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Xiangmin Zhou

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6 papers

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AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

De-collapsing User Intent: Adaptive Diffusion Augmentation with Mixture-of-Experts for Sequential Recommendation

Xiaoxi Cui
Chao Zhao
Yurong Cheng
Xiangmin Zhou

Sequential recommendation (SR) aims to predict users' next action based on their historical behavior, and is widely adopted by a number of platforms. The performance of SR models relies on rich interaction data. However, in real-world scenarios, many users only have a few historical interactions, leading to the problem of data sparsity. Data sparsity not only leads to model overfitting on sparse sequences, but also hinders the model’s ability to capture the underlying hierarchy of user intents. This results in misinterpreting the user's true intents and recommending irrelevant items. Existing data augmentation methods attempt to mitigate overfitting by generating relevant and varied data. However, they overlook the problem of reconstructing the user's intent hierarchy, which is lost in sparse data. Consequently, the augmented data often fails to align with the user's true intents, potentially leading to misguided recommendations. To address this, we propose the Adaptive Diffusion Augmentation for Recommendation (ADARec) framework. Critically, instead of using a diffusion model as a black-box generator, we use its entire step-wise denoising trajectory to reconstruct a user's intent hierarchy from a single sparse sequence. To ensure both efficiency and effectiveness, our framework adaptively determines the required augmentation depth for each sequence and employs a specialized mixture-of-experts architecture to decouple coarse- and fine-grained intents. Experiments show ADARec outperforms state-of-the-art methods on standard benchmarks and on sparse sequences, demonstrating its ability to reconstruct hierarchical intent representations from sparse data.

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TIST Journal 2025 Journal Article

Adaptive Intention Learning for Session-Based Recommendation

Qingbo Zhang
Xiaochun Yang
Hao Chen
Bin Wang
Zhu Sun
Xiangmin Zhou

In recent years, session-based recommender systems (SRSs) have emerged as a significant research focus within the recommendation field. Capturing user intentions to infer user interest accordingly has proven to be effective in enhancing the accuracy of SRSs. However, existing techniques assume that all sessions have the same number of intentions or that the items in one category belonging to the same session reflect the same intention. In real applications, such as e-commerce, sessions may have different numbers of intentions, and the same type of items in a session may correspond to different intentions. As a result, existing techniques cannot guarantee high-quality user interest prediction. In this article, we propose a novel Adaptive Intention Learning Network (AILN) to capture an adaptive number of intentions for each session, thereby enhancing the accuracy of user interest inference. Specifically, we design an intention evaluation network (IEN) to evaluate whether a subsequence of a session corresponds to a valid intention, and an intention generation network (IGN) to learn the representation of a valid intention. By checking each subsequence of a session, IEN and IGN enable the incremental learning of a session-specific intention hierarchy (IH) to store valid intentions of the session. To reduce the cost of building the IH, we propose a pruning strategy that exploits the intention validity to avoid unnecessary evaluation. The representative intentions are selected from IH and input into a designed interest predictor to infer the user interest. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed AILN.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Reverse Distribution Based Video Moment Retrieval for Effective Bias Elimination

Lingdu Kong
Xiaochun Yang
Tieying Li
Bin Wang
Xiangmin Zhou

Video Moment Retrieval (VMR) aims to identify a temporal segment in an untrimmed video that best matches a given textual query. Bias in VMR is a critical issue, where the model achieves favorable results even if disregarding the video input. Existing evaluation methods, such as Resplitting, have attempted to address bias by creating out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. However, these methods provide an incomplete definition of bias and do not quantify bias. To this end, we provide a comprehensive definition of bias in VMR, encompassing both data bias and model bias. Besides, our evaluation metrics can analyze the magnitude of these biases better. To address both data and model biases comprehensively, we introduce Reverse Distribution based VMR (ReDis-VMR). This novel approach dynamically generates datasets with inverse distributions tailored to different models based on Gaussian kernel estimation. As a result, it enables a more accurate evaluation of model performance. Building on ReDis-VMR, we further propose the Dynamic Expandable Adjustment (DEA) pipeline. DEA incrementally expands the model structure to enhance its focus on video and text features, and it incorporates a fair loss to minimize the influence of concentrated data distributions. The experimental results on bias ratio demonstrate that our ReDis method achieves state-of-the-art performance in bias elimination, while the results on moment retrieval confirm the effectiveness of our DEA framework across three evaluation methods, two datasets, and three baselines.

