Machine Learning-Based Genomic Linguistic Analysis (Gene Sequence Feature Learning): A Case Study on Predicting Heavy Metal Response Genes in Rice

This study explores the application of machine learning-based genetic linguistics for identifying heavy metal response genes in rice (Oryza sativa). By integrating convolutional neural networks and random forest algorithms, we developed a hybrid model capable of extracting and learning meaningful features from gene sequences, such as k-mer frequencies and physicochemical properties. The model was trained and tested on datasets of genes, achieving high predictive performance (precision: 0.89, F1-score: 0.82). RNA-seq and qRT-PCR experiments conducted on rice leaves which exposed to Hg0, revealed differential expression of genes associated with heavy metal responses, which validated the model's predictions. Co-expression network analysis identified 103 related genes, and a literature review indicated that these genes are highly likely to be involved in heavy metal-related biological processes. By integrating and comparing the analysis results with those of differentially expressed genes (DEGs), the validity of the new machine learning method was further demonstrated. This study highlights the efficacy of combining machine learning with genetic linguistics for large-scale gene prediction. It demonstrates a cost-effective and efficient approach for uncovering molecular mechanisms underlying heavy metal responses, with potential applications in developing stress-tolerant crop varieties.

Exploring the Performance Improvement of Tensor Processing Engines through Transformation in the Bit-weight Dimension of MACs

General matrix-matrix multiplication (GEMM) is a cornerstone of AI computations, making tensor processing engines (TPEs) increasingly critical in GPUs and domain-specific architectures. Existing architectures primarily optimize dataflow or operand reuse strategies. However, considering the interaction between matrix multiplication and multiply-accumulators (MACs) offers greater optimization potential. This work introduces a novel hardware perspective on matrix multiplication, focusing on the bit-weight dimension of MACs. We propose a finer-grained TPE notation using matrix triple loops as an example, introducing new methods for designing and optimizing PE microarchitectures. Based on this notation and its transformations, we propose four optimization techniques that improve timing, area, and power consumption. Implementing our design in RTL using the SMIC-28nm process, we evaluate its effectiveness across four classic TPE architectures: systolic array, 3D-Cube, multiplier-adder tree, and 2D-Matrix. Our techniques achieve area efficiency improvements of 1.27x, 1.28x, 1.56x, and 1.44x, and energy efficiency gains of 1.04x, 1.56x, 1.49x, and 1.20x, respectively. Applied to a bit-slice architecture, our approach achieves a 12.10x improvement in energy efficiency and 2.85x in area efficiency compared to Laconic. Our Verilog HDL code, along with timing, area, and power reports, is available at https://github.com/wqzustc/High-Performance-Tensor-Processing-Engines

CCS: Controllable and Constrained Sampling with Diffusion Models via Initial Noise Perturbation

Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for generative tasks, producing high-quality outputs across diverse domains. However, how the generated data responds to the initial noise perturbation in diffusion models remains under-explored, which hinders understanding the controllability of the sampling process. In this work, we first observe an interesting phenomenon: the relationship between the change of generation outputs and the scale of initial noise perturbation is highly linear through the diffusion ODE sampling. Then we provide both theoretical and empirical study to justify this linearity property of this input-output (noise-generation data) relationship. Inspired by these new insights, we propose a novel Controllable and Constrained Sampling method (CCS) together with a new controller algorithm for diffusion models to sample with desired statistical properties while preserving good sample quality. We perform extensive experiments to compare our proposed sampling approach with other methods on both sampling controllability and sampled data quality. Results show that our CCS method achieves more precisely controlled sampling while maintaining superior sample quality and diversity.

XMusic: Towards a Generalized and Controllable Symbolic Music Generation Framework

In recent years, remarkable advancements in artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) have been achieved in the fields of image synthesis and text generation, generating content comparable to that produced by humans. However, the quality of AI-generated music has not yet reached this standard, primarily due to the challenge of effectively controlling musical emotions and ensuring high-quality outputs. This paper presents a generalized symbolic music generation framework, XMusic, which supports flexible prompts (i.e., images, videos, texts, tags, and humming) to generate emotionally controllable and high-quality symbolic music. XMusic consists of two core components, XProjector and XComposer. XProjector parses the prompts of various modalities into symbolic music elements (i.e., emotions, genres, rhythms and notes) within the projection space to generate matching music. XComposer contains a Generator and a Selector. The Generator generates emotionally controllable and melodious music based on our innovative symbolic music representation, whereas the Selector identifies high-quality symbolic music by constructing a multi-task learning scheme involving quality assessment, emotion recognition, and genre recognition tasks. In addition, we build XMIDI, a large-scale symbolic music dataset that contains 108,023 MIDI files annotated with precise emotion and genre labels. Objective and subjective evaluations show that XMusic significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods with impressive music quality. Our XMusic has been awarded as one of the nine Highlights of Collectibles at WAIC 2023. The project homepage of XMusic is https://xmusic-project.github.io.

