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Bo Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Zheng.

At least 181 records · Page 10Linked to original sources

Online-PVLM: Advancing Personalized VLMs with Online Concept Learning

Personalized Visual Language Models (VLMs) are gaining increasing attention for their formidable ability in user-specific concepts aligned interactions (e.g., identifying a user's bike). Existing methods typically require the learning of separate embeddings for each new concept, which fails to support real-time adaptation during testing. This limitation becomes particularly pronounced in large-scale scenarios, where efficient retrieval of concept embeddings is not achievable. To alleviate this gap, we propose Online-PVLM, a framework for online concept learning by leveraging hyperbolic representations. Our approach makes a train-free paradigm for concept embeddings generation at test time, making the use of personalized VLMs both scalable and efficient. In addition, we develop OP-Eval, a comprehensive and large-scale benchmark comprising 1,292 concepts and over 30K high-quality instances with diverse question types, designed to rigorously assess online concept learning in realistic scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our proposed framework. Our source code and dataset will be made available.

cs.CL↗

QuadSentinel: Sequent Safety for Machine-Checkable Control in Multi-agent Systems

Safety risks arise as large language model-based agents solve complex tasks with tools, multi-step plans, and inter-agent messages. However, deployer-written policies in natural language are ambiguous and context dependent, so they map poorly to machine-checkable rules, and runtime enforcement is unreliable. Expressing safety policies as sequents, we propose \textsc{QuadSentinel}, a four-agent guard (state tracker, policy verifier, threat watcher, and referee) that compiles these policies into machine-checkable rules built from predicates over observable state and enforces them online. Referee logic plus an efficient top-$k$ predicate updater keeps costs low by prioritizing checks and resolving conflicts hierarchically. Measured on ST-WebAgentBench (ICML CUA~'25) and AgentHarm (ICLR~'25), \textsc{QuadSentinel} improves guardrail accuracy and rule recall while reducing false positives. Against single-agent baselines such as ShieldAgent (ICML~'25), it yields better overall safety control. Near-term deployments can adopt this pattern without modifying core agents by keeping policies separate and machine-checkable. Our code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/yyiliu/QuadSentinel.

cs.AI↗

RecGPT-V2 Technical Report

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in transforming recommender systems from implicit behavioral pattern matching to explicit intent reasoning. While RecGPT-V1 successfully pioneered this paradigm by integrating LLM-based reasoning into user interest mining and item tag prediction, it suffers from four fundamental limitations: (1) computational inefficiency and cognitive redundancy across multiple reasoning routes; (2) insufficient explanation diversity in fixed-template generation; (3) limited generalization under supervised learning paradigms; and (4) simplistic outcome-focused evaluation that fails to match human standards. To address these challenges, we present RecGPT-V2 with four key innovations. First, a Hierarchical Multi-Agent System restructures intent reasoning through coordinated collaboration, eliminating cognitive duplication while enabling diverse intent coverage. Combined with Hybrid Representation Inference that compresses user-behavior contexts, our framework reduces GPU consumption by 60% and improves exclusive recall from 9.39% to 10.99%. Second, a Meta-Prompting framework dynamically generates contextually adaptive prompts, improving explanation diversity by +7.3%. Third, constrained reinforcement learning mitigates multi-reward conflicts, achieving +24.1% improvement in tag prediction and +13.0% in explanation acceptance. Fourth, an Agent-as-a-Judge framework decomposes assessment into multi-step reasoning, improving human preference alignment. Online A/B tests on Taobao demonstrate significant improvements: +2.98% CTR, +3.71% IPV, +2.19% TV, and +11.46% NER. RecGPT-V2 establishes both the technical feasibility and commercial viability of deploying LLM-powered intent reasoning at scale, bridging the gap between cognitive exploration and industrial utility.

cs.IR↗

MUSE: A Simple Yet Effective Multimodal Search-Based Framework for Lifelong User Interest Modeling

