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Shijun Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Shijun Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Reward Guided Decoding for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation formulates recommendation task into an SID sequence autoregressive generation paradigm, but the decoding process is often dominated by generation likelihood. This may conflict with real-world business objectives, where high-value candidates can receive low generation probability and be pruned early during beam search. Existing reranking or training-time alignment methods either intervene too late or require costly model retraining when business preferences change. To this end, we propose \textbf{R}eward \textbf{G}uided \textbf{D}ecoding, named \textbf{RGD}, a controllable decoding framework for industrial value-oriented generative recommendation. We formulate value-guided decoding as a KL-regularized reward maximization problem, deriving a closed-form reward guided decoding distribution that principledly combines generation probability with reward signals. RGD treats the base generator as a reference policy and introduces a reward model as a test-time controller, injecting reward into each decoding step to reshape the search trajectory without retraining the generator. Extensive offline and online experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for aligning personalization and business value. RGD has been deployed on the Kuaishou platform, bringing consistent improvements in real-world recommendation scenarios.

cs.IR

KuaiLive-M3: A Multi-Modal, Multi-Domain, and Multi-Feedback Dataset for Live Streaming Recommendation

Existing public live streaming datasets suffer from three major limitations: they provide limited access to temporally evolving multimodal live content, overlook users' cross-domain interactions between short videos and live streams, and contain only implicit behavioral signals without explicit feedback that captures users' perceived content quality and satisfaction. These limitations prevent existing benchmarks from faithfully reflecting real-world live streaming scenarios and hinder comprehensive research on live streaming recommendation. To address these limitations, we introduce KuaiLive-M3, a multi-modal, multi-domain, and multi-feedback dataset for live streaming recommendation, collected from Kuaishou, a leading live streaming and short video platform in China. KuaiLive-M3 covers 21,938 users and contains 35 million live streaming interactions and 111 million short video interactions, with fine-grained timestamps and diverse user behaviors. It further provides approximately 88 million timestamped segment-level multi-modal embeddings that capture the temporal evolution of live streaming content, as well as 25,403 questionnaire-based feedback records that bridge implicit user behaviors and explicit user preferences. Based on these unique signals, we establish benchmarks for cross-domain recommendation, live stream highlight prediction, and questionnaire-enhanced recommendation. Extensive experiments with representative baselines demonstrate that KuaiLive-M3 provides a challenging and realistic benchmark for future live streaming recommendation research. The results further highlight the importance of modeling temporally evolving content, transferring user preferences across domains, and bridging the gap between implicit behaviors and explicit user feedback. The dataset and benchmark code are publicly available at https://imgkkk574.github.io/KuaiLive-M3/.

cs.IR

Bridging Short Videos and Live Streams: Reasoning-Guided Multimodal LLMs for Cross-Domain Representation Learning

As live streaming services grow, many platforms offer short videos and live streams to meet diverse needs. Short videos carry substantial traffic and rich behavior signals, whereas live streaming is a core conversion scenario with sparse behavior data, making cold start severe. Transferring user interests from short videos to live streaming recommendation can alleviate these issues. Meanwhile, short videos and live streams are complex multimodal items, and integrating multimodal signals improves recommendation performance. Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show strong multimodal understanding and reasoning, their application to cross-domain recommendation remains underexplored. To this end, we propose Reasoning-Guided Cross-Domain Representation Learning (RGCD-Rep), a reasoning-guided framework for cross-domain recommendation from short videos to live streams. RGCD-Rep introduces MLLM reasoning resource-efficiently and learns transferable item representations guided by behavioral collaboration via two-stage training. First, reasoning-aware distillation lets a frozen teacher MLLM generate structured cross-domain reasoning knowledge and distills it into a lightweight student MLLM. Second, transferability-guided cross-domain representation learning decomposes item representations into transferable and domain residual representations. The resulting representations are computed offline and integrated into downstream retrieval tasks, enabling low-cost industrial deployment. Extensive offline experiments demonstrate RGCD-Rep's superiority. After deployment in Kuaishou's live streaming recommendation system, A/B tests show significant gains across multiple core business metrics, confirming its effectiveness and practicality in real industrial scenarios. RGCD-Rep is fully deployed and serves over 400 million users daily.

