arXiv subjects

Cong Xu

Publications and source records attributed to Cong Xu.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2026

ASPIRE: Make Spectral Graph Collaborative Filtering Great Again via Adaptive Filter Learning

Graph filter design is central to spectral collaborative filtering, yet most existing methods rely on manually tuned hyperparameters rather than fully learnable filters. We show that this challenge stems from a bias in traditional recommendation objectives, which induces a spectral phenomenon termed low-frequency explosion, thereby fundamentally hindering the effective learning of graph filters. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel adaptive spectral graph collaborative filtering framework (ASPIRE) based on a bi-level optimization objective. Guided by our theoretical analysis, we disentangle the filter learning objective, which in turn leads to excellent recommendation performance, spectral adaptivity, and training stability in practice. Extensive experiments show our learned filters match the performance of carefully engineered task-specific designs. Furthermore, ASPIRE is equally effective in LLM-powered collaborative filtering. Our findings demonstrate that graph filter learning is viable and generalizable, paving the way for more expressive graph neural networks in collaborative filtering.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

AIM 2025 Rip Current Segmentation (RipSeg) Challenge Report

This report presents an overview of the AIM 2025 RipSeg Challenge, a competition designed to advance techniques for automatic rip current segmentation in still images. Rip currents are dangerous, fast-moving flows that pose a major risk to beach safety worldwide, making accurate visual detection an important and underexplored research task. The challenge builds on RipVIS, the largest available rip current dataset, and focuses on single-class instance segmentation, where precise delineation is critical to fully capture the extent of rip currents. The dataset spans diverse locations, rip current types, and camera orientations, providing a realistic and challenging benchmark. In total, $75$ participants registered for this first edition, resulting in $5$ valid test submissions. Teams were evaluated on a composite score combining $F_1$, $F_2$, $AP_{50}$, and $AP_{[50:95]}$, ensuring robust and application-relevant rankings. The top-performing methods leveraged deep learning architectures, domain adaptation techniques, pretrained models, and domain generalization strategies to improve performance under diverse conditions. This report outlines the dataset details, competition framework, evaluation metrics, and final results, providing insights into the current state of rip current segmentation. We conclude with a discussion of key challenges, lessons learned from the submissions, and future directions for expanding RipSeg.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Tighter entropic uncertainty relations in the presence of quantum memories for complete sets of mutually unbiased bases

Entropic uncertainty relations provide an information-theoretic framework for quantifying the fundamental indeterminacy inherent in quantum mechanics. We propose more stringent quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relations for complete sets of mutually unbiased bases in multipartite scenarios. We present lower and upper bounds of the quantum uncertainties based on the complementarity of the observables, the purity of the measured state, the (conditional) von-Neumann entropies, the Holevo quantities and mutual information. The results are illustrated by several representative cases, showing that our bounds are tighter than and outperform previously existing bounds.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Markovian Pre-Trained Transformer for Next-Item Recommendation

We introduce the Markovian Pre-trained Transformer (MPT) for next-item recommendation, a transferable model fully pre-trained on synthetic Markov chains, yet capable of achieving state-of-the-art performance by fine-tuning a lightweight adaptor. This counterintuitive success stems from the observation of the `Markovian' nature: advanced sequential recommenders coincidentally rely on the latest interaction to make predictions, while the historical interactions serve mainly as auxiliary cues for inferring the user's general, non-sequential identity. This characteristic necessitates the capabilities of a universal recommendation model to effectively summarize the user sequence, with particular emphasis on the latest interaction. MPT inherently has the potential to be universal and transferable. On the one hand, when trained to predict the next state of Markov chains, it acquires the capabilities to estimate transition probabilities from the context (one adaptive manner for summarizing sequences) and attend to the last state to ensure accurate state transitions. On the other hand, unlike the heterogeneous interaction data, an unlimited amount of controllable Markov chains is available to boost the model capacity. We conduct extensive experiments on five public datasets from three distinct platforms to validate the superiority of Markovian pre-training over traditional recommendation pre-training and recent language pre-training paradigms.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