Lifelong user interest modeling is crucial for industrial recommender systems, yet existing approaches rely predominantly on ID-based features, suffering from poor generalization on long-tail items and limited semantic expressiveness. While recent work explores multimodal representations for behavior retrieval in the General Search Unit (GSU), they often neglect multimodal integration in the fine-grained modeling stage -- the Exact Search Unit (ESU). In this work, we present a systematic analysis of how to effectively leverage multimodal signals across both stages of the two-stage lifelong modeling framework. Our key insight is that simplicity suffices in the GSU: lightweight cosine similarity with high-quality multimodal embeddings outperforms complex retrieval mechanisms. In contrast, the ESU demands richer multimodal sequence modeling and effective ID-multimodal fusion to unlock its full potential. Guided by these principles, we propose MUSE, a simple yet effective multimodal search-based framework. MUSE has been deployed in Taobao display advertising system, enabling 100K-length user behavior sequence modeling and delivering significant gains in top-line metrics with negligible online latency overhead. To foster community research, we share industrial deployment practices and open-source the first large-scale dataset featuring ultra-long behavior sequences paired with high-quality multimodal embeddings. Our code and data is available at https://taobao-mm.github.io.

cs.IR↗

Living the Novel: A System for Generating Self-Training Timeline-Aware Conversational Agents from Novels

We present the Living Novel, an end-to-end system that transforms any literary work into an immersive, multi-character conversational experience. This system is designed to solve two fundamental challenges for LLM-driven characters. Firstly, generic LLMs suffer from persona drift, often failing to stay in character. Secondly, agents often exhibit abilities that extend beyond the constraints of the story's world and logic, leading to both narrative incoherence (spoiler leakage) and robustness failures (frame-breaking). To address these challenges, we introduce a novel two-stage training pipeline. Our Deep Persona Alignment (DPA) stage uses data-free reinforcement finetuning to instill deep character fidelity. Our Coherence and Robustness Enhancing (CRE) stage then employs a story-time-aware knowledge graph and a second retrieval-grounded training pass to architecturally enforce these narrative constraints. We validate our system through a multi-phase evaluation using Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. A lab study with a detailed ablation of system components is followed by a 5-day in-the-wild diary study. Our DPA pipeline helps our specialized model outperform GPT-4o on persona-specific metrics, and our CRE stage achieves near-perfect performance in coherence and robustness measures. Our study surfaces practical design guidelines for AI-driven narrative systems: we find that character-first self-training is foundational for believability, while explicit story-time constraints are crucial for sustaining coherent, interruption-resilient mobile-web experiences.

cs.HC↗

From Code Foundation Models to Agents and Applications: A Comprehensive Survey and Practical Guide to Code Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally transformed automated software development by enabling direct translation of natural language descriptions into functional code, driving commercial adoption through tools like Github Copilot (Microsoft), Cursor (Anysphere), Trae (ByteDance), and Claude Code (Anthropic). While the field has evolved dramatically from rule-based systems to Transformer-based architectures, achieving performance improvements from single-digit to over 95\% success rates on benchmarks like HumanEval. In this work, we provide a comprehensive synthesis and practical guide (a series of analytic and probing experiments) about code LLMs, systematically examining the complete model life cycle from data curation to post-training through advanced prompting paradigms, code pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and autonomous coding agents. We analyze the code capability of the general LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, LLaMA) and code-specialized LLMs (StarCoder, Code LLaMA, DeepSeek-Coder, and QwenCoder), critically examining the techniques, design decisions, and trade-offs. Further, we articulate the research-practice gap between academic research (e.g., benchmarks and tasks) and real-world deployment (e.g., software-related code tasks), including code correctness, security, contextual awareness of large codebases, and integration with development workflows, and map promising research directions to practical needs. Last, we conduct a series of experiments to provide a comprehensive analysis of code pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, covering scaling law, framework selection, hyperparameter sensitivity, model architectures, and dataset comparisons.

cs.SE↗

Beyond Existing Retrievals: Cross-Scenario Incremental Sample Learning Framework

The parallelized multi-retrieval architecture has been widely adopted in large-scale recommender systems for its computational efficiency and comprehensive coverage of user interests. Many retrieval methods typically integrate additional cross-scenario samples to enhance the overall performance ceiling. However, those model designs neglect the fact that a part of the cross-scenario samples have already been retrieved by existing models within a system, leading to diminishing marginal utility in delivering incremental performance gains. In this paper, we propose a novel retrieval framework IncRec, specifically for cross-scenario incremental sample learning. The innovations of IncRec can be highlighted as two aspects. Firstly, we construct extreme cross-scenario incremental samples that are not retrieved by any existing model. And we design an incremental sample learning framework which focuses on capturing incremental representation to improve the overall retrieval performance. Secondly, we introduce a consistency-aware alignment module to further make the model prefer incremental samples with high exposure probability. Extensive offline and online A/B tests validate the superiority of our framework over state-of-the-art retrieval methods. In particular, we deploy IncRec in the Taobao homepage recommendation, achieving a 1% increase in online transaction count, demonstrating its practical applicability.

