UMRE: A Unified Monotonic Transformation for Ranking Ensemble in Recommender Systems

Industrial recommender systems commonly rely on ensemble sorting (ES) to combine predictions from multiple behavioral objectives. Traditionally, this process depends on manually designed nonlinear transformations (e.g., polynomial or exponential functions) and hand-tuned fusion weights to balance competing goals -- an approach that is labor-intensive and frequently suboptimal in achieving Pareto efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel Unified Monotonic Ranking Ensemble (UMRE) framework to address the limitations of traditional methods in ensemble sorting. UMRE replaces handcrafted transformations with Unconstrained Monotonic Neural Networks (UMNN), which learn expressive, strictly monotonic functions through the integration of positive neural integrals. Subsequently, a lightweight ranking model is employed to fuse the prediction scores, assigning personalized weights to each prediction objective. To balance competing goals, we further introduce a Pareto optimality strategy that adaptively coordinates task weights during training. UMRE eliminates manual tuning, maintains ranking consistency, and achieves fine-grained personalization. Experimental results on two public recommendation datasets (Kuairand and Tenrec) and online A/B tests demonstrate impressive performance and generalization capabilities.

Entropy-Memorization Law: Evaluating Memorization Difficulty of Data in LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to memorize portions of their training data, sometimes reproducing content verbatim when prompted appropriately. In this work, we investigate a fundamental yet under-explored question in the domain of memorization: How to characterize memorization difficulty of training data in LLMs? Through empirical experiments on OLMo, a family of open models, we present the Entropy-Memorization Law. It suggests that data entropy is linearly correlated with memorization score. Moreover, in a case study of memorizing highly randomized strings, or "gibberish", we observe that such sequences, despite their apparent randomness, exhibit unexpectedly low empirical entropy compared to the broader training corpus. Adopting the same strategy to discover Entropy-Memorization Law, we derive a simple yet effective approach to distinguish training and testing data, enabling Dataset Inference (DI).

ForensicHub: A Unified Benchmark & Codebase for All-Domain Fake Image Detection and Localization

The field of Fake Image Detection and Localization (FIDL) is highly fragmented, encompassing four domains: deepfake detection (Deepfake), image manipulation detection and localization (IMDL), artificial intelligence-generated image detection (AIGC), and document image manipulation localization (Doc). Although individual benchmarks exist in some domains, a unified benchmark for all domains in FIDL remains blank. The absence of a unified benchmark results in significant domain silos, where each domain independently constructs its datasets, models, and evaluation protocols without interoperability, preventing cross-domain comparisons and hindering the development of the entire FIDL field. To close the domain silo barrier, we propose ForensicHub, the first unified benchmark & codebase for all-domain fake image detection and localization. Considering drastic variations on dataset, model, and evaluation configurations across all domains, as well as the scarcity of open-sourced baseline models and the lack of individual benchmarks in some domains, ForensicHub: i) proposes a modular and configuration-driven architecture that decomposes forensic pipelines into interchangeable components across datasets, transforms, models, and evaluators, allowing flexible composition across all domains; ii) fully implements 10 baseline models, 6 backbones, 2 new benchmarks for AIGC and Doc, and integrates 2 existing benchmarks of DeepfakeBench and IMDLBenCo through an adapter-based design; iii) conducts indepth analysis based on the ForensicHub, offering 8 key actionable insights into FIDL model architecture, dataset characteristics, and evaluation standards. ForensicHub represents a significant leap forward in breaking the domain silos in the FIDL field and inspiring future breakthroughs.

Palette of Language Models: A Solver for Controlled Text Generation

Recent advancements in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. These models can produce controlled texts that closely adhere to specific requirements when prompted appropriately. However, designing an optimal prompt to control multiple attributes simultaneously can be challenging. A common approach is to linearly combine single-attribute models, but this strategy often overlooks attribute overlaps and can lead to conflicts. Therefore, we propose a novel combination strategy inspired by the Law of Total Probability and Conditional Mutual Information Minimization on generative language models. This method has been adapted for single-attribute control scenario and is termed the Palette of Language Models due to its theoretical linkage between attribute strength and generation style, akin to blending colors on an artist's palette. Moreover, positive correlation and attribute enhancement are advanced as theoretical properties to guide a rational combination strategy design. We conduct experiments on both single control and multiple control settings, and achieve surpassing results.

LLaVA-Mini: Efficient Image and Video Large Multimodal Models with One Vision Token

The advent of real-time large multimodal models (LMMs) like GPT-4o has sparked considerable interest in efficient LMMs. LMM frameworks typically encode visual inputs into vision tokens (continuous representations) and integrate them and textual instructions into the context of large language models (LLMs), where large-scale parameters and numerous context tokens (predominantly vision tokens) result in substantial computational overhead. Previous efforts towards efficient LMMs always focus on replacing the LLM backbone with smaller models, while neglecting the crucial issue of token quantity. In this paper, we introduce LLaVA-Mini, an efficient LMM with minimal vision tokens. To achieve a high compression ratio of vision tokens while preserving visual information, we first analyze how LMMs understand vision tokens and find that most vision tokens only play a crucial role in the early layers of LLM backbone, where they mainly fuse visual information into text tokens. Building on this finding, LLaVA-Mini introduces modality pre-fusion to fuse visual information into text tokens in advance, thereby facilitating the extreme compression of vision tokens fed to LLM backbone into one token. LLaVA-Mini is a unified large multimodal model that can support the understanding of images, high-resolution images, and videos in an efficient manner. Experiments across 11 image-based and 7 video-based benchmarks demonstrate that LLaVA-Mini outperforms LLaVA-v1.5 with just 1 vision token instead of 576. Efficiency analyses reveal that LLaVA-Mini can reduce FLOPs by 77%, deliver low-latency responses within 40 milliseconds, and process over 10,000 frames of video on the GPU hardware with 24GB of memory.

Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) can correct their self-generated responses, but a decline in accuracy after self-correction is also witnessed. To have a deeper understanding of self-correction, we endeavor to decompose, evaluate, and analyze the self-correction behaviors of LLMs. By enumerating and analyzing answer correctness before and after self-correction, we decompose the self-correction capability into confidence (being confident to correct answers) and critique (turning wrong answers to correct) capabilities, and propose two metrics from a probabilistic perspective to measure these 2 capabilities, along with another metric for overall self-correction capability evaluation. Based on our decomposition and evaluation metrics, we conduct extensive experiments and draw some empirical conclusions. For example, we find different models can exhibit distinct behaviors: some models are confident while others are more critical. We also find the trade-off between the two capabilities (i.e. improving one can lead to a decline in the other) when manipulating model self-correction behavior by prompts or in-context learning. Further, we find a simple yet efficient strategy to improve self-correction capability by transforming Supervision Fine-Tuning (SFT) data format, and our strategy outperforms vanilla SFT in both capabilities and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.

SPGL: Enhancing Session-based Recommendation with Single Positive Graph Learning

Session-based recommendation seeks to forecast the next item a user will be interested in, based on their interaction sequences. Due to limited interaction data, session-based recommendation faces the challenge of limited data availability. Traditional methods enhance feature learning by constructing complex models to generate positive and negative samples. This paper proposes a session-based recommendation model using Single Positive optimization loss and Graph Learning (SPGL) to deal with the problem of data sparsity, high model complexity and weak transferability. SPGL utilizes graph convolutional networks to generate global item representations and batch session representations, effectively capturing intrinsic relationships between items. The use of single positive optimization loss improves uniformity of item representations, thereby enhancing recommendation accuracy. In the intent extractor, SPGL considers the hop count of the adjacency matrix when constructing the directed global graph to fully integrate spatial information. It also takes into account the reverse positional information of items when constructing session representations to incorporate temporal information. Comparative experiments across three benchmark datasets, Tmall, RetailRocket and Diginetica, demonstrate the model's effectiveness. The source code can be accessed on https://github.com/liang-tian-tian/SPGL .

Multi-Graph Co-Training for Capturing User Intent in Session-based Recommendation

Session-based recommendation focuses on predicting the next item a user will interact with based on sequences of anonymous user sessions. A significant challenge in this field is data sparsity due to the typically short-term interactions. Most existing methods rely heavily on users' current interactions, overlooking the wealth of auxiliary information available. To address this, we propose a novel model, the Multi-Graph Co-Training model (MGCOT), which leverages not only the current session graph but also similar session graphs and a global item relation graph. This approach allows for a more comprehensive exploration of intrinsic relationships and better captures user intent from multiple views, enabling session representations to complement each other. Additionally, MGCOT employs multi-head attention mechanisms to effectively capture relevant session intent and uses contrastive learning to form accurate and robust session representations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate that MGCOT significantly enhances the performance of session-based recommendations, particularly on the Diginetica dataset, achieving improvements up to 2.00% in P@20 and 10.70% in MRR@20. Resources have been made publicly available in our GitHub repository https://github.com/liang-tian-tian/MGCOT.

Hyperbolic-constraint Point Cloud Reconstruction from Single RGB-D Images

Reconstructing desired objects and scenes has long been a primary goal in 3D computer vision. Single-view point cloud reconstruction has become a popular technique due to its low cost and accurate results. However, single-view reconstruction methods often rely on expensive CAD models and complex geometric priors. Effectively utilizing prior knowledge about the data remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce hyperbolic space to 3D point cloud reconstruction, enabling the model to represent and understand complex hierarchical structures in point clouds with low distortion. We build upon previous methods by proposing a hyperbolic Chamfer distance and a regularized triplet loss to enhance the relationship between partial and complete point clouds. Additionally, we design adaptive boundary conditions to improve the model's understanding and reconstruction of 3D structures. Our model outperforms most existing models, and ablation studies demonstrate the significance of our model and its components. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves feature extraction capabilities. Our model achieves outstanding performance in 3D reconstruction tasks.

Zero-Shot Load Forecasting with Large Language Models

Deep learning models have shown strong performance in load forecasting, but they generally require large amounts of data for model training before being applied to new scenarios, which limits their effectiveness in data-scarce scenarios. Inspired by the great success of pre-trained language models (LLMs) in natural language processing, this paper proposes a zero-shot load forecasting approach using an advanced LLM framework denoted as the Chronos model. By utilizing its extensive pre-trained knowledge, the Chronos model enables accurate load forecasting in data-scarce scenarios without the need for extensive data-specific training. Simulation results across five real-world datasets demonstrate that the Chronos model significantly outperforms nine popular baseline models for both deterministic and probabilistic load forecasting with various forecast horizons (e.g., 1 to 48 hours), even though the Chronos model is neither tailored nor fine-tuned to these specific load datasets. Notably, Chronos reduces root mean squared error (RMSE), continuous ranked probability score (CRPS), and quantile score (QS) by approximately 7.34%-84.30%, 19.63%-60.06%, and 22.83%-54.49%, respectively, compared to baseline models. These results highlight the superiority and flexibility of the Chronos model, positioning it as an effective solution in data-scarce scenarios.