Abstract:The item cold-start problem is critical for online recommendation systems, as the success of this phase determines whether high-quality new items can transition to popular ones, receive essential feedback to inspire creators, and thus lead to the long-term retention of creators. However, modern recommendation systems still struggle to address item cold-start challenges due to the heavy reliance on item and historical interactions, which are non-trivial for cold-start items lacking sufficient exposure and feedback. Lookalike algorithms provide a promising solution by extending feedback for new items based on lookalike users. Traditional lookalike algorithms face such limitations: (1) failing to effectively model the lookalike users and further improve recommendations with the existing rule- or model-based methods; and (2) struggling to utilize the interaction signals and incorporate diverse features in modern recommendation systems. Inspired by lookalike algorithms, we propose Next-User Retrieval, a novel framework for enhancing cold-start recommendations via generative next-user modeling. Specifically, we employ a transformer-based model to capture the unidirectional relationships among recently interacted users and utilize these sequences to generate the next potential user who is most likely to interact with the item. The additional item features are also integrated as prefix prompt embeddings to assist the next-user generation. The effectiveness of Next-User Retrieval is evaluated through both offline experiments and online A/B tests. Our method achieves significant improvements with increases of 0.0142% in daily active users and +0.1144% in publications in Douyin, showcasing its practical applicability and scalability.
Abstract:Ensuring the safety and alignment of Large Language Models is a significant challenge with their growing integration into critical applications and societal functions. While prior research has primarily focused on jailbreak attacks, less attention has been given to non-adversarial failures that subtly emerge during benign interactions. We introduce secondary risks a novel class of failure modes marked by harmful or misleading behaviors during benign prompts. Unlike adversarial attacks, these risks stem from imperfect generalization and often evade standard safety mechanisms. To enable systematic evaluation, we introduce two risk primitives verbose response and speculative advice that capture the core failure patterns. Building on these definitions, we propose SecLens, a black-box, multi-objective search framework that efficiently elicits secondary risk behaviors by optimizing task relevance, risk activation, and linguistic plausibility. To support reproducible evaluation, we release SecRiskBench, a benchmark dataset of 650 prompts covering eight diverse real-world risk categories. Experimental results from extensive evaluations on 16 popular models demonstrate that secondary risks are widespread, transferable across models, and modality independent, emphasizing the urgent need for enhanced safety mechanisms to address benign yet harmful LLM behaviors in real-world deployments.
Abstract:The emergence of large language models (LLMs) enables the development of intelligent agents capable of engaging in complex and multi-turn dialogues. However, multi-agent collaboration face critical safety challenges, such as hallucination amplification and error injection and propagation. This paper presents GUARDIAN, a unified method for detecting and mitigating multiple safety concerns in GUARDing Intelligent Agent collaboratioNs. By modeling the multi-agent collaboration process as a discrete-time temporal attributed graph, GUARDIAN explicitly captures the propagation dynamics of hallucinations and errors. The unsupervised encoder-decoder architecture incorporating an incremental training paradigm, learns to reconstruct node attributes and graph structures from latent embeddings, enabling the identification of anomalous nodes and edges with unparalleled precision. Moreover, we introduce a graph abstraction mechanism based on the Information Bottleneck Theory, which compresses temporal interaction graphs while preserving essential patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate GUARDIAN's effectiveness in safeguarding LLM multi-agent collaborations against diverse safety vulnerabilities, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with efficient resource utilization.
Abstract:Financial markets pose fundamental challenges for asset return prediction due to their high dimensionality, non-stationarity, and persistent volatility. Despite advances in large language models and multi-agent systems, current quantitative research pipelines suffer from limited automation, weak interpretability, and fragmented coordination across key components such as factor mining and model innovation. In this paper, we propose R&D-Agent for Quantitative Finance, in short RD-Agent(Q), the first data-centric multi-agent framework designed to automate the full-stack research and development of quantitative strategies via coordinated factor-model co-optimization. RD-Agent(Q) decomposes the quant process into two iterative stages: a Research stage that dynamically sets goal-aligned prompts, formulates hypotheses based on domain priors, and maps them to concrete tasks, and a Development stage that employs a code-generation agent, Co-STEER, to implement task-specific code, which is then executed in real-market backtests. The two stages are connected through a feedback stage that thoroughly evaluates experimental outcomes and informs subsequent iterations, with a multi-armed bandit scheduler for adaptive direction selection. Empirically, RD-Agent(Q) achieves up to 2X higher annualized returns than classical factor libraries using 70% fewer factors, and outperforms state-of-the-art deep time-series models on real markets. Its joint factor-model optimization delivers a strong balance between predictive accuracy and strategy robustness. Our code is available at: https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent.
