OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Mtrajrec: Map-constrained trajectory recovery via seq2seq multi-task learning
Authors: Huimin Ren, Sijie Ruan, Yanhua Li, Jie Bao, Chuishi Meng, Ruiyuan Li, Yu Zheng
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

With the increasing adoption of GPS modules, there are a wide range of urban applications based on trajectory data analysis, such as vehicle navigation, travel time estimation, and driver behavior analysis. The effectiveness of urban applications relies greatly on the high sampling rates of trajectories precisely matched to the map. However, a large number of trajectories are collected under a low sampling rate in real-world practice, due to certain communication loss and energy constraints. To enhance the trajectory data and support the urban applications more effectively, many trajectory recovery methods are proposed to infer the trajectories in free space. In addition, the recovered trajectory still needs to be mapped to the road network, before it can be used in the applications. However, the two-stage pipeline, which first infers high-sampling-rate trajectories and then performs the map matching, is inaccurate and inefficient. In this paper, we propose a Map-constrained Trajectory Recovery framework, MTrajRec, to recover the fine-grained points in trajectories and map match them on the road network in an end-to-end manner. MTrajRec implements a multi-task sequence-to-sequence learning architecture to predict road segment and moving ratio simultaneously. Constraint mask, attention mechanism, and attribute module are proposed to overcome the limits of coarse grid representation and improve the performance. Extensive experiments based on large-scale real-world trajectory data confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.
Separated contrastive learning for matching in cross-domain recommendation with curriculum scheduling
Authors: Heng Chang, Liang Gu, Cheng Hu, Zhinan Zhang, Hong Zhu, Yuhui Xu, Yuan Fang, Zhen Chen
Venue: Conference WWW 2025
Year: 2025

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) is a task that aims to improve the recommendation performance in a target domain by leveraging the information from source domains. Contrastive learning methods have been widely adopted among intra-domain (intra-CL) and inter-domain (inter-CL) users/items for their representation learning and knowledge transfer during the matching stage of CDR. However, we observe that directly employing contrastive learning on mixed-up intra-CL and inter-CL tasks ignores the difficulty of learning from inter-domain over learning from intra-domain, and thus could cause severe training instability. Therefore, this instability deteriorates the representation learning process and hurts the quality of generated embeddings. To this end, we propose a novel framework named SCCDR built up on a separated intra-CL and inter-CL paradigm and a stop-gradient operation to handle the drawback. Specifically, SCCDR comprises two specialized curriculum stages: intra-inter separation and inter-domain curriculum scheduling. The former stage explicitly uses two distinct contrastive views for the intra-CL task in the source and target domains, respectively. Meanwhile, the latter stage deliberately tackles the inter-CL tasks with a curriculum scheduling strategy that derives effective curricula by accounting for the difficulty of negative samples anchored by overlapping users. Empirical experiments on various open-source datasets and an offline proprietary industrial dataset extracted from a real-world recommender system, and an online A/B test verify that SCCDR achieves state-of-the-art performance over multiple baselines.
EdgeRec: recommender system on edge in Mobile Taobao
Authors: Yu Gong, Ziwen Jiang, Yufei Feng, Binbin Hu, Kaiqi Zhao, Qingwen Liu, Wenwu Ou
Venue: Conference CIKM 2020
Year: 2020

Recommender system (RS) has become a crucial module in most web-scale applications. Recently, most RSs are in the waterfall form based on the cloud-to-edge framework, where recommended results are transmitted to edge (e.g., user mobile) by computing in advance in the cloud server. Despite effectiveness, network bandwidth and latency between cloud server and edge may cause the delay for system feedback and user perception. Hence, real-time computing on edge could help capture user preferences more preciously and thus make more satisfactory recommendations. Our work, to our best knowledge, is the first attempt to design and implement the novel Recommender System on Edge (EdgeRec), which achieves Real-time User Perception and Real-time System Feedback. Moreover, we propose Heterogeneous User Behavior Sequence Modeling and Context-aware Reranking with Behavior Attention Networks to capture user's diverse interests and adjust recommendation results accordingly. Experimental results on both the offline evaluation and online performance in Taobao home-page feeds demonstrate the effectiveness of EdgeRec.
Linear, or Non-Linear, That is the Question!
Authors: Taeyong Kong, Taeri Kim, Jinsung Jeon, Jeongwhan Choi, Yeon-Chang Lee, Noseong Park, Sang-Wook Kim
Venue: Conference WSDM 2022
Year: 2022