cs.IR

KuaiLive: A Real-time Interactive Dataset for Live Streaming Recommendation

Live streaming platforms have become a dominant form of online content consumption, offering dynamically evolving content, real-time interactions, and highly engaging user experiences. These unique characteristics introduce new challenges that differentiate live streaming recommendation from traditional recommendation settings and have garnered increasing attention from industry in recent years. However, research progress in academia has been hindered by the lack of publicly available datasets that accurately reflect the dynamic nature of live streaming environments. To address this gap, we introduce KuaiLive, the first real-time, interactive dataset collected from Kuaishou, a leading live streaming platform in China with over 400 million daily active users. The dataset records the interaction logs of 23,772 users and 452,621 streamers over a 21-day period. Compared to existing datasets, KuaiLive offers several advantages: it includes precise live room start and end timestamps, multiple types of real-time user interactions (click, comment, like, gift), and rich side information features for both users and streamers. These features enable more realistic simulation of dynamic candidate items and better modeling of user and streamer behaviors. We conduct a thorough analysis of KuaiLive from multiple perspectives and evaluate several representative recommendation methods on it, establishing a strong benchmark for future research. KuaiLive can support a wide range of tasks in the live streaming domain, such as top-K recommendation, click-through rate prediction, watch time prediction, and gift price prediction. Moreover, its fine-grained behavioral data also enables research on multi-behavior modeling, multi-task learning, and fairness-aware recommendation. The dataset and related resources are publicly available at https://imgkkk574.github.io/KuaiLive.

cs.IR

Pantheon: Personalized Multi-objective Ensemble Sort via Iterative Pareto Policy Optimization

In this paper, we provide our milestone ensemble sort work and the first-hand practical experience, Pantheon, which transforms ensemble sorting from a "human-curated art" to a "machine-optimized science". Compared with formulation-based ensemble sort, our Pantheon has the following advantages: (1) Personalized Joint Training: our Pantheon is jointly trained with the real-time ranking model, which could capture ever-changing user personalized interests accurately. (2) Representation inheritance: instead of the highly compressed Pxtrs, our Pantheon utilizes the fine-grained hidden-states as model input, which could benefit from the Ranking model to enhance our model complexity. Meanwhile, to reach a balanced multi-objective ensemble sort, we further devise an \textbf{iterative Pareto policy optimization} (IPPO) strategy to consider the multiple objectives at the same time. To our knowledge, this paper is the first work to replace the entire formulation-based ensemble sort in industry RecSys, which was fully deployed at Kuaishou live-streaming services, serving 400 Million users daily.

cs.SI

Electrified Fracture of Nanotube Films

Strong and conductive carbon nanotube films are ideal candidates for lightning-strike protection. Understanding their failure mechanisms by considering the anisotropic and single-fiber nature is essential to improve performance. Our experimental studies show that the single-layer, nanometer-thick films fail under electrification by crack nucleation and propagation, reminiscent of brittle and ductile fracture of materials under mechanical loads. Sharp and diffuse patterns of fracture are identified in aligned and non-woven films, respectively, signaling the strong effect of material anisotropy that is absent in common engineering materials. The fracture is driven by local Joule heating concentrated at the crack fronts instead of force-induced breakage, which is validated by experimental characterization and simulation results at both continuum and atomistic levels.

physics.app-ph

Automatic Speech Disentanglement for Voice Conversion using Rank Module and Speech Augmentation

Voice Conversion (VC) converts the voice of a source speech to that of a target while maintaining the source's content. Speech can be mainly decomposed into four components: content, timbre, rhythm and pitch. Unfortunately, most related works only take into account content and timbre, which results in less natural speech. Some recent works are able to disentangle speech into several components, but they require laborious bottleneck tuning or various hand-crafted features, each assumed to contain disentangled speech information. In this paper, we propose a VC model that can automatically disentangle speech into four components using only two augmentation functions, without the requirement of multiple hand-crafted features or laborious bottleneck tuning. The proposed model is straightforward yet efficient, and the empirical results demonstrate that our model can achieve a better performance than the baseline, regarding disentanglement effectiveness and speech naturalness.

cs.SD

Learning Emotional Representations from Imbalanced Speech Data for Speech Emotion Recognition and Emotional Text-to-Speech

Effective speech emotional representations play a key role in Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) and Emotional Text-To-Speech (TTS) tasks. However, emotional speech samples are more difficult and expensive to acquire compared with Neutral style speech, which causes one issue that most related works unfortunately neglect: imbalanced datasets. Models might overfit to the majority Neutral class and fail to produce robust and effective emotional representations. In this paper, we propose an Emotion Extractor to address this issue. We use augmentation approaches to train the model and enable it to extract effective and generalizable emotional representations from imbalanced datasets. Our empirical results show that (1) for the SER task, the proposed Emotion Extractor surpasses the state-of-the-art baseline on three imbalanced datasets; (2) the produced representations from our Emotion Extractor benefit the TTS model, and enable it to synthesize more expressive speech.

