Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DocSemMap 2.0: Semantic Labeling based on Textual Data Documentations Using Seq2Seq Context Learner

Methods for automated semantic labeling of data are an indispensable basis for increasing the usability of data. On the one hand, they contribute to the homogenization of the annotations and thus to the increase in quality; on the other hand, they reduce the modeling effort, provided that the quality of the used methodology is sufficient. In the past, research has focused primarily on data- and label-based methods. Another approach that has received recent attention is the incorporation of textual data documentations to support the automatic mapping of datasets to a knowledge graph. However, upon deeper analysis, our recent approach called DocSemMap gives away potential in a number of places. In this paper, we extend the current state of the art approach by uncovering existing shortcomings and presenting our own improvements. Using a sequence-to-sequence model (Seq2Seq), we exploit the context of datasets. An additional introduced classifier provides the linkage of documentation and labels for prediction. Our extended approach achieves a sustainable improvement in comparison to the reference approach.
Causal Learning Empowered OD Prediction for Urban Planning

Predicting future origin-destination (OD) flow is essential for urban planning since it provides feedback for planning adjustment and reference for road planning. However, OD prediction for urban planning scenarios is unique as it typically lacks training data. A common practice is to refer to data from other cities, which causes the out-of-distribution (OOD) problem. A promising solution is to leverage causal information in the data. However, there are two challenges in utilizing causal information in urban planning scenarios: (a) Urban system has numerous factors, and only part of them indicate causal information. (b) The planned city development correlates with original city characteristics, therefore bringing confounding bias to the causal modelling process. In this paper, we propose designs to solve both challenges. Specifically, we first design a causal disentangled representation module to identify causal factors in attributes. Second, we adopt a variational sample re-weighting module to reduce the confounding bias. Our proposed model outperforms seven state-of-the-art baselines on three real-world datasets, achieving an average improvement of 9.59% in the MAE metric. Further in-depth analysis shows our method's robustness across different urban planning scenarios and outstanding performance in predicting extremely large OD flows, which corroborates the contribution of our designs to the urban planning field.
A Case Study in Educational Recommenders: Recommending Music Partitures at Tomplay

Recommendation technologies have been playing an instrumental role for promoting both physical and digital content across several global platforms (Amazon, Apple, Netflix). Here we provide a study on the benefits of recommendation technologies in an educational platform with a focus on music learning. There are several characteristics present in this educational platform that make this recommendation problem particularly interesting, namely: a) the few but highly repetitive interactions, b) the existence of multiple versions of the same content across many difficulty levels, orchestrations, and musical instruments, and c) the user's expertise in a musical instrument which is essential for making appropriate recommendations. We highlight the unique dataset characteristics and compare them to those of other widely-used recommendation datasets. To alleviate the very high data sparsity due to the multi-instantiation of songs, we use entity resolution principles to embed songs in a new space. Using this lightweight entity resolution step on song data, in combination with neural recommendation architectures, we can double the predictive accuracy compared to techniques based on matrix factorization.
Towards Fair Workload Assessment via Homogeneous Order Grouping in Last-mile Delivery

The popularity of e-commerce has promoted the rapid development of the logistics industry in recent years. As an important step in logistics, last-mile delivery from delivery stations to customers' addresses is now mainly finished by couriers, which requires accurate workload assessment based on actual efforts. However, the state-of-the-practice assessment methods neglect a vital factor that orders with the same customer's address (i.e., Homogeneous orders) can be delivered in a group (i.e., in a single trip) or separately (i.e., in multiple trips). It would cause unfair assessment among couriers if following the same rule. Thus, grouping homogeneous order accurately in the workload assessment is significant for achieving fair courier's workload assessment. To this end, we design, implement, and deploy a nationwide homogeneous order grouping system called FHOG for improving the accuracy of homogeneous order grouping in last-mile delivery for fair courier's workload assessment. FHOG utilizes the courier's reporting behavior for order inspection, collection, and delivery to identify homogeneous orders in the delivery station simultaneously for homogeneous order grouping. Compared with the state-of-the-practice method, our evaluation shows FHOG can effectively reduce order amounts with the higher and lower assessed courier's workload. We further deploy FHOG online in 8336 delivery stations to provide homogeneous order grouping service for more than 120 thousand couriers and 12 million daily orders. The results of the two surveys show that the couriers' acceptance rate is improved by 67% with FHOG after the promotion.
Relation-aware Blocking for Scalable Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems contain rich relation information. The multiple relations in a recommender system form a heterogeneous information network. How to efficiently find similar users and items based on hop-n relations in heterogeneous information networks is one significant challenge to develop scalable recommender systems in the era of big data. Hashing has been popularly used for dimensionality reduction and data size reduction. Current hashing techniques mainly focus on hashing for directly related (i.e. hop-1) features. This paper proposes to develop relation-aware hashing techniques to bridge this gap. The proposed approaches use locality sensitive hashing (LSH) and consider hop-n relations in an information network to construct user or item blocks. They help facilitate efficient neighborhood formation and recommendation making. The experiments conducted on a large-scale real-life dataset show that the proposed approaches are effective.
Balancing Utility and Exposure Fairness for Integrated Ranking with Reinforcement Learning

