Topology-Aware Popularity Debiasing via Simplicial Complexes

Recommender systems (RS) play a critical role in delivering personalized content across various online platforms, leveraging collaborative filtering (CF) as a key technique to generate recommendations based on users' historical interaction data. Recent advancements in CF have been driven by the adoption of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which model user-item interactions as bipartite graphs, enabling the capture of high-order collaborative signals. Despite their success, GNN-based methods face significant challenges due to the inherent popularity bias in the user-item interaction graph's topology, leading to skewed recommendations that favor popular items over less-known ones. To address this challenge, we propose a novel topology-aware popularity debiasing framework, Test-time Simplicial Propagation (TSP), which incorporates simplicial complexes (SCs) to enhance the expressiveness of GNNs. Unlike traditional methods that focus on pairwise relationships, our approach captures multi-order relationships through SCs, providing a more comprehensive representation of user-item interactions. By enriching the neighborhoods of tail items and leveraging SCs for feature smoothing, TSP enables the propagation of multi-order collaborative signals and effectively mitigates biased propagation. Our TSP module is designed as a plug-and-play solution, allowing for seamless integration into pre-trained GNN-based models without the need for fine-tuning additional parameters. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method, particularly in long-tail recommendation tasks. Visualization results further confirm that TSP produces more uniform distributions of item representations, leading to fairer and more accurate recommendations.

Differentiable Gaussian Representation for Incomplete CT Reconstruction

Incomplete Computed Tomography (CT) benefits patients by reducing radiation exposure. However, reconstructing high-fidelity images from limited views or angles remains challenging due to the ill-posed nature of the problem. Deep Learning Reconstruction (DLR) methods have shown promise in enhancing image quality, but the paradox between training data diversity and high generalization ability remains unsolved. In this paper, we propose a novel Gaussian Representation for Incomplete CT Reconstruction (GRCT) without the usage of any neural networks or full-dose CT data. Specifically, we model the 3D volume as a set of learnable Gaussians, which are optimized directly from the incomplete sinogram. Our method can be applied to multiple views and angles without changing the architecture. Additionally, we propose a differentiable Fast CT Reconstruction method for efficient clinical usage. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and settings demonstrate significant improvements in reconstruction quality metrics and high efficiency. We plan to release our code as open-source.

NT-LLM: A Novel Node Tokenizer for Integrating Graph Structure into Large Language Models

Graphs are a fundamental data structure for representing relationships in real-world scenarios. With the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, there has been growing interest in integrating LLMs for graph learning. However, applying LLMs to graph-related tasks poses significant challenges, as these models are not inherently designed to capture the complex structural information present in graphs. Existing approaches address this challenge through two strategies: the chain of tasks approach, which uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to encode the graph structure so that LLMs are relieved from understanding spatial positions; and Graph-to-Text Conversion, which translates graph structures into semantic text representations that LLMs can process. Despite their progress, these methods often struggle to fully preserve the topological information of graphs or require extensive computational resources, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we introduce Node Tokenizer for Large Language Models (NT-LLM), a novel framework that efficiently encodes graph structures by selecting key nodes as anchors and representing each node based on its relative distance to these anchors. This position-anchored encoding effectively captures the graph topology, enabling enhanced reasoning capabilities in LLMs over graph data. Additionally, we implement a task-specific tuning procedure to further improve structural understanding within LLMs. Through extensive empirical evaluations, NT-LLM demonstrates significant performance improvements across a variety of graph-related tasks.

Towards Personalized Federated Multi-scenario Multi-task Recommendation

In modern recommender system applications, such as e-commerce, predicting multiple targets like click-through rate (CTR) and post-view click-through \& conversion rate (CTCVR) is common. Multi-task recommender systems are gaining traction in research and practical use. Existing multi-task recommender systems tackle diverse business scenarios, merging and modeling these scenarios unlocks shared knowledge to boost overall performance. As new and more complex real-world recommendation scenarios have emerged, data privacy issues make it difficult to train a single global multi-task recommendation model that processes multiple separate scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for personalized federated multi-scenario multi-task recommendation, called PF-MSMTrec. We assign each scenario to a dedicated client, with each client utilizing the Mixture-of-Experts (MMoE) structure. Our proposed method aims to tackle the unique challenge posed by multiple optimization conflicts in this setting. We introduce a bottom-up joint learning mechanism. Firstly, we design a parameter template to decouple the parameters of the expert network. Thus, scenario parameters are shared knowledge for federated parameter aggregation, while task-specific parameters are personalized local parameters. Secondly, we conduct personalized federated learning for the parameters of each expert network through a federated communication round, utilizing three modules: federated batch normalization, conflict coordination, and personalized aggregation. Finally, we perform another round of personalized federated parameter aggregation on the task tower network to obtain the prediction results for multiple tasks. We conduct extensive experiments on two public datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods.

Learning Multiple Representations with Inconsistency-Guided Detail Regularization for Mask-Guided Matting

Mask-guided matting networks have achieved significant improvements and have shown great potential in practical applications in recent years. However, simply learning matting representation from synthetic and lack-of-real-world-diversity matting data, these approaches tend to overfit low-level details in wrong regions, lack generalization to objects with complex structures and real-world scenes such as shadows, as well as suffer from interference of background lines or textures. To address these challenges, in this paper, we propose a novel auxiliary learning framework for mask-guided matting models, incorporating three auxiliary tasks: semantic segmentation, edge detection, and background line detection besides matting, to learn different and effective representations from different types of data and annotations. Our framework and model introduce the following key aspects: (1) to learn real-world adaptive semantic representation for objects with diverse and complex structures under real-world scenes, we introduce extra semantic segmentation and edge detection tasks on more diverse real-world data with segmentation annotations; (2) to avoid overfitting on low-level details, we propose a module to utilize the inconsistency between learned segmentation and matting representations to regularize detail refinement; (3) we propose a novel background line detection task into our auxiliary learning framework, to suppress interference of background lines or textures. In addition, we propose a high-quality matting benchmark, Plant-Mat, to evaluate matting methods on complex structures. Extensively quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art mask-guided methods.

