Papers for
video streaming service teams
Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.
Long-term user behavior boosts recommendation accuracy for active users
BehaveRec: When Does Long-Term Behavioral History Help Sequential Recommendation? A Study with Session, History, and Community Signals
Abstract: Sequential recommendation models typically predict a user's next action from recent session interactions, which limits personalization when short-term signals are weak or ambiguous. Rather than assuming that incorporating longer-term history and community signals is universally beneficial, we study when it actually helps. We propose BehaveRec, a three-signal framework combining a causal session transformer, a bidirectional User History Encoder over a 90-day window, and a GraphSAGE module over a user-user graph built from behavioral embedding similarity rather than item co-occurrence; a learned gate blends the three signals per user. On an industrial dataset of 137M sequences from 12.6M users, BehaveRec improves R@5 by +3.2% over SASRec, with a larger-capacity SASRec baseline (more parameters than BehaveRec) still trailing by +2.5%, ruling out capacity as the explanation. More importantly, a user-level stratification by history length reveals a clear dose-response relationship: BehaveRec's advantage is negligible below roughly 10 interactions and grows monotonically with history richness, reaching +0.017 R@5 for users with 101+ events. This pattern is corroborated across one industrial and three public datasets spanning history-rich to history-sparse regimes, where session-only models remain preferable. These headline results, and the resulting deployment threshold, are established for category-level intent prediction; a preliminary, single-run check on the full item-level vocabulary yields a directionally mixed result and is scoped as an open question rather than a claim. We use these results to derive a practical deployment rule -- roughly 20 interactions per user -- for when long-term history and behavioral-graph signals are worth their added complexity. Despite this added complexity, BehaveRec remains lightweight: it uses 5.67M parameters and trains on a single GPU in under two days.
PixelSR improves image super-resolution by balancing detail and structure
PixelSR: Pixel-Space Orthogonal Flow Decoupling for Real-World Image Super-Resolution
Abstract: Latent diffusion models have recently achieved remarkable progress in Real-world Image Super-Resolution (Real-SR). However, existing methods consistently exhibit a persistent seesaw effect: enhancing perceptual realism compromises structural fidelity. This effect, we argue, is not intrinsic to diffusion models, but largely stems from the architectural constraints of prevailing two-stage frameworks. To address this challenge, we propose PixelSR, a novel single-stage Pixel Diffusion Transformer for Real-SR that operates directly in pixel space. Specifically, PixelSR consists of two core designs: Pixel-space Conditional Diffusion and Orthogonal Flow Decoupling. The former establishes an effective pixel-space restoration framework by integrating spatially aligned LR conditioning, visual semantic guidance, and lightweight texture refinement, thereby bypassing VAE compression and enabling end-to-end optimization directly in RGB space. Complementarily, the latter decomposes the asymmetric flow target into a low-rank semantic component and a noise-free orthogonal texture component. By routing these components to specialized branches, it achieves decoupled optimization with reduced mutual interference. Benefiting from these designs, our PixelSR restores perceptually realistic details while faithfully preserving structural content. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PixelSR not only achieves competitive performance, but also effectively mitigates the fidelity--realism seesaw effect.
Screen content videos enhanced by spatial temporal multi scale network
Spatial-Temporal Multi-scale Network for Screen Content Video Quality Enhancement
Abstract: Different from natural videos, Screen Content Videos (SCVs) are characterized by abrupt motion, scene switches, and high-frequency details such as text and graphics. Conventional video enhancement methods, which rely heavily on temporal continuity, often suffer from performance degradation when processing SCVs due to the disruption of temporal correlations. To address these challenges, we propose the Spatial-Temporal Multi-scale Network (STM-Net), a novel framework specifically tailored for compressed SCV enhancement. Our approach integrates three complementary components: a Prior-Guided Spatio-Temporal Dispatcher (PG-STD) that routes input into three parallel streams to avoid feature contamination, a Bidirectional Temporal Feature Extraction (BTFE) module that adaptively handles abrupt transitions without explicit detection, and a Cascaded Multi-scale Feature Distillation (CMFD) module that preserves critical high-frequency details. Experimental results demonstrate that STM-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both objective metrics and subjective visual quality, providing a robust solution for screen content artifacts. Code is available at https://github.com/HUANGZiyin1/STM-Net.
Fastvr restores hd video quality quickly using efficient diffusion models
FastVR: Efficient Streaming Video Restoration with One-Step Diffusion
Abstract: Diffusion-based video restoration recovers realistic details, but its practical deployment is limited by two efficiency bottlenecks: costly VAE encoding and decoding, and the quadratic cost of full self-attention in diffusion transformers (DiTs). This paper presents FastVR, a streaming video restoration framework built on a one-step diffusion model, which delivers strong restoration quality and temporal consistency while processing 1080p video at 11 FPS on a single H20 GPU. To improve inference efficiency, FastVR combines a lightweight VAE with chunk-wise causal attention, which substantially reduces the computational cost. During training, it further adopts velocity consistency regularization and continuous trajectory learning, which improve restoration quality. Extensive experiments show that FastVR is more efficient than the evaluated diffusion baselines while achieving state-of-the-art performance on synthetic and real-world benchmarks. We hope that this work supports further progress in the community.