Sequential recommendation aims to capture user preferences by modeling sequential patterns in user-item interactions. However, these models are often influenced by noise such as accidental interactions, leading to suboptimal performance. Therefore, to reduce the effect of noise, some works propose explicitly identifying and removing noisy items. However, we find that simply relying on collaborative information may result in an over-denoising problem, especially for cold items. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel framework: Interest Alignment for Denoising Sequential Recommendation (IADSR) which integrates both collaborative and semantic information. Specifically, IADSR is comprised of two stages: in the first stage, we obtain the collaborative and semantic embeddings of each item from a traditional sequential recommendation model and an LLM, respectively. In the second stage, we align the collaborative and semantic embeddings and then identify noise in the interaction sequence based on long-term and short-term interests captured in the collaborative and semantic modalities. Our extensive experiments on four public datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and its compatibility with different sequential recommendation systems.

While text-to-image (T2I) models can synthesize high-quality images, their performance degrades significantly when prompted with novel or out-of-distribution (OOD) entities due to inherent knowledge cutoffs. We introduce World-To-Image, a novel framework that bridges this gap by empowering T2I generation with agent-driven world knowledge. We design an agent that dynamically searches the web to retrieve images for concepts unknown to the base model. This information is then used to perform multimodal prompt optimization, steering powerful generative backbones toward an accurate synthesis. Critically, our evaluation goes beyond traditional metrics, utilizing modern assessments like LLMGrader and ImageReward to measure true semantic fidelity. Our experiments show that World-To-Image substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both semantic alignment and visual aesthetics, achieving +8.1% improvement in accuracy-to-prompt on our curated NICE benchmark. Our framework achieves these results with high efficiency in less than three iterations, paving the way for T2I systems that can better reflect the ever-changing real world. Our demo code is available here\footnote{https://github.com/mhson-kyle/World-To-Image}.

Recent advances in image editing have shifted from manual pixel manipulation to employing deep learning methods like stable diffusion models, which now leverage cross-attention mechanisms for text-driven control. This transition has simplified the editing process but also introduced variability in results, such as inconsistent hair color changes. Our research aims to enhance the precision and reliability of prompt-to-prompt image editing frameworks by exploring and optimizing hyperparameters. We present a comprehensive study of the "word swap" method, develop an "attention re-weight method" for better adaptability, and propose the "CL P2P" framework to address existing limitations like cycle inconsistency. This work contributes to understanding and improving the interaction between hyperparameter settings and the architectural choices of neural network models, specifically their attention mechanisms, which significantly influence the composition and quality of the generated images.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming useful in many domains due to their impressive abilities that arise from large training datasets and large model sizes. More recently, they have been shown to be very effective in textual classification tasks, motivating the need to explain the LLMs' decisions. Motivated by practical constrains where LLMs are black-boxed and LLM calls are expensive, we study how incorporating counterfactuals into LLM reasoning can affect the LLM's ability to identify the top words that have contributed to its classification decision. To this end, we introduce a framework called the decision changing rate that helps us quantify the importance of the top words in classification. Our experimental results show that using counterfactuals can be helpful.

Although large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, trustworthiness is still a chief concern: models often generate incorrect information with high confidence. While contextual information can help guide generation, identifying when a query would benefit from retrieved context and assessing the effectiveness of that context remains challenging. In this work, we operationalize interpretability methods to ascertain whether we can predict the correctness of model outputs from the model's activations alone. We also explore whether model internals contain signals about the efficacy of external context. We consider correct, incorrect, and irrelevant context and introduce metrics to distinguish amongst them. Experiments on six different models reveal that a simple classifier trained on intermediate layer activations of the first output token can predict output correctness with about 75% accuracy, enabling early auditing. Our model-internals-based metric significantly outperforms prompting baselines at distinguishing between correct and incorrect context, guarding against inaccuracies introduced by polluted context. These findings offer a lens to better understand the underlying decision-making processes of LLMs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jiarui-liu/LLM-Microscope

Starting from flow- and diffusion-based transformers, Multi-modal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs) have reshaped text-to-vision generation, gaining acclaim for exceptional visual fidelity. As these models advance, users continually push the boundary with imaginative or rare prompts, which advanced models still falter in generating, since their concepts are often too scarce to leave a strong imprint during pre-training. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective intervention that surfaces rare semantics inside MM-DiTs without additional training steps, data, denoising-time optimization, or reliance on external modules (e.g., large language models). In particular, the joint-attention mechanism intrinsic to MM-DiT sequentially updates text embeddings alongside image embeddings throughout transformer blocks. We find that by mathematically expanding representational basins around text token embeddings via variance scale-up before the joint-attention blocks, rare semantics clearly emerge in MM-DiT's outputs. Furthermore, our results generalize effectively across text-to-vision tasks, including text-to-image, text-to-video, and text-driven image editing. Our work invites generative models to reveal the semantics that users intend, once hidden yet ready to surface.

