Multi-Granularity Click Confidence Learning via Self-Distillation in Recommendation

Recommendation systems rely on historical clicks to learn user interests and provide appropriate items. However, current studies tend to treat clicks equally, which may ignore the assorted intensities of user interests in different clicks. In this paper, we aim to achieve multi-granularity Click confidence Learning via Self-Distillation in recommendation (CLSD). Due to the lack of supervised signals in click confidence, we first apply self-supervised learning to obtain click confidence scores via a global self-distillation method. After that, we define a local confidence function to adapt confidence scores at the user group level, since the confidence distributions can be varied among user groups. With the combination of multi-granularity confidence learning, we can distinguish the quality of clicks and model user interests more accurately without involving extra data and model structures. The significant improvements over different backbones on industrial offline and online experiments in a real-world recommender system prove the effectiveness of our model. Recently, CLSD has been deployed on a large-scale recommender system, affecting over 400 million users.

FishMOT: A Simple and Effective Method for Fish Tracking Based on IoU Matching

Fish tracking plays a vital role in understanding fish behavior and ecology. However, existing tracking methods face challenges in accuracy and robustness dues to morphological change of fish, occlusion and complex environment. This paper proposes FishMOT(Multiple Object Tracking for Fish), a novel fish tracking approach combining object detection and IoU matching, including basic module, interaction module and refind module. Wherein, a basic module performs target association based on IoU of detection boxes between successive frames to deal with morphological change of fish; an interaction module combines IoU of detection boxes and IoU of fish entity to handle occlusions; a refind module use spatio-temporal information uses spatio-temporal information to overcome the tracking failure resulting from the missed detection by the detector under complex environment. FishMOT reduces the computational complexity and memory consumption since it does not require complex feature extraction or identity assignment per fish, and does not need Kalman filter to predict the detection boxes of successive frame. Experimental results demonstrate FishMOT outperforms state-of-the-art multi-object trackers and specialized fish tracking tools in terms of MOTA, accuracy, computation time, memory consumption, etc.. Furthermore, the method exhibits excellent robustness and generalizability for varying environments and fish numbers. The simplified workflow and strong performance make FishMOT as a highly effective fish tracking approach. The source codes and pre-trained models are available at: https://github.com/gakkistar/FishMOT

Learning from All Sides: Diversified Positive Augmentation via Self-distillation in Recommendation

Personalized recommendation relies on user historical behaviors to provide user-interested items, and thus seriously struggles with the data sparsity issue. A powerful positive item augmentation is beneficial to address the sparsity issue, while few works could jointly consider both the accuracy and diversity of these augmented training labels. In this work, we propose a novel model-agnostic Diversified self-distillation guided positive augmentation (DivSPA) for accurate and diverse positive item augmentations. Specifically, DivSPA first conducts three types of retrieval strategies to collect high-quality and diverse positive item candidates according to users' overall interests, short-term intentions, and similar users. Next, a self-distillation module is conducted to double-check and rerank these candidates as the final positive augmentations. Extensive offline and online evaluations verify the effectiveness of our proposed DivSPA on both accuracy and diversity. DivSPA is simple and effective, which could be conveniently adapted to other base models and systems. Currently, DivSPA has been deployed on multiple widely-used real-world recommender systems.

Explainable Equivariant Neural Networks for Particle Physics: PELICAN

We present a comprehensive study of the PELICAN machine learning algorithm architecture in the context of both tagging (classification) and reconstructing (regression) Lorentz-boosted top quarks, including the difficult task of specifically identifying and measuring the $W$-boson inside the dense environment of the boosted hadronic final state. PELICAN is a novel permutation equivariant and Lorentz invariant or covariant aggregator network designed to overcome common limitations found in architectures applied to particle physics problems. Compared to many approaches that use non-specialized architectures that neglect underlying physics principles and require very large numbers of parameters, PELICAN employs a fundamentally symmetry group-based architecture that demonstrates benefits in terms of reduced complexity, increased interpretability, and raw performance. When tested on the standard task of Lorentz-boosted top quark tagging, PELICAN outperforms existing competitors with much lower model complexity and high sample efficiency. On the less common and more complex task of four-momentum regression, PELICAN also outperforms hand-crafted algorithms. We discuss the implications of symmetry-restricted architectures for the wider field of machine learning for physics.