cs.IR↗

AI Deception: Risks, Dynamics, and Controls

As intelligence increases, so does its shadow. AI deception, in which systems induce false beliefs to secure self-beneficial outcomes, has evolved from a speculative concern to an empirically demonstrated risk across language models, AI agents, and emerging frontier systems. This project provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the AI deception field, covering its core concepts, methodologies, genesis, and potential mitigations. First, we identify a formal definition of AI deception, grounded in signaling theory from studies of animal deception. We then review existing empirical studies and associated risks, highlighting deception as a sociotechnical safety challenge. We organize the landscape of AI deception research as a deception cycle, consisting of two key components: deception emergence and deception treatment. Deception emergence reveals the mechanisms underlying AI deception: systems with sufficient capability and incentive potential inevitably engage in deceptive behaviors when triggered by external conditions. Deception treatment, in turn, focuses on detecting and addressing such behaviors. On deception emergence, we analyze incentive foundations across three hierarchical levels and identify three essential capability preconditions required for deception. We further examine contextual triggers, including supervision gaps, distributional shifts, and environmental pressures. On deception treatment, we conclude detection methods covering benchmarks and evaluation protocols in static and interactive settings. Building on the three core factors of deception emergence, we outline potential mitigation strategies and propose auditing approaches that integrate technical, community, and governance efforts to address sociotechnical challenges and future AI risks. To support ongoing work in this area, we release a living resource at www.deceptionsurvey.com.

cs.AI↗

SocialDriveGen: Generating Diverse Traffic Scenarios with Controllable Social Interactions

The generation of realistic and diverse traffic scenarios in simulation is essential for developing and evaluating autonomous driving systems. However, most simulation frameworks rely on rule-based or simplified models for scene generation, which lack the fidelity and diversity needed to represent real-world driving. While recent advances in generative modeling produce more realistic and context-aware traffic interactions, they often overlook how social preferences influence driving behavior. SocialDriveGen addresses this gap through a hierarchical framework that integrates semantic reasoning and social preference modeling with generative trajectory synthesis. By modeling egoism and altruism as complementary social dimensions, our framework enables controllable diversity in driver personalities and interaction styles. Experiments on the Argoverse 2 dataset show that SocialDriveGen generates diverse, high-fidelity traffic scenarios spanning cooperative to adversarial behaviors, significantly enhancing policy robustness and generalization to rare or high-risk situations.

cs.MA↗

Qwen3-VL Technical Report

We introduce Qwen3-VL, the most capable vision-language model in the Qwen series to date, achieving superior performance across a broad range of multimodal benchmarks. It natively supports interleaved contexts of up to 256K tokens, seamlessly integrating text, images, and video. The model family includes both dense (2B/4B/8B/32B) and mixture-of-experts (30B-A3B/235B-A22B) variants to accommodate diverse latency-quality trade-offs. Qwen3-VL delivers three core pillars: (i) markedly stronger pure-text understanding, surpassing comparable text-only backbones in several cases; (ii) robust long-context comprehension with a native 256K-token window for both text and interleaved multimodal inputs, enabling faithful retention, retrieval, and cross-referencing across long documents and videos; and (iii) advanced multimodal reasoning across single-image, multi-image, and video tasks, demonstrating leading performance on comprehensive evaluations such as MMMU and visual-math benchmarks (e.g., MathVista and MathVision). Architecturally, we introduce three key upgrades: (i) an enhanced interleaved-MRoPE for stronger spatial-temporal modeling across images and video; (ii) DeepStack integration, which effectively leverages multi-level ViT features to tighten vision-language alignment; and (iii) text-based time alignment for video, evolving from T-RoPE to explicit textual timestamp alignment for more precise temporal grounding. Under comparable token budgets and latency constraints, Qwen3-VL achieves superior performance in both dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures. We envision Qwen3-VL serving as a foundational engine for image-grounded reasoning, agentic decision-making, and multimodal code intelligence in real-world workflows.

cs.CV↗

ConceptGuard: Proactive Safety in Text-and-Image-to-Video Generation through Multimodal Risk Detection