EnhancedRL: An Enhanced-State Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Multi-Task Fusion in Recommender Systems

As a key stage of Recommender Systems (RSs), Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for merging multiple scores output by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) into a single score, finally determining the recommendation results. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been applied to MTF to maximize long-term user satisfaction within a recommendation session. However, due to limitations in modeling paradigm, all existing RL algorithms for MTF can only utilize user features and statistical features as the state to generate actions at the user level, but unable to leverage item features and other valuable features, which leads to suboptimal performance. Overcoming this problem requires a breakthrough in the existing modeling paradigm, yet, to date, no prior work has addressed it. To tackle this challenge, we propose EnhancedRL, an innovative RL algorithm. Unlike existing RL-MTF methods, EnhancedRL takes the enhanced state as input, incorporating not only user features but also item features and other valuable information. Furthermore, it introduces a tailored actor-critic framework - including redesigned actor and critics and a novel learning procedure - to optimize long-term rewards at the user-item pair level within a recommendation session. Extensive offline and online experiments are conducted in an industrial RS and the results demonstrate that EnhancedRL outperforms other methods remarkably, achieving a +3.84% increase in user valid consumption and a +0.58% increase in user duration time. To the best of our knowledge, EnhancedRL is the first work to address this challenge, and it has been fully deployed in a large-scale RS since September 14, 2023, yielding significant improvements.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Conditional Information Bottleneck for Multimodal Fusion: Overcoming Shortcut Learning in Sarcasm Detection

Multimodal sarcasm detection is a complex task that requires distinguishing subtle complementary signals across modalities while filtering out irrelevant information. Many advanced methods rely on learning shortcuts from datasets rather than extracting intended sarcasm-related features. However, our experiments show that shortcut learning impairs the model's generalization in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, we reveal the weaknesses of current modality fusion strategies for multimodal sarcasm detection through systematic experiments, highlighting the necessity of focusing on effective modality fusion for complex emotion recognition. To address these challenges, we construct MUStARD++$^{R}$ by removing shortcut signals from MUStARD++. Then, a Multimodal Conditional Information Bottleneck (MCIB) model is introduced to enable efficient multimodal fusion for sarcasm detection. Experimental results show that the MCIB achieves the best performance without relying on shortcut learning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Quantifying nonclassical correlations relative to local channels

Nonclassical correlations are significant physical resources with extensive applications in quantum information processing. We introduce the modified Wigner-Yanase-Dyson skew information of a quantum state relative to a quantum channel, and a quantitative measure of quantum correlations. Their basic properties are explored in detail. Through a specific example, we also compare our correlations measure with the existing one. Moreover, the correlations relative to various channels including the von Neumann measurements, the unitary channels and the twirling channels are analyzed.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

Tightening the entropic uncertainty relations with quantum memory in a multipartite scenario

The quantum uncertainty principle stands as a cornerstone and a distinctive feature of quantum mechanics, setting it apart from classical mechanics. We introduce a tripartite quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relation, and extend the relation to encompass multiple measurements conducted within multipartite systems. The related lower bounds are shown to be tighter than those formulated by Zhang et al. [Phys. Rev. A 108, 012211 (2023)]. Additionally, we present generalized quantum-memory-assisted entropic uncertainty relations (QMA-EURs) tailored for arbitrary positive-operator-valued measures (POVMs). Finally, we demonstrate the applications of our results to both the relative entropy of unilateral coherence and the quantum key distribution protocols.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2025

UnifiedRL: A Reinforcement Learning Algorithm Tailored for Multi-Task Fusion in Large-Scale Recommender Systems

