arXiv subjects

Yangchen Zeng

Publications and source records attributed to Yangchen Zeng.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

DeepInterestGR: Mining Deep Multi-Interest Using Multi-Modal LLMs for Generative Recommendation

We introduce DeepInterestGR, a novel framework that integrates deep interest mining into the generative recommendation pipeline. This addresses the "Shallow Interest" problem: existing generative methods rely on surface-level textual features and fail to capture latent user motivations, limiting personalization depth and recommendation interpretability. Our approach leverages Multi-LLM Interest Mining (MLIM) via structured reasoning prompting, Reward-Labeled Deep Interest (RLDI) for quality control, and Interest-Enhanced Item Discretization (IEID) via RQ-VAE, combined with a two-stage SFT-GRPO training pipeline guided by an Interest-Aware Reward. We validate DeepInterestGR on three Amazon Review benchmarks (Beauty, Sports, Instruments), comparing against 14 state-of-the-art baselines including SASRec, BERT4Rec, TIGER, LC-Rec, and S-DPO. Our method achieves 12.4%-15.4% relative improvements on HR@10 and 15.5%-17.9% on NDCG@10, with cross-domain generalization gains of +24.8%. To our knowledge, this is the first work to demonstrate such significant gains by incorporating deep semantic interests into generative recommendation.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Selective Positional Allocation for Noise-Robust Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection

In aerial and remote-sensing imagery, detecting tiny targets is frequently hampered less by the representational capacity of the backbone network than by the manner in which positional priors are distributed across ill-defined foreground and background regions. We introduce SPAR (Selective Positional Allocation and Retrieval), a detection framework that re-conceptualizes positional cues as an allocatable resource: they are intensified at semantically meaningful locations while responses driven by scene clutter are actively attenuated. At the heart of SPAR lies Selective Positional Embedding (SPE), an interpretable embedding mechanism paired with an activation-bar visualization that facilitates direct inspection and hyper-parameter tuning. The encoder branch, termed MOHFE, fuses heatmap-modulated positional signals with category-specific and box-level evidence to yield more compact multi-scale features; the decoder branch, termed HIDQ, employs a foreground gating operation to discard background-dominated candidates prior to query decoding. To cope with the extreme sparsity of small-object evidence, we additionally design DPSConv (Dual-Path Sampling Convolution), which augments retrieval-oriented representations through two geometrically complementary sampling routes. Notably, all heatmap supervision is derived from existing detection objectives and consumed exclusively during training, requiring no auxiliary heatmap annotations and leaving inference as an ordinary forward pass with no additional gradient overhead. Comprehensive evaluations on DOTA, DIOR, VisDrone, PASCAL VOC, NWPU VHR-10, and AITOD demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design: relative to the baseline, SPAR attains an improvement of up to 9.1 percentage points, shortens the decoder from eight layers to three, and reduces model parameters by 59.4% (66.3M versus 163M).

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Route What Remains: A Meta-Modal Agent for Missing-Modality Candidate Reranking in Recommender Systems

Missing-modality recommenders usually reconstruct absent representations, although the observed evidence may not determine the missing content. We formulate candidate reranking as budgeted sequential evidence acquisition. A policy queries text, image, and interaction-graph tools, incorporates \texttt{Null} returns into its observation history, and sparsely rescores a retrieved candidate pool. Our \textbf{Meta-Modal Agent} (MMA) uses PPO to optimize terminal NDCG and tool cost without explicit access to the route-availability mask or target identity. When only one evidence route is available, MMA-Auto improves NDCG@10 by $10.0$\% over the strongest completion baseline and by $9.5$\% over a fixed router with the same Llama scorer. It obtains the highest result in all nine reported combinations of dataset and available route against these comparators. MMA-Auto also reduces failed calls by 17.8 percentage points and uses 1.1 fewer turns than the fixed router. On the fixed candidate pools produced by full-catalog retrieval, MMA-Auto improves NDCG@10 by $19.7$\%. These results associate adaptive evidence routing with improved reranking under severe, constructed missingness. The code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/WSDM2027-MMA-C381.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