Recent progress in video generative models has enabled the creation of high-quality videos from multimodal prompts that combine text and images. While these systems offer enhanced controllability, they also introduce new safety risks, as harmful content can emerge from individual modalities or their interaction. Existing safety methods are often text-only, require prior knowledge of the risk category, or operate as post-generation auditors, struggling to proactively mitigate such compositional, multimodal risks. To address this challenge, we present ConceptGuard, a unified safeguard framework for proactively detecting and mitigating unsafe semantics in multimodal video generation. ConceptGuard operates in two stages: First, a contrastive detection module identifies latent safety risks by projecting fused image-text inputs into a structured concept space; Second, a semantic suppression mechanism steers the generative process away from unsafe concepts by intervening in the prompt's multimodal conditioning. To support the development and rigorous evaluation of this framework, we introduce two novel benchmarks: ConceptRisk, a large-scale dataset for training on multimodal risks, and T2VSafetyBench-TI2V, the first benchmark adapted from T2VSafetyBench for the Text-and-Image-to-Video (TI2V) safety setting. Comprehensive experiments on both benchmarks show that ConceptGuard consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results in both risk detection and safe video generation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Ruize-Ma/ConceptGuard.

cs.CV↗

Enhancing Sequential Recommendation with World Knowledge from Large Language Models

Sequential Recommendation System~(SRS) has become pivotal in modern society, which predicts subsequent actions based on the user's historical behavior. However, traditional collaborative filtering-based sequential recommendation models often lead to suboptimal performance due to the limited information of their collaborative signals. With the rapid development of LLMs, an increasing number of works have incorporated LLMs' world knowledge into sequential recommendation. Although they achieve considerable gains, these approaches typically assume the correctness of LLM-generated results and remain susceptible to noise induced by LLM hallucinations. To overcome these limitations, we propose GRASP (Generation Augmented Retrieval with Holistic Attention for Sequential Prediction), a flexible framework that integrates generation augmented retrieval for descriptive synthesis and similarity retrieval, and holistic attention enhancement which employs multi-level attention to effectively employ LLM's world knowledge even with hallucinations and better capture users' dynamic interests. The retrieved similar users/items serve as auxiliary contextual information for the later holistic attention enhancement module, effectively mitigating the noisy guidance of supervision-based methods. Comprehensive evaluations on two public benchmarks and one industrial dataset reveal that GRASP consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance when integrated with diverse backbones. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/GRASP-SRS.

cs.IR↗

A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modeling

Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: \href{https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling}{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

cs.CL↗

VALUE: Value-Aware Large Language Model for Query Rewriting via Weighted Trie in Sponsored Search

Query-to-bidword(i.e., bidding keyword) rewriting is fundamental to sponsored search, transforming noisy user queries into semantically relevant and commercially valuable keywords. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) improve semantic relevance through generative retrieval frameworks, but they rarely encode the commercial value of keywords. As a result, rewrites are often semantically correct yet economically suboptimal, and a reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) stage is usually added after supervised fine-tuning(SFT) to mitigate this deficiency. However, conventional preference alignment frequently overemphasize the ordering of bidword values and is susceptible to overfitting, which degrades rewrite quality. In addition, bidword value changes rapidly, while existing generative methods do not respond to these fluctuations. To address this shortcoming, we introduce VALUE(Value-Aware Large language model for qUery rewriting via wEighted trie), a framework that integrates value awareness directly into generation and enhances value alignment during training. VALUE employs the Weighted Trie, a novel variant of the classical trie that stores real-time value signals for each token. During decoding, the framework adjusts the LLM's token probabilities with these signals, constraining the search space and steering generation toward high-value rewrites. The alignment stage uses a fine-grained preference learning strategy that emphasizes stable, high-value differences and down-weights noisy or transient fluctuations, thereby improving robustness and reducing overfitting. Offline experiments show that VALUE significantly outperforms baselines in both semantic matching and value-centric metrics. VALUE has been deployed on our advertising system since October 2024 and served the Double Eleven promotions, the biggest shopping carnival in China.

