Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Exposure-Aware Recommendation using Contextual Bandits

Exposure bias is a well-known issue in recommender systems where items and suppliers are not equally represented in the recommendation results. This is especially problematic when bias is amplified over time as a few items (e.g., popular ones) are repeatedly over-represented in recommendation lists and users' interactions with those items will amplify bias towards those items over time resulting in a feedback loop. This issue has been extensively studied in the literature on model-based or neighborhood-based recommendation algorithms, but less work has been done on online recommendation models, such as those based on top-K contextual bandits, where recommendation models are dynamically updated with ongoing user feedback. In this paper, we study exposure bias in a class of well-known contextual bandit algorithms known as Linear Cascading Bandits. We analyze these algorithms on their ability to handle exposure bias and provide a fair representation for items in the recommendation results. Our analysis reveals that these algorithms tend to amplify exposure disparity among items over time. In particular, we observe that these algorithms do not properly adapt to the feedback provided by the users and frequently recommend certain items even when those items are not selected by users. To mitigate this bias, we propose an Exposure-Aware (EA) reward model that updates the model parameters based on two factors: 1) user feedback (i.e., clicked or not), and 2) position of the item in the recommendation list. This way, the proposed model controls the utility assigned to items based on their exposure in the recommendation list. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets using three contextual bandit algorithms show that the proposed reward model reduces exposure bias amplification in long run while maintaining the recommendation accuracy.
How important are activation functions in regression and classification? A survey, performance comparison, and future directions

Inspired by biological neurons, the activation functions play an essential part in the learning process of any artificial neural network commonly used in many real-world problems. Various activation functions have been proposed in the literature for classification as well as regression tasks. In this work, we survey the activation functions that have been employed in the past as well as the current state-of-the-art. In particular, we present various developments in activation functions over the years and the advantages as well as disadvantages or limitations of these activation functions. We also discuss classical (fixed) activation functions, including rectifier units, and adaptive activation functions. In addition to discussing the taxonomy of activation functions based on characterization, a taxonomy of activation functions based on applications is presented. To this end, the systematic comparison of various fixed and adaptive activation functions is performed for classification data sets such as the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR- 100. In recent years, a physics-informed machine learning framework has emerged for solving problems related to scientific computations. For this purpose, we also discuss various requirements for activation functions that have been used in the physics-informed machine learning framework. Furthermore, various comparisons are made among different fixed and adaptive activation functions using various machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, Pytorch, and JAX.
DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers

Differential privacy (DP) is the state-of-the-art and rigorous notion of privacy for answering aggregate database queries while preserving the privacy of sensitive information in the data. In today's era of data analysis, however, it poses new challenges for users to understand the trends and anomalies observed in the query results: Is the unexpected answer due to the data itself, or is it due to the extra noise that must be added to preserve DP? In the second case, even the observation made by the users on query results may be wrong. In the first case, can we still mine interesting explanations from the sensitive data while protecting its privacy? To address these challenges, we present a three-phase framework DPXPlain, which is the first system to the best of our knowledge for explaining group-by aggregate query answers with DP. In its three phases, DPXPlain (a) answers a group-by aggregate query with DP, (b) allows users to compare aggregate values of two groups and with high probability assesses whether this comparison holds or is flipped by the DP noise, and (c) eventually provides an explanation table containing the approximately 'top-k' explanation predicates along with their relative influences and ranks in the form of confidence intervals, while guaranteeing DP in all steps. We perform an extensive experimental analysis of DPXPlain with multiple use-cases on real and synthetic data showing that DPXPlain efficiently provides insightful explanations with good accuracy and utility.
Disentangled Graph Contrastive Learning for Review-based Recommendation

User review data is helpful in alleviating the data sparsity problem in many recommender systems. In review-based recommendation methods, review data is considered as auxiliary information that can improve the quality of learned user/item or interaction representations for the user rating prediction task. However, these methods usually model user-item interactions in a holistic manner and neglect the entanglement of the latent factors behind them, e.g., price, quality, or appearance, resulting in suboptimal representations and reducing interpretability. In this paper, we propose a Disentangled Graph Contrastive Learning framework for Review-based recommendation (DGCLR), to separately model the user-item interactions based on different latent factors through the textual review data. To this end, we first model the distributions of interactions over latent factors from both semantic information in review data and structural information in user-item graph data, forming several factor graphs. Then a factorized message passing mechanism is designed to learn disentangled user/item representations on the factor graphs, which enable us to further characterize the interactions and adaptively combine the predicted ratings from multiple factors via a devised attention mechanism. Finally, we set two factor-wise contrastive learning objectives to alleviate the sparsity issue and model the user/item and interaction features pertinent to each factor more accurately. Empirical results over five benchmark datasets validate the superiority of DGCLR over the state-of-the-art methods. Further analysis is offered to interpret the learned intent factors and rating prediction in DGCLR.
MO2: Model-Based Offline Options

