Sparse Meets Dense: Unified Generative Recommendations with Cascaded Sparse-Dense Representations

Generative models have recently gained attention in recommendation systems by directly predicting item identifiers from user interaction sequences. However, existing methods suffer from significant information loss due to the separation of stages such as quantization and sequence modeling, hindering their ability to achieve the modeling precision and accuracy of sequential dense retrieval techniques. Integrating generative and dense retrieval methods remains a critical challenge. To address this, we introduce the Cascaded Organized Bi-Represented generAtive retrieval (COBRA) framework, which innovatively integrates sparse semantic IDs and dense vectors through a cascading process. Our method alternates between generating these representations by first generating sparse IDs, which serve as conditions to aid in the generation of dense vectors. End-to-end training enables dynamic refinement of dense representations, capturing both semantic insights and collaborative signals from user-item interactions. During inference, COBRA employs a coarse-to-fine strategy, starting with sparse ID generation and refining them into dense vectors via the generative model. We further propose BeamFusion, an innovative approach combining beam search with nearest neighbor scores to enhance inference flexibility and recommendation diversity. Extensive experiments on public datasets and offline tests validate our method's robustness. Online A/B tests on a real-world advertising platform with over 200 million daily users demonstrate substantial improvements in key metrics, highlighting COBRA's practical advantages.

A Single-Frame and Multi-Frame Cascaded Image Super-Resolution Method

The objective of image super-resolution is to reconstruct a high-resolution (HR) image with the prior knowledge from one or several low-resolution (LR) images. However, in the real world, due to the limited complementary information, the performance of both single-frame and multi-frame super-resolution reconstruction degrades rapidly as the magnification increases. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step image super resolution method concatenating multi-frame super-resolution (MFSR) with single-frame super-resolution (SFSR), to progressively upsample images to the desired resolution. The proposed method consisting of an L0-norm constrained reconstruction scheme and an enhanced residual back-projection network, integrating the flexibility of the variational modelbased method and the feature learning capacity of the deep learning-based method. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, extensive experiments with both simulated and real world sequences were implemented. The experimental results show that the proposed method yields superior performance in both objective and perceptual quality measurements. The average PSNRs of the cascade model in set5 and set14 are 33.413 dB and 29.658 dB respectively, which are 0.76 dB and 0.621 dB more than the baseline method. In addition, the experiment indicates that this cascade model can be robustly applied to different SFSR and MFSR methods.

Inference-to-complete: A High-performance and Programmable Data-plane Co-processor for Neural-network-driven Traffic Analysis

Neural-networks-driven intelligent data-plane (NN-driven IDP) is becoming an emerging topic for excellent accuracy and high performance. Meanwhile we argue that NN-driven IDP should satisfy three design goals: the flexibility to support various NNs models, the low-latency-high-throughput inference performance, and the data-plane-unawareness harming no performance and functionality. Unfortunately, existing work either over-modify NNs for IDP, or insert inline pipelined accelerators into the data-plane, failing to meet the flexibility and unawareness goals. In this paper, we propose Kaleidoscope, a flexible and high-performance co-processor located at the bypass of the data-plane. To address the challenge of meeting three design goals, three key techniques are presented. The programmable run-to-completion accelerators are developed for flexible inference. To further improve performance, we design a scalable inference engine which completes low-latency and low-cost inference for the mouse flows, and perform complex NNs with high-accuracy for the elephant flows. Finally, raw-bytes-based NNs are introduced, which help to achieve unawareness. We prototype Kaleidoscope on both FPGA and ASIC library. In evaluation on six NNs models, Kaleidoscope reaches 256-352 ns inference latency and 100 Gbps throughput with negligible influence on the data-plane. The on-board tested NNs perform state-of-the-art accuracy among other NN-driven IDP, exhibiting the the significant impact of flexibility on enhancing traffic analysis accuracy.

Performance-Driven QUBO for Recommender Systems on Quantum Annealers

We propose Counterfactual Analysis Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (CAQUBO) to solve QUBO problems for feature selection in recommender systems. CAQUBO leverages counterfactual analysis to measure the impact of individual features and feature combinations on model performance and employs the measurements to construct the coefficient matrix for a quantum annealer to select the optimal feature combinations for recommender systems, thereby improving their final recommendation performance. By establishing explicit connections between features and the recommendation performance, the proposed approach demonstrates superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art quantum annealing methods. Extensive experiments indicate that integrating quantum computing with counterfactual analysis holds great promise for addressing these challenges.

MemFusionMap: Working Memory Fusion for Online Vectorized HD Map Construction

High-definition (HD) maps provide environmental information for autonomous driving systems and are essential for safe planning. While existing methods with single-frame input achieve impressive performance for online vectorized HD map construction, they still struggle with complex scenarios and occlusions. We propose MemFusionMap, a novel temporal fusion model with enhanced temporal reasoning capabilities for online HD map construction. Specifically, we contribute a working memory fusion module that improves the model's memory capacity to reason across history frames. We also design a novel temporal overlap heatmap to explicitly inform the model about the temporal overlap information and vehicle trajectory in the Bird's Eye View space. By integrating these two designs, MemFusionMap significantly outperforms existing methods while also maintaining a versatile design for scalability. We conduct extensive evaluation on open-source benchmarks and demonstrate a maximum improvement of 5.4% in mAP over state-of-the-art methods. The code for MemFusionMap will be made open-source upon publication of this paper.