As the last pivotal stage of Recommender System (RS), Multi-Task Fusion (MTF) is responsible for combining multiple scores outputted by Multi-Task Learning (MTL) model into a final score to maximize user satisfaction. Recently, to optimize long-term user satisfaction, Reinforcement Learning (RL) is used for MTF in RSs. However, the existing offline RL algorithms used for MTF have the following severe problems: a) To avoid Out-of-Distribution (OOD), their constraints are overly strict, which seriously damage performance; b) They are unaware of the exploration policy used to collect training data, only suboptimal policy can be learned; c) Their exploration policies are inefficient and hurt user experience. To solve the above problems, we propose an innovative method called UnifiedRL tailored for MTF in large-scale RSs. UnifiedRL seamlessly integrates offline RL model with its custom exploration policy to relax overly strict constraints, which is different from existing RL-MTF methods and significantly improves performance. In addition, compared to existing exploration policies, UnifiedRL's custom exploration policy is highly efficient, enabling frequent online exploration and offline training iterations, which further improves performance. Extensive offline and online experiments are conducted in a large-scale RS. The results demonstrate that UnifiedRL outperforms other existing MTF methods remarkably, achieving a +4.64% increase in user valid consumption and a +1.74% increase in user duration time. To the best of our knowledge, UnifiedRL is the first RL algorithm tailored for MTF in RSs and has been successfully deployed in multiple large-scale RSs since June 2023, yielding significant benefits.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Dynamic User Interest Augmentation via Stream Clustering and Memory Networks in Large-Scale Recommender Systems

Recommender System (RS) provides personalized recommendation service based on user interest. However, lots of users' interests are sparse due to lacking consumption behaviors, making it challenging to provide accurate recommendations for them, which is widespread in large-scale RSs. In particular, efficiently solving this problem in the ranking stage of RS is an even greater challenge, which requires an end-to-end and real-time approach. To solve this problem, we propose an innovative method called Dynamic User Interest Augmentation (DUIA). DUIA enhances user interest including user profile and user history behavior sequences by generating enhancement vectors and personalized enhancement vectors through dynamic stream clustering of similar users and relevant items from multiple perspectives. To realize stream clustering, we specially design an algorithm called Gradient-based Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm (GHCA) for DUIA, which performs clustering via gradient descent and stores the cluster centers in memory networks. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate that DUIA not only significantly improves model performance for users with sparse interests but also delivers notable gains for other users. As an end-to-end method, DUIA can be easily integrated with existing models. Furthermore, DUIA is also used for long-tail items and cold-start problem, which also yields excellent improvements. Since 2022, DUIA has been successfully deployed in multiple industrial RSs in Tencent and was made public in May 2024. Moreover, the thoughts behind DUIA, dynamic stream clustering and similarity-based enhancement, have inspired relevant works and have also been applied in other stages of RS.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning: Datasets, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Outlook

This paper reviews the MARS2 2025 Challenge on Multimodal Reasoning. We aim to bring together different approaches in multimodal machine learning and LLMs via a large benchmark. We hope it better allows researchers to follow the state-of-the-art in this very dynamic area. Meanwhile, a growing number of testbeds have boosted the evolution of general-purpose large language models. Thus, this year's MARS2 focuses on real-world and specialized scenarios to broaden the multimodal reasoning applications of MLLMs. Our organizing team released two tailored datasets Lens and AdsQA as test sets, which support general reasoning in 12 daily scenarios and domain-specific reasoning in advertisement videos, respectively. We evaluated 40+ baselines that include both generalist MLLMs and task-specific models, and opened up three competition tracks, i.e., Visual Grounding in Real-world Scenarios (VG-RS), Visual Question Answering with Spatial Awareness (VQA-SA), and Visual Reasoning in Creative Advertisement Videos (VR-Ads). Finally, 76 teams from the renowned academic and industrial institutions have registered and 40+ valid submissions (out of 1200+) have been included in our ranking lists. Our datasets, code sets (40+ baselines and 15+ participants' methods), and rankings are publicly available on the MARS2 workshop website and our GitHub organization page https://github.com/mars2workshop/, where our updates and announcements of upcoming events will be continuously provided.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Pushing the Limits of Low-Bit Optimizers: A Focus on EMA Dynamics

