Search and Recommendation (S&R) are core information access channels on modern multi-scenario platforms. Existing joint S&R models face two critical challenges: (1) cross-scenario interest inconsistency, failing to unify explicit search intent (queries) and implicit recommendation intent (behavioral interactions) into coherent user interest representations; (2) severe S&R trade-off, where enhancing one task degrades the other due to static knowledge sharing and unbalanced feature utilization. To address these issues, we propose MinSAR, a novel framework focusing on cross-S&R user interest consistency. It integrates two key innovations: a Unified Interest Generation (UIG) module using Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (VQ-VAE) to fuse long-term user preferences (via a user-specific memory network) and dynamic short-term contextual behaviors, generating compact cross-scenario latent representations that bridge explicit and implicit intents. Additionally, an Interest-Guided Attention Expert Network replaces static multi-task gating with intent-aware weight allocation. Guided by UIG's unified interest, it dynamically balances cross-S&R shared knowledge and task-specific expertise (semantic matching for search, collaborative filtering for recommendation), mitigating inter-task conflicts. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets (KuaiSAR and Amazon Kindle Store) against 13 baselines show MinSAR outperforms state-of-the-art joint S&R models. Further analysis confirms its ability to eliminate the S&R performance trade-off.

In recent years, significant developments have been made in both video retrieval and video moment retrieval tasks, which respectively retrieve complete videos or moments for a given text query. These advancements have greatly improved user satisfaction during the search process. However, previous work has failed to establish meaningful ''interaction'' between the retrieval system and the user, and its one-way retrieval paradigm can no longer fully meet the personalization and dynamic needs of at least 80.8% of users. In this paper, we introduce the Interactive Video Corpus Retrieval (IVCR) task, a more realistic setting that enables multi-turn, conversational, and realistic interactions between the user and the retrieval system. To facilitate research on this challenging task, we introduce IVCR-200K, a high-quality, bilingual, multi-turn, conversational, and abstract semantic dataset that supports video retrieval and even moment retrieval. Furthermore, we propose a comprehensive framework based on multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) to help users interact in several modes with more explainable solutions. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our dataset and framework. The datasets, codes, and leaderboards are available at: https://ivcr200k.github.io/IVCR.

As an extension of machine translation, the primary objective of multi-modal machine translation is to optimize the utilization of visual information. Technically, image information is integrated into multi-modal fusion and alignment as an auxiliary modality through concepts or latent semantics, which are typically based on the Transformer framework. However, current approaches often ignore one modality to design numerous handcrafted features (e.g. visual concept extraction) and require training of all parameters in their framework. Therefore, it is worthwhile to explore multi-modal concepts or features to enhance performance and an efficient approach to incorporate visual information with minimal cost. Meanwhile, with the development of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs), they are faced with the visual hallucination issue of compromising performance, despite their powerful capabilities. Inspired by pioneering techniques in the multi-modal field, such as prompt learning and MLLMs, this paper innovatively explores the possibility of applying multi-modal prompt learning to this multi-modal machine translation task.

Given a textual sentence provided by a user, the Temporal Language Grounding (TLG) task is defined as the process of finding a semantically relevant video moment or clip from an untrimmed video. In recent years, localization-based TLG methods have been explored, which adopt reinforcement learning to locate a clip from the video. However, these methods are not stable enough due to the stochastic exploration mechanism of reinforcement learning, which is sensitive to the reward. Therefore, providing a more flexible and reasonable reward has become a focus of attention for both academia and industry.

Multi-modal machine translation (MMT) aims to augment the linguistic machine translation frameworks by incorporating aligned vision information. As the core research challenge for MMT, how to fuse the image information and further align it with the bilingual data remains critical. Existing works have either focused on a methodological alignment in the space of bilingual text or emphasized the combination of the one-sided text and given image. In this work, we entertain the possibility of a triplet alignment, among the source and target text together with the image instance. In particular, we propose Multi-aspect AlignmenT (MAT) model that augments the MMT tasks to three sub-tasks --- namely cross-language translation alignment, cross-modal captioning alignment and multi-modal hybrid alignment tasks. Core to this model consists of a hybrid vocabulary which compiles the visually depictable entity (nouns) occurrence on both sides of the text as well as the detected object labels appearing in the images. Through this sub-task, we postulate that MAT manages to further align the modalities by casting three instances into a shared domain, as compared against previously proposed methods. Extensive experiments and analyses demonstrate the superiority of our approaches, which achieve several state-of-the-art results on two benchmark datasets of the MMT task.

The cross-modal person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve one person from one modality to the other single modality, such as text-based and sketch-based ReID tasks. However, for these different modalities of describing a person, combining multiple aspects can obviously make full use of complementary information and improve the identification performance. Therefore, to explore how to comprehensively consider multi-modal information, we advance a novel multi-modal person re-identification task, which utilizes both text and sketch as a descriptive query to retrieve desired images. In fact, the textual description and the visual description are understood together to retrieve the person in the database to be more aligned with real-world scenarios, which is promising but seldom considered. Besides, based on an existing sketch-based ReID dataset, we construct a new dataset, TriReID, to support this challenging task in a semi-automated way. Particularly, we implement an image captioning model under the active learning paradigm to generate sentences suitable for ReID, in which the quality scores of the three levels are customized. Moreover, we propose a novel framework named Descriptive Fusion Model (DFM) to solve the multi-modal ReID issue. Specifically, we first develop a flexible descriptive embedding function to fuse the text and sketch modalities. Further, the fused descriptive semantic feature is jointly optimized under the generative adversarial paradigm to mitigate the cross-modal semantic gap. Extensive experiments on the TriReID dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of our proposed solution.

The task of temporally language grounding (TLG) aims to locate a video moment from an untrimmed video that match a given textual query, which has attracted considerable research attention. In recent years, typical retrieval-based TLG methods are inefficient due to pre-segmented candidate moments, while localization-based TLG solutions adopt reinforcement learning resulting in unstable convergence. Therefore, how to perform TLG task efficiently and stably is a non-trivial work.