Tackling Data Heterogeneity in Federated Time Series Forecasting

Time series forecasting plays a critical role in various real-world applications, including energy consumption prediction, disease transmission monitoring, and weather forecasting. Although substantial progress has been made in time series forecasting, most existing methods rely on a centralized training paradigm, where large amounts of data are collected from distributed devices (e.g., sensors, wearables) to a central cloud server. However, this paradigm has overloaded communication networks and raised privacy concerns. Federated learning, a popular privacy-preserving technique, enables collaborative model training across distributed data sources. However, directly applying federated learning to time series forecasting often yields suboptimal results, as time series data generated by different devices are inherently heterogeneous. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, Fed-TREND, to address data heterogeneity by generating informative synthetic data as auxiliary knowledge carriers. Specifically, Fed-TREND generates two types of synthetic data. The first type of synthetic data captures the representative distribution information from clients' uploaded model updates and enhances clients' local training consensus. The second kind of synthetic data extracts long-term influence insights from global model update trajectories and is used to refine the global model after aggregation. Fed-TREND is compatible with most time series forecasting models and can be seamlessly integrated into existing federated learning frameworks to improve prediction performance. Extensive experiments on eight datasets, using several federated learning baselines and four popular time series forecasting models, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of Fed-TREND.

Data Watermarking for Sequential Recommender Systems

In the era of large foundation models, data has become a crucial component for building high-performance AI systems. As the demand for high-quality and large-scale data continues to rise, data copyright protection is attracting increasing attention. In this work, we explore the problem of data watermarking for sequential recommender systems, where a watermark is embedded into the target dataset and can be detected in models trained on that dataset. We address two specific challenges: dataset watermarking, which protects the ownership of the entire dataset, and user watermarking, which safeguards the data of individual users. We systematically define these problems and present a method named DWRS to address them. Our approach involves randomly selecting unpopular items to create a watermark sequence, which is then inserted into normal users' interaction sequences. Extensive experiments on five representative sequential recommendation models and three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of DWRS in protecting data copyright while preserving model utility.

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.

FELLAS: Enhancing Federated Sequential Recommendation with LLM as External Services

Federated sequential recommendation (FedSeqRec) has gained growing attention due to its ability to protect user privacy. Unfortunately, the performance of FedSeqRec is still unsatisfactory because the models used in FedSeqRec have to be lightweight to accommodate communication bandwidth and clients' on-device computational resource constraints. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited strong transferable and generalized language understanding abilities and therefore, in the NLP area, many downstream tasks now utilize LLMs as a service to achieve superior performance without constructing complex models. Inspired by this successful practice, we propose a generic FedSeqRec framework, FELLAS, which aims to enhance FedSeqRec by utilizing LLMs as an external service. Specifically, FELLAS employs an LLM server to provide both item-level and sequence-level representation assistance. The item-level representation service is queried by the central server to enrich the original ID-based item embedding with textual information, while the sequence-level representation service is accessed by each client. However, invoking the sequence-level representation service requires clients to send sequences to the external LLM server. To safeguard privacy, we implement dx-privacy satisfied sequence perturbation, which protects clients' sensitive data with guarantees. Additionally, a contrastive learning-based method is designed to transfer knowledge from the noisy sequence representation to clients' sequential recommendation models. Furthermore, to empirically validate the privacy protection capability of FELLAS, we propose two interacted item inference attacks. Extensive experiments conducted on three datasets with two widely used sequential recommendation models demonstrate the effectiveness and privacy-preserving capability of FELLAS.

End-to-end Driving in High-Interaction Traffic Scenarios with Reinforcement Learning

Dynamic and interactive traffic scenarios pose significant challenges for autonomous driving systems. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach by enabling the exploration of driving policies beyond the constraints of pre-collected datasets and predefined conditions, particularly in complex environments. However, a critical challenge lies in effectively extracting spatial and temporal features from sequences of high-dimensional, multi-modal observations while minimizing the accumulation of errors over time. Additionally, efficiently guiding large-scale RL models to converge on optimal driving policies without frequent failures during the training process remains tricky. We propose an end-to-end model-based RL algorithm named Ramble to address these issues. Ramble processes multi-view RGB images and LiDAR point clouds into low-dimensional latent features to capture the context of traffic scenarios at each time step. A transformer-based architecture is then employed to model temporal dependencies and predict future states. By learning a dynamics model of the environment, Ramble can foresee upcoming traffic events and make more informed, strategic decisions. Our implementation demonstrates that prior experience in feature extraction and decision-making plays a pivotal role in accelerating the convergence of RL models toward optimal driving policies. Ramble achieves state-of-the-art performance regarding route completion rate and driving score on the CARLA Leaderboard 2.0, showcasing its effectiveness in managing complex and dynamic traffic situations.

PDC-FRS: Privacy-preserving Data Contribution for Federated Recommender System

Federated recommender systems (FedRecs) have emerged as a popular research direction for protecting users' privacy in on-device recommendations. In FedRecs, users keep their data locally and only contribute their local collaborative information by uploading model parameters to a central server. While this rigid framework protects users' raw data during training, it severely compromises the recommendation model's performance due to the following reasons: (1) Due to the power law distribution nature of user behavior data, individual users have few data points to train a recommendation model, resulting in uploaded model updates that may be far from optimal; (2) As each user's uploaded parameters are learned from local data, which lacks global collaborative information, relying solely on parameter aggregation methods such as FedAvg to fuse global collaborative information may be suboptimal. To bridge this performance gap, we propose a novel federated recommendation framework, PDC-FRS. Specifically, we design a privacy-preserving data contribution mechanism that allows users to share their data with a differential privacy guarantee. Based on the shared but perturbed data, an auxiliary model is trained in parallel with the original federated recommendation process. This auxiliary model enhances FedRec by augmenting each user's local dataset and integrating global collaborative information. To demonstrate the effectiveness of PDC-FRS, we conduct extensive experiments on two widely used recommendation datasets. The empirical results showcase the superiority of PDC-FRS compared to baseline methods.