The ability to discover useful behaviours from past experience and transfer them to new tasks is considered a core component of natural embodied intelligence. Inspired by neuroscience, discovering behaviours that switch at bottleneck states have been long sought after for inducing plans of minimum description length across tasks. Prior approaches have either only supported online, on-policy, bottleneck state discovery, limiting sample-efficiency, or discrete state-action domains, restricting applicability. To address this, we introduce Model-Based Offline Options (MO2), an offline hindsight framework supporting sample-efficient bottleneck option discovery over continuous state-action spaces. Once bottleneck options are learnt offline over source domains, they are transferred online to improve exploration and value estimation on the transfer domain. Our experiments show that on complex long-horizon continuous control tasks with sparse, delayed rewards, MO2's properties are essential and lead to performance exceeding recent option learning methods. Additional ablations further demonstrate the impact on option predictability and credit assignment.
Semi-Supervised Clustering via Dynamic Graph Structure Learning

—Most existing semi-supervised graph-based cluster- ing methods exploit the supervisory information by either reﬁning the afﬁnity matrix or directly constraining the low-dimensional representations of data points. The afﬁnity matrix represents the graph structure and is vital to the performance of semi- supervised graph-based clustering. However, existing methods adopt a static afﬁnity matrix to learn the low-dimensional repre- sentations of data points and do not optimize the afﬁnity matrix during the learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic graph structure learning method for semi-supervised clustering. In this method, we simultaneously optimize the afﬁnity matrix and the low-dimensional representations of data points by leveraging the given pairwise constraints. Moreover, we propose an alternating minimization approach with proven convergence to solve the proposed nonconvex model. During the iteration process, our method cyclically updates the low-dimensional representations of data points and reﬁnes the afﬁnity matrix, leading to a dynamic afﬁnity matrix (graph structure). Speciﬁcally, for the update of the afﬁnity matrix, we enforce the data points with remarkably different low-dimensional representations to have an afﬁnity value of 0. Furthermore, we construct the initial afﬁnity matrix by integrating the local distance and global self-representation among data points. Experimental results on eight benchmark datasets under different settings show the advantages of the proposed approach.
Model Predictive Control Design of a 3-DOF Robot Arm Based on Recognition of Spatial Coordinates

This paper uses Model Predictive Control (MPC) to optimise the input torques of a Three-Degrees-of-Freedom (DOF) robotic arm, enabling it to operate to the target position and grasp the object accurately. A monocular camera is firstly used to recognise the colour and depth of the object. Then, the inverse kinematics calculation and the spatial coordinates of the object through coordinate transformation are combined to get the required rotating angle of each servo. Finally, the dynamic model of the robotic arm structure is derived and the model predictive control is applied to simulate the optimal input torques of servos to minimise the cost function.
Profiling Television Watching Behaviour Using Bayesian Hierarchical Joint Models for Time-to-Event and Count Data

Customer churn prediction is a valuable task in many industries. In telecommunications it presents great challenges, given the high dimensionality of the data, and how difficult it is to identify underlying frustration signatures, which may represent an important driver regarding future churn behaviour. Here, we propose a novel Bayesian hierarchical joint model that is able to characterise customer profiles based on how many events take place within different television watching journeys, and how long it takes between events. The model drastically reduces the dimensionality of the data from thousands of observations per customer to 11 customer-level parameter estimates and random effects. We test our methodology using data from 40 BT customers (20 active and 20 who eventually cancelled their subscription) whose TV watching behaviours were recorded from October to December 2019, totalling approximately half a million observations. Employing different machine learning techniques using the parameter estimates and random effects from the Bayesian hierarchical model as features yielded up to 92\% accuracy predicting churn, associated with 100\% true positive rates and false positive rates as low as 14\% on a validation set. Our proposed methodology represents an efficient way of reducing the dimensionality of the data, while at the same time maintaining high descriptive and predictive capabilities. We provide code to implement the Bayesian model at https://github.com/rafamoral/profiling_tv_watching_behaviour.
Transfer Learning of Lexical Semantic Families for Argumentative Discourse Units Identification