Abstract:Recent advances in AI and ML have transformed data science, yet increasing complexity and expertise requirements continue to hinder progress. While crowdsourcing platforms alleviate some challenges, high-level data science tasks remain labor-intensive and iterative. To overcome these limitations, we introduce R&D-Agent, a dual-agent framework for iterative exploration. The Researcher agent uses performance feedback to generate ideas, while the Developer agent refines code based on error feedback. By enabling multiple parallel exploration traces that merge and enhance one another, R&D-Agent narrows the gap between automated solutions and expert-level performance. Evaluated on MLE-Bench, R&D-Agent emerges as the top-performing machine learning engineering agent, demonstrating its potential to accelerate innovation and improve precision across diverse data science applications. We have open-sourced R&D-Agent on GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/RD-Agent.
Abstract:3D spatial understanding is essential in real-world applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles, virtual reality, and medical imaging. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs), having demonstrated remarkable success across various domains, have been leveraged to enhance 3D understanding tasks, showing potential to surpass traditional computer vision methods. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of methods integrating LLMs with 3D spatial understanding. We propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods into three branches: image-based methods deriving 3D understanding from 2D visual data, point cloud-based methods working directly with 3D representations, and hybrid modality-based methods combining multiple data streams. We systematically review representative methods along these categories, covering data representations, architectural modifications, and training strategies that bridge textual and 3D modalities. Finally, we discuss current limitations, including dataset scarcity and computational challenges, while highlighting promising research directions in spatial perception, multi-modal fusion, and real-world applications.
Abstract:With the rapid expansion of cloud computing infrastructure, energy consumption has become a critical challenge, driving the need for accurate and efficient prediction models. This study proposes a novel Vector Weighted Average Kernel Extreme Learning Machine (VWAA-KELM) model to enhance energy consumption prediction in cloud computing environments. By integrating a vector weighted average algorithm (VWAA) with kernel extreme learning machine (KELM), the proposed model dynamically adjusts feature weights and optimizes kernel functions, significantly improving prediction accuracy and generalization. Experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of VWAA-KELM: 94.7% of test set prediction errors fall within [0, 50] units, with only three cases exceeding 100 units, indicating strong stability. The model achieves a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.987 in the training set (RMSE = 28.108, RPD = 8.872) and maintains excellent generalization with R2 = 0.973 in the test set (RMSE = 43.227, RPD = 6.202). Visual analysis confirms that predicted values closely align with actual energy consumption trends, avoiding overfitting while capturing nonlinear dependencies. A key innovation of this study is the introduction of adaptive feature weighting, allowing the model to dynamically assign importance to different input parameters, thereby enhancing high-dimensional data processing. This advancement provides a scalable and efficient approach for optimizing cloud data center energy consumption. Beyond cloud computing, the proposed hybrid framework has broader applications in Internet of Things (IoT) and edge computing, supporting real-time energy management and intelligent resource allocation.
Abstract:This study addresses the challenge of resource scheduling optimization in edge-cloud collaborative computing using deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The proposed DRL-based approach improves task processing efficiency, reduces overall processing time, enhances resource utilization, and effectively controls task migrations. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of DRL over traditional scheduling algorithms, particularly in managing complex task allocation, dynamic workloads, and multiple resource constraints. Despite its advantages, further improvements are needed to enhance learning efficiency, reduce training time, and address convergence issues. Future research should focus on increasing the algorithm's fault tolerance to handle more complex and uncertain scheduling scenarios, thereby advancing the intelligence and efficiency of edge-cloud computing systems.
Abstract:Cloud computing environments are increasingly vulnerable to security threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and SQL injection. Traditional security mechanisms, based on rule matching and feature recognition, struggle to adapt to evolving attack strategies. This paper proposes an adaptive security protection framework leveraging deep learning to construct a multi-layered defense architecture. The proposed system is evaluated in a real-world business environment, achieving a detection accuracy of 97.3%, an average response time of 18 ms, and an availability rate of 99.999%. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly enhances detection accuracy, response efficiency, and resource utilization, offering a novel and effective approach to cloud computing security.
Abstract:Traditional security protection methods struggle to address sophisticated attack vectors in large-scale distributed systems, particularly when balancing detection accuracy with data privacy concerns. This paper presents a novel distributed security threat detection system that integrates federated learning with multimodal large language models (LLMs). Our system leverages federated learning to ensure data privacy while employing multimodal LLMs to process heterogeneous data sources including network traffic, system logs, images, and sensor data. Experimental evaluation on a 10TB distributed dataset demonstrates that our approach achieves 96.4% detection accuracy, outperforming traditional baseline models by 4.1 percentage points. The system reduces both false positive and false negative rates by 1.8 and 2.4 percentage points respectively. Performance analysis shows that our system maintains efficient processing capabilities in distributed environments, requiring 180 seconds for model training and 3.8 seconds for threat detection across the distributed network. These results demonstrate significant improvements in detection accuracy and computational efficiency while preserving data privacy, suggesting strong potential for real-world deployment in large-scale security systems.