On Disentangled Training for Nonlinear Transform in Learned Image Compression

Learned image compression (LIC) has demonstrated superior rate-distortion (R-D) performance compared to traditional codecs, but is challenged by training inefficiency that could incur more than two weeks to train a state-of-the-art model from scratch. Existing LIC methods overlook the slow convergence caused by compacting energy in learning nonlinear transforms. In this paper, we first reveal that such energy compaction consists of two components, i.e., feature decorrelation and uneven energy modulation. On such basis, we propose a linear auxiliary transform (AuxT) to disentangle energy compaction in training nonlinear transforms. The proposed AuxT obtains coarse approximation to achieve efficient energy compaction such that distribution fitting with the nonlinear transforms can be simplified to fine details. We then develop wavelet-based linear shortcuts (WLSs) for AuxT that leverages wavelet-based downsampling and orthogonal linear projection for feature decorrelation and subband-aware scaling for uneven energy modulation. AuxT is lightweight and plug-and-play to be integrated into diverse LIC models to address the slow convergence issue. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can accelerate training of LIC models by 2 times and simultaneously achieves an average 1\% BD-rate reduction. To our best knowledge, this is one of the first successful attempt that can significantly improve the convergence of LIC with comparable or superior rate-distortion performance. Code will be released at \url{https://github.com/qingshi9974/AuxT}

ReARTeR: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning with Trustworthy Process Rewarding

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems for Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise in knowledge-intensive tasks but face limitations in complex multi-step reasoning. While recent methods have integrated RAG with chain-of-thought reasoning or test-time search using Process Reward Models (PRMs), these approaches encounter challenges such as a lack of explanations, bias in PRM training data, early-step bias in PRM scores, and insufficient post-training optimization of reasoning potential. To address these issues, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning through Trustworthy Process Rewarding (ReARTeR), a framework that enhances RAG systems' reasoning capabilities through post-training and test-time scaling. At test time, ReARTeR introduces Trustworthy Process Rewarding via a Process Reward Model for accurate scalar scoring and a Process Explanation Model (PEM) for generating natural language explanations, enabling step refinement. During post-training, it utilizes Monte Carlo Tree Search guided by Trustworthy Process Rewarding to collect high-quality step-level preference data, optimized through Iterative Preference Optimization. ReARTeR addresses three core challenges: (1) misalignment between PRM and PEM, tackled through off-policy preference learning; (2) bias in PRM training data, mitigated by balanced annotation methods and stronger annotations for challenging examples; and (3) early-step bias in PRM, resolved through a temporal-difference-based look-ahead search strategy. Experimental results on multi-step reasoning benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements, underscoring ReARTeR's potential to advance the reasoning capabilities of RAG systems.

Generative Regression Based Watch Time Prediction for Video Recommendation: Model and Performance

Watch time prediction (WTP) has emerged as a pivotal task in short video recommendation systems, designed to encapsulate user interests. Predicting users' watch times on videos often encounters challenges, including wide value ranges and imbalanced data distributions, which can lead to significant bias when directly regressing watch time. Recent studies have tried to tackle these issues by converting the continuous watch time estimation into an ordinal classification task. While these methods are somewhat effective, they exhibit notable limitations. Inspired by language modeling, we propose a novel Generative Regression (GR) paradigm for WTP based on sequence generation. This approach employs structural discretization to enable the lossless reconstruction of original values while maintaining prediction fidelity. By formulating the prediction problem as a numerical-to-sequence mapping, and with meticulously designed vocabulary and label encodings, each watch time is transformed into a sequence of tokens. To expedite model training, we introduce the curriculum learning with an embedding mixup strategy which can mitigate training-and-inference inconsistency associated with teacher forcing. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art approaches on four public datasets and one industrial dataset. We also perform online A/B testing on Kuaishou, a leading video app with about 400 million DAUs, to demonstrate the real-world efficacy of our method. The results conclusively show that GR outperforms existing techniques significantly. Furthermore, we successfully apply GR to another regression task in recommendation systems, i.e., Lifetime Value (LTV) prediction, which highlights its potential as a novel and effective solution to general regression challenges.

