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Bo Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Bo Zheng.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources
arXiv2026

Qwen-Image-Flash: Rethinking the Training Recipe for Few-Step Distillation

Few-step distillation has emerged as a critical component in the development of advanced visual generative foundation models, substantially reducing inference overhead while enabling real-time generation and cost-efficient deployment across a broad range of practical scenarios. However, prior work has predominantly focused on advancing training objectives, while comparatively overlooking the training recipe, which has become increasingly critical in the era of large-scale foundation models. In this work, we systematically revisit the training recipe under the well-established distribution matching distillation (DMD) framework for both text-to-image generation and image editing, focusing on three key dimensions: training data composition, teacher guidance within DMD, and task mixture. Our empirical analysis reveals several non-obvious and counterintuitive phenomena, ultimately motivating the development of Qwen-Image-Flash. These findings highlight that effective few-step distillation depends not only on carefully designed objectives, but also on a principled training recipe.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

PIVOT: Physics-Grounded Verification for AI-Generated Audio-Video Detection

As generative models continue to advance, AI-generated content (AIGC) is becoming increasingly realistic, weakening the artifact cues commonly exploited by existing detectors. Nevertheless, faithfully reproducing the physical behavior of real-world events remains challenging for current generators. We therefore explore detecting AIGC by assessing whether the depicted event satisfies measurable constraints derived from physical laws. We introduce PIVOT, a physics-grounded AIGC detector, instantiated here for audio-video clips, that estimates physical quantities from video and audio, selects physical laws relevant to each clip, and verifies their measurable constraints. Beyond a real/fake decision, PIVOT returns supporting evidence that records the verification outcome, relevant time window, and supporting quantities for each applicable law. Although instantiated and evaluated here on audio-video data, the framework can, in principle, extend to other AIGC modalities whenever the physical quantities required for verification can be estimated reliably. We also introduce PhysForensics-Bench, comprising paired real and generated audio-video clips from nine event-centric scene families and two recent audio-video generators. On PhysForensics-Bench, PIVOT achieves 70.30% accuracy and 64.29% F1 score on Real+Seedance, and 72.16% accuracy and 65.82% F1 on Real+VEO. In comparison, direct inspection with Gemini 3.1 Pro obtains 53.96% accuracy and 60.09% F1 on Real+Seedance, and 57.22% accuracy and 63.44% F1 on Real+Veo. These results demonstrate the practical promise of physical-consistency verification as a structured and inspectable source of evidence that complements artifact-based AIGC detection.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

LoopMemGR: From Behavior Logs to Evolving Memory for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation formulates next-item prediction as conditional autoregressive generation over discrete Semantic IDs, enabling end-to-end recommendation over large-scale item spaces. However, most existing methods follow a history-as-context paradigm that repeatedly reconstructs user preference from behavior history while discarding system-side recommendation decisions after each request. This creates an asymmetric memory: the system remembers what the user has done, but not what it has previously recommended or learned from the resulting feedback. Consequently, useful preference-validation signals, potential negative evidence, and historical exploration information cannot be directly reused across requests. To address these limitations, we propose LoopMemGR, a closed-loop recommendation experience memory framework for generative recommendation. In addition to the conventional behavior log, LoopMemGR maintains a recommendation experience log that records past recommendation--feedback trajectories. It extracts request-relevant evidence through three complementary views: the recency view captures short-term interaction dynamics, the frequency view summarizes recurring recommendation patterns, and the global view distills transferable regularities shared across users. These signals are compressed into a fixed number of experience tokens to condition the generative backbone under a bounded input budget. Extensive experiments on an industrial Taobao dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of closed-loop experience accumulation and multi-view experience extraction.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

From Leakage to Fidelity: Reliable Benchmarking for Temporal Cascade Prediction

Temporal cascade prediction is widely studied, yet its empirical foundations remain fragile. Most existing works report results under random cascade splits that mix past and future signals, rely on datasets with limited features and no downstream conversion labels, and compare increasingly complex models without systematically examining whether benchmark conclusions are protocol-dependent. This paper argues that the field should move from leakage-prone evaluation toward fidelity-aware benchmarking. We introduce a protocol suite and renewed evaluation standard for temporal cascade prediction, centered on the Full Temporal protocol, overlap-based leakage diagnostics, and analyses of performance inflation and temporal drift. To broaden the scope of benchmark tasks, we also present Taoke, a real-world e-commerce cascade dataset with rich promoter/product features and observed purchase conversions, enabling both first-stage popularity forecasting and second-stage conversion forecasting under a shared benchmark asset. Finally, we include CasTemp as a lightweight reference method and additionally probe a larger same-task internal extension to verify that this pipeline remains operational at substantially greater scale. Together, these components turn cascade prediction from a protocol-sensitive leaderboard exercise into a more reliable analysis and benchmarking problem, while still providing a practical reference pipeline for large-scale evaluation and conversion-aware modeling.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Pailitao-MMSearch: Building Native E-Commerce Multimodal Search Foundation