The rapid scaling of models has led to prohibitively high training and fine-tuning costs. A major factor accounting for memory consumption is the widespread use of stateful optimizers (e.g., Adam), which maintain auxiliary information of even 2x the model size in order to achieve optimal convergence. We therefore present SOLO in this work to spawn a novel type of optimizer that requires an extremely light memory footprint. While previous efforts have achieved certain success in 8-bit or 4-bit cases, SOLO enables Adam-style optimizers to maintain quantized states with precision as low as 3 bits, or even 2 bits. This immense progress is due to the identification and resolution of two key challenges: the signal swamping problem in unsigned quantization that results in unchanged state dynamics, and the increased gradient variance in signed quantization that leads to incorrect descent directions. The theoretical analysis suggests a tailored logarithmic quantization for the former and a precision-specific momentum hyperparameter for the latter. SOLO can thus be seamlessly applied to Adam-style optimizers, leading to substantial memory savings with minimal accuracy loss.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

CAdam: Confidence-Based Optimization for Online Learning

Modern recommendation systems frequently employ online learning to dynamically update their models with freshly collected data. The most commonly used optimizer for updating neural networks in these contexts is the Adam optimizer, which integrates momentum ($m_t$) and adaptive learning rate ($v_t$). However, the volatile nature of online learning data, characterized by its frequent distribution shifts and presence of noise, poses significant challenges to Adam's standard optimization process: (1) Adam may use outdated momentum and the average of squared gradients, resulting in slower adaptation to distribution changes, and (2) Adam's performance is adversely affected by data noise. To mitigate these issues, we introduce CAdam, a confidence-based optimization strategy that assesses the consistency between the momentum and the gradient for each parameter dimension before deciding on updates. If momentum and gradient are in sync, CAdam proceeds with parameter updates according to Adam's original formulation; if not, it temporarily withholds updates and monitors potential shifts in data distribution in subsequent iterations. This method allows CAdam to distinguish between the true distributional shifts and mere noise, and to adapt more quickly to new data distributions. In various settings with distribution shift or noise, our experiments demonstrate that CAdam surpasses other well-known optimizers, including the original Adam. Furthermore, in large-scale A/B testing within a live recommendation system, CAdam significantly enhances model performance compared to Adam, leading to substantial increases in the system's gross merchandise volume (GMV).

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Collaborative Filtering Meets Spectrum Shift: Connecting User-Item Interaction with Graph-Structured Side Information

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated their superiority in collaborative filtering, where the user-item (U-I) interaction bipartite graph serves as the fundamental data format. However, when graph-structured side information (e.g., multimodal similarity graphs or social networks) is integrated into the U-I bipartite graph, existing graph collaborative filtering methods fall short of achieving satisfactory performance. We quantitatively analyze this problem from a spectral perspective. Recall that a bipartite graph possesses a full spectrum within the range of [-1, 1], with the highest frequency exactly achievable at -1 and the lowest frequency at 1; however, we observe as more side information is incorporated, the highest frequency of the augmented adjacency matrix progressively shifts rightward. This spectrum shift phenomenon has caused previous approaches built for the full spectrum [-1, 1] to assign mismatched importance to different frequencies. To this end, we propose Spectrum Shift Correction (dubbed SSC), incorporating shifting and scaling factors to enable spectral GNNs to adapt to the shifted spectrum. Unlike previous paradigms of leveraging side information, which necessitate tailored designs for diverse data types, SSC directly connects traditional graph collaborative filtering with any graph-structured side information. Experiments on social and multimodal recommendation demonstrate the effectiveness of SSC, achieving relative improvements of up to 23% without incurring any additional computational overhead. Our code is available at https://github.com/yhhe2004/SSC-KDD.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

DropletVideo: A Dataset and Approach to Explore Integral Spatio-Temporal Consistent Video Generation