UFNRec: Utilizing False Negative Samples for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation models are primarily optimized to distinguish positive samples from negative ones during training in which negative sampling serves as an essential component in learning the evolving user preferences through historical records. Except for randomly sampling negative samples from a uniformly distributed subset, many delicate methods have been proposed to mine negative samples with high quality. However, due to the inherent randomness of negative sampling, false negative samples are inevitably collected in model training. Current strategies mainly focus on removing such false negative samples, which leads to overlooking potential user interests, lack of recommendation diversity, less model robustness, and suffering from exposure bias. To this end, we propose a novel method that can Utilize False Negative samples for sequential Recommendation (UFNRec) to improve model performance. We first devise a simple strategy to extract false negative samples and then transfer these samples to positive samples in the following training process. Furthermore, we construct a teacher model to provide soft labels for false negative samples and design a consistency loss to regularize the predictions of these samples from the student model and the teacher model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to utilize false negative samples instead of simply removing them for the sequential recommendation. Experiments on three benchmark public datasets are conducted using three widely applied SOTA models. The experiment results demonstrate that our proposed UFNRec can effectively draw information from false negative samples and further improve the performance of SOTA models. The code is available at https://github.com/UFNRec-code/UFNRec.

Light Field Depth Estimation Based on Stitched-EPI

Depth estimation is one of the most essential problems for light field applications. In EPI-based methods, the slope computation usually suffers low accuracy due to the discretization error and low angular resolution. In addition, recent methods work well in most regions but often struggle with blurry edges over occluded regions and ambiguity over texture-less regions. To address these challenging issues, we first propose the stitched-EPI and half-stitched-EPI algorithms for non-occluded and occluded regions, respectively. The algorithms improve slope computation by shifting and concatenating lines in different EPIs but related to the same point in 3D scene, while the half-stitched-EPI only uses non-occluded part of lines. Combined with the joint photo-consistency cost proposed by us, the more accurate and robust depth map can be obtained in both occluded and non-occluded regions. Furthermore, to improve the depth estimation in texture-less regions, we propose a depth propagation strategy that determines their depth from the edge to interior, from accurate regions to coarse regions. Experimental and ablation results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves accurate and robust depth maps in all regions effectively.

C$^2$-Rec: An Effective Consistency Constraint for Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation methods play an important role in real-world recommender systems. These systems are able to catch user preferences by taking advantage of historical records and then performing recommendations. Contrastive learning(CL) is a cutting-edge technology that can assist us in obtaining informative user representations, but these CL-based models need subtle negative sampling strategies, tedious data augmentation methods, and heavy hyper-parameters tuning work. In this paper, we introduce another way to generate better user representations and recommend more attractive items to users. Particularly, we put forward an effective \textbf{C}onsistency \textbf{C}onstraint for sequential \textbf{Rec}ommendation(C$^2$-Rec) in which only two extra training objectives are used without any structural modifications and data augmentation strategies. Substantial experiments have been conducted on three benchmark datasets and one real industrial dataset, which proves that our proposed method outperforms SOTA models substantially. Furthermore, our method needs much less training time than those CL-based models. Online AB-test on real-world recommendation systems also achieves 10.141\% improvement on the click-through rate and 10.541\% increase on the average click number per capita. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/zhengrongqin/C2-Rec}.

Jointly Cross- and Self-Modal Graph Attention Network for Query-Based Moment Localization

Query-based moment localization is a new task that localizes the best matched segment in an untrimmed video according to a given sentence query. In this localization task, one should pay more attention to thoroughly mine visual and linguistic information. To this end, we propose a novel Cross- and Self-Modal Graph Attention Network (CSMGAN) that recasts this task as a process of iterative messages passing over a joint graph. Specifically, the joint graph consists of Cross-Modal interaction Graph (CMG) and Self-Modal relation Graph (SMG), where frames and words are represented as nodes, and the relations between cross- and self-modal node pairs are described by an attention mechanism. Through parametric message passing, CMG highlights relevant instances across video and sentence, and then SMG models the pairwise relation inside each modality for frame (word) correlating. With multiple layers of such a joint graph, our CSMGAN is able to effectively capture high-order interactions between two modalities, thus enabling a further precise localization. Besides, to better comprehend the contextual details in the query, we develop a hierarchical sentence encoder to enhance the query understanding. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model, and GCSMAN significantly outperforms the state-of-the-arts.