CaDA: Cross-Problem Routing Solver with Constraint-Aware Dual-Attention

Vehicle Routing Problems (VRPs) are significant Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems holding substantial practical importance. Recently, Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO), which involves training deep learning models on extensive data to learn vehicle routing heuristics, has emerged as a promising approach due to its efficiency and the reduced need for manual algorithm design. However, applying NCO across diverse real-world scenarios with various constraints necessitates cross-problem capabilities. Current NCO methods typically employ a unified model lacking a constraint-specific structure, thereby restricting their cross-problem performance. Current multi-task methods for VRPs typically employ a constraint-unaware model, limiting their cross-problem performance. Furthermore, they rely solely on global connectivity, which fails to focus on key nodes and leads to inefficient representation learning. This paper introduces a Constraint-Aware Dual-Attention Model (CaDA), designed to address these limitations. CaDA incorporates a constraint prompt that efficiently represents different problem variants. Additionally, it features a dual-attention mechanism with a global branch for capturing broader graph-wide information and a sparse branch that selectively focuses on the most relevant nodes. We comprehensively evaluate our model on 16 different VRPs and compare its performance against existing cross-problem VRP solvers. CaDA achieves state-of-the-art results across all the VRPs. Our ablation study further confirms that each component of CaDA contributes positively to its cross-problem learning performance.

Multimodal Instruction Tuning with Hybrid State Space Models

Handling lengthy context is crucial for enhancing the recognition and understanding capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in applications such as processing high-resolution images or high frame rate videos. The rise in image resolution and frame rate substantially increases computational demands due to the increased number of input tokens. This challenge is further exacerbated by the quadratic complexity with respect to sequence length of the self-attention mechanism. Most prior works either pre-train models with long contexts, overlooking the efficiency problem, or attempt to reduce the context length via downsampling (e.g., identify the key image patches or frames) to decrease the context length, which may result in information loss. To circumvent this issue while keeping the remarkable effectiveness of MLLMs, we propose a novel approach using a hybrid transformer-MAMBA model to efficiently handle long contexts in multimodal applications. Our multimodal model can effectively process long context input exceeding 100k tokens, outperforming existing models across various benchmarks. Remarkably, our model enhances inference efficiency for high-resolution images and high-frame-rate videos by about 4 times compared to current models, with efficiency gains increasing as image resolution or video frames rise. Furthermore, our model is the first to be trained on low-resolution images or low-frame-rate videos while being capable of inference on high-resolution images and high-frame-rate videos, offering flexibility for inference in diverse scenarios.

RecFlow: An Industrial Full Flow Recommendation Dataset

Industrial recommendation systems (RS) rely on the multi-stage pipeline to balance effectiveness and efficiency when delivering items from a vast corpus to users. Existing RS benchmark datasets primarily focus on the exposure space, where novel RS algorithms are trained and evaluated. However, when these algorithms transition to real world industrial RS, they face a critical challenge of handling unexposed items which are a significantly larger space than the exposed one. This discrepancy profoundly impacts their practical performance. Additionally, these algorithms often overlook the intricate interplay between multiple RS stages, resulting in suboptimal overall system performance. To address this issue, we introduce RecFlow, an industrial full flow recommendation dataset designed to bridge the gap between offline RS benchmarks and the real online environment. Unlike existing datasets, RecFlow includes samples not only from the exposure space but also unexposed items filtered at each stage of the RS funnel. Our dataset comprises 38M interactions from 42K users across nearly 9M items with additional 1.9B stage samples collected from 9.3M online requests over 37 days and spanning 6 stages. Leveraging the RecFlow dataset, we conduct courageous exploration experiments, showcasing its potential in designing new algorithms to enhance effectiveness by incorporating stage-specific samples. Some of these algorithms have already been deployed online, consistently yielding significant gains. We propose RecFlow as the first comprehensive benchmark dataset for the RS community, supporting research on designing algorithms at any stage, study of selection bias, debiased algorithms, multi-stage consistency and optimality, multi-task recommendation, and user behavior modeling. The RecFlow dataset, along with the corresponding source code, is available at https://github.com/RecFlow-ICLR/RecFlow.

