Multi-object navigation (MON) tasks involve sequentially locating multiple targets in an unknown environment, requiring global long-term planning under incomplete information. This necessitates that the agent dynamically balance immediate actions and long-term rewards while considering both local adaptability and global foresight. However, current methods overly focus on local path optimization, which leads to slower convergence in sparse reward settings and increases the risk of deadlocks or trap states. The core challenge of MON lies in the deformation of the shared decision space, where independent optimization leads to redundant and overlapping paths. Thus, path planning requires dynamic, cross-task optimization rather than simple subtask aggregation. To minimize overall effort, the optimization process should adaptively balance task contributions through weight adjustment. Thus, we propose the Goal-oriented Dynamic Weight Optimization (GDWO) algorithm. GDWO integrates target-specific value loss functions into a unified optimization framework and dynamically adjusts weights through gradient-based updates. To prevent over-optimization, weights are normalized during training according to navigation success rates, prioritizing more challenging targets. This adaptive mechanism effectively addresses the challenge of sparse rewards and improves convergence efficiency. By leveraging this mechanism, GDWO unifies multiple objectives within a unified decision space, achieving efficient optimization and balancing short-term gains with long-term goals. Additionally, we introduce two auxiliary modules: prior knowledge-based navigation and frontier-aware exploration to further enhance GDWO's performance. Experimental results on the Gibson and Matterport3D datasets demonstrate that GDWO achieves improvements in key metrics for MON tasks. It optimizes path planning, reduces exploration costs, and enhances navigation efficiency, enabling the agent to perform tasks more effectively in complex environments.

With the rapid development of smart TV, TV recommendation is attracting more and more users. TV users usually distribute in multiple regions with different cultures and hence have diverse TV program preferences. From the perspective of engineering practice and performance improvement, it's very essential to model users from multiple regions with one single model. In previous work, Multi-gate Mixture-of-Expert (MMoE) has been widely adopted in multi-task and multi-domain recommendation scenarios. In practice, however, we first observe the embeddings generated by experts tend to be homogeneous which may result in high semantic similarities among embeddings that reduce the capability of Multi-gate Mixture-of-Expert (MMoE) model. Secondly, we also find there are lots of commonalities and differences between multiple regions regarding user preferences. Therefore, it's meaningful to model the complicated relationships between regions. In this paper, we first introduce contrastive learning to overcome the expert representation degeneration problem. The embeddings of two augmented samples generated by the same experts are pushed closer to enhance the alignment, and the embeddings of the same samples generated by different experts are pushed away in vector space to improve uniformity. Then we propose a Graph-based Gating Mechanism to empower typical Multi-gate Mixture-of-Experts. Graph-based MMoE is able to recognize the commonalities and differences among multiple regions by introducing a Graph Neural Network (GNN) with region similarity prior. We name our model Multi-gate Mixture-of-Contrastive-Experts model with Graph-based Gating Mechanism (MMoCEG). Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests on a commercial TV service provider over 100 million users and 2.3 million items demonstrate the efficacy of MMoCEG compared to the existing models.

Item representation learning (IRL) plays an essential role in recommender systems, especially for sequential recommendation. Traditional sequential recommendation models usually utilize ID embeddings to represent items, which are not shared across different domains and lack the transferable ability. Recent studies use pre-trained language models (PLM) for item text embeddings (text-based IRL) that are universally applicable across domains. However, the existing text-based IRL is unaware of the important collaborative filtering (CF) information. In this paper, we propose CoWPiRec, an approach of Collaborative Word-based Pre-trained item representation for Recommendation. To effectively incorporate CF information into text-based IRL, we convert the item-level interaction data to a word graph containing word-level collaborations. Subsequently, we design a novel pre-training task to align the word-level semantic-and CF-related item representation. Extensive experimental results on multiple public datasets demonstrate that compared to state-of-the-art transferable sequential recommenders, CoWPiRec achieves significantly better performances in both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings for cross-scenario recommendation and effectively alleviates the cold-start issue. The code is available at: https://github.com/ysh-1998/CoWPiRec.

Calibration in recommender systems ensures that the user’s interests distribution over groups of items is reflected with their corresponding proportions in the recommendation, which has gained increasing attention recently. For example, a user who watched 80 entertainment videos and 20 knowledge videos is expected to receive recommendations comprising about 80% entertainment and 20% knowledge videos as well. However, with the increasing calls for responsible recommendation, it has become inadequate to just match users’ historical behaviors especially when items are grouped by their qualities, which could result in undesired effects at the system level (e.g., overwhelming clickbaits). In this paper, we envision the two-sided calibration task that not only matches the users’ past interests distribution (user-level calibration) but also guarantees an overall target exposure distribution of different item groups (system-level calibration). The target group exposure distribution can be explicitly pursued by users, platform owners, and even the law (e.g., the platform owners expect about 50% knowledge video recommendation on the whole). To support this scenario, we propose a post-processing method named PCT. PCT first solves personalized calibration targets that minimize the changes in users’ historical interest distributions while ensuring the overall target group exposure distribution. Then, PCT reranks the original recommendation lists according to personalized calibration targets to generate both relevant and two-sided calibrated recommendations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared to calibrated and fairness-aware recommendation approaches.

