Author name cluster

Boyu Chen

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

10 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

G-UBS: Towards Robust Understanding of Implicit Feedback via Group-Aware User Behavior Simulation

Boyu Chen
Siran Chen
Zhengrong Yue
Kainan Yan
Chenyun Yu
Beibei Kong
Lei Cheng
Chengxiang Zhuo

User feedback is critical for refining recommendation systems, yet explicit feedback (e.g., likes or dislikes) remains scarce in practice. As a more feasible alternative, inferring user preferences from massive implicit feedback has shown great potential (e.g., a user quickly skipping a recommended video usually indicates disinterest). Unfortunately, implicit feedback is often noisy: a user might skip a video due to accidental clicks or other reasons, rather than disliking it. Such noise can easily misjudge user interests, thereby undermining recommendation performance. To address this issue, we propose a novel Group-aware User Behavior Simulation (G-UBS) paradigm, which leverages contextual guidance from relevant user groups, enabling robust and in-depth interpretation of implicit feedback for individual users. Specifically, G-UBS operates via two key agents. First, the User Group Manager (UGM) effectively clusters users to generate group profiles utilizing a ``summarize-cluster-reflect" workflow based on LLMs. Second, the User Feedback Modeler (UFM) employs an innovative group-aware reinforcement learning approach, where each user is guided by the associated group profiles during the reinforcement learning process, allowing UFM to robustly and deeply examine the reasons behind implicit feedback. To assess our G-UBS paradigm, we have constructed a Video Recommendation benchmark with Implicit Feedback (IF-VR). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-modal benchmark for implicit feedback evaluation in video recommendation, encompassing 15k users, 25k videos, and 933k interaction records with implicit feedback. Extensive experiments on IF-VR demonstrate that G-UBS significantly outperforms mainstream LLMs and MLLMs, with a 4.0% higher proportion of videos achieving a play rate > 30% and 14.9% higher reasoning accuracy on IF-VR.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

PaSE: Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-based Equilibrium for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis

Kang He
Boyu Chen
Yuzhe Ding
Fei Li
Chong Teng
Donghong Ji

Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) seeks to understand human emotions by integrating textual, acoustic, and visual signals. Although multimodal fusion is designed to leverage cross-modal complementarity, real-world scenarios often exhibit modality competition: dominant modalities tend to overshadow weaker ones, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose PaSE, a novel Prototype-aligned Calibration and Shapley-optimized Equilibrium framework, which enhances collaboration while explicitly mitigating modality competition. PaSE first applies Prototype-guided Calibration Learning (PCL) to refine unimodal representations and align them through an Entropic Optimal Transport mechanism that ensures semantic consistency. To further stabilize optimization, we introduce a Dual-Phase Optimization strategy. A prototype-gated fusion module is first used to extract shared representations, followed by Shapley-based Gradient Modulation (SGM), which adaptively adjusts gradients according to the contribution of each modality. Extensive experiments on IEMOCAP, MOSI, and MOSEI confirm that PaSE achieves the superior performance and effectively alleviates modality competition.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

PathRAG: Pruning Graph-based Retrieval Augmented Generation with Relational Paths

Boyu Chen
Zirui Guo
Zidan Yang
Yuluo Chen
Junze Chen
Zhenghao Liu
Chuan Shi
Cheng Yang

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves the response quality of large language models (LLMs) by retrieving knowledge from external databases. Typical RAG approaches split the text database into chunks, organizing them in a flat structure for efficient searches. To better capture the inherent dependencies and structured relationships across the text database, researchers propose to organize textual information into an indexing graph, known as graph-based RAG. However, we argue that the limitation of current graph-based RAG methods lies in the redundancy of the retrieved information, rather than its insufficiency. Moreover, previous methods use a flat structure to organize retrieved information within the prompts, leading to suboptimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose PathRAG, which retrieves key relational paths from the indexing graph, and converts these paths into textual form for prompting LLMs. Specifically, PathRAG effectively reduces redundant information with flow-based pruning, while guiding LLMs to generate more logical and coherent responses with path-based prompting. Experimental results show that PathRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across six datasets and five evaluation dimensions.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