Integrated ranking is critical in industrial recommendation systems and has attracted increasing attention. In an integrated ranking system, items from multiple channels are merged together and form an integrated list. During this process, apart from optimizing the system's utility like the total number of clicks, a fair allocation of the exposure opportunities over different channels also needs to be satisfied. To address this problem, we propose an integrated ranking model called Integrated Deep-Q Network (iDQN), which jointly considers user preferences, the platform's utility, and the exposure fairness. Extensive offline experiments validate the effectiveness of iDQN in managing the tradeoff between utility and fairness. Moreover, iDQN also has been deployed onto the online AppStore platform in Huawei, where the online A/B test shows iDQN outperforms the baseline by 1.87% and 2.21% in terms of utility and fairness, respectively.
Personalized Query Suggestion with Searching Dynamic Flow for Online Recruitment

Employing query suggestion techniques to assist users in articulating their needs during online search has become increasingly vital for search engines in an age of exponential information growth. The success of a query suggestion system lies in understanding and modeling user search intent behind each query accurately, which can hardly be achieved without personalization efforts on taking advantage of dynamic user feedback behaviors and rich contextual information. This valuable area, however, has been still largely untapped by current query suggestion systems. In this work, we propose Dynamic Searching Flow Model (DSFM), a query suggestion framework that is capable of modeling and refining user search intent progressively in recruitment scenarios by leveraging a dynamic flow mechanism. Here the concepts of local flow and global flow are introduced to capture the real-time intention of users and the overall influence of a session, respectively. By utilizing rich semantic information contained in resumes and job requirements, DSFM enables the personalization of query suggestions. In addition, weighted contrast learning is introduced into the training process to produce more extensive targeted query samples and partially alleviate the exposure bias. The adoption of attention mechanism allows the selection of the most relevant information to compose the final intention representation. Extensive experimental results on different categories of real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach on the task of query suggestion for online recruitment platforms.
RealGraphGPU: A High-Performance GPU-Based Graph Engine toward Large-Scale Real-World Network Analysis

A graph, consisting of vertices and edges, has been widely adopted for network analysis. Recently, with the increasing size of real-world networks, many graph engines have been studied to efficiently process large-scale real-world graphs. RealGraph, one of the state-of-the-art single-machine-based graph engines, efficiently processes storage-to-memory I/Os by considering unique characteristics of real-world graphs. Via an in-depth analysis of RealGraph, however, we found that there is still a chance for more performance improvement in the computation part of RealGraph despite its great I/O processing ability. Motivated by this, in this paper, we propose RealGraphGPU, a GPU-based single-machine graph engine. We design the core components required for GPU-based graph processing and incorporate them into the architecture of RealGraph. Further, we propose two optimizations that successfully address the technical issues that could cause the performance degradation in the GPU-based graph engine: buffer pre-checking and edge-based workload allocation strategies. Through extensive evaluation with 6 real-world datasets, we demonstrate that (1) RealGraphGPU improves RealGraph by up to 546%, (2) RealGraphGPU outperforms existing state-of-the-art graph engines dramatically, and (3) the optimizations are all effective in large-scale graph processing.
DBinsight: A Tool for Interactively Understanding the Query Processing Pipeline in RDBMSs