Longitudinal Causal Image Synthesis

Clinical decision-making relies heavily on causal reasoning and longitudinal analysis. For example, for a patient with Alzheimer's disease (AD), how will the brain grey matter atrophy in a year if intervened on the A-beta level in cerebrospinal fluid? The answer is fundamental to diagnosis and follow-up treatment. However, this kind of inquiry involves counterfactual medical images which can not be acquired by instrumental or correlation-based image synthesis models. Yet, such queries require counterfactual medical images, not obtainable through standard image synthesis models. Hence, a causal longitudinal image synthesis (CLIS) method, enabling the synthesis of such images, is highly valuable. However, building a CLIS model confronts three primary yet unmet challenges: mismatched dimensionality between high-dimensional images and low-dimensional tabular variables, inconsistent collection intervals of follow-up data, and inadequate causal modeling capability of existing causal graph methods for image data. In this paper, we established a tabular-visual causal graph (TVCG) for CLIS overcoming these challenges through a novel integration of generative imaging, continuous-time modeling, and structural causal models combined with a neural network. We train our CLIS based on the ADNI dataset and evaluate it on two other AD datasets, which illustrate the outstanding yet controllable quality of the synthesized images and the contributions of synthesized MRI to the characterization of AD progression, substantiating the reliability and utility in clinics.

Coarse-to-fine Dynamic Uplift Modeling for Real-time Video Recommendation

With the rise of short video platforms, video recommendation technology faces more complex challenges. Currently, there are multiple non-personalized modules in the video recommendation pipeline that urgently need personalized modeling techniques for improvement. Inspired by the success of uplift modeling in online marketing, we attempt to implement uplift modeling in the video recommendation scenario. However, we face two main challenges: 1) Design and utilization of treatments, and 2) Capture of user real-time interest. To address them, we design adjusting the distribution of videos with varying durations as the treatment and propose Coarse-to-fine Dynamic Uplift Modeling (CDUM) for real-time video recommendation. CDUM consists of two modules, CPM and FIC. The former module fully utilizes the offline features of users to model their long-term preferences, while the latter module leverages online real-time contextual features and request-level candidates to model users' real-time interests. These two modules work together to dynamically identify and targeting specific user groups and applying treatments effectively. Further, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the offline public and industrial datasets and online A/B test, demonstrating the superiority and effectiveness of our proposed CDUM. Our proposed CDUM is eventually fully deployed on the Kuaishou platform, serving hundreds of millions of users every day. The source code will be provided after the paper is accepted.

Variable Aperture Bokeh Rendering via Customized Focal Plane Guidance

Bokeh rendering is one of the most popular techniques in photography. It can make photographs visually appealing, forcing users to focus their attentions on particular area of image. However, achieving satisfactory bokeh effect usually presents significant challenge, since mobile cameras with restricted optical systems are constrained, while expensive high-end DSLR lens with large aperture should be needed. Therefore, many deep learning-based computational photography methods have been developed to mimic the bokeh effect in recent years. Nevertheless, most of these methods were limited to rendering bokeh effect in certain single aperture. There lacks user-friendly bokeh rendering method that can provide precise focal plane control and customised bokeh generation. There as well lacks authentic realistic bokeh dataset that can potentially promote bokeh learning on variable apertures. To address these two issues, in this paper, we have proposed an effective controllable bokeh rendering method, and contributed a Variable Aperture Bokeh Dataset (VABD). In the proposed method, user can customize focal plane to accurately locate concerned subjects and select target aperture information for bokeh rendering. Experimental results on public EBB! benchmark dataset and our constructed dataset VABD have demonstrated that the customized focal plane together aperture prompt can bootstrap model to simulate realistic bokeh effect. The proposed method has achieved competitive state-of-the-art performance with only 4.4M parameters, which is much lighter than mainstream computational bokeh models. The contributed dataset and source codes will be released on github https://github.com/MoTong-AI-studio/VABM.

ReDeEP: Detecting Hallucination in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Mechanistic Interpretability

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models are designed to incorporate external knowledge, reducing hallucinations caused by insufficient parametric (internal) knowledge. However, even with accurate and relevant retrieved content, RAG models can still produce hallucinations by generating outputs that conflict with the retrieved information. Detecting such hallucinations requires disentangling how Large Language Models (LLMs) utilize external and parametric knowledge. Current detection methods often focus on one of these mechanisms or without decoupling their intertwined effects, making accurate detection difficult. In this paper, we investigate the internal mechanisms behind hallucinations in RAG scenarios. We discover hallucinations occur when the Knowledge FFNs in LLMs overemphasize parametric knowledge in the residual stream, while Copying Heads fail to effectively retain or integrate external knowledge from retrieved content. Based on these findings, we propose ReDeEP, a novel method that detects hallucinations by decoupling LLM's utilization of external context and parametric knowledge. Our experiments show that ReDeEP significantly improves RAG hallucination detection accuracy. Additionally, we introduce AARF, which mitigates hallucinations by modulating the contributions of Knowledge FFNs and Copying Heads.