VideoChat-A1: Thinking with Long Videos by Chain-of-Shot Reasoning

Zikang Wang
Boyu Chen
Zhengrong Yue
Yi Wang
Yu Qiao
Limin Wang
Yali Wang

Recent advances in video understanding have been driven by MLLMs. But these MLLMs are good at analyzing short videos, while suffering from difficulties in understanding videos with a longer context. To address this difficulty, several agent paradigms have recently been proposed, using MLLMs as agents for retrieving extra contextual knowledge in a long video. However, most existing agents ignore the key fact that a long video is composed with multiple shots, i.e., to answer the user question from a long video, it is critical to deeply understand its relevant shots like human. Without such insight, these agents often mistakenly find redundant even noisy temporal context, restricting their capacity for long video understanding. To fill this gap, we propose VideoChat-A1, a novel long video agent paradigm. Different from the previous works, our VideoChat-A1 can deeply think with long videos, via a distinct chain-of-shot reasoning paradigm. More specifically, it can progressively select the relevant shots of user question, and look into these shots in a coarse-to-fine partition. By multi-modal reasoning along the shot chain, VideoChat-A1 can effectively mimic step-by-step human thinking process, allowing the interactive discovery of preferable temporal context for thoughtful understanding in long videos. Extensive experiments show that, VideoChat-A1 achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the mainstream long video QA benchmarks, e.g., it achieves 77.0 on VideoMME(w/ subs) and 70.1 on EgoSchema, outperforming its strong baselines (e.g., InternVL2.5-8B and InternVideo2.5-8B), by up to 10.1% and 6.2%. Compared to leading closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro, VideoChat-A1 offers competitive accuracy, but only with 7% input frames and 12% inference time on average.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

VRAgent-R1: Boosting Video Recommendation with MLLM-based Agents via Reinforcement Learning

Siran Chen
Boyu Chen
Yuxiao Luo
Chenyun Yu
Yi Ouyang
Lei Cheng
Chengxiang Zhuo
Zang Li

Large language model (LLM) agents have emerged as a promising solution for enhancing recommendation systems via user simulation. However, existing studies predominantly resort to prompt-based simulation using frozen LLMs, which frequently results in suboptimal item modeling and user preference learning, thereby ultimately constraining recommendation performance. To address these challenges, we introduce VRAgent-R1, a novel agent-based paradigm that incorporates human-like intelligence in user simulation. Specifically, VRAgent-R1 comprises two distinct agents: the Item Perception (IP) Agent and the User Simulation (US) Agent, designed for interactive user-item modeling. Firstly, the IP Agent emulates human-like progressive thinking based on MLLMs, effectively capturing hidden recommendation semantics in videos. With a more comprehensive multimodal content understanding provided by the IP Agent, the video recommendation system is equipped to provide higher-quality candidate items. Subsequently, the US Agent refines the recommended video sets based on in-depth chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and achieves better alignment with real user preferences through reinforcement learning. Experimental results on a large-scale video recommendation benchmark MicroLens-100k have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed VRAgent-R1 method, e.g., the IP Agent achieves a 6.0% improvement in NDCG@10, while the US Agent shows approximately 45.0% higher accuracy in user decision simulation compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

When Top-ranked Recommendations Fail: Modeling Multi-Granular Negative Feedback for Explainable and Robust Video Recommendation

Siran Chen
Boyu Chen
Chenyun Yu
Yi Ouyang
Lei Cheng
Chengxiang Zhuo
Zang Li
Yali Wang

Existing video recommendation systems, relying mainly on ID-based embedding mapping and collaborative filtering, often fail to capture in-depth video content semantics. Moreover, most struggle to address biased user behaviors (e.g., accidental clicks, fast skips), leading to inaccurate interest modeling and frequent negative feedback in top recommendations with unclear causes. To tackle this issue, we collect real-world user video-watching sequences, annotate the reasons for users' dislikes, and construct a benchmark dataset for personalized explanations. We then introduce the Agentic Explainable Negative Feedback (ENF) framework, which integrates three core components: (1) the Profile Agent, extracting behavioral cues from users' historical data to derive psychological and personality profiles; (2) the Video Agent, performing comprehensive multimodal video analysis; and (3) the Reason Agent, synthesizing information from the other two agents to predict user engagement and generate explanations. Additionally, we propose the S-GRPO algorithm, enabling the model to progressively address complex tasks during reinforcement fine-tuning. Experimental results on the collected dataset show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in negative feedback prediction and reason explanation. Notably, it achieves an 8.6% improvement over GPT-4o in reason classification. Deployment on the business platform further validates its benefits: increasing average user watch time by 6.2%, reducing the fast-skip rate by 9.4%, and significantly enhancing user satisfaction.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Balanced Active Inference