Argument mining tasks require an informed range of low to high complexity linguistic phenomena and commonsense knowledge. Previous work has shown that pre-trained language models are highly effective at encoding syntactic and semantic linguistic phenomena when applied with transfer learning techniques and built on different pre-training objectives. It remains an issue of how much the existing pre-trained language models encompass the complexity of argument mining tasks. We rely on experimentation to shed light on how language models obtained from different lexical semantic families leverage the performance of the identiﬁcation of argumentative discourse units task. Experimental results show that transfer learning techniques are beneﬁcial to the task and that current methods may be insufﬁcient to leverage commonsense knowledge from different lexical semantic families. a clear to measure the impact of models pre-trained with different lexical semantic families on ADUs identiﬁcation. We presented a focused contribution resorting to three different and heterogeneous data sets, with the transfer learning of semantic spaces from different semantic families. Using transfer learning techniques proved to be beneﬁcial to the task. When proposing that in some way or the other the correlation of downstream tasks mirrors the linguistic complexity found in the ADUs task, the results obtained suggest that ARAUC encodes higher linguistic complexity followed by UKPS and ﬁnally by an almost completely lexical dependent WEBIS data set. We expected the contribution of the commonsense knowledge encoded in different lexical semantic models. The somewhat negative results using different lexical semantic families and the lack of improvements using ensembles points the future work to alternatives for the training-objectives of current LMs architectures, for example exploring neuro-symbolic approaches guided with feature-based models and semantic networks.
Phishing URL Detection: A Network-based Approach Robust to Evasion

Many cyberattacks start with disseminating phishing URLs. When clicking these phishing URLs, the victim's private information is leaked to the attacker. There have been proposed several machine learning methods to detect phishing URLs. However, it still remains under-explored to detect phishing URLs with evasion, i.e., phishing URLs that pretend to be benign by manipulating patterns. In many cases, the attacker i) reuses prepared phishing web pages because making a completely brand-new set costs non-trivial expenses, ii) prefers hosting companies that do not require private information and are cheaper than others, iii) prefers shared hosting for cost efficiency, and iv) sometimes uses benign domains, IP addresses, and URL string patterns to evade existing detection methods. Inspired by those behavioral characteristics, we present a network-based inference method to accurately detect phishing URLs camouflaged with legitimate patterns, i.e., robust to evasion. In the network approach, a phishing URL will be still identified as phishy even after evasion unless a majority of its neighbors in the network are evaded at the same time. Our method consistently shows better detection performance throughout various experimental tests than state-of-the-art methods, e.g., F-1 of 0.891 for our method vs. 0.840 for the best feature-based method.
STAD: Self-Training with Ambiguous Data for Low-Resource Relation Extraction

We present a simple yet effective self-training approach, named as STAD, for low-resource relation extraction. The approach first classifies the auto-annotated instances into two groups: confident instances and uncertain instances, according to the probabilities predicted by a teacher model. In contrast to most previous studies, which mainly only use the confident instances for self-training, we make use of the uncertain instances. To this end, we propose a method to identify ambiguous but useful instances from the uncertain instances and then divide the relations into candidate-label set and negative-label set for each ambiguous instance. Next, we propose a set-negative training method on the negative-label sets for the ambiguous instances and a positive training method for the confident instances. Finally, a joint-training method is proposed to build the final relation extraction system on all data. Experimental results on two widely used datasets SemEval2010 Task-8 and Re-TACRED with low-resource settings demonstrate that this new self-training approach indeed achieves significant and consistent improvements when comparing to several competitive self-training systems.
The C/M Ratio of AGB Stars in the Local Group Galaxies

The number ratio of carbon-rich to oxygen-rich asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars (the so-called C/M ratio) is closely related to the evolution environment of the host galaxy. This work studies the C/M ratio in 14 galaxies within the Local Group with the most complete and clean sample of member stars identified in our previous works. The borderlines between carbon-rich AGB and oxygen-rich AGB stars as well as red supergiants are defined by Gaussian mixture model fitting to the number density in the (J−K)/K diagram for the member stars of the LMC and M33, and then applied to the other galaxies by shifting the difference in the position of tip red giant branch (TRGB). The C/M ratios are obtained after precise and consistent categorization. Although for galaxies with larger distance modulo there is greater uncertainty, the C/M ratio is clearly found to decrease with the color index (J−K)0 of TRGB as the indicator of metallicity, which agrees with previous studies and can be explained by the fact that carbon stars are more easily formed in a metal-poor environment. Furthermore, the C/M ratio within M33 is found to increase with galactocentric distance, which coincides with this scenario and the galactic chemical evolution model. On the other hand, the C/M ratio within M31 is found to decrease with galactocentric radius, which deserves further study.
Model-Free Deep Reinforcement Learning in Software-Defined Networks