HGSQ: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for Real-Time Aerial Small Object Detection

Real-time aerial small object detection is an important visual signal and image processing problem, requiring a detector to preserve fine-grained localization while avoiding redundant computation on large background regions. This paper focuses on this deployment-oriented aerial/UAV setting rather than claiming a universal detector for all object detection scenarios. Existing Transformer-based detectors provide strong global modeling, but their dense query initialization and multi-layer decoder still spend substantial computation on background tokens, which is inefficient when small objects occupy only sparse image regions. To address this problem, this paper proposes HGSQ, a Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Detector for real-time aerial small object detection. HGSQ uses a lightweight Heatmap Budget Predictor (HBP) to predict a foreground budget map in a single forward pass. The predicted heatmap is then used by three fixed components: Heatmap-Guided Sparse Query Selection (HSQS), which initializes decoder queries from high-confidence foreground positions; Heatmap-Gated Lite Snake Convolution (HGLSConv), which performs local shape refinement only on heatmap-activated small-object regions; and Adaptive Query-Decoder Budgeting (AQDB), which adjusts the query budget and decoder depth according to the estimated object density. Unlike post-hoc heatmap generation, HGSQ treats the heatmap as a real-time computation budget rather than a visualization map during deployment. Experiments on NWPU VHR-10 and VisDrone2019 show that HGSQ achieves 95.10 mAP50 on NWPU VHR-10 and 54.8 mAP50 on VisDrone2019, while reducing GFLOPs to 48.6 and running at 96.0 FPS on an RTX 4070 under our TensorRT FP16 deployment protocol.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

CaST-POI: Candidate-Conditioned Spatiotemporal Modeling for Next POI Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation ranks a user's likely next location based on check-in history. Most recent rankers compress the trajectory into a single user vector and score every candidate through the same representation, ignoring that every candidate carries geographic coordinates and that the relevance of a past visit depends on where the candidate is located. Target attention from click-through-rate prediction conditions the user representation on the scored item, but its operator was developed for web items without geometry. This paper proposes CaST-POI, a candidate-conditioned POI ranker that keeps a standard target-attention reader and adds two bucketised biases to the attention logits: one for the recency of each past visit and another for its distance to the candidate being scored. Different candidates therefore read the same trajectory with different attention weights, grounded in real geographic distance rather than inferred from item embeddings. Comparing against seven sequential recommenders trained with the same split on three datasets NYC, TKY and CA under per-user leave-one-out with full-vocabulary ranking, CaST-POI improves MRR over the strongest baseline by 5.1%, 7.6% and 14.5%. Holm-corrected paired tests confirm the gains on TKY and CA. Ablation study locates the gain in the explicit revisit gate and the candidate-relative spatial bias, whereas the candidate-independent temporal bias has no measurable effect on all datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/CaST-POI.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

When Images Look Right and Retrieve Wrong: Coverage-Guided Cross-Scale Re-Indexing for Knowledge-Faithful Generative Perception

Multimodal information systems increasingly route generated visual content back through the same vision-language index that informed its production, so the output must remain retrievable by the queries it was meant to serve. When the scene contains entities at vastly different scales, existing language-guided generators condition on a single, globally pooled text embedding and quietly drop scale-specific concepts, breaking concept-query retrieval even when pixel fidelity is high. We formalise this failure as semantic collapse and propose CERES, a closed-loop multimodal indexing framework that builds a three-level semantic pyramid, mines implicit concepts via a co-occurrence-aware router, performs scale-routed cross-attention into a lightweight U-Net generator, and verifies coverage by re-indexing the generated image with the same frozen VLM. A continuously differentiable soft-Jaccard coverage objective returns dense gradients to the 0.39 M-parameter generator under explicit non-degeneracy conditions, and coverage is verified by an independent DINOv2 linear probe trained only on external scene and object labels. On four pansharpening benchmarks across seven settings, CERES delivers the new state of the art with the largest gains where scale variation is most extreme (+4.64% relative Q2n and +9.7 mAP for DOTA detection). It also improves concept-query retrieval Recall@5 by +14.0 points and image-text mean reciprocal rank by 0.19 over the strongest baseline, showing that the closed loop preserves queryable content rather than self-referential feature consistency.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2026