Denoising is a core operation in modern video pipelines. In codecs, in-loop filters suppress sensor noise and quantisation artefacts to improve rate-distortion performance; in cinema post-production, denoisers are used for restoration, grain management, and plate clean-up. However, state-of-the-art deep denoisers are computationally intensive and, at scale, are typically deployed on GPUs, incurring high power and cost for real-time, high-resolution streams. This paper presents Real-Time Denoise (ReTiDe), a hardware-accelerated denoising system that serves inference on data-centre Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). A compact convolutional model is quantised (post-training quantisation plus quantisation-aware fine-tuning) to INT8 and compiled for AMD Deep Learning Processor Unit (DPU)-based FPGAs. A client-server integration offloads computation from the host CPU/GPU to a networked FPGA service, while remaining callable from existing workflows, e.g., NUKE, without disrupting artist tooling. On representative benchmarks, ReTiDe delivers 37.71$\times$ Giga Operations Per Second (GOPS) throughput and 5.29$\times$ higher energy efficiency than prior FPGA denoising accelerators, with negligible degradation in Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR)/Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). These results indicate that specialised accelerators can provide practical, scalable denoising for both encoding pipelines and post-production, reducing energy per frame without sacrificing quality or workflow compatibility. Code is available at https://github.com/RCSL-TCD/ReTiDe.

This paper explores the ability of large language models to generate and recognize deep cognitive frames, particularly in socio-political contexts. We demonstrate that LLMs are highly fluent in generating texts that evoke specific frames and can recognize these frames in zero-shot settings. Inspired by mechanistic interpretability research, we investigate the location of the `strict father' and `nurturing parent' frames within the model's hidden representation, identifying singular dimensions that correlate strongly with their presence. Our findings contribute to understanding how LLMs capture and express meaningful human concepts.

Vision-language models trained on large-scale multimodal datasets show strong demographic biases, but the role of training data in producing these biases remains unclear. A major barrier has been the lack of demographic annotations in web-scale datasets such as LAION-400M. We address this gap by creating person-centric annotations for the full dataset, including over 276 million bounding boxes, perceived gender and race/ethnicity labels, and automatically generated captions. These annotations are produced through validated automatic labeling pipelines combining object detection, multimodal captioning, and finetuned classifiers. Using them, we uncover demographic imbalances and harmful associations, such as the disproportionate linking of men and individuals perceived as Black or Middle Eastern with crime-related and negative content. We also show that 60-70% of gender bias in CLIP and Stable Diffusion can be linearly explained by direct co-occurrences in the data. Our resources establish the first large-scale empirical link between dataset composition and downstream model bias.

A significant portion of real-world data is inherently represented as textual graphs, and integrating these graphs into large language models (LLMs) is promising to enable complex graph-based question answering. However, a key challenge in LLM-based textual graph QA systems lies in graph retrieval, i.e., how to retrieve relevant content from large graphs that is sufficiently informative while remaining compact for the LLM context. Existing retrievers suffer from poor performance since they either rely on shallow embedding similarity or employ interactive retrieving policies that demand excessive data labeling and training cost. To address these issues, we present Graph-$S^3$, an agentic textual graph reasoning framework that employs an LLM-based retriever trained with synthetic stepwise supervision. Instead of rewarding the agent based on the final answers, which may lead to sparse and unstable training signals, we propose to closely evaluate each step of the retriever based on offline-extracted golden subgraphs. Our main techniques include a data synthesis pipeline to extract the golden subgraphs for reward generation and a two-stage training scheme to learn the interactive graph exploration policy based on the synthesized rewards. Based on extensive experiments on three common datasets in comparison with seven strong baselines, our approach achieves an average improvement of 8.1\% in accuracy and 9.7\% in F$_1$ score. The advantage is even higher in more complicated multi-hop reasoning tasks. Our code will be open-sourced.