Speaker Contrastive Learning for Source Speaker Tracing

As a form of biometric authentication technology, the security of speaker verification systems is of utmost importance. However, SV systems are inherently vulnerable to various types of attacks that can compromise their accuracy and reliability. One such attack is voice conversion, which modifies a persons speech to sound like another person by altering various vocal characteristics. This poses a significant threat to SV systems. To address this challenge, the Source Speaker Tracing Challenge in IEEE SLT2024 aims to identify the source speaker information in manipulated speech signals. Specifically, SSTC focuses on source speaker verification against voice conversion to determine whether two converted speech samples originate from the same source speaker. In this study, we propose a speaker contrastive learning-based approach for source speaker tracing to learn the latent source speaker information in converted speech. To learn a more source-speaker-related representation, we employ speaker contrastive loss during the training of the embedding extractor. This speaker contrastive loss helps identify the true source speaker embedding among several distractor speaker embeddings, enabling the embedding extractor to learn the potentially possessing source speaker information present in the converted speech. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed speaker contrastive learning system achieves the lowest EER of 16.788% on the challenge test set, securing first place in the challenge.

DiffFAS: Face Anti-Spoofing via Generative Diffusion Models

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) plays a vital role in preventing face recognition (FR) systems from presentation attacks. Nowadays, FAS systems face the challenge of domain shift, impacting the generalization performance of existing FAS methods. In this paper, we rethink about the inherence of domain shift and deconstruct it into two factors: image style and image quality. Quality influences the purity of the presentation of spoof information, while style affects the manner in which spoof information is presented. Based on our analysis, we propose DiffFAS framework, which quantifies quality as prior information input into the network to counter image quality shift, and performs diffusion-based high-fidelity cross-domain and cross-attack types generation to counter image style shift. DiffFAS transforms easily collectible live faces into high-fidelity attack faces with precise labels while maintaining consistency between live and spoof face identities, which can also alleviate the scarcity of labeled data with novel type attacks faced by nowadays FAS system. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on challenging cross-domain and cross-attack FAS datasets, achieving the state-of-the-art performance. Available at https://github.com/murphytju/DiffFAS.

SDformer: Efficient End-to-End Transformer for Depth Completion

Depth completion aims to predict dense depth maps with sparse depth measurements from a depth sensor. Currently, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models are the most popular methods applied to depth completion tasks. However, despite the excellent high-end performance, they suffer from a limited representation area. To overcome the drawbacks of CNNs, a more effective and powerful method has been presented: the Transformer, which is an adaptive self-attention setting sequence-to-sequence model. While the standard Transformer quadratically increases the computational cost from the key-query dot-product of input resolution which improperly employs depth completion tasks. In this work, we propose a different window-based Transformer architecture for depth completion tasks named Sparse-to-Dense Transformer (SDformer). The network consists of an input module for the depth map and RGB image features extraction and concatenation, a U-shaped encoder-decoder Transformer for extracting deep features, and a refinement module. Specifically, we first concatenate the depth map features with the RGB image features through the input model. Then, instead of calculating self-attention with the whole feature maps, we apply different window sizes to extract the long-range depth dependencies. Finally, we refine the predicted features from the input module and the U-shaped encoder-decoder Transformer module to get the enriching depth features and employ a convolution layer to obtain the dense depth map. In practice, the SDformer obtains state-of-the-art results against the CNN-based depth completion models with lower computing loads and parameters on the NYU Depth V2 and KITTI DC datasets.

AgileIR: Memory-Efficient Group Shifted Windows Attention for Agile Image Restoration

Image Transformers show a magnificent success in Image Restoration tasks. Nevertheless, most of transformer-based models are strictly bounded by exorbitant memory occupancy. Our goal is to reduce the memory consumption of Swin Transformer and at the same time speed up the model during training process. Thus, we introduce AgileIR, group shifted attention mechanism along with window attention, which sparsely simplifies the model in architecture. We propose Group Shifted Window Attention (GSWA) to decompose Shift Window Multi-head Self Attention (SW-MSA) and Window Multi-head Self Attention (W-MSA) into groups across their attention heads, contributing to shrinking memory usage in back propagation. In addition to that, we keep shifted window masking and its shifted learnable biases during training, in order to induce the model interacting across windows within the channel. We also re-allocate projection parameters to accelerate attention matrix calculation, which we found a negligible decrease in performance. As a result of experiment, compared with our baseline SwinIR and other efficient quantization models, AgileIR keeps the performance still at 32.20 dB on Set5 evaluation dataset, exceeding other methods with tailor-made efficient methods and saves over 50% memory while a large batch size is employed.

Spectrum Prediction With Deep 3D Pyramid Vision Transformer Learning

In this paper, we propose a deep learning (DL)-based task-driven spectrum prediction framework, named DeepSPred. The DeepSPred comprises a feature encoder and a task predictor, where the encoder extracts spectrum usage pattern features, and the predictor configures different networks according to the task requirements to predict future spectrum. Based on the Deep- SPred, we first propose a novel 3D spectrum prediction method combining a flow processing strategy with 3D vision Transformer (ViT, i.e., Swin) and a pyramid to serve possible applications such as spectrum monitoring task, named 3D-SwinSTB. 3D-SwinSTB unique 3D Patch Merging ViT-to-3D ViT Patch Expanding and pyramid designs help the model accurately learn the potential correlation of the evolution of the spectrogram over time. Then, we propose a novel spectrum occupancy rate (SOR) method by redesigning a predictor consisting exclusively of 3D convolutional and linear layers to serve possible applications such as dynamic spectrum access (DSA) task, named 3D-SwinLinear. Unlike the 3D-SwinSTB output spectrogram, 3D-SwinLinear projects the spectrogram directly as the SOR. Finally, we employ transfer learning (TL) to ensure the applicability of our two methods to diverse spectrum services. The results show that our 3D-SwinSTB outperforms recent benchmarks by more than 5%, while our 3D-SwinLinear achieves a 90% accuracy, with a performance improvement exceeding 10%.