MotionCraft: Latent World Modeling with Sparse Attention for Visual Upscaling

Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to recover high-fidelity high-resolution videos from low-resolution inputs and is central to applications ranging from mobile capture to streaming and archival restoration. Existing approaches trade off among local-detail fidelity, long-range spatio-temporal modeling, perceptual realism, and efficiency: convolutional alignment techniques preserve local structure but suffer when motion is large or degradations are complex; transformer-based methods capture long-range dependencies yet require architectural or algorithmic adaptations to remain computationally feasible; and recent latent or diffusion-based generators synthesize rich texture but require specialized temporal constraints to maintain coherence. We present MotionCraft, a controllable VSR framework that formulates restoration as motion-aware latent state prediction inspired by world models and integrates adaptive sparse attention with an explicit user-accessible control interface. MotionCraft combines robust motion fusion, a Latent World Transformer that balances locality and targeted non-local interactions, and a compact conditional decoder to deliver temporally consistent, high-quality reconstructions under streaming constraints. Empirical evaluations show that MotionCraft achieves strong reconstruction and perceptual performance while enabling predictable trade-offs between temporal smoothness and reconstruction fidelity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

SphUnc: Hyperspherical Uncertainty Decomposition and Causal Identification via Information Geometry

Reliable decision-making in complex multi-agent systems requires calibrated predictions and interpretable uncertainty. We introduce SphUnc, a unified framework combining hyperspherical representation learning with structural causal modeling. The model maps features to unit hypersphere latents using von Mises-Fisher distributions, decomposing uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components through information-geometric fusion. A structural causal model on spherical latents enables directed influence identification and interventional reasoning via sample-based simulation. Empirical evaluations on social and affective benchmarks demonstrate improved accuracy, better calibration, and interpretable causal signals, establishing a geometric-causal foundation for uncertainty-aware reasoning in multi-agent settings with higher-order interactions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Degeneracy-Guided List Compression for Greedy Graph Coloring

We study degeneracy guided list compression for greedy graph coloring when graph structure is available before colors are sampled. Our exposure calibrated ordering framework assigns each vertex an independent uniform list according to its backward neighborhood in a color independent order. Its certified instantiation, Profiled Structure Aware Asymmetric Palette Sparsification, or P-SAPST, reverses a minimum degree removal sequence and obtains every backward exposure from the removal profile. For each fixed profile, we characterize the exact local budget required by independent uniform lists under history robust greedy recovery. The profile yields linear list volume on high degree forests and on a core fringe family where reciprocal rank allocation requires Theta(n log^2 n) sampled colors. Exact conflict expectation, concentration, and a dense exposure barrier complete the theoretical description. The evaluation contains 40,320 runs over SAPBench and two SNAP networks. At the theorem scale, P-SAPST reduces mean list size by 47.6 percent relative to calibrated APST while attaining 99.8 percent observed greedy success. P-SAPST Lite replaces peeling with a degree order and provides a lower latency order choice within the same framework. On stress graphs with 250,000 vertices and up to 1,251,868 edges, Lite obtains a payload ratio of 0.865, while calibrated APST obtains 7.886. On email Enron, the corresponding ratios are 0.193 and 5.814. Compression is strongest on hub dominated and power law graphs and disappears near the dense exposure barrier. The method complements edge oblivious streaming APST by addressing an offline regime in which structural plans can be reused.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2026

