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Hansi Wu

Publications and source records attributed to Hansi Wu.

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LLMDistill4Ads: Using Cross-Encoders to Distill from LLM Signals for Advertiser Keyphrase Recommendations at eBay

E-commerce sellers are advised to bid on keyphrases to boost their advertising campaigns. These keyphrases must be relevant to prevent irrelevant items from cluttering Search systems and to maintain positive seller perception. It is vital that keyphrase suggestions align with seller, Search, and buyer judgments. Given the challenges in collecting negative feedback in these systems, LLMs have been used as a scalable proxy for human judgments. We present an empirical study on a major e-commerce platform of a distillation framework involving an LLM teacher, a cross-encoder assistant and a bi-encoder Embedding Based Retrieval (EBR) student model, aimed at mitigating click-induced biases and provide more diverse keyphrase recommendations while aligning advertising, search and buyer preferences.

cs.IR

ConsID-Gen: View-Consistent and Identity-Preserving Image-to-Video Generation

Image-to-Video generation (I2V) animates a static image into a temporally coherent video sequence following textual instructions, yet preserving fine-grained object identity under changing viewpoints remains a persistent challenge. Unlike text-to-video models, existing I2V pipelines often suffer from appearance drift and geometric distortion, artifacts we attribute to the sparsity of single-view 2D observations and weak cross-modal alignment. Here we address this problem from both data and model perspectives. First, we curate ConsIDVid, a large-scale object-centric dataset built with a scalable pipeline for high-quality, temporally aligned videos, and establish ConsIDVid-Bench, where we present a novel benchmarking and evaluation framework for multi-view consistency using metrics sensitive to subtle geometric and appearance deviations. We further propose ConsID-Gen, a view-assisted I2V generation framework that augments the first frame with unposed auxiliary views and fuses semantic and structural cues via a dual-stream visual-geometric encoder as well as a text-visual connector, yielding unified conditioning for a Diffusion Transformer backbone. Experiments across ConsIDVid-Bench demonstrate that ConsID-Gen consistently outperforms in multiple metrics, with the best overall performance surpassing leading video generation models like Wan2.1 and HunyuanVideo, delivering superior identity fidelity and temporal coherence under challenging real-world scenarios. We will release our model and dataset at https://myangwu.github.io/ConsID-Gen.

cs.CV

BroadGen: A Framework for Generating Effective and Efficient Advertiser Broad Match Keyphrase Recommendations

In the domain of sponsored search advertising, the focus of Keyphrase recommendation has largely been on exact match types, which pose issues such as high management expenses, limited targeting scope, and evolving search query patterns. Alternatives like Broad match types can alleviate certain drawbacks of exact matches but present challenges like poor targeting accuracy and minimal supervisory signals owing to limited advertiser usage. This research defines the criteria for an ideal broad match, emphasizing on both efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring that a significant portion of matched queries are relevant. We propose BroadGen, an innovative framework that recommends efficient and effective broad match keyphrases by utilizing historical search query data. Additionally, we demonstrate that BroadGen, through token correspondence modeling, maintains better query stability over time. BroadGen's capabilities allow it to serve daily, millions of sellers at eBay with over 2.5 billion items.

cs.IR

Correctness Forensics for Batch Speculative Decoding: Diagnosing the Ragged Tensor Problem

Inference optimizations are routinely evaluated by throughput alone, without verifying output correctness. We conduct a forensic analysis of batch speculative decoding and find that several widely-used implementations silently produce corrupted outputs (repetitive tokens, symbols) while reporting competitive speed; failures invisible to metrics like ROUGE. We trace the root cause to the ragged tensor problem: variable token acceptance desynchronizes position IDs, attention masks, and KV-cache across a batch. We formalize the synchronization invariants (rectangular alignment and position-ID contiguity) that valid batched inference must preserve and show that maintaining them incurs superlinear alignment overhead under contiguous layouts. EQSPEC enforces the invariants without custom kernels; EXSPEC schedules same-length sequences to bypass realignment. On SpecBench across three model families, EXSPEC reaches 3 x throughput at batch size 8 with 95% exact match to standard decoding; residual divergence traces to floating-point non-determinism, not synchronization error. Code:https://github.com/eBay/spec_dec

cs.CL

Q-Router: Agentic Video Quality Assessment with Expert Model Routing and Artifact Localization

Video quality assessment (VQA) is a fundamental computer vision task that aims to predict the perceptual quality of a given video in alignment with human judgments. Existing performant VQA models trained with direct score supervision suffer from (1) poor generalization across diverse content and tasks, ranging from user-generated content (UGC), short-form videos, to AI-generated content (AIGC), (2) limited interpretability, and (3) lack of extensibility to novel use cases or content types. We propose Q-Router, an agentic framework for universal VQA with a multi-tier model routing system. Q-Router integrates a diverse set of expert models and employs vision--language models (VLMs) as real-time routers that dynamically reason and then ensemble the most appropriate experts conditioned on the input video semantics. We build a multi-tiered routing system based on the computing budget, with the heaviest tier involving a specific spatiotemporal artifacts localization for interpretability. This agentic design enables Q-Router to combine the complementary strengths of specialized experts, achieving both flexibility and robustness in delivering consistent performance across heterogeneous video sources and tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Q-Router matches or surpasses state-of-the-art VQA models on a variety of benchmarks, while substantially improving generalization and interpretability. Moreover, Q-Router excels on the quality-based question answering benchmark, Q-Bench-Video, highlighting its promise as a foundation for next-generation VQA systems. Finally, we show that Q-Router capably localizes spatiotemporal artifacts, showing potential as a reward function for post-training video generation models.