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TIST Journal 2024 Journal Article

Responsible Recommendation Services with Blockchain Empowered Asynchronous Federated Learning

Waqar Ali
Rajesh Kumar
Xiangmin Zhou
Jie Shao

Privacy and trust are highly demanding in practical recommendation engines. Although Federated Learning (FL) has significantly addressed privacy concerns, commercial operators are still worried about several technical challenges while bringing FL into production. In addition, classical FL has several intrinsic operational limitations such as single-point failure, data and model tampering, and heterogenic clients participating in the FL process. To address these challenges in practical recommenders, we propose a responsible recommendation generation framework based on blockchain-empowered asynchronous FL that can be adopted for any model-based recommender system. In standard FL settings, we build an additional aggregation layer in which multiple trusted nodes guided by a mediator component perform gradient aggregation to achieve an optimal model locally in a parallel fashion. The mediator partitions users into K clusters, and each cluster is represented by a cluster head. Once a cluster gets semi-global convergence, the cluster head transmits model gradients to the FL server for global aggregation. In addition the trusted cluster heads are responsible to submit the converged semi-global model to a blockchain to ensure tamper resilience. In our settings, an additional mediator component works like an independent observer that monitors the performance of each cluster head, updates a reward score, and records it into a digital ledger. Finally, evaluation results on three diversified benchmarks illustrate that the recommendation performance on selected measures is considerably comparable with the standard and federated version of a well-known neural collaborative filtering recommender.

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AAAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Soft Target-Enhanced Matching Framework for Deep Entity Matching

Wenzhou Dou
Derong Shen
Xiangmin Zhou
Tiezheng Nie
Yue Kou
Hang Cui
Ge Yu

Deep Entity Matching (EM) is one of the core research topics in data integration. Typical existing works construct EM models by training deep neural networks (DNNs) based on the training samples with onehot labels. However, these sharp supervision signals of onehot labels harm the generalization of EM models, causing them to overfit the training samples and perform badly in unseen datasets. To solve this problem, we first propose that the challenge of training a well-generalized EM model lies in achieving the compromise between fitting the training samples and imposing regularization, i.e., the bias-variance tradeoff. Then, we propose a novel Soft Target-EnhAnced Matching (Steam) framework, which exploits the automatically generated soft targets as label-wise regularizers to constrain the model training. Specifically, Steam regards the EM model trained in previous iteration as a virtual teacher and takes its softened output as the extra regularizer to train the EM model in the current iteration. As such, Steam effectively calibrates the obtained EM model, achieving the bias-variance tradeoff without any additional computational cost. We conduct extensive experiments over open datasets and the results show that our proposed Steam outperforms the state-of-the-art EM approaches in terms of effectiveness and label efficiency.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Bi-CMR: Bidirectional Reinforcement Guided Hashing for Effective Cross-Modal Retrieval

Tieying Li
Xiaochun Yang
Bin Wang
Chong Xi
Hanzhong Zheng
Xiangmin Zhou

Cross-modal hashing has attracted considerable attention for large-scale multimodal data. Recent supervised cross-modal hashing methods using multi-label networks utilize the semantics of multi-labels to enhance retrieval accuracy, where label hash codes are learned independently. However, all these methods assume that label annotations reliably reflect the relevance between their corresponding instances, which is not true in real applications. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Bidirectional Reinforcement Guided Hashing for Effective Cross-Modal Retrieval (Bi-CMR), which exploits a bidirectional learning to relieve the negative impact of this assumption. Specifically, in the forward learning procedure, we highlight the representative labels and learn the reinforced multi-label hash codes by intra-modal semantic information, and further adjust similarity matrix. In the backward learning procedure, the reinforced multi-label hash codes and adjusted similarity matrix are used to guide the matching of instances. We construct two datasets with explicit relevance labels that reflect the semantic relevance of instance pairs based on two benchmark datasets. The Bi-CMR is evaluated by conducting extensive experiments over these two datasets. Experimental results prove the superiority of Bi-CMR over four state-of-the-art methods in terms of effectiveness.

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