Given an sql, a rdbms performs a series of operations to generate a Query Execution Plan (qep), which tells how the results will be collected and returned eventually. The whole pipeline for obtaining the qep is the core functionality of a rdbms, thus is definitely a fundamental knowledge that must be acquired by database learners and junior engineers of any rdbms. Unfortunately, though the majority of rdbmss provide EXPLAIN statement to show the qep, general users cannot see how/why these plans are generated. The only way for learning that is to turn to the textbook, which contains limited number of predefined examples accordingly. However, they are too sketchy to allow us to have a hand-on experience in practice. In this work, we present a general framework, DBinsight, that unveils the query processing pipeline visually at each phase during the processing pipeline, including parsing, translating, query optimization, etc. Considering that the underlying designs and optimization strategies of rdbmss are different, in DBinsight we present an SQPProfile interface, such that heterogeneous data structures in various rdbmss are normalized to a uniform format. Thanks to that, in DBinsight we only need to focus on offering the presentation and interaction functionalities based on the uniformed SQPProfile, and do not need to worry about the difference in the underlying rdbmss.
Dissecting Cross-Layer Dependency Inference on Multi-Layered Inter-Dependent Networks

Multi-layered inter-dependent networks have emerged in a wealth of high-impact application domains. Cross-layer dependency inference, which aims to predict the dependencies between nodes across different layers, plays a pivotal role in such multi-layered network systems. Most, if not all, of existing methods exclusively follow a coupling principle of design and can be categorized into the following two groups, including (1) heterogeneous network embedding based methods (data coupling), and (2) collaborative filtering based methods (module coupling). Despite the favorable achievement, methods of both types are faced with two intricate challenges, including (1) the sparsity challenge where very limited observations of cross-layer dependencies are available, resulting in a deteriorated prediction of missing dependencies, and (2) the dynamic challenge given that the multi-layered network system is constantly evolving over time. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the inability of existing methods to resolve the sparsity challenge roots in the coupling principle from the perspectives of both data coupling and module coupling. Armed with such theoretical analysis, we pursue a new principle where the key idea is to decouple the within-layer connectivity from the observed cross-layer dependencies. Specifically, to tackle the sparsity challenge for static networks, we propose FITO-S, which incorporates a position embedding matrix generated by random walk with restart and the embedding space transformation function. More essentially, the decoupling principle ameliorates the dynamic challenge, which naturally leads to FITO-D, being capable of tracking the inference results in the dynamic setting through incrementally updating the position embedding matrix and fine-tuning the space transformation function. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework FITO for cross-layer dependency inference.
ITSM-GCN: Informative Training Sample Mining for Graph Convolutional Network-based Collaborative Filtering

Recently, graph convolutional network (GCN) has become one of the most popular and state-of-the-art collaborative filtering (CF) methods. Existing GCN-based CF studies have made many meaningful and excellent efforts at loss function design and embedding propagation improvement. Despite their successes, we argue that existing methods have not yet properly explored more effective sampling strategy, including both positive sampling and negative sampling. To tackle this limitation, a novel framework named ITSM-GCN is proposed to carry out our designed Informative Training Sample Mining (ITSM) sampling strategy for the learning of GCN-based CF models. Specifically, we first adopt and improve the dynamic negative sampling (DNS) strategy, which achieves considerable improvements in both training efficiency and recommendation performance. More importantly, we design two potentially positive training sample mining strategies, namely a similarity-based sampler and score-based sampler, to further enhance GCN-based CF. Extensive experiments show that ITSM-GCN significantly outperforms state-of-the-art GCN-based CF models, including LightGCN, SGL-ED and SimpleX. For example, ITSM-GCN improves on SimpleX by 12.0%, 3.0%, and 1.2% on Recall@20 for Amazon-Books, Yelp2018 and Gowalla, respectively.
Scalable Multiple Kernel k-means Clustering

With its simplicity and effectiveness, k-means is immensely popular, but it cannot perform well on complex nonlinear datasets. Multiple kernel k-means (MKKM) demonstrates the ability to describe highly complex nonlinear separable data structures. However, its speed requirement cannot scale as well as the data size grows beyond tens of thousands. Nowadays, digital data explosion mandates more scalable clustering methods to assist the machine learning tasks in easy-to-access form. To address the issue, we propose to employ the Nystrom scheme for MKKM clustering, termed scalable multiple kernel k-means clustering. It significantly reduces the computational complexity by replacing the original kernel matrix with a low-rank approximation. Analytically and empirically, we demonstrate that our method performs as well as existing state-of-the-art methods, but at a significantly lower compute cost, allowing us to scale the method more effectively for clustering tasks.
AutoXAI: A Framework to Automatically Select the Most Adapted XAI Solution