Data-driven Energy Consumption Modelling for Electric Micromobility using an Open Dataset

The escalating challenges of traffic congestion and environmental degradation underscore the critical importance of embracing E-Mobility solutions in urban spaces. In particular, micro E-Mobility tools such as E-scooters and E-bikes, play a pivotal role in this transition, offering sustainable alternatives for urban commuters. However, the energy consumption patterns for these tools are a critical aspect that impacts their effectiveness in real-world scenarios and is essential for trip planning and boosting user confidence in using these. To this effect, recent studies have utilised physical models customised for specific mobility tools and conditions, but these models struggle with generalization and effectiveness in real-world scenarios due to a notable absence of open datasets for thorough model evaluation and verification. To fill this gap, our work presents an open dataset, collected in Dublin, Ireland, specifically designed for energy modelling research related to E-Scooters and E-Bikes. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive analysis of energy consumption modelling based on the dataset using a set of representative machine learning algorithms and compare their performance against the contemporary mathematical models as a baseline. Our results demonstrate a notable advantage for data-driven models in comparison to the corresponding mathematical models for estimating energy consumption. Specifically, data-driven models outperform physical models in accuracy by up to 83.83% for E-Bikes and 82.16% for E-Scooters based on an in-depth analysis of the dataset under certain assumptions.

Optimal Design and Implementation of an Open-source Emulation Platform for User-Centric Shared E-mobility Services

In response to the escalating global challenge of increasing emissions and pollution in transportation, shared electric mobility services, encompassing e-cars, e-bikes, and e-scooters, have emerged as a popular strategy. However, existingshared electric mobility services exhibit critical design deficiencies, including insufficient service integration, imprecise energy consumption forecasting, limited scalability and geographical coverage, and a notable absence of a user-centric perspective, particularly in the context of multi-modal transportation. More importantly, there is no consolidated open-source framework which could benefit the e-mobility research community. This paper aims to bridge this gap by providing a pioneering open-source framework for shared e-mobility. The proposed framework, with an agent-in-the-loop approach and modular architecture, is tailored to diverse user preferences and offers enhanced customization. We demonstrate the viability of this framework by solving an integrated multi-modal route-optimization problem using the modified Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm. The primary contribution of this work is to provide a collaborative and transparent framework to tackle the dynamic challenges in the field of e-mobility research using a consolidated approach.

YOLO-MED : Multi-Task Interaction Network for Biomedical Images

Object detection and semantic segmentation are pivotal components in biomedical image analysis. Current single-task networks exhibit promising outcomes in both detection and segmentation tasks. Multi-task networks have gained prominence due to their capability to simultaneously tackle segmentation and detection tasks, while also accelerating the segmentation inference. Nevertheless, recent multi-task networks confront distinct limitations such as the difficulty in striking a balance between accuracy and inference speed. Additionally, they often overlook the integration of cross-scale features, which is especially important for biomedical image analysis. In this study, we propose an efficient end-to-end multi-task network capable of concurrently performing object detection and semantic segmentation called YOLO-Med. Our model employs a backbone and a neck for multi-scale feature extraction, complemented by the inclusion of two task-specific decoders. A cross-scale task-interaction module is employed in order to facilitate information fusion between various tasks. Our model exhibits promising results in balancing accuracy and speed when evaluated on the Kvasir-seg dataset and a private biomedical image dataset.

Task Indicating Transformer for Task-conditional Dense Predictions

The task-conditional model is a distinctive stream for efficient multi-task learning. Existing works encounter a critical limitation in learning task-agnostic and task-specific representations, primarily due to shortcomings in global context modeling arising from CNN-based architectures, as well as a deficiency in multi-scale feature interaction within the decoder. In this paper, we introduce a novel task-conditional framework called Task Indicating Transformer (TIT) to tackle this challenge. Our approach designs a Mix Task Adapter module within the transformer block, which incorporates a Task Indicating Matrix through matrix decomposition, thereby enhancing long-range dependency modeling and parameter-efficient feature adaptation by capturing intra- and inter-task features. Moreover, we propose a Task Gate Decoder module that harnesses a Task Indicating Vector and gating mechanism to facilitate adaptive multi-scale feature refinement guided by task embeddings. Experiments on two public multi-task dense prediction benchmarks, NYUD-v2 and PASCAL-Context, demonstrate that our approach surpasses state-of-the-art task-conditional methods.

Federated Multi-Task Learning on Non-IID Data Silos: An Experimental Study

The innovative Federated Multi-Task Learning (FMTL) approach consolidates the benefits of Federated Learning (FL) and Multi-Task Learning (MTL), enabling collaborative model training on multi-task learning datasets. However, a comprehensive evaluation method, integrating the unique features of both FL and MTL, is currently absent in the field. This paper fills this void by introducing a novel framework, FMTL-Bench, for systematic evaluation of the FMTL paradigm. This benchmark covers various aspects at the data, model, and optimization algorithm levels, and comprises seven sets of comparative experiments, encapsulating a wide array of non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) data partitioning scenarios. We propose a systematic process for comparing baselines of diverse indicators and conduct a case study on communication expenditure, time, and energy consumption. Through our exhaustive experiments, we aim to provide valuable insights into the strengths and limitations of existing baseline methods, contributing to the ongoing discourse on optimal FMTL application in practical scenarios. The source code will be made available for results replication.