The evolution of e-commerce has fundamentally transformed how users search for products, shifting from simple text-based keyword queries to complex multimodal interactions that seamlessly combine product images, natural language descriptions, and mixed-intent instructions. However, existing approaches face a critical dilemma: single-modal specialist models, deployed independently for text retrieval, visual search, and voice recognition, operate in isolation and cannot handle cross-modal queries, while general-purpose vision-language models lack the domain-specific knowledge necessary for fine-grained product understanding, user behavior modeling, and commercial intent reasoning. In this work, we present Pailitao-MMSearch, one native e-commerce multimodal search foundation model designed to bridge this gap. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1)HybSID (Hybrid Semantic ID);(2)a two-stage continual pre-training strategy; and (3)a hybrid reasoning post-training pipeline. Built upon Qwen and deployed on Taobao's Pailitao multimodal search platform, Pailitao-MMSearch achieves substantial improvements in online A/B testing, including up to +13.61\% in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and +8.21\% in transaction volume compared to traditional multi-modal search pipeline, demonstrating the effectiveness of our native e-commerce multimodal search large language models.

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

EAVer: Long-Form Factuality Verification as an End-to-End Agentic Policy

Long-form factuality verification is commonly implemented as a static decompose-search-verify pipeline, with separately prompted modules processing claims and invoking external search. Treating claims independently makes LLM and search calls scale with claim count and causes repeated searches for overlapping evidence about related claims. We introduce EAVer, an End-to-end Agentic Verifier that learns to control the complete response-level verification workflow as a unified policy. EAVer groups semantically related claims, routes each group to direct verification or targeted search based on confidence, and keeps evidence returned by search in compact in-context memos for cross-claim reuse. To train this policy, we develop a privileged-teacher synthesis pipeline that converts gold claim annotations into executable multi-turn tool-interaction trajectories with live search rather than post-hoc rationales. Structural, label-alignment, tool-use, search-budget, and leakage checks yield 1,447 quality-controlled trajectories. We further construct 794 bidirectional same-trajectory preference pairs that keep claim grouping, search, and evidence fixed, enabling decision-focused Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) over factuality-decision tokens. The results with Qwen3-8B show that EAVer outperforms the strongest search-based baseline on each benchmark by 2.88 Macro-F1 points on VeriFastScore and 4.73 points on the out-of-distribution FaStFact-Bench, while using about 80% fewer searches than the most search-efficient baseline. Moreover, EAVer consistently improves performance across models ranging from 4B to 32B parameters, demonstrating its strong generalizability.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

SPARC: Sequence-aware Progressive Attribute Routing and Compression Framework for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation tokenizes items as discrete Semantic IDs (SIDs) and autoregressively generates target items from users' historical SID sequences. Although existing SIDs incorporate multimodal and structured information, they are typically statically assigned and independent of the current interaction context. In industrial scenarios, each behavior also contains heterogeneous attributes, such as category, brand, price, behavior type, and timestamp. Fully expanding these features greatly increases the input length, while directly compressing them into a single representation may prematurely discard context-relevant information. We propose \textbf{SPARC}, \uline{\textbf{S}}equence-aware \uline{\textbf{P}}rogressive \uline{\textbf{A}}ttribute \uline{\textbf{R}}outing and \uline{\textbf{C}}ompression Framework for Generative recommendation. SPARC first models the sequential dependencies of each field type to obtain context-aware field representations. It then routes the original, contextual, and identity representations of different fields into multiple slots to preserve complementary information under a fixed capacity. Finally, lightweight cross-item interaction integrates the intermediate tokens and compresses each historical item into a single token. Following the principle of contextualizing before compression, SPARC enriches user-history representations without increasing the input length of the generative backbone. Experiments on industrial Taobao and public Amazon datasets demonstrate that SPARC outperforms strong conventional and generative baselines. Further comparisons with static compression variants show that the improvement of SPARC comes from context-conditioned information retention rather than merely increasing the expressiveness of the compression module.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