This paper is concerned with TV recommendation, where one major challenge is the coupling behavior issue that the behaviors of multiple users are coupled together and not directly distinguishable because the users share the same account. Unable to identify the current watching user and use the coupling behaviors directly could lead to sub-optimal recommendation results due to the noise introduced by the behaviors of other users. Most existing methods deal with this issue either by unsupervised clustering algorithms or depending on latent user representation learning with strong assumptions. However, they neglect to sophisticatedly model the current session behaviors, which carry the information of user identification. Another critical limitation of the existing models is the lack of supervision signal on distinguishing behaviors because they solely depend on the final click label, which is insufficient to provide effective supervision. To address the above problems, we propose the Coupling Sequence Model (COSMO) for TV recommendation. In COSMO, we design a session-aware co-attention mechanism that uses both the candidate item and session behaviors as the query to attend to the historical behaviors in a fine-grained manner. Furthermore, we propose to use the data of accounts with multiple devices (e.g., families with various TV sets), which means the behaviors of one account are generated on different devices. We regard the device information as weak supervision and propose a novel pair-wise attention loss for learning to distinguish the coupling behaviors. Extensive offline experiments and online A/B tests over a commercial TV service provider demonstrate the efficacy of COSMO compared to the existing models.

The goal of few-shot image recognition is to classify different categories with only one or a few training samples. Previous works of few-shot learning mainly focus on simple images, such as object or character images. Those works usually use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to learn the global image representations from training tasks, which are then adapted to novel tasks. However, there are many more abstract and complex images in real world, such as scene images, consisting of many object entities with flexible spatial relations among them. In such cases, global features can hardly obtain satisfactory generalization ability due to the large diversity of object relations in the scenes, which may hinder the adaptability to novel scenes. This paper proposes a composite object relation modeling method for few-shot scene recognition, capturing the spatial structural characteristic of scene images to enhance adaptability on novel scenes, considering that objects commonly co- occurred in different scenes. In different few-shot scene recognition tasks, the objects in the same images usually play different roles. Thus we propose a task-aware region selection module (TRSM) to further select the detected regions in different few-shot tasks. In addition to detecting object regions, we mainly focus on exploiting the relations between objects, which are more consistent to the scenes and can be used to cleave apart different scenes. Objects and relations are used to construct a graph in each image, which is then modeled with graph convolutional neural network. The graph modeling is jointly optimized with few-shot recognition, where the loss of few-shot learning is also capable of adjusting graph based representations. Typically, the proposed graph based representations can be plugged in different types of few-shot architectures, such as metric-based and meta-learning methods. Experimental results of few-shot scene recognition show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Visual object navigation is an essential task of embodied AI, which is letting the agent navigate to the goal object under the user's demand. Previous methods often focus on single-object navigation. However, in real life, human demands are generally continuous and multiple, requiring the agent to implement multiple tasks in sequence. These demands can be addressed by repeatedly performing previous single task methods. However, by dividing multiple tasks into several independent tasks to perform, without the global optimization between different tasks, the agents' trajectories may overlap, reducing the efficiency of navigation. In this paper, we propose an efficient reinforcement learning framework with a hybrid policy for multi-object navigation, aiming to maximally eliminate noneffective actions. First, the visual observations are embedded to detect the semantic entities (such as objects). And the detected objects are memorized and projected into semantic maps, which can also be regarded as a long-term memory of the observed environment. Then a hybrid policy consisting of exploration and long-term planning strategies is proposed to predict the potential target position. In particular, when the target is directly oriented, the policy function makes long-term planning for the target based on the semantic map, which is implemented by a sequence of motion actions. In the alternative, when the target is not oriented, the policy function estimates an object's potential position toward exploring the most possible objects (positions) that have close relations to the target. The relation between different objects is obtained with prior knowledge, which is used to predict the potential target position by integrating with the memorized semantic map. And then a path to the potential target is planned by the policy function. We evaluate our proposed method on two large-scale 3D realistic environment datasets, Gibson and Matterport3D, and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of the proposed method.

Scene images are usually composed of foreground and background regional contents. Some existing methods propose to extract regional contents with dense grids or objectness region proposals. However, dense grids may split the object into several discrete parts, learning semantic ambiguity for the patches. The objectness methods may focus on particular objects but only pay attention to the foreground contents and do not exploit the background that is key to scene recognition. In contrast, we propose a novel scene recognition framework with amorphous region detection and context modeling. In the proposed framework, discriminative regions are first detected with amorphous contours that can tightly surround the targets through semantic segmentation techniques. In addition, both foreground and background regions are jointly embedded to obtain the scene representations with the graph model. Based on the graph modeling module, we explore the contextual relations between the regions in geometric and morphology aspects, and generate the discriminative representations for scene recognition. Experimental results on MIT67 and SUN397 demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the proposed method.