NeuroSymActive: Differentiable Neural-Symbolic Reasoning with Active Exploration for Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large pretrained language models and neural reasoning systems have advanced many natural language tasks, yet they remain challenged by knowledge-intensive queries that require precise, structured multi-hop inference. Knowledge graphs provide a compact symbolic substrate for factual grounding, but integrating graph structure with neural models is nontrivial: naively embedding graph facts into prompts leads to inefficiency and fragility, while purely symbolic or search-heavy approaches can be costly in retrievals and lack gradient-based refinement. We introduce NeuroSymActive, a modular framework that combines a differentiable neural-symbolic reasoning layer with an active, value-guided exploration controller for Knowledge Graph Question Answering. The method couples soft-unification style symbolic modules with a neural path evaluator and a Monte-Carlo style exploration policy that prioritizes high-value path expansions. Empirical results on standard KGQA benchmarks show that NeuroSymActive attains strong answer accuracy while reducing the number of expensive graph lookups and model calls compared to common retrieval-augmented baselines.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Dependency-Guided Code Generation: Structured Matrix Decomposition and Consistency-Guided Refinement

The increasing complexity of modern software systems has made automated code generation a fundamental task in software engineering. However, existing approaches often fail to adequately capture the intricate, multi-level dependencies among code entities, leading to generated code that is logically incomplete or difficult to integrate into real-world systems. To address this limitation, we propose a dependency-aware code generation framework that explicitly models interactions among code entities through a graph-based representation. We decompose dependencies into two complementary components: a quantized matrix that captures strong, explicit relations, and a sparse low-rank factorization that models weaker, implicit interactions. The decomposition is efficiently learned via an alternating optimization procedure. During code generation, the learned dependency structure is incorporated as a constraint, ensuring both semantic coherence and structural consistency of the generated code. Furthermore, we introduce a sparse triplet representation for strong dependencies, significantly improving storage efficiency and computational scalability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently produces code with superior semantic alignment and structural fidelity compared to existing methods.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

Do Vision Models Truly Forget? New Findings from Representation-Level Certification of Visual Unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning

Machine unlearning in Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) has attracted growing interest, yet existing methods certify forgetting solely using output-level metrics. We challenge these works by introducing Mirage, a representation-level auditing framework that comprises four complementary diagnostics: Linear probe recovery (LPR), centered kernel alignment (CKA), feature separability scoring, and layer-wise recovery analysis. Extensive experiments across seven datasets and seven baseline methods following recent VFL unlearning protocols reveal three key findings: (1) Forgetting gap: methods that pass output-level certification still retain substantial class structure in their representations, with LPR exceeding the retrained baseline by up to 15.4 points; CKA shows that these models remain structurally closer to the original than to the retrained reference, while separability scores indicate persistent geometric discrimination. (2) Unlearning trilemma: no existing method simultaneously achieves high utility, output-level forgetting, and representation-level forgetting. (3) Class-sample asymmetry: class-level forgetting leaves strong representational traces (LPR exceeding 96 percent on several datasets), whereas sample-level forgetting is indistinguishable from chance (LPR is approximately 50 percent); layer-wise analysis further shows that residual class information persists across network depths. These findings call for representation-aware evaluation standards in federated unlearning research. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuZhenyuLindy/Mirage.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

TriAlignGR: Triangular Multitask Alignment with Multimodal Deep Interest Mining for Generative Recommendation