On the Design of Qwen3.8-Next Architecture: Evaluation, Efficiency, and Training Stability

We describe the architecture and ablations of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a sparse mixture-of-experts model with 125B parameters, 6B activated per token, and additional 51B parameters of n-gram embedding tables held off the accelerator. On fourteen pre-training benchmarks the model leads the 397B-A17B predecessor on eight and trails it on the rest by at most 2.6 points, at 1/3 the activated parameters, 1/3 the training tokens, and roughly 1/9 the training FLOPs. Token mixing uses a layer-wise hybrid of Gated DeltaNet (GDN) and global attention, with one full-attention layer in every four; at continued-pretraining time those full-attention layers are replaced by Qwen Sparse Attention (QSA), which scores context at micro-block granularity with a compressed lightweight indexer. The residual stream is widened to four branches and read through an elementwise gate, a design we call the Gated Residual (GR). Capacity is added outside the backbone by a single n-gram embedding layer whose tables are prefetched from host memory. We evaluate every candidate change along three axes: loss together with downstream benchmarks; the cost of the change in training, prefill and decode; and its effect on the optimal hyperparameters and training stability. Loss and downstream accuracy do not always move together: enlarging the n-gram vocabulary lowers loss monotonically while downstream accuracy saturates. The architecture and the Muon optimizer together shift the optimal learning rate and batch size upwards, render batch-size warmup unnecessary, and substantially improve stability under stress tests. Loss, benchmarks, efficiency and stability form one design problem. Solved jointly, they yield a recipe that is simultaneously more efficient, more capable and more stable.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Self-OPD: On-Policy Distillation for Flow Matching Models without Teacher

On-policy distillation (OPD), which leverages a pre-trained, specialized teacher model to provide dense supervisory signals, has achieved significant success in Large Language Models (LLMs) and has recently been adapted to flow matching models. However, this paradigm suffers from two major issues: First, training a separate, task-specific teacher for every new objective incurs high computational costs. Second, the discrepancy between teacher and student distributions often leads to compounding errors along the generation trajectory. In this paper, we introduce \textbf{Self-OPD}, a teacher-free OPD framework for flow matching models that turns the student's own self-exploration into step-wise supervision. At each timestep, Self-OPD branches the deterministic next-state prediction into $K$ stochastic SDE candidates, rolls them out with the ODE sampler, and compares their rewards against a deterministic self-reference baseline to obtain normalized advantages. The velocity field is optimized with an all-branch pull-push objective, where high-advantage branches attract the student and low-advantage branches repel it under direction-aware attenuation and SDE-variance normalization. For multi-objective alignment, Self-OPD fuses normalized scores at the reward level, avoiding direct gradient conflict. Experiments on single and mixed reward benchmarks show that Self-OPD outperforms prior RL and OPD methods without task-specific teachers.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Beyond Semantic IDs: Encoding Business-Value Ranking into Document Identifiers for Generative Retrieval

Generative Retrieval (GR) formulates retrieval as a sequence-to-sequence generation task, assigning each document a document identifier (DocID) and retrieving it through autoregressive decoding, making DocID design a critical factor in retrieval quality. However, existing schemes based on discrete representation learning suffer from inherent collision issues and create a mismatch between the DocID's encoding objective and the system's business optimization target. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Cluster-Ranked Identifier (CRID)}, which decouples DocID into \textit{semantic clustering} and \textit{business-value ranking}, yielding collision-free identifiers that support incremental updates via intra-cluster reranking. We further introduce an analytical framework that decomposes retrieval gains into \textit{personalized preference} and \textit{statistical prior} generalization, revealing how semantic cluster size governs the balance between the two components. Experiments on a Taobao e-commerce corpus of over 300M items show that CRID surpasses the strongest embedding-based retrieval baseline on top-K Hitrate, and delivers +1.06\% GMV in full-traffic deployment.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

SkillChain: Closing the Loop on Skill Evolution for Image-Based E-Commerce AI Assistants

Image-based AI assistants are now deployed at production scale on e-commerce platforms, where a single uploaded image can trigger fundamentally different user intents: product search, style recommendation, visual encyclopedia, or utility tool calls, each demanding its own response format, tool invocation, and domain knowledge. Without per-intent behavioral constraints, LLM-based systems conflate these heterogeneous modes and fall short of domain quality standards, while the breadth and dynamism of the intent space render manual engineering infeasible. To address this, we present SkillChain, which closes the production feedback loop on Skill evolution, automating the lifecycle of Skills through three stages: Skill Creator for bootstrapping from task specs and trajectories, Route Optimizer for routing alignment, and Body Refiner for iterative Skill Body refinement via dual-path LLM-Judge evaluation. Deployed on a production-scale e-commerce image assistant, SkillChain substantially improves aggregate response quality, with the strongest gains on structural compliance and content quality; a one-week online A/B experiment further confirms significant gains in user engagement, content consumption, and long-term retention.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Strategy-Aware Parameter-Efficient Adaptation for LLM-based Auto-Bidding

