Accurate customer LifeTime Value (LTV) predictions are of critical importance for evaluating the efficiency of customer management strategies, which could enhance advertising placement for better decision-making in ad systems. However, existing solutions for LTV prediction usually rely on determined historical sequence data, which are challenging to apply in Baidu ads due to two unique features including (i) uncertain behavior sequence of customers caused by dynamic advertising strategies, (ii) complex and long-tail distribution of LTV caused by continuous customer behaviors and unique business pattern of search and news feed ads in Baidu. To incorporate these new factors, we propose an Uncertain behavior Sequence modeling framework to predict customer LifeTime Value (USE-LTV), where we (i) utilize a transformer module to extract uncertain sequence features, and develop a dynamic weight mechanism to capture differentiated information under uncertain behavior sequence, (ii) design an continuous loss function tailored to the real-world long-tail exponential LTV distribution in Baidu ads. We extensively evaluate our method based on the industrial-scale real-world data from Baidu, one of the world's largest ads platform, demonstrate that USE-LTV achieves 11.64% of NMAE improvement for a-year LTV compared to the state-of-the-art method.
The paper introduces White Rabbit, a novel method for discovering high-quality, meaningful paths between entities in online Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Traditional exploration methods, such as SPARQL endpoints, struggle due to the large size and complexity of KGs. The proposed approach addresses this by introducing the problem of context-aware path finding, ensuring that retrieved paths are coherent and involve highly relevant entities. White Rabbit uses embeddings to score entity neighbors, a queue-based prioritization mechanism, and an iterative refinement process to improve efficiency and relevance. The system is demonstrated live, allowing participants to test it and compare it against baseline methods (structural approaches, pretrained embeddings, and large language models). Results show that White Rabbit enhances both the efficiency of exploration and the quality of discovered paths.
Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) in remote sensing (RS) has shown remarkable generalization capabilities across diverse RS imagery through alignment between image and text embeddings. Such methods have further improved detection performance by incorporating additional scene-level context from both visual and textual domains. However, existing methods approximate scene context by simply averaging the text embeddings of the image's object labels, which is insufficient to capture the rich linguistic context present in RS scenes. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Feature-Aligned Scene Encoding (FASE), which constructs comprehensive scene representations through high-quality captions generated by a specialized vision-language model. Our Feature Alignment Module (FAM) creates a robust scene representation by fusing domain-specific caption embeddings with general text features through dual-branch fusion with gating and cross-attention. This resulting representation then facilitates the alignment with visual features. By utilizing enhanced scene encoding only during training, our method internalizes rich contextual knowledge without increasing inference complexity. Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of our approach for OVD in RS.
Network resilience refers to the ability of a network to maintain its functionality despite perturbations, where resilience/robustness is shown when a substantial proportion of its nodes remain engaged even under changes. Such phenomenon is common in real-world networks, such as computing power networks. Previous works demonstrate that the coreness of a user/node effectively captures the dynamics of user engagement. However, most existing works only consider changes in a single coreness value and thus fail to measure the overall network resilience. Subsequent works are either inefficient or do not consider coreness-decreased scenario. In this paper, we propose and study the collapsed follower maximization problem, aiming to maximize the number of coreness-decreased vertices by finding a group collapser (collapsing a set of vertices) with a given budget. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and W[2]-hard parameterized by the budget b. To address the problem, we first present a Greedy algorithm that iteratively finds the best collapser in each of the budget b iterations. To further optimize the Greedy algorithm, we propose GreedyOpt, which leverages the shell component structure to accelerate the computation of follower for one collapser and prune the search space. Extensive experimental results on 8 real-world datasets show that the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithms.