Boyu Chen
Zhixiang Zhou
Liuhua Peng
Zhonglei Wang

Limited labeling budget severely impedes data-driven research, such as medical analysis, remote sensing and population census, and active inference is a solution to this problem. Prior works utilizing independent sampling have achieved improvements over uniform sampling, but its insufficient usage of available information undermines its statistical efficiency. In this paper, we propose balanced active inference, a novel algorithm that incorporates balanced constraints based on model uncertainty utilizing the cube method for label selection. Under regularity conditions, we establish its asymptotic properties and also prove that the statistical efficiency of the proposed algorithm is higher than its alternatives. Various numerical experiments, including regression and classification in both synthetic setups and real data analysis, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms its alternatives while guaranteeing nominal coverage.

PDF Details

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Blend the Separated: Mixture of Synergistic Experts for Data-Scarcity Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

Xinlong Zhai
Chunchen Wang
Ruijia Wang
Jiazheng Kang
Shujie Li
Boyu Chen
Tengfei Ma
Zikai Zhou

Drug-target interaction prediction (DTI) is essential in various applications including drug discovery and clinical application. There are two perspectives of input data widely used in DTI prediction: Intrinsic data represents how drugs or targets are constructed, and extrinsic data represents how drugs or targets are related to other biological entities. However, any of the two perspectives of input data can be scarce for some drugs or targets, especially for those unpopular or newly discovered. Furthermore, ground-truth labels for specific interaction types can also be scarce. Therefore, we propose the first method to tackle DTI prediction under input data and/or label scarcity. To make our model functional when only one perspective of input data is available, we design two separate experts to process intrinsic and extrinsic data respectively and fuse them adaptively according to different samples. Furthermore, to make the two perspectives complement each other and remedy label scarcity, two experts synergize with each other in a mutually supervised way to exploit the enormous unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on 3 real-world datasets under different extents of input data scarcity and/or label scarcity demonstrate our model outperforms states of the art significantly and steadily, with a maximum improvement of 53.53%. We also test our model without any data scarcity and it still outperforms current methods.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

JEN-1 Composer: A Unified Framework for High-Fidelity Multi-Track Music Generation

Yao Yao
Peike Li
Boyu Chen
Alex Wang

With rapid advances in generative artificial intelligence, the text-to-music synthesis task has emerged as a promising direction for music generation. Nevertheless, achieving precise control over multi-track generation remains an open challenge. While existing models excel in directly generating multi-track mix, their limitations become evident when it comes to composing individual tracks and integrating them in a controllable manner. This departure from the typical workflows of professional composers hinders the ability to refine details in specific tracks. To address this gap, we propose JEN-1 Composer, a unified framework designed to efficiently model marginal, conditional, and joint distributions over multi-track music using a single model. Building upon an audio latent diffusion model, JEN-1 Composer extends the versatility of multi-track music generation. We introduce a progressive curriculum training strategy, which gradually escalates the difficulty of training tasks while ensuring the model's generalization ability and facilitating smooth transitions between different scenarios. During inference, users can iteratively generate and select music tracks, thus incrementally composing entire musical pieces in accordance with the Human-AI co-composition workflow. Our approach demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in controllable and high-fidelity multi-track music synthesis, marking a significant advancement in interactive AI-assisted music creation.

PDF Details DOI

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

JEN-1 DreamStyler: Customized Musical Concept Learning via Pivotal Parameters Tuning

Boyu Chen
Peike Li
Yao Yao
Alex Wang

Large models for text-to-music generation have achieved significant progress, facilitating the creation of high-quality and varied musical compositions from provided text prompts. However, input text prompts may not precisely capture user requirements, particularly when the objective is to generate music that embodies a specific concept derived from a designated reference collection. In this paper, we propose a novel method for customized text-to-music generation, which can capture the concept from a two-minute reference music and generate a new piece of music conforming to the concept. We achieve this by fine-tuning a pretrained text-to-music model using the reference music. However, directly fine-tuning all parameters leads to overfitting issues. To address this problem, we propose a Pivotal Parameters Tuning method that enables the model to assimilate the new concept while preserving its original generative capabilities. Additionally, we identify a potential concept conflict when introducing multiple concepts into the pretrained model. We present a concept enhancement strategy to distinguish multiple concepts, enabling the fine-tuned model to generate music incorporating either individual or multiple concepts simultaneously. We also introduce a new dataset and evaluation protocol for this task. Our proposed JEN1-DreamStyler outperforms several baselines in both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.

PDF Details DOI