PULSE: Socially-Aware User Representation Modeling Toward Parameter-Efficient Graph Collaborative Filtering

Graph-based social recommendation (SocialRec) has emerged as a powerful extension of graph collaborative filtering (GCF), which leverages graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture multi-hop collaborative signals from user-item interactions. These methods enrich user representations by incorporating social network information into GCF, thereby integrating additional collaborative signals from social relations. However, existing GCF and graph-based SocialRec approaches face significant challenges: they incur high computational costs and suffer from limited scalability due to the large number of parameters required to assign explicit embeddings to all users and items. In this work, we propose PULSE (Parameter-efficient User representation Learning with Social Knowledge), a framework that addresses this limitation by constructing user representations from socially meaningful signals without creating an explicit learnable embedding for each user. PULSE reduces the parameter size by up to 50% compared to the most lightweight GCF baseline. Beyond parameter efficiency, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming 13 GCF and graph-based social recommendation baselines across varying levels of interaction sparsity, from cold-start to highly active users, through a time- and memory-efficient modeling process.

By My Eyes: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models with Sensor Data via Visual Prompting

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities across various domains. However, utilizing LLMs for ubiquitous sensing applications remains challenging as existing text-prompt methods show significant performance degradation when handling long sensor data sequences. We propose a visual prompting approach for sensor data using multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). We design a visual prompt that directs MLLMs to utilize visualized sensor data alongside the target sensory task descriptions. Additionally, we introduce a visualization generator that automates the creation of optimal visualizations tailored to a given sensory task, eliminating the need for prior task-specific knowledge. We evaluated our approach on nine sensory tasks involving four sensing modalities, achieving an average of 10% higher accuracy than text-based prompts and reducing token costs by 15.8x. Our findings highlight the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of visual prompts with MLLMs for various sensory tasks.