We introduce TriAlignGR, a unified multitask-multimodal framework for generative recommendation that establishes two-stage multimodal semantic propagation: (i) encoding visual semantics directly into SIDs via multimodal embeddings, and (ii) enabling the model to decode these semantics through visual description tasks. Existing Semantic ID (SID) pipelines suffer from two fundamental but underexplored problems: \textbf{SID Content Degradation (SCD)}, where cascaded encoding and residual quantization discard critical multimodal and interest-level semantics; and \textbf{SID Semantic Opacity (SSO)}, where models autoregressively generate SID sequences without truly comprehending their underlying meaning, leading to hallucination and poor generalization. Prior work addresses at most text-SID alignment, leaving visual semantics and latent user interests entirely unexploited. TriAlignGR resolves both problems through three tightly integrated components: (1)~\textbf{Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CMSA)} integrates visual content into SID construction through both VLM-generated textual descriptions and a multimodal embedding model that directly encodes image features alongside text, ensuring that SIDs inherently carry multimodal semantics; (2)~\textbf{Multimodal Deep Interest Mining (MDIM)} leverages LLM Chain-of-Thought reasoning to extract latent user intents (\eg ``productivity-focused lifestyle'' from noise-canceling headphones) beyond surface attributes, enriching SID semantics before discretization; and (3)~\textbf{Triangular Multitask (TMT)} jointly trains on eight complementary generation tasks under a single autoregressive loss -- including two novel visual-semantic tasks (VisDesc$\to$SID, VisDesc$\to$Title) that map VLM-generated image descriptions to SIDs and titles, completing the SID-Text-Image triangle -- without requiring task-specific towers or complex loss weighting.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Deep Interest Mining for Intent-Enriched Semantic IDs in Multimodal Generative Recommendation

Semantic IDs (SIDs) provide the discrete item vocabulary used by generative recommendation, but their quality depends on what item evidence is preserved before quantization. In product recommendation, surface metadata often misses latent usage intent, visual evidence may be only weakly reflected in text, and downstream policy learning provides sparse feedback about whether a generated SID corresponds to a semantically useful item. We introduce \textbf{DeepInterestGR}, an intent-enriched SID framework for generative recommendation. Before SID quantization, \textbf{CMSA} enriches item representations through two complementary evidence paths: recommendation-oriented VLM captions and projected image embeddings. \textbf{DCIM} then uses an LLM to mine item-side intent descriptors -- latent usage motivations implied by product content rather than personalized user states. During policy training over the constructed SIDs, \textbf{QARM} adds a relevance-gated semantic-quality bonus on top of standard SID rewards, applying the bonus only when the generated SID decodes to the target item. Thus, semantic quality cannot reward a fluent but irrelevant item prediction. Experiments on three Amazon Product Review categories (Beauty, Sports, and Instruments) show that DeepInterestGR improves over competitive generative and RL-based baselines, with relative gains of up to \textbf{15.1\%} in NDCG@5 and \textbf{13.9\%} in NDCG@10 over the strongest per-metric baseline. Component ablations, CMSA branch analyses, reward variants, and SID-level case studies support a bounded claim: enriching pre-quantization item evidence with visual cues and item-side intent descriptors, together with relevance-gated semantic rewards, improves SID-based generative recommendation under the evaluated settings.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

TrajShield: Trajectory-Level Safety Mediation for Defending Text-to-Video Models Against Jailbreak Attacks

Text-to-Video (T2V) models have demonstrated remarkable capability in generating temporally coherent videos from natural language prompts, yet they also risk producing unsafe content such as violence or explicit material. Existing prompt-level defenses are largely inherited from text-to-image safety and operate on the lexical surface of the input, making them vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that disguise harmful intent through rephrasing or adversarial prompting. Moreover, T2V generation introduces a distinctive challenge overlooked by prior work: temporally emergent risk, where a seemingly benign prompt leads to unsafe content through the generator's temporal extrapolation toward narrative coherence. We propose \method{}, a training-free, inference-time defense framework that reformulates T2V safety as a causal intervention in a temporally structured semantic space. TrajShield handles explicit unsafe prompts, jailbreak attacks, and temporally emergent risks in a unified manner by simulating the implied trajectory of a prompt, localizing the causal origin of potential risk, and applying a minimally invasive rewrite that neutralizes the risk while preserving safety-irrelevant semantics. Experiments on T2VSafetyBench across 14 safety categories and multiple T2V backends demonstrate that TrajShield achieves state-of-the-art defenseive performance while maintaining high semantic fidelity, substantially outperforming existing defenses, with an average ASR reduction of 52.44\%.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Learning Where to Embed: Noise-Aware Positional Embedding for Query Retrieval in Small-Object Detection