In the past few years, the prediction models have shown remarkable performance in most biological correlation prediction tasks. These tasks traditionally use a fixed dataset, and the model, once trained, is deployed as is. These models often encounter training issues such as sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning and "catastrophic forgetting" when adding new data. However, with the development of biomedicine and the accumulation of biological data, new predictive models are required to face the challenge of adapting to change. To this end, we propose a computational approach based on Broad learning system (BLS) to predict potential disease-associated miRNAs that retain the ability to distinguish prior training associations when new data need to be adapted. In particular, we are introducing incremental learning to the field of biological association prediction for the first time and proposed a new method for quantifying sequence similarity. In the performance evaluation, the AUC in the 5-fold cross-validation was 0.9400 +/- 0.0041. To better assess the effectiveness of MISSIM, we compared it with various classifiers and former prediction models. Its performance is superior to the previous method. Besides, the case study on identifying miRNAs associated with breast neoplasms, lung neoplasms and esophageal neoplasms show that 34, 36 and 35 out of the top 40 associations predicted by MISSIM are confirmed by recent biomedical resources. These results provide ample convincing evidence of this approach have potential value and prospect in promoting biomedical research productivity.

Recognizing visual categories from semantic descriptions is a promising way to extend the capability of a visual classifier beyond the concepts represented in the training data (i.e. seen categories). This problem is addressed by (generalized) zero-shot learning methods (GZSL), which leverage semantic descriptions that connect them to seen categories (e.g. label embedding, attributes). Conventional GZSL are designed mostly for object recognition. In this paper we focus on zero-shot scene recognition, a more challenging setting with hundreds of categories where their differences can be subtle and often localized in certain objects or regions. Conventional GZSL representations are not rich enough to capture these local discriminative differences. Addressing these limitations, we propose a feature generation framework with two novel components: 1) multiple sources of semantic information (i.e. attributes, word embeddings and descriptions), 2) region descriptions that can enhance scene discrimination. To generate synthetic visual features we propose a two-step generative approach, where local descriptions are sampled and used as conditions to generate visual features. The generated features are then aggregated and used together with real features to train a joint classifier. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we introduce a new dataset for zero-shot scene recognition with multi-semantic annotations. Experimental results on the proposed dataset and SUN Attribute dataset illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Exploiting the spatial structure in scene images is a key research direction for scene recognition. Due to the large intra-class structural diversity, building and modeling flexible structural layout to adapt various image characteristics is a challenge. Existing structural modeling methods in scene recognition either focus on predefined grids or rely on learned prototypes, which all have limited representative ability. In this paper, we propose Prototype-agnostic Scene Layout (PaSL) construction method to build the spatial structure for each image without conforming to any prototype. Our PaSL can flexibly capture the diverse spatial characteristic of scene images and have considerable generalization capability. Given a PaSL, we build Layout Graph Network (LGN) where regions in PaSL are defined as nodes and two kinds of independent relations between regions are encoded as edges. The LGN aims to incorporate two topological structures (formed in spatial and semantic similarity dimensions) into image representations through graph convolution. Extensive experiments show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on widely recognized MIT67 and SUN397 datasets without multi-model or multi-scale fusion. Moreover, we also conduct the experiments on one of the largest scale datasets, Places365. The results demonstrate the proposed method can be well generalized and obtains competitive performance.

Scene recognition has been a challenging task in the field of computer vision and multimedia for a long time. The current scene recognition works often extract object features and scene features through CNN, and combine these two types of features to obtain complementary and discriminative scene representations. However, when the scene categories are visually similar, the object features might lack of discriminations. Therefore, it may be debatable to consider only object features. In contrast to the existing works, in this paper, we discuss the discrimination of scene attributes in local regions and utilize scene attributes as the complementary features of object and scene features. We extract these visual features from two individual CNN branches, one extracting the global features of the image while the other extracting the features of local regions. Through contextual modeling framework, we aggregate these features and generate more discriminative scene representations, which achieve better performance than the feature aggregation of object and scene. Moreover, we achieve the new state-of-the-art performance on both standard scene recognition benchmarks by aggregating more complementary visual features: MIT67 (88.06%) and SUN397 (74.12%).

Productivity is a critical performance index of process resources. As successive history productivity data tends to be auto-correlated, time series prediction method based on auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model was introduced into software productivity prediction by Humphrey et al. In this paper, a variant of their prediction method named ARIMAmmse is proposed. This variant formulates the ARIMA parameter estimation issue as a minimum mean square error (MMSE) based constrained optimization problem. The ARIMA model is used to describe constraints of the parameter estimation problem, while MMSE is used as the objective function of the constrained optimization problem. According to the optimization theory, ARIMAmmse will definitely achieve a higher MMSE prediction precision than Humphrey et al's which is based on the Yule-Walk estimation technique. Two comparative experiments are also presented. The experimental results further confirm the theoretical superiority of ARIMAmmse