QARM: Quantitative Alignment Multi-Modal Recommendation at Kuaishou

In recent years, with the significant evolution of multi-modal large models, many recommender researchers realized the potential of multi-modal information for user interest modeling. In industry, a wide-used modeling architecture is a cascading paradigm: (1) first pre-training a multi-modal model to provide omnipotent representations for downstream services; (2) The downstream recommendation model takes the multi-modal representation as additional input to fit real user-item behaviours. Although such paradigm achieves remarkable improvements, however, there still exist two problems that limit model performance: (1) Representation Unmatching: The pre-trained multi-modal model is always supervised by the classic NLP/CV tasks, while the recommendation models are supervised by real user-item interaction. As a result, the two fundamentally different tasks' goals were relatively separate, and there was a lack of consistent objective on their representations; (2) Representation Unlearning: The generated multi-modal representations are always stored in cache store and serve as extra fixed input of recommendation model, thus could not be updated by recommendation model gradient, further unfriendly for downstream training. Inspired by the two difficulties challenges in downstream tasks usage, we introduce a quantitative multi-modal framework to customize the specialized and trainable multi-modal information for different downstream models.

MvKSR: Multi-view Knowledge-guided Scene Recovery for Hazy and Rainy Degradation

High-quality imaging is crucial for ensuring safety supervision and intelligent deployment in fields like transportation and industry. It enables precise and detailed monitoring of operations, facilitating timely detection of potential hazards and efficient management. However, adverse weather conditions, such as atmospheric haziness and precipitation, can have a significant impact on image quality. When the atmosphere contains dense haze or water droplets, the incident light scatters, leading to degraded captured images. This degradation is evident in the form of image blur and reduced contrast, increasing the likelihood of incorrect assessments and interpretations by intelligent imaging systems (IIS). To address the challenge of restoring degraded images in hazy and rainy conditions, this paper proposes a novel multi-view knowledge-guided scene recovery network (termed MvKSR). Specifically, guided filtering is performed on the degraded image to separate high/low-frequency components. Subsequently, an en-decoder-based multi-view feature coarse extraction module (MCE) is used to coarsely extract features from different views of the degraded image. The multi-view feature fine fusion module (MFF) will learn and infer the restoration of degraded images through mixed supervision under different views. Additionally, we suggest an atrous residual block to handle global restoration and local repair in hazy/rainy/mixed scenes. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that MvKSR outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency and stability for restoring degraded scenarios in IIS.