Jianghong Ma

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure

• Jingmao Zhang
• Zhiting Zhao
• Yunqi Lin
• Jianghong Ma
• Tianjun Wei
• Haijun Zhang
• Xiaofeng Zhang

Beyond user-item modeling, item-to-item relationships are increasingly used to enhance recommendation. However, common methods largely rely on co-occurrence, making them prone to item popularity bias and user attributes, which degrades embedding quality and performance. Meanwhile, although diversity is acknowledged as a key aspect of recommendation quality, existing research offers limited attention to it, with a notable lack of causal perspectives and theoretical grounding. To address these challenges, we propose Cadence: Diversity Recommendation via Causal Deconfounding of Co-purchase Relations and Counterfactual Exposure—a plug-and-play framework built upon LightGCN as the backbone, primarily designed to enhance recommendation diversity while preserving accuracy. First, we compute the Unbiased Asymmetric Co-purchase Relationship (UACR) between items—excluding item popularity and user attributes—to construct a deconfounded directed item graph, with an aggregation mechanism to refine embeddings. Second, we leverage UACR to identify diverse categories of items that exhibit strong causal relevance to a user's interacted items but have not yet been engaged with. We then simulate their behavior under high-exposure scenarios, thereby significantly enhancing recommendation diversity while preserving relevance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art diversity models in both diversity and accuracy, and further validates its effectiveness, transferability, and efficiency over baselines.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Satellite-Text-Prompted Large Language Model for Photovoltaic Power Forecasting

• Pengfei Jia
• Jianghong Ma
• Baoquan Zhang
• Kenghong Lin
• Xinyu Zhang
• Chuyao Luo
• Xutao Li
• Yunming Ye

Photovoltaic (PV) power forecasting is critical for the operation of solar power plants and the coordination of energy within power grids. This work aims to predict future PV power time series by leveraging multimodal data. While recent studies have incorporated numerical modalities such as satellite image sequences and numerical weather prediction (NWP) time series, they often overlook textual modalities—such as the spatio-temporal context of PV plants—and the potential of pretrained large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we build upon existing numerical inputs and further explore the use of spatio-temporal text prompts, generated based on plant coordinates and forecast start time, to enhance the forecasting process. We propose PV-LLM, a satellite-text-prompted framework that integrates a pretrained LLM to improve PV power forecasting. The framework consists of three key components: Text Prompt Construction, Modality-Specific Encoding, and Adaptive Prompt Tuning. First, the Text Prompt Construction module generates spatio-temporal prompts that offer high-level semantic guidance. Next, the Modality-Specific Encoding module encodes each modality according to its unique characteristics, capturing modality-specific patterns while managing varying context lengths. Finally, the Adaptive Prompt Tuning module fine-tunes the LLM to integrate multimodal embeddings, while an adaptive gating mechanism retains its pretrained knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on a real-world dataset containing multiple PV plants. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

SGMT: Social Generating with Multiview-Guided Tuning In Recommender Systems

• Jianghong Ma
• Changran He
• Dezhao Yang
• Tianjun Wei
• Haijun Zhang
• Xiaofeng Zhang

The sparsity of user–item interactions remains a fundamental obstacle in collaborative filtering, limiting the ability of Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based recommender systems to capture high-order user relationships without incurring over-smoothing and computational overhead. Existing social recommendation approaches mitigate this by incorporating social networks, yet most rely on explicit ties and fail to construct informative links in their absence. Meanwhile, contrastive learning (CL) has shown promise in improving representation quality, but current view generation strategies, augmentation-based for robustness and nonaugmentation-based for semantic fidelity, are seldom combined, leaving their complementary potential underexplored. We propose Social Generating with Multiview-guided Tuning (SGMT), a unified framework that addresses both challenges. First, an interest-aware social generation mechanism constructs synthetic user–user links from shared interaction patterns, theoretically shown to compress collaborative paths and uncover latent high-order relations. Second, we present two complementary CL modules, Noise-augmented View and Semantic-explored View, which we theoretically prove to preferentially enhance uniformity and alignment, respectively, two fundamental objectives in CL. Experiments on three real-world datasets show that SGMT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating both the theoretical analysis and the practical efficacy of our model.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

CoDeR: Counterfactual Demand Reasoning for Sequential Recommendation

• Shuai Tang
• Sitao Lin
• Jianghong Ma
• Xiaofeng Zhang

Sequential recommendation systems aim to predict the next item based on users' historical interactions. While traditional methods focus on learning feature representations or user preferences, they often struggle with detecting subtle demand shifts in short sequences, especially when these shifts are obscured by noise or biases. To address these issues, we propose CoDeR (Counterfactual Demand Reasoning), a novel framework designed to handle demand shifts in sequential recommendations with greater precision. CoDeR features two key modules: (1) the User Demand Extraction module, which utilizes self-attention mechanisms and demand graphs to identify and model demand shifts from minimal user interactions; and (2) the Counterfactual Demand Reasoning module, which employs causal effect analysis and backdoor adjustment techniques to distinguish true demand shifts from noisy or biased signals. Our approach represents the first application of counterfactual reasoning to sequential recommendation systems. Comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that CoDeR significantly outperforms existing baselines.

AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

FashionTailor: Controllable Clothing Editing for Human Images with Appearance Preserving

• Jie Hou
• Jianghong Ma
• Xiangyu Mu
• Haijun Zhang
• Zhao Zhang

The garment structure serves as a crucial medium for expressing the designer's creative vision and showcasing the distinctive character of clothing items. Effective editing of garment structure in fashion images allows for an advanced preview of the design, accelerating the process of garment customization to meet individualized requirements. Although large-scale diffusion models have demonstrated impressive image generation and editing capabilities, no efforts have been made to exploit their potential in part-level editing of images. Unlike previous research, we define a clothing structure editing (CSE) task aimed at accurately editing the local structure of human-centered clothing images through simple instruction-based prompts while maintaining the consistency of clothing appearance. Specifically, this paper develops a new controllable triple-flow framework for structure editing named FashionTailor. An additional network called ClothingNet is proposed to extract the clothing details to address the rigid constraints of the original garment structure. Then, we propose a semantic-refined module to extract the semantic understanding of the source image and adaptively focus on the part to be edited. We also design a cross-blend attention mechanism to integrate fine-grained clothing features to guarantee precise alignment between appearance and target structure features. In addition, a garment structure dataset called StructureFashion has been collated, wherein each item of clothing is represented by multiple photos with diverse structure characteristics, containing over six million pairs. Finally, our method supports editing the structure of multiple parts on a garment simultaneously. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method for editing part-level human images in StructureFashion dataset and real-scenarios.

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

RocketEval: Efficient automated LLM evaluation via grading checklist

• Tianjun Wei
• Wei Wen
• Ruizhi Qiao
• Xing Sun 0001
• Jianghong Ma

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in diverse and challenging scenarios is essential to align them with human preferences. To mitigate the prohibitive costs associated with human evaluations, utilizing a powerful LLM as a judge has emerged as a favored approach. Nevertheless, this methodology encounters several challenges, including substantial expenses, concerns regarding privacy and security, and reproducibility. In this paper, we propose a straightforward, replicable, and accurate automated evaluation method by leveraging a lightweight LLM as the judge, named RocketEval. Initially, we identify that the performance disparity between lightweight and powerful LLMs in evaluation tasks primarily stems from their ability to conduct comprehensive analyses, which is not easily enhanced through techniques such as chain-of-thought reasoning. By reframing the evaluation task as a multi-faceted Q\&A using an instance-specific checklist, we demonstrate that the limited judgment accuracy of lightweight LLMs is largely attributes to high uncertainty and positional bias. To address these challenges, we introduce an automated evaluation process grounded in checklist grading, which is designed to accommodate a variety of scenarios and questions. This process encompasses the creation of checklists, the grading of these checklists by lightweight LLMs, and the reweighting of checklist items to align with the supervised annotations. Our experiments carried out on the automated evaluation benchmarks, MT-Bench and WildBench datasets, reveal that RocketEval, when using $\textit{Gemma-2-2B}$ as the judge, achieves a high correlation (0.965) with human preferences, which is comparable to $\textit{GPT-4o}$. Moreover, RocketEval provides a cost reduction exceeding 50-fold for large-scale evaluation and comparison scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Joinn99/RocketEval-ICLR.

EAAI Journal 2024 Journal Article

A hybrid genetic-fuzzy ant colony optimization algorithm for automatic K-means clustering in urban global positioning system

• Xiaojuan Ran
• Naret Suyaroj
• Worawit Tepsan
• Jianghong Ma
• Xiangbing Zhou
• Wu Deng

TIST Journal 2024 Journal Article

Personalized Fashion Recommendations for Diverse Body Shapes with Contrastive Multimodal Cross-Attention Network

• Jianghong Ma
• Huiyue Sun
• Dezhao Yang
• Haijun Zhang

Fashion recommendation has become a prominent focus in the realm of online shopping, with various tasks being explored to enhance the customer experience. Recent research has particularly emphasized fashion recommendation based on body shapes, yet a critical aspect of incorporating multimodal data relevance has been overlooked. In this paper, we present the Contrastive Multimodal Cross-Attention Network, a novel approach specifically designed for fashion recommendation catering to diverse body shapes. By incorporating multimodal representation learning and leveraging contrastive learning techniques, our method effectively captures both inter- and intra-sample relationships, resulting in improved accuracy in fashion recommendations tailored to individual body types. Additionally, we propose a locality-aware cross-attention module to align and understand the local preferences between body shapes and clothing items, thus enhancing the matching process. Experimental results conducted on a diverse dataset demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance achieved by our approach, reinforcing its potential to significantly enhance the personalized online shopping experience for consumers with varying body shapes and preferences.