A large number of XAI (eXplainable Artificial Intelligence) solutions have been proposed in recent years. Recently, thanks to new XAI evaluation metrics, it has become possible to compare these XAI solutions. However, selecting the most relevant XAI solution among all this diversity is still a tedious task, especially if a user has specific needs and constraints. In this paper, we propose AutoXAI, a framework that recommends the best XAI solution and its hyperparameters according to specified XAI evaluation metrics while considering the user's context (dataset, machine learning model, XAI needs and constraints). It adapts approaches from context-aware recommender systems on one side and strategies of optimization and evaluation from AutoML (Automated Machine Learning) on the other. Through two use cases, we show that AutoXAI recommends XAI solutions adapted to the user's needs with the best hyperparameters matching the user's constraints.
Building Next Best Action Engines for B2C and B2B Use Cases

Traditional machine learning methods used in marketing and digital commerce applications, including propensity scoring and many recommendation algorithms, are usually focused on improving short-term outcomes such as click-through rates. In many environments, however, long-term customer engagement can be more important than immediate outcomes. In this paper, we describe several real-world case studies on building personalization engines that address this problem using reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We also discuss the design patterns used to create such solutions.
MAE4Rec: Storage-saving Transformer for Sequential Recommendations

Sequential recommender systems (SRS) aim to infer the users' preferences from their interaction history and predict items that will be of interest to the users. The majority of SRS models typically incorporate all historical interactions for next-item recommendations. Despite their success, feeding all interactions into the model without filtering may lead to severe practical issues: (i) redundant interactions hinder the SRS model from capturing the users' intentions; (ii) the computational cost is huge, as the computational complexity is proportional to the length of the interaction sequence; (iii) more memory space is necessitated to store all interaction records from all users. To this end, we propose a novel storage-saving SRS framework, MAE4Rec, based on a unidirectional self-attentive mechanism and masked autoencoder. Specifically, in order to lower the storage consumption, MAE4Rec first masks and discards a large percentage of historical interactions, and then infers the next interacted item solely based on the latent representation of unmarked ones. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive performance against state-of-the-art SRS models with more than 40% compression of storage.
RSD: A Reinforced Siamese Network with Domain Knowledge for Early Diagnosis

The availability of electronic health record data makes it possible to develop automatic disease diagnosis approaches. In this paper, we study the early diagnosis of diseases. As being a difficult task (even for experienced doctors), early diagnosis of diseases poses several challenges that are not well solved by prior studies, including insufficient training data, dynamic and complex signs of complications and trade-off between earliness and accuracy. To address these challenges, we propose a Reinforced Siamese network with Domain knowledge regularization approach, namely RSD, to achieve high performance for early diagnosis. The RSD approach consists of a diagnosis module and a control module. The diagnosis module adopts any EHR Encoder as a basic framework to extract representations, and introduces two improved training strategies. To overcome the insufficient sample problem, we design a Siamese network architecture to enhance the model learning. Furthermore, we propose a domain knowledge regularization strategy to guide the model learning with domain knowledge. Based on the diagnosis module, our control module learns to automatically determine whether making a disease alert to the patients based on the diagnosis results. Through carefully designed architecture, rewards and policies, it is able to effectively balance earliness and accuracy for diagnosis. Experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach on both diagnosis prediction and early diagnosis. We also perform extensive analysis experiments to verify the robustness of the proposed approach.
Generative-Free Urban Flow Imputation

Urban flow imputation, which aims to infer the missing flows of some locations based on the available flows of surrounding areas, is critically important to various smart city related applications such as urban planning and public safety. Although many methods are proposed to impute time series data, they may not be feasible to be directly applied on urban flow data due to the following reasons. First, urban flows have the complex spatial and temporal correlations which are much harder to be captured compared with time series data. Second, the urban flow data can be random missing (i.e., missing randomly in terms of times and locations) or block missing (i.e., missing for all locations in a particular time slot). Thus it is difficult for existing methods to work well on both scenarios. In this paper, we for the first time study the urban flow imputation problem and propose a generative-free Attention-based Spatial-Temporal Combine and Mix Completion Network model (AST-CMCN for short) to effectively address it. Specifically, AST-CMCN consists of a Spatial and Temporal Completion Network (SATCNet for short) and a Spatial-Temporal Mix Completion Network (STMCNet for short). SATCNet is composed of stacked GRUAtt modules to capture the geographical and temporal correlations of the urban flows, separately. STMCNet is designed to capture the complex spatial-temporal associations jointly between historical urban flows and current data. A Message Passing module is also proposed to capture new spatial-temporal patterns that never appear in the historical data. Extensive experiments on two large real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method compared with the state-of-the-art baselines.