Advertising bidding has evolved from manual strategies to auto-bidding systems better adapted for large-scale, dynamic auction environments. While recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning for auto-bidding, existing methods suffer from shallow trajectory-text interactions and require costly fine-tuning, hindering the efficient use of pretrained knowledge under diverse constraints. To address these challenges, we propose SAGE, a novel Strategy-aware Auto-bidding framework Guided by LLMs for Efficient bidding. SAGE introduces a parameter-efficient multi-modal alignment framework for constrained auto-bidding with LLMs. Specifically, SAGE comprises three key components: (i) the position augmentation module adopts temporal-semantic positional embeddings to effectively capture the intrinsic dynamics and semantic structures; (ii) the text alignment module leverages gated cross-attention to align the embedding spaces of trajectory and text modalities, enabling effective multi-modal fusion while alleviating the computational overhead caused by long trajectories; (iii) the constraint-gated LoRA module employs constraints as routing signals, activating only a small subset of experts to adapt the behavior of a frozen LLM efficiently. Extensive experiments on large-scale auto-bidding benchmark demonstrate that SAGE consistently achieves superior performance while tuning less than 10% of the trainable parameters required by full fine-tuning. Ablation studies further validate the critical contribution of each component to the framework's overall performance.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

PailitaoGR: Latent Think-with-Images for Generative Image Retrieval

Generative retrieval has demonstrated strong performance by directly generating product semantic identifiers (SIDs). Extending this paradigm to image search, however, is nontrivial because real-world query images contain diverse information, including the search target, useful auxiliary evidence, and irrelevant visual content. This requires the model to identify and focus on the search target while selectively utilizing auxiliary evidence. In this paper, we propose \textbf{PailitaoGR}, a \emph{Latent Think-with-Images} method for generative image retrieval, which internalizes target-focused perception and selective auxiliary-evidence utilization into a the generative retrieval model, enabling \textit{Zooming without Cropping} and \textit{Reading without OCR}. Specifically, we design a target-focused perception mechanism that identifies and enhances visual tokens of the search target, consisting of a target Enhancer and a learning strategy based on on-policy distillation and attention guidance loss, enabling the model to focus on search-target regions. We also design a selective auxiliary-evidence utilization mechanism that identifies and enhances visual tokens of auxiliary evidence, including an auxiliary enhancer and an in-capacity incremental contrastive distillation strategy, enabling the model to exploit auxiliary evidence. We construct training and validation sets sampled from real-world online image-search logs. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing baselines by an average of 13.8\%, validating its effectiveness.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

TransRetrieval: Scaling Up Transformer-Based Retrieval for Industrial Recommendation

Applying scaling laws to recommendation retrieval is hindered by feature heterogeneity: naively stacking Transformer layers yields diminishing returns because heterogeneous fields produce severe token-norm divergence. We present TransRetrieval, a Transformer-based retrieval framework that scales with both computational budget and cross-domain data. The key enabler is (1) weighted average aggregation, which restores the homogeneous-token assumption Transformers rely on. Building on this, we introduce (2) target token compression that cuts per-candidate FLOPs by 85% while preserving cross-attention expressiveness, and (3) position-style domain embeddings that unify multiple domains at negligible additional cost, turning cross-domain data into a scaling asset. On a 40-billion-interaction industrial dataset and the public KuaiRand benchmark, scaling compute from 0.1 to 2 MFLOPs per target yields +19.3/+22.2 pt Recall@2000, confirming robust log-linear scaling. In online A/B tests, TransRetrieval lifts platform revenue by 2.53% under the same end-to-end latency constraint as the production baseline.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

CMI-Mem: Toward Generalizable Long-Term Memory Management via CMI-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