—This paper compares two deep reinforcement learn- ing approaches for cyber security in software deﬁned networking. Neural Episodic Control to Deep Q-Network has been implemented and compared with that of Double Deep Q-Networks. The two algorithms are implemented in a format similar to that of a zero-sum game. A two-tailed T-test analysis is done on the two game results containing the amount of turns taken for the defender to win. Another comparison is done on the game scores of the agents in the respective games. The analysis is done to determine which algorithm is the best in game performer and whether there is a signiﬁcant difference between them, demonstrating if one would have greater preference over the other. It was found that there is no signiﬁcant statistical difference between the two approaches.
Quantitative Stopword Generation for Sentiment Analysis via Recursive and Iterative Deletion

Stopwords carry little semantic information and are often removed from text data to reduce dataset size and improve machine learning model performance. Consequently, researchers have sought to develop techniques for generating effective stopword sets. Previous approaches have ranged from qualitative techniques relying upon linguistic experts, to statistical approaches that extract word importance using correlations or frequency-dependent metrics computed on a corpus. We present a novel quantitative approach that employs iterative and recursive feature deletion algorithms to see which words can be deleted from a pre-trained transformer's vocabulary with the least degradation to its performance, specifically for the task of sentiment analysis. Empirically, stopword lists generated via this approach drastically reduce dataset size while negligibly impacting model performance, in one such example shrinking the corpus by 28.4% while improving the accuracy of a trained logistic regression model by 0.25%. In another instance, the corpus was shrunk by 63.7% with a 2.8% decrease in accuracy. These promising results indicate that our approach can generate highly effective stopword sets for specific NLP tasks.
An EOQ model for imperfect quality items with multiple screening and shortage backordering

In this paper, we propose an inventory model where items are inspected through multiple screening processes before delivery to customers. Each screening process has independent screening rate and defective percentage. Defective items screened out are stored and then returned to supplier. Shortage backordering are also allowed in the model. Two approaches are used to obtain the closed-form optimal order size and the maximum backordering quantity. Numerical examples are also provided to demonstrate the use of the model.
Chiral higher spin gravity and convex geometry

Chiral Higher Spin Gravity is the minimal extension of the graviton with propagating massless higher spin fields. It admits any value of the cosmological constant, including zero. Its existence implies that Chern-Simons vector models have closed subsectors and supports the 3d3d bosonization duality. In this letter, we explicitly construct an A_\inftyA∞-algebra that determines all interaction vertices of the theory. The algebra turns out to be of pre-Calabi-Yau type. The corresponding products, some of which originate from Shoikhet-Tsygan-Kontsevich formality, are given by integrals over the configuration space of convex polygons.
LDP-FPMiner: FP-Tree Based Frequent Itemset Mining with Local Differential Privacy

Data aggregation in the setting of local differential privacy (LDP) guarantees strong privacy by providing plausible deniability of sensitive data. Existing works on this issue mostly focused on discovering heavy hitters, leaving the task of frequent itemset mining (FIM) as an open problem. To the best of our knowledge, the-state-of-the-art LDP solution to FIM is the SVSM protocol proposed recently. The SVSM protocol is mainly based on the padding and sampling based frequency oracle (PSFO) protocol, and regarded an itemset as an independent item without considering the frequency consistency among itemsets. In this paper, we propose a novel LDP approach to FIM called LDP-FPMiner based on frequent pattern tree (FP-tree). Our proposal exploits frequency consistency among itemsets by constructing and optimizing a noisy FP-tree with LDP. Specifically, it works as follows. First, the most frequent items are identified, and the item domain is cut down accordingly. Second, the maximum level of the FP-tree is estimated. Third, a noisy FP-tree is constructed and optimized by using itemset frequency consistency, and then mined to obtain the 𝑘 most frequent itemsets. Experimental results show that the LDP-FPMiner significantly improves over the state-of-the-art approach, SVSM, especially in the case of a high privacy level.