eess.AS

Fine-grained Emotional Control of Text-To-Speech: Learning To Rank Inter- And Intra-Class Emotion Intensities

State-of-the-art Text-To-Speech (TTS) models are capable of producing high-quality speech. The generated speech, however, is usually neutral in emotional expression, whereas very often one would want fine-grained emotional control of words or phonemes. Although still challenging, the first TTS models have been recently proposed that are able to control voice by manually assigning emotion intensity. Unfortunately, due to the neglect of intra-class distance, the intensity differences are often unrecognizable. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained controllable emotional TTS, that considers both inter- and intra-class distances and be able to synthesize speech with recognizable intensity difference. Our subjective and objective experiments demonstrate that our model exceeds two state-of-the-art controllable TTS models for controllability, emotion expressiveness and naturalness.

cs.SD

A Graph Regularized Point Process Model For Event Propagation Sequence

Point process is the dominant paradigm for modeling event sequences occurring at irregular intervals. In this paper we aim at modeling latent dynamics of event propagation in graph, where the event sequence propagates in a directed weighted graph whose nodes represent event marks (e.g., event types). Most existing works have only considered encoding sequential event history into event representation and ignored the information from the latent graph structure. Besides they also suffer from poor model explainability, i.e., failing to uncover causal influence across a wide variety of nodes. To address these problems, we propose a Graph Regularized Point Process (GRPP) that can be decomposed into: 1) a graph propagation model that characterizes the event interactions across nodes with neighbors and inductively learns node representations; 2) a temporal attentive intensity model, whose excitation and time decay factors of past events on the current event are constructed via the contextualization of the node embedding. Moreover, by applying a graph regularization method, GRPP provides model interpretability by uncovering influence strengths between nodes. Numerical experiments on various datasets show that GRPP outperforms existing models on both the propagation time and node prediction by notable margins.

cs.LG

Generative Data Augmentation Guided by Triplet Loss for Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is crucial for human-computer interaction but still remains a challenging problem because of two major obstacles: data scarcity and imbalance. Many datasets for SER are substantially imbalanced, where data utterances of one class (most often Neutral) are much more frequent than those of other classes. Furthermore, only a few data resources are available for many existing spoken languages. To address these problems, we exploit a GAN-based augmentation model guided by a triplet network, to improve SER performance given imbalanced and insufficient training data. We conduct experiments and demonstrate: 1) With a highly imbalanced dataset, our augmentation strategy significantly improves the SER performance (+8% recall score compared with the baseline). 2) Moreover, in a cross-lingual benchmark, where we train a model with enough source language utterances but very few target language utterances (around 50 in our experiments), our augmentation strategy brings benefits for the SER performance of all three target languages.

cs.SD

Zero-shot Voice Conversion via Self-supervised Prosody Representation Learning

Voice Conversion (VC) for unseen speakers, also known as zero-shot VC, is an attractive research topic as it enables a range of applications like voice customizing, animation production, and others. Recent work in this area made progress with disentanglement methods that separate utterance content and speaker characteristics from speech audio recordings. However, many of these methods are subject to the leakage of prosody (e.g., pitch, volume), causing the speaker voice in the synthesized speech to be different from the desired target speakers. To prevent this issue, we propose a novel self-supervised approach that effectively learns disentangled pitch and volume representations that can represent the prosody styles of different speakers. We then use the learned prosodic representations as conditional information to train and enhance our VC model for zero-shot conversion. In our experiments, we show that our prosody representations are disentangled and rich in prosody information. Moreover, we demonstrate that the addition of our prosody representations improves our VC performance and surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot VC performances.

cs.SD

A Meta Reinforcement Learning Approach for Predictive Autoscaling in the Cloud

Predictive autoscaling (autoscaling with workload forecasting) is an important mechanism that supports autonomous adjustment of computing resources in accordance with fluctuating workload demands in the Cloud. In recent works, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been introduced as a promising approach to learn the resource management policies to guide the scaling actions under the dynamic and uncertain cloud environment. However, RL methods face the following challenges in steering predictive autoscaling, such as lack of accuracy in decision-making, inefficient sampling and significant variability in workload patterns that may cause policies to fail at test time. To this end, we propose an end-to-end predictive meta model-based RL algorithm, aiming to optimally allocate resource to maintain a stable CPU utilization level, which incorporates a specially-designed deep periodic workload prediction model as the input and embeds the Neural Process to guide the learning of the optimal scaling actions over numerous application services in the Cloud. Our algorithm not only ensures the predictability and accuracy of the scaling strategy, but also enables the scaling decisions to adapt to the changing workloads with high sample efficiency. Our method has achieved significant performance improvement compared to the existing algorithms and has been deployed online at Alipay, supporting the autoscaling of applications for the world-leading payment platform.