Memory Manager models are pivotal in agent systems. Existing reinforcement-learning methods commonly use LLM-judged synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs: this provides useful downstream task grounding, but values memory through a sampled query distribution and a fixed reader. We propose CMI-Mem, a lightweight RL memory manager with a hybrid reward. Its extrinsic QA term measures end-task correctness, while its intrinsic Conditional Mutual Information (CMI) term evaluates the information contributed by new conversational inputs relative to the current memory state without conditioning on a sampled QA query. The two signals are complementary: QA anchors task utility, whereas CMI provides per-operation supervision for relevant, non-redundant memory construction. Experiments demonstrate improved transfer across memory-use scenarios, together with more efficient training and inference from the per-operation CMI signal. Our codes are available at: https://github.com/Wyb0627/CMIMem , and the CMI-Mem-4B model checkpoint is available at: https://www.modelscope.cn/models/wyb0627/CMIMem-4B

cs.AI↗
arXiv2026

Towards Faithful Simulation of Human Shopping Behavior

Simulating realistic user shopping behavior underpins offline evaluation and reinforcement learning in e-commerce scenarios. While recent LLM- and VLM-based simulators have made encouraging progress, reproducing a real browsing session remains difficult for two reasons. (i) Memory Challenge: a shopping session spans dozens of pages, yet existing agents either discard long-range observation histories, losing the evolving user state, or naively concatenate them, overwhelming the context window and even degrading simulation quality. (ii) Optimization Challenge: current user simulators are typically supervised to match each logged action via imitation or step-level rewards; the resulting sessions often display unrealistic patterns, such as over-exploration or excessive passivity, which per-step supervision can neither detect nor correct. To address the above challenges, we present RecVerse, a GUI-grounded simulation agent that perceives pages through screenshots and produces faithful multi-turn trajectories. For the memory challenge, RecVerse adopts a cognitive-inspired hierarchical memory: Working Memory for short-term focus, Episodic Memory for in-session traces, and Preference Memory for high-level intent, with memory updates treated as actions so that the agent adaptively learns when and what to memorize. For the optimization challenge, RecVerse is optimized with a trajectory-level RL objective that scores entire sessions, aligning both macro-level action-type distributions and micro-level shopping intent with real users. We further release USB (User Simulation Benchmark), an interactive e-commerce GUI trajectory dataset for multi-turn user simulation. Experiments show that RecVerse significantly outperforms existing baselines in both behavioral fidelity and intent consistency.

cs.IR↗
arXiv2026

InfinityEdit: Infinite Video Editing with a Lightweight Edit-Ignition Adapter

With large pretrained models, existing methods have effectively improved instruction-based video editing. However, most of them rely on an in-place editing assumption. They align the edited video with the given source clip frame by frame over a fixed time span. This pattern fails for open-ended streams, e.g., restyling a live game or applying a camera move to an ongoing shot. In such cases, edits must extend to future frames as they arrive, rather than be applied to a static input clip. In this paper, we study this setting and name it infinite video editing: given a preceding segment and an edit request, a model must generate the next segment that continues the stream while applying the requested edit. This process repeats as an unbounded sequence of edit instructions arrives. This task brings two challenges: the edit must be a faithful continuation rather than a frame-wise rewrite, and generation quality must remain stable as edits accumulate. To address them, we first design a data-collection pipeline for infinite video editing. Based on the collected data, we propose InfinityEdit, a lightweight edit adapter that equips a streaming video generator with unbounded editing ability. The adapter contains three attention modules. History cross-attention guides the denoising frames using the input frames. Temporal causal self-attention keeps temporal cues flowing only from earlier frames to later ones. Edit cross-attention injects the edit request into generation. During inference, the adapter is activated only in the chunk where an edit request arrives. Subsequent chunks are generated by the original model with a reset anchor frame. This scheme applies the edit while preserving the original model's infinite generation ability. Extensive experiments show that InfinityEdit faithfully continues the stream under each edit, and stays stable over unbounded edit sequences.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2026

Re$^3$Cap: Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning Enhancement via Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated significant gains in image captioning, yet it is still limited in encouraging Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to explore novel reasoning strategies. This limitation leads to a performance gap between RL and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this paper, we argue that multi-modal retrieval can serve as an effective reasoning signal for caption refinement. Based on this insight, we present the Retrieval-Guided Refinement for Image Captioning (Re$^3$Cap), a retrieval-guided reasoning strategy that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Instantiated by Caption Refinement Suggester (CRS) and Caption Quality Assessor (CQA), this strategy identifies hallucinations and omissions in image captions, leading to more accurate and detailed descriptions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in image captioning, even compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Especially, Re$^3$Cap outperforms GRPO with an average improvement of 8.64% in relation reasoning on the COCO-LN500 benchmark.

cs.CV↗