There were fierce debates on whether the non-linear embedding propagation of GCNs is appropriate to GCN-based recommender systems. It was recently found that the linear embedding propagation shows better accuracy than the non-linear embedding propagation. Since this phenomenon was discovered especially in recommender systems, it is required that we carefully analyze the linearity and non-linearity issue. In this work, therefore, we revisit the issues of i) which of the linear or non-linear propagation is better and ii) which factors of users/items decide the linearity/non-linearity of the embedding propagation. We propose a novel Hybrid method of linear and non-linear collaborative filtering method (HMLET, pronounced as Hamlet). In our design, there exist both linear and non-linear propagation steps, when processing each user or item node, and our gating module chooses one of them, which results in a hybrid model of the linear and non-linear GCN-based collaborative filtering (CF). The proposed model yields the best accuracy in three public benchmark datasets. Moreover, we classify users/items into the following three classes depending on our gating modules' selections: Full-Non-Linearity (FNL), Partial-Non-Linearity (PNL), and Full-Linearity (FL). We found that there exist strong correlations between nodes' centrality and their class membership, i.e., important user/item nodes exhibit more preferences towards the non-linearity during the propagation steps. To our knowledge, we are the first who design a hybrid method and report the correlation between the graph centrality and the linearity/non-linearity of nodes. All HMLET codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/qbxlvnf11/HMLET.
Logical-shapelets: an expressive primitive for time series classification
Authors: Abdullah Mueen, Eamonn J. Keogh, Neal E. Young
Venue: Conference KDD 2011
Year: 2011

Time series shapelets are small, local patterns in a time series that are highly predictive of a class and are thus very useful features for building classifiers and for certain visualization and summarization tasks. While shapelets were introduced only recently, they have already seen significant adoption and extension in the community. Despite their immense potential as a data mining primitive, there are two important limitations of shapelets. First, their expressiveness is limited to simple binary presence/absence questions. Second, even though shapelets are computed offline, the time taken to compute them is significant. In this work, we address the latter problem by introducing a novel algorithm that finds shapelets in less time than current methods by an order of magnitude. Our algorithm is based on intelligent caching and reuse of computations, and the admissible pruning of the search space. Because our algorithm is so fast, it creates an opportunity to consider more expressive shapelet queries. In particular, we show for the first time an augmented shapelet representation that distinguishes the data based on conjunctions or disjunctions of shapelets. We call our novel representation Logical-Shapelets. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach on the classic benchmark datasets used for these problems, and show several case studies where logical shapelets significantly outperform the original shapelet representation and other time series classification techniques. We demonstrate the utility of our ideas in domains as diverse as gesture recognition, robotics, and biometrics.
Conformal graph-level out-of-distribution detection with adaptive data augmentation
Authors: Xixun Lin, Yanan Cao, Nan Sun, Lixin Zou, Chuan Zhou, Peng Zhang, Shuai Zhang, Ge Zhang, Jia Wu
Venue: Conference WWW 2025
Year: 2025

Graph-level out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, which attempts to identify OOD graphs originated from an unknown distribution, is a vital building block for safety-critical applications in Web and society. Current approaches concentrate on how to learn better graph representations, but fail to provide any statistically guarantee on detection results, therefore impeding their deployments in the scenario where detection errors would result in serious consequences. To overcome this critical issue, we propose the Conformal Graph-level Out-of-distribution Detection (CGOD), extending the theory of conformal prediction to graph-level OOD detection with a rigorous control over the false positive rate. In CGOD, we develop a new aggregated non-conformity score function based on the proposed adaptive data augmentation. Through the guidance from two designed metrics, i.e., score consistency and representation diversity, our augmentation strategy can generate multiple non-conformity scores, and aggregating these generated non-conformity scores together is robust to the misleading information. Meanwhile, our score function can perceive the subsequent process of conformal inference, enabling the aggregated non-conformity score to be adaptive to different input graphs and deriving a more accurate score estimation. We conduct experiments on multiple real-world datasets with different empirical settings. Extensive results and model analyses demonstrate the superior performance of our approach over several competitive baselines.
Time-dependent representation for neural event sequence prediction
Authors: Yang Li 0058, Nan Du, Samy Bengio
Venue: Conference ICLR 2018
Year: 2018

Existing sequence prediction methods are mostly concerned with time-independent sequences, in which the actual time span between events is irrelevant and the distance between events is simply the difference between their order positions in the sequence. While this time-independent view of sequences is applicable for data such as natural languages, e.g., dealing with words in a sentence, it is inappropriate and inefficient for many real world events that are observed and collected at unequally spaced points of time as they naturally arise, e.g., when a person goes to a grocery store or makes a phone call. The time span between events can carry important information about the sequence dependence of human behaviors. In this work, we propose a set of methods for using time in sequence prediction. Because neural sequence models such as RNN are more amenable for handling token-like input, we propose two methods for time-dependent event representation, based on the intuition on how time is tokenized in everyday life and previous work on embedding contextualization. We also introduce two methods for using next event duration as regularization for training a sequence prediction model. We discuss these methods based on recurrent neural nets. We evaluate these methods as well as baseline models on five datasets that resemble a variety of sequence prediction tasks. The experiments revealed that the proposed methods offer accuracy gain over baseline models in a range of settings.
RDGSL: Dynamic Graph Representation Learning with Structure Learning
Authors: Siwei Zhang, Yun Xiong, Yao Zhang, Yiheng Sun, Xi Chen, Yizhu Jiao, Yangyong Zhu
Venue: Conference CIKM 2023
Year: 2023

Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs) have shown remarkable performance in learning representation for continuous-time dynamic graphs. However, real-world dynamic graphs typically contain diverse and intricate noise. Noise can significantly degrade the quality of representation generation, impeding the effectiveness of TGNs in downstream tasks. Though structure learning is widely applied to mitigate noise in static graphs, its adaptation to dynamic graph settings poses two significant challenges. i) Noise dynamics. Existing structure learning methods are ill-equipped to address the temporal aspect of noise, hampering their effectiveness in such dynamic and ever-changing noise patterns. ii) More severe noise. Noise may be introduced along with multiple interactions between two nodes, leading to the re-pollution of these nodes and consequently causing more severe noise compared to static graphs. In this paper, we present RDGSL, a representation learning method in continuous-time dynamic graphs. Meanwhile, we propose dynamic graph structure learning, a novel supervisory signal that empowers RDGSL with the ability to effectively combat noise in dynamic graphs. To address the noise dynamics issue, we introduce the Dynamic Graph Filter, where we innovatively propose a dynamic noise function that dynamically captures both current and historical noise, enabling us to assess the temporal aspect of noise and generate a denoised graph. We further propose the Temporal Embedding Learner to tackle the challenge of more severe noise, which utilizes an attention mechanism to selectively turn a blind eye to noisy edges and hence focus on normal edges, enhancing the expressiveness for representation generation that remains resilient to noise. Our method demonstrates robustness towards downstream tasks, resulting in up to 5.1% absolute AUC improvement in evolving classification versus the second-best baseline.
Proximity matters: Local proximity enhanced balancing for treatment effect estimation
Authors: Hao Wang, Zhichao Chen, Zhaoran Liu, Xu Chen, Haoxuan Li, Zhouchen Lin
Venue: Conference KDD 2025
Year: 2025

Heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) estimation from observational data poses significant challenges due to treatment selection bias. Existing methods address this bias by minimizing distribution discrepancies between treatment groups in latent space, focusing on global alignment. However, the fruitful aspect of local proximity, where similar units exhibit similar outcomes, is often overlooked. In this study, we propose Proximity-enhanced CounterFactual Regression (CFR-Pro) to exploit proximity for enhancing representation balancing within the HTE estimation context. Specifically, we introduce a pair-wise proximity regularizer based on optimal transport to incorporate the local proximity in discrepancy calculation. However, the curse of dimensionality renders the proximity measure and discrepancy estimation ineffective-exacerbated by limited data availability for HTE estimation. To handle this problem, we further develop an informative subspace projector, which trades off minimal distance precision for improved sample complexity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CFR-Pro accurately matches units across different treatment groups, effectively mitigates treatment selection bias, and significantly outperforms competitors. Code is available at https://github.com/HowardZJU/CFR-Pro.
Your neighbor matters: Towards fair decisions under networked interference
Authors: Wenjing Yang 0002, Haotian Wang 0001, Haoxuan Li 0001, Hao Zou 0001, Ruochun Jin, Kun Kuang 0001, Peng Cui 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2024
Year: 2024

In the era of big data, decision-making in social networks may introduce bias due to interconnected individuals. For instance, in peer-to-peer loan platforms on the Web, considering an individual's attributes along with those of their interconnected neighbors, including sensitive attributes, is vital for loan approval or rejection downstream. Unfortunately, conventional fairness approaches often assume independent individuals, overlooking the impact of one person's sensitive attribute on others' decisions. To fill this gap, we introduce "Interference-aware Fairness" (IAF) by defining two forms of discrimination as Self-Fairness (SF) and Peer-Fairness (PF), leveraging advances in interference analysis within causal inference. Specifically, SF and PF causally capture and distinguish discrimination stemming from an individual's sensitive attributes (with fixed neighbors' sensitive attributes) and from neighbors' sensitive attributes (with fixed self's sensitive attributes), separately. Hence, a network-informed decision model is fair only when SF and PF are satisfied simultaneously, as interventions in individuals' sensitive attributes or those of their peers both yield equivalent outcomes. To achieve IAF, we develop a deep doubly robust framework to estimate and regularize SF and PF metrics for decision models. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate our proposed concepts and methods.
Robust causal inference for recommender system to overcome noisy confounders
Authors: Zhiheng