cs.IR↗

TBGRecall: A Generative Retrieval Model for E-commerce Recommendation Scenarios

Recommendation systems are essential tools in modern e-commerce, facilitating personalized user experiences by suggesting relevant products. Recent advancements in generative models have demonstrated potential in enhancing recommendation systems; however, these models often exhibit limitations in optimizing retrieval tasks, primarily due to their reliance on autoregressive generation mechanisms. Conventional approaches introduce sequential dependencies that impede efficient retrieval, as they are inherently unsuitable for generating multiple items without positional constraints within a single request session. To address these limitations, we propose TBGRecall, a framework integrating Next Session Prediction (NSP), designed to enhance generative retrieval models for e-commerce applications. Our framework reformulation involves partitioning input samples into multi-session sequences, where each sequence comprises a session token followed by a set of item tokens, and then further incorporate multiple optimizations tailored to the generative task in retrieval scenarios. In terms of training methodology, our pipeline integrates limited historical data pre-training with stochastic partial incremental training, significantly improving training efficiency and emphasizing the superiority of data recency over sheer data volume. Our extensive experiments, conducted on public benchmarks alongside a large-scale industrial dataset from TaoBao, show TBGRecall outperforms the state-of-the-art recommendation methods, and exhibits a clear scaling law trend. Ultimately, NSP represents a significant advancement in the effectiveness of generative recommendation systems for e-commerce applications.

cs.IR↗

AIF: Asynchronous Inference Framework for Cost-Effective Pre-Ranking

In industrial recommendation systems, pre-ranking models based on deep neural networks (DNNs) commonly adopt a sequential execution framework: feature fetching and model forward computation are triggered only after receiving candidates from the upstream retrieval stage. This design introduces inherent bottlenecks, including redundant computations of identical users/items and increased latency due to strictly sequential operations, which jointly constrain the model's capacity and system efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose the Asynchronous Inference Framework (AIF), a cost-effective computational architecture that decouples interaction-independent components, those operating within a single user or item, from real-time prediction. AIF reorganizes the model inference process by performing user-side computations in parallel with the retrieval stage and conducting item-side computations in a nearline manner. This means that interaction-independent components are calculated just once and completed before the real-time prediction phase of the pre-ranking stage. As a result, AIF enhances computational efficiency and reduces latency, freeing up resources to significantly improve the feature set and model architecture of interaction-independent components. Moreover, we delve into model design within the AIF framework, employing approximated methods for interaction-dependent components in online real-time predictions. By co-designing both the framework and the model, our solution achieves notable performance gains without significantly increasing computational and latency costs. This has enabled the successful deployment of AIF in the Taobao display advertising system.

cs.LG↗

MOON Embedding: Multimodal Representation Learning for E-commerce Search Advertising

We introduce MOON, our comprehensive set of sustainable iterative practices for multimodal representation learning for e-commerce applications. MOON has already been fully deployed across all stages of Taobao search advertising system, including retrieval, relevance, ranking, and so on. The performance gains are particularly significant on click-through rate (CTR) prediction task, which achieves an overall +20.00% online CTR improvement. Over the past three years, this project has delivered the largest improvement on CTR prediction task and undergone five full-scale iterations. Throughout the exploration and iteration of our MOON, we have accumulated valuable insights and practical experience that we believe will benefit the research community. MOON contains a three-stage training paradigm of "Pretraining, Post-training, and Application", allowing effective integration of multimodal representations with downstream tasks. Notably, to bridge the misalignment between the objectives of multimodal representation learning and downstream training, we define the exchange rate to quantify how effectively improvements in an intermediate metric can translate into downstream gains. Through this analysis, we identify the image-based search recall as a critical intermediate metric guiding the optimization of multimodal models. Over three years and five iterations, MOON has evolved along four critical dimensions: data processing, training strategy, model architecture, and downstream application. The lessons and insights gained through the iterative improvements will also be shared. As part of our exploration into scaling effects in the e-commerce field, we further conduct a systematic study of the scaling laws governing multimodal representation learning, examining multiple factors such as the number of training tokens, negative samples, and the length of user behavior sequences.

cs.IR↗

Unbiased Platform-Level Causal Estimation for Search Systems: A Competitive Isolation PSM-DID Framework

Evaluating platform-level interventions in search-based two-sided marketplaces is fundamentally challenged by systemic effects such as spillovers and network interference. While widely used for causal inference, the PSM (Propensity Score Matching) - DID (Difference-in-Differences) framework remains susceptible to selection bias and cross-unit interference from unaccounted spillovers. In this paper, we introduced Competitive Isolation PSM-DID, a novel causal framework that integrates propensity score matching with competitive isolation to enable platform-level effect measurement (e.g., order volume, GMV) instead of item-level metrics in search systems. Our approach provides theoretically guaranteed unbiased estimation under mutual exclusion conditions, with an open dataset released to support reproducible research on marketplace interference (github.com/xxxx). Extensive experiments demonstrate significant reductions in interference effects and estimation variance compared to baseline methods. Successful deployment in a large-scale marketplace confirms the framework's practical utility for platform-level causal inference.

cs.AI↗