Transformer-based detectors have advanced small-object detection, but they often remain inefficient and vulnerable to background-induced query noise, which motivates deep decoders to refine low-quality queries. We present HELP (Heatmap-guided Embedding Learning Paradigm), a noise-aware positional-semantic fusion framework that studies where to embed positional information by selectively preserving positional encodings in foreground-salient regions while suppressing background clutter. Within HELP, we introduce Heatmap-guided Positional Embedding (HPE) as the core embedding mechanism and visualize it with a heatbar for interpretable diagnosis and fine-tuning. HPE is integrated into both the encoder and decoder: it guides noise-suppressed feature encoding by injecting heatmap-aware positional encoding, and it enables high-quality query retrieval by filtering background-dominant embeddings via a gradient-based mask filter before decoding. To address feature sparsity in complex small targets, we integrate Linear-Snake Convolution to enrich retrieval-relevant representations. The gradient-based heatmap supervision is used during training only, incurring no additional gradient computation at inference. As a result, our design reduces decoder layers from eight to three and achieves a 59.4% parameter reduction (66.3M vs. 163M) while maintaining consistent accuracy gains under a reduced compute budget across benchmarks. Code Repository: https://github.com/yidimopozhibai/Noise-Suppressed-Query-Retrieval

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

A Weak-Signal-Aware Framework for Subsurface Defect Detection: Mechanisms for Enhancing Low-SCR Hyperbolic Signatures

Subsurface defect detection via Ground Penetrating Radar is challenged by "weak signals" faint diffraction hyperbolas with low signal-to-clutter ratios, high wavefield similarity, and geometric degradation. Existing lightweight detectors prioritize efficiency over sensitivity, failing to preserve low-frequency structures or decouple heterogeneous clutter. We propose WSA-Net, a framework designed to enhance faint signatures through physical-feature reconstruction. Moving beyond simple parameter reduction, WSA-Net integrates four mechanisms: Signal preservation using partial convolutions; Clutter suppression via heterogeneous grouping attention; Geometric reconstruction to sharpen hyperbolic arcs; Context anchoring to resolve semantic ambiguities. Evaluations on the RTSTdataset show WSA-Net achieves 0.6958 mAP@0.5 and 164 FPS with only 2.412 M parameters. Results prove that signal-centric awareness in lightweight architectures effectively reduces false negatives in infrastructure inspection.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Agent4POI: Agentic Context-Conditioned Affordance Reasoning for Multimodal Point-of-Interest Recommendation

We introduce Agent4POI, the first POI recommendation framework that generates context-conditioned multimodal representations at recommendation time, rather than relying on static POI embeddings pre-computed independently of context. Existing multimodal systems encode each POI once as a static embedding, a design that precludes reasoning about why the same cafe affords solo work on Monday but group celebration on Friday evening. We formally prove that no pre-computed encoder can satisfy context-sensitive ranking under standard bilinear scoring, motivating inference-time item-side representation. Agent4POI inverts this computation: given a situational context, a four-phase LLM agent generates dynamic, context-specific affordance queries (Phase 1) and executes a five-step cross-modal chain-of-thought over image, review, and metadata evidence (Phase 2). The resulting uncertainty-aware affordance representation is grounded in Gibsonian affordance theory. These cross-modal verdicts form a structured, uncertainty-adjusted affordance representation (Phase 3), which is aligned with user preferences via a semantic caching system for low-latency ranking (Phase 4). On three POI benchmarks and three evaluation configurations (standard, cold-start, context-shift), Agent4POI achieves a 23.2% relative gain over the strongest baseline and degrades by only 7.5% under context-shift versus 16--17\% for the strongest baselines. In cold-start scenarios, Agent4POI outperforms the best content-based baseline by up to 2.4x, whereas ID-based methods fail to generalize.

cs.IR↗