cs.CV

To Judge or not to Judge: Using LLM Judgements for Advertiser Keyphrase Relevance at eBay

E-commerce sellers are recommended keyphrases based on their inventory on which they advertise to increase buyer engagement (clicks/sales). The relevance of advertiser keyphrases plays an important role in preventing the inundation of search systems with numerous irrelevant items that compete for attention in auctions, in addition to maintaining a healthy seller perception. In this work, we describe the shortcomings of training Advertiser keyphrase relevance filter models on click/sales/search relevance signals and the importance of aligning with human judgment, as sellers have the power to adopt or reject said keyphrase recommendations. In this study, we frame Advertiser keyphrase relevance as a complex interaction between 3 dynamical systems -- seller judgment, which influences seller adoption of our product, Advertising, which provides the keyphrases to bid on, and Search, who holds the auctions for the same keyphrases. This study discusses the practicalities of using human judgment via a case study at eBay Advertising and demonstrate that using LLM-as-a-judge en-masse as a scalable proxy for seller judgment to train our relevance models achieves a better harmony across the three systems -- provided that they are bound by a meticulous evaluation framework grounded in business metrics.

cs.IR

Middleman Bias in Advertising: Aligning Relevance of Keyphrase Recommendations with Search

E-commerce sellers are recommended keyphrases based on their inventory on which they advertise to increase buyer engagement (clicks/sales). Keyphrases must be pertinent to items; otherwise, it can result in seller dissatisfaction and poor targeting -- towards that end relevance filters are employed. In this work, we describe the shortcomings of training relevance filter models on biased click/sales signals. We re-conceptualize advertiser keyphrase relevance as interaction between two dynamical systems -- Advertising which produces the keyphrases and Search which acts as a middleman to reach buyers. We discuss the bias of search relevance systems (middleman bias) and the need to align advertiser keyphrases with search relevance signals. We also compare the performance of cross encoders and bi-encoders in modeling this alignment and the scalability of such a solution for sellers at eBay.

cs.IR

From Lazy to Prolific: Tackling Missing Labels in Open Vocabulary Extreme Classification by Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning

Open-vocabulary Extreme Multi-label Classification (OXMC) extends traditional XMC by allowing prediction beyond an extremely large, predefined label set (typically $10^3$ to $10^{12}$ labels), addressing the dynamic nature of real-world labeling tasks. However, self-selection bias in data annotation leads to significant missing labels in both training and test data, particularly for less popular inputs. This creates two critical challenges: generation models learn to be "lazy'" by under-generating labels, and evaluation becomes unreliable due to insufficient annotation in the test set. In this work, we introduce Positive-Unlabeled Sequence Learning (PUSL), which reframes OXMC as an infinite keyphrase generation task, addressing the generation model's laziness. Additionally, we propose to adopt a suite of evaluation metrics, F1@$\mathcal{O}$ and newly proposed B@$k$, to reliably assess OXMC models with incomplete ground truths. In a highly imbalanced e-commerce dataset with substantial missing labels, PUSL generates 30% more unique labels, and 72% of its predictions align with actual user queries. On the less skewed EURLex-4.3k dataset, PUSL demonstrates superior F1 scores, especially as label counts increase from 15 to 30. Our approach effectively tackles both the modeling and evaluation challenges in OXMC with missing labels.

cs.IR

Human Mobility Prediction with Causal and Spatial-constrained Multi-task Network

Modeling human mobility helps to understand how people are accessing resources and physically contacting with each other in cities, and thus contributes to various applications such as urban planning, epidemic control, and location-based advertisement. Next location prediction is one decisive task in individual human mobility modeling and is usually viewed as sequence modeling, solved with Markov or RNN-based methods. However, the existing models paid little attention to the logic of individual travel decisions and the reproducibility of the collective behavior of population. To this end, we propose a Causal and Spatial-constrained Long and Short-term Learner (CSLSL) for next location prediction. CSLSL utilizes a causal structure based on multi-task learning to explicitly model the "\textit{when$\rightarrow$what$\rightarrow$where}", a.k.a. "\textit{time$\rightarrow$activity$\rightarrow$location}" decision logic. We next propose a spatial-constrained loss function as an auxiliary task, to ensure the consistency between the predicted and actual spatial distribution of travelers' destinations. Moreover, CSLSL adopts modules named Long and Short-term Capturer (LSC) to learn the transition regularities across different time spans. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets show promising performance improvements of CSLSL over baselines and confirm the effectiveness of introducing the causality and consistency constraints. The implementation is available at https://github.com/urbanmobility/CSLSL.

cs.AI