, our system possesses the capability to understand complex financial queries, such as "How should I manage my investments during inflation?", and provide informed responses. Furthermore, our system incorporates a local knowledge base and a search engine to retrieve relevant information. The final responses are conditioned on the search results and include proper citations to the sources, thus enjoying an enhanced credibility. Through a range of finance-related questions, we have demonstrated the superior performance of our system compared to other models. To experience our system firsthand, users can interact with our live demo at https://weaverbird.ttic.edu, as well as watch our 2-min video illustration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyV2qQkX6Tc.