cs.LG

NoiseVC: Towards High Quality Zero-Shot Voice Conversion

Voice conversion (VC) is a task that transforms voice from target audio to source without losing linguistic contents, it is challenging especially when source and target speakers are unseen during training (zero-shot VC). Previous approaches require a pre-trained model or linguistic data to do the zero-shot conversion. Meanwhile, VC models with Vector Quantization (VQ) or Instance Normalization (IN) are able to disentangle contents from audios and achieve successful conversions. However, disentanglement in these models highly relies on heavily constrained bottleneck layers, thus, the sound quality is drastically sacrificed. In this paper, we propose NoiseVC, an approach that can disentangle contents based on VQ and Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC). Additionally, Noise Augmentation is performed to further enhance disentanglement capability. We conduct several experiments and demonstrate that NoiseVC has a strong disentanglement ability with a small sacrifice of quality.

cs.SD

Neural Physicist: Learning Physical Dynamics from Image Sequences

We present a novel architecture named Neural Physicist (NeurPhy) to learn physical dynamics directly from image sequences using deep neural networks. For any physical system, given the global system parameters, the time evolution of states is governed by the underlying physical laws. How to learn meaningful system representations in an end-to-end way and estimate accurate state transition dynamics facilitating long-term prediction have been long-standing challenges. In this paper, by leveraging recent progresses in representation learning and state space models (SSMs), we propose NeurPhy, which uses variational auto-encoder (VAE) to extract underlying Markovian dynamic state at each time step, neural process (NP) to extract the global system parameters, and a non-linear non-recurrent stochastic state space model to learn the physical dynamic transition. We apply NeurPhy to two physical experimental environments, i.e., damped pendulum and planetary orbits motion, and achieve promising results. Our model can not only extract the physically meaningful state representations, but also learn the state transition dynamics enabling long-term predictions for unseen image sequences. Furthermore, from the manifold dimension of the latent state space, we can easily identify the degree of freedom (DoF) of the underlying physical systems.

cs.LG

Riemannian Proximal Policy Optimization

In this paper, We propose a general Riemannian proximal optimization algorithm with guaranteed convergence to solve Markov decision process (MDP) problems. To model policy functions in MDP, we employ Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and formulate it as a nonconvex optimization problem in the Riemannian space of positive semidefinite matrices. For two given policy functions, we also provide its lower bound on policy improvement by using bounds derived from the Wasserstein distance of GMMs. Preliminary experiments show the efficacy of our proposed Riemannian proximal policy optimization algorithm.

cs.LG

A Riemannian Primal-dual Algorithm Based on Proximal Operator and its Application in Metric Learning

In this paper, we consider optimizing a smooth, convex, lower semicontinuous function in Riemannian space with constraints. To solve the problem, we first convert it to a dual problem and then propose a general primal-dual algorithm to optimize the primal and dual variables iteratively. In each optimization iteration, we employ a proximal operator to search optimal solution in the primal space. We prove convergence of the proposed algorithm and show its non-asymptotic convergence rate. By utilizing the proposed primal-dual optimization technique, we propose a novel metric learning algorithm which learns an optimal feature transformation matrix in the Riemannian space of positive definite matrices. Preliminary experimental results on an optimal fund selection problem in fund of funds (FOF) management for quantitative investment showed its efficacy.

cs.LG

2D View Aggregation for Lymph Node Detection Using a Shallow Hierarchy of Linear Classifiers

Enlarged lymph nodes (LNs) can provide important information for cancer diagnosis, staging, and measuring treatment reactions, making automated detection a highly sought goal. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm representation of decomposing the LN detection problem into a set of 2D object detection subtasks on sampled CT slices, largely alleviating the curse of dimensionality issue. Our 2D detection can be effectively formulated as linear classification on a single image feature type of Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG), covering a moderate field-of-view of 45 by 45 voxels. We exploit both simple pooling and sparse linear fusion schemes to aggregate these 2D detection scores for the final 3D LN detection. In this manner, detection is more tractable and does not need to perform perfectly at instance level (as weak hypotheses) since our aggregation process will robustly harness collective information for LN detection. Two datasets (90 patients with 389 mediastinal LNs and 86 patients with 595 abdominal LNs) are used for validation. Cross-validation demonstrates 78.0% sensitivity at 6 false positives/volume (FP/vol.) (86.1% at 10 FP/vol.) and 73.1% sensitivity at 6 FP/vol. (87.2% at 10 FP/vol.), for the mediastinal and abdominal datasets respectively. Our results compare favorably to previous state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV