Compressed Video Aggregator: Content-driven Module for Efficient Micro-Video Recommendation

TL;DR

Introduced Compressed Video Aggregator (CVA), improving recommendation performance on MicroLens with significant training time reduction.

cs.LG 🟡 Intermediate 2026-05-09 4 views
Yang Xiao Huiyuan Chen Kaiyuan Deng Chao Jiang Zinan Ling Ruimeng Ye Fei Wang Xiaolong Ma Bo Hui
video recommendation compression algorithm deep learning multimodal efficient computing

Key Findings

Methodology

CVA aggregates frozen VFM frame embeddings using masked mean pooling to create a semantic anchor, projects it into a compact latent space, and refines the representation with residual self-attention and feedforward blocks. This method effectively reduces computational load.

Key Results

  • On MicroLens, CVA improved HR@10/NDCG@10 by 0.139/0.156 compared to Perceiver IO, reduced training time to 1/33, and GPU memory to 1/250.
  • On the Short-Video dataset, CVA increased HR@10 from 0.346 to 1.433 in the NARM model.
  • Experiments show that semantic resampling is more effective than uniform and random sampling.

Significance

CVA enhances the efficiency and performance of micro-video recommendation systems by reducing video frame redundancy and computational overhead. This research provides a feasible solution for deploying large-scale video recommendation systems, addressing the computational burden of content-based modeling in existing methods.

Technical Contribution

CVA introduces a lightweight compressed video aggregator in video recommendation, significantly reducing computational complexity and achieving efficient video embedding generation through semantic resampling and latent space refinement.

Novelty

CVA uniquely combines semantic resampling with compressed video aggregation, differing from traditional frame-by-frame processing, offering an efficient content-driven video recommendation approach.

Limitations

  • CVA's performance may be affected in scenarios with erroneous titles, as it relies on titles for frame resampling.
  • In cases of extremely long videos, CVA's efficiency advantage may diminish.

Future Work

Future research could explore CVA's application across different video types and platforms, and enhance its robustness in handling erroneous title scenarios.

AI Executive Summary

Micro-video recommendation systems play a crucial role in modern social media, yet existing methods face computational challenges when processing video content. This paper introduces a novel method called Compressed Video Aggregator (CVA), which significantly reduces computational overhead using frozen Visual Foundation Models (VFM) and semantic resampling techniques.

CVA generates semantic anchors through masked mean pooling and refines them in latent space, ultimately producing compact video embeddings. Experimental results demonstrate that CVA excels on both the MicroLens and Short-Video datasets, significantly enhancing recommendation performance while drastically reducing training time and GPU memory usage.

Although CVA has limitations in handling erroneous title scenarios, its contributions to improving recommendation efficiency and performance are noteworthy. Future research could further optimize CVA's robustness and explore its potential across various application scenarios.

Deep Analysis

Background

With the rise of short-video platforms, research on micro-video recommendation systems has become increasingly important. Existing methods often rely on user-video interaction signals, neglecting direct video content modeling. Additionally, the computational cost of processing video content directly is prohibitively high, limiting large-scale system deployment.

Core Problem

Existing video recommendation methods face two critical issues: over-reliance on user interaction signals without directly capturing video semantics, and the high computational cost of directly processing video content, making it challenging to apply on large-scale platforms.

Innovation

CVA's core innovations include: 1) reducing video frame redundancy through semantic resampling; 2) introducing a compressed video aggregator for efficient video embedding generation; 3) leveraging frozen Visual Foundation Models to lower computational costs.

Methodology

  • �� Use CLIP model for semantic resampling to select the most informative frames.
  • �� Utilize frozen VFM to extract frame features, forming a video-level semantic anchor.
  • �� Refine in latent space to generate compact video embeddings.
  • �� Input video embeddings into a sequential recommender for user preference modeling.

Experiments

Experiments were conducted on MicroLens and Short-Video datasets, using metrics like HR@10 and NDCG@10 to evaluate performance. Baselines included Perceiver IO and parameter-matched MLP. Ablation studies validated the effectiveness of semantic resampling.

Results

On MicroLens, CVA improved HR@10 by 0.139 over Perceiver IO, with training time reduced to 1/33. On the Short-Video dataset, CVA significantly boosted HR@10 in the NARM model.

Applications

CVA can be applied to large-scale short-video platform recommendation systems, particularly in scenarios with limited computational resources. Its efficient computational performance makes it advantageous for real-time recommendations.

Limitations & Outlook

CVA's performance may decline when handling erroneous title videos. Additionally, its efficiency advantage may diminish in scenarios with extremely long videos. Future research could explore methods to enhance its robustness.

Plain Language Accessible to non-experts

Imagine you're in a library looking for books. Traditional methods are like flipping through every page of every book, time-consuming and laborious. CVA is like a librarian who picks the most relevant pages based on the book title and quickly summarizes the book's essence. This way, CVA saves time and improves recommendation accuracy. This method is particularly suitable for processing large amounts of video content in a short time.

ELI14 Explained like you're 14

Imagine you're playing a video game, and you need to quickly find the most interesting videos. Traditional methods are like watching every video one by one, way too slow! CVA is like a super helper that picks the most exciting clips based on the video title and tells you which video is worth watching. This way, you can find great videos faster!

Glossary

Compressed Video Aggregator

A lightweight module for generating video embeddings through semantic resampling and latent space refinement.

Used in this paper to enhance micro-video recommendation efficiency.

Semantic Resampling

Reduces video redundancy by selecting the most informative frames.

Used to optimize frame selection and improve recommendation performance.

Visual Foundation Model

Pre-trained visual model for extracting video frame features.

Used in CVA to generate video-level semantic anchors.

Masked Mean Pooling

An aggregation method that averages important features using a mask.

Used to create a semantic anchor for videos.

Residual Self-Attention

A network structure for refining video representations in latent space.

Used in CVA to enhance video embedding quality.

Open Questions Unanswered questions from this research

  • 1 How to optimize CVA's performance without titles or with erroneous titles?
  • 2 How to enhance CVA's efficiency when handling ultra-long videos?
  • 3 How to validate CVA's generalizability across different platforms?

Applications

Immediate Applications

Short Video Recommendation

CVA can be used in short-video platform recommendation systems to quickly generate efficient video embeddings and improve recommendation quality.

Long-term Vision

Large-scale Video Processing

CVA's efficiency makes it a promising tool for large-scale video processing and analysis in the future.

Abstract

We propose \textbf{Compressed Video Aggregator} (CVA), a lightweight micro-video recommendation module that decouples video information from preference learning. CVA first summarizes frozen VFM frame embeddings into a semantic-consensus anchor through masked mean pooling, projects this anchor into a compact latent space, and refines the projected representation with residual self-attention and feedforward blocks before producing a single video embedding for the recommender. Due to the redundancy in the frame count of the original benchmark and its overly coarse sampling, we used titles to re-select key frames based on CLIP. Experiments on MicroLens and Short-Video show consistent gains with orders-of-magnitude reductions in training time and GPU memory, and re-selected frames can further enhance the performance of all methods, including CVA. Furthermore, we also discussed the impact of several scenarios involving erroneous titles on our method.

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