Traditional recommender systems such as matrix factorization methods have primarily focused on learning a shared dense embedding space to represent both items and user preferences. Subsequently, sequence models such as RNN, GRUs, and, recently, Transformers have emerged and excelled in the task of sequential recommendation. This task requires understanding the sequential structure present in users’ historical interactions to predict the next item they may like. Building upon the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in a variety of tasks, researchers have recently explored using LLMs that are pretrained on vast corpora of text for sequential recommendation. To use LLMs for sequential recommendation, both the history of user interactions and the model’s prediction of the next item are expressed in text form. We propose CALRec, a two-stage LLM finetuning framework that finetunes a pretrained LLM in a two-tower fashion using a mixture of two contrastive losses and a language modeling loss: the LLM is first finetuned on a data mixture from multiple domains followed by another round of target domain finetuning. Our model significantly outperforms many state-of-the-art baselines (+37% in Recall@1 and +24% in NDCG@10) and our systematic ablation studies reveal that (i) both stages of finetuning are crucial, and, when combined, we achieve improved performance, and (ii) contrastive alignment is effective among the target domains explored in our experiments.

Kidney stone disease is a serious public health concern that is getting worse with changes in diet, obesity, medical conditions, certain supplements etc. A kidney stone also called a renal calculus, is a hard buildup of urine minerals that form in the kidneys. Computed tomography (CT) is one of the imaging models used to identify kidney stones by clinical experts. Due to the low resolution of these images, sometimes detecting kidney stones is tedious with the naked eye, which may lead to false alarms. In this work, a computer-based diagnosis system with a deep learning technique has been developed as a practical solution to aid clinicians in their diagnosis. The traditional convolutional neural network (CNN)-based deep learning technology can detect stones in the kidney. Still, it suffers from the performance and standard implementation of the convolution operations in convolution layers. A Kronecker product-based convolution technique is incorporated in the proposed deep learning architecture to reduce the redundancy in feature maps without convolution overlapping. Our proposed method helps to make the network more effective by extracting abstract and in-depth features from the input images. The publicly available GitHub kidney stone CT scans are utilized to develop the proposed architecture. Our automated model detected kidney stones with an accuracy of 98.56% utilizing CT images. Our system is more effective than the most recent and cutting-edge techniques developed for identifying kidney stones of any size, including the smallest ones.

Person re-identification (re-ID) is a method that uses several non-overlapping cameras to identify the same individual. Person re-ID has been employed successfully in a diversity of computer vision applications. This task is made more difficult by occlusions, abrupt illumination, pose changes among camera views, cluttered backgrounds, and inaccurate detections. Therefore, we propose a new graph convolutional network with attention modules. This research reveals a new attention network that encompasses the encoder-decoder and the triplet attention module. The proposed attention module employs the self-attention process to achieve potent and discriminatory features by utilizing temporal, spatial, and channel context information. The triplet attention module is utilized to capture cross-dimension dependencies and pedestrian features, and also reduces the impact of the imperfect pedestrian image to remedy the occlusion issue. The encoder-decoder is used to observe the whole-body shape. Experiments on several publicly available datasets reveal that our method has a high degree of generalization and outperforms existing methods. On Market1501, the proposed method outperformed the recent approaches with an accuracy of 92.98% for rank-1. According to the results, our method ameliorates quantitative and qualitative person re-ID methods.

Recently, electrocardiogram (ECG) signals have received a high level of attention as a physiological signal in the field of biometrics. It has presented great possibilities for its strength against counterfeit. However, the ECG feature templates are irreplaceable, and a compromised template implies a permanent loss of identity. Therefore, several studies have been introduced biometric template protection techniques such as cancelable techniques to protect the original template in case it is stolen or lost. In this research, a cancelable ECG approach is proposed to protect the ECG feature template for human authentication. In our system, we first employed some image processing techniques for preprocessing the input ECG signals. Then, a deep transfer learning approach is employed to extract the deep ECG features. Later, the proposed cancelable approach based on DNA and amino acid is applied to protect the deep feature templates. Lastly, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) is employed for authentication. Extensive experiments on two commonly used datasets coupled with comprehensive theoretical analysis demonstrate the highest accuracy of the proposed system and the strong resilience of the system to various security and privacy attacks. Results show that the proposed cancelable method meets all requirements of cancelable biometrics such as irreversibility, revocability, and unlinkability.