Spatio-temporal consistency is a critical research topic in video generation. A qualified generated video segment must ensure plot plausibility and coherence while maintaining visual consistency of objects and scenes across varying viewpoints. Prior research, especially in open-source projects, primarily focuses on either temporal or spatial consistency, or their basic combination, such as appending a description of a camera movement after a prompt without constraining the outcomes of this movement. However, camera movement may introduce new objects to the scene or eliminate existing ones, thereby overlaying and affecting the preceding narrative. Especially in videos with numerous camera movements, the interplay between multiple plots becomes increasingly complex. This paper introduces and examines integral spatio-temporal consistency, considering the synergy between plot progression and camera techniques, and the long-term impact of prior content on subsequent generation. Our research encompasses dataset construction through to the development of the model. Initially, we constructed a DropletVideo-10M dataset, which comprises 10 million videos featuring dynamic camera motion and object actions. Each video is annotated with an average caption of 206 words, detailing various camera movements and plot developments. Following this, we developed and trained the DropletVideo model, which excels in preserving spatio-temporal coherence during video generation. The DropletVideo dataset and model are accessible at https://dropletx.github.io.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Pattern-wise Transparent Sequential Recommendation

A transparent decision-making process is essential for developing reliable and trustworthy recommender systems. For sequential recommendation, it means that the model can identify key items that account for its recommendation results. However, achieving both interpretability and recommendation performance simultaneously is challenging, especially for models that take the entire sequence of items as input without screening. In this paper, we propose an interpretable framework (named PTSR) that enables a pattern-wise transparent decision-making process without extra features. It breaks the sequence of items into multi-level patterns that serve as atomic units throughout the recommendation process. The contribution of each pattern to the outcome is quantified in the probability space. With a carefully designed score correction mechanism, the pattern contribution can be implicitly learned in the absence of ground-truth key patterns. The final recommended items are those that most key patterns strongly endorse. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate remarkable recommendation performance, while statistical analysis and case studies validate the model interpretability.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Spreading dynamics of information on online social networks

Social media is profoundly changing our society with its unprecedented spreading power. Due to the complexity of human behaviors and the diversity of massive messages, the information spreading dynamics are complicated, and the reported mechanisms are different and even controversial. Based on data from mainstream social media platforms, including WeChat, Weibo, and Twitter, cumulatively encompassing a total of 7.45 billion users, we uncover a ubiquitous mechanism that the information spreading dynamics are basically driven by the interplay of social reinforcement and social weakening effects. Accordingly, we propose a concise equation, which, surprisingly, can well describe all the empirical large-scale spreading trajectories. Our theory resolves a number of controversial claims and satisfactorily explains many phenomena previously observed. It also reveals that the highly clustered nature of social networks can lead to rapid and high-frequency information bursts with relatively small coverage per burst. This vital feature enables social media to have a high capacity and diversity for information dissemination, beneficial for its ecological development.

physics.soc-ph↗

arXiv2025

X-TIME: An in-memory engine for accelerating machine learning on tabular data with CAMs

Structured, or tabular, data is the most common format in data science. While deep learning models have proven formidable in learning from unstructured data such as images or speech, they are less accurate than simpler approaches when learning from tabular data. In contrast, modern tree-based Machine Learning (ML) models shine in extracting relevant information from structured data. An essential requirement in data science is to reduce model inference latency in cases where, for example, models are used in a closed loop with simulation to accelerate scientific discovery. However, the hardware acceleration community has mostly focused on deep neural networks and largely ignored other forms of machine learning. Previous work has described the use of an analog content addressable memory (CAM) component for efficiently mapping random forests. In this work, we develop an analog-digital architecture that implements a novel increased precision analog CAM and a programmable chip for inference of state-of-the-art tree-based ML models, such as XGBoost, CatBoost, and others. Thanks to hardware-aware training, X-TIME reaches state-of-the-art accuracy and 119x higher throughput at 9740x lower latency with >150x improved energy efficiency compared with a state-of-the-art GPU for models with up to 4096 trees and depth of 8, with a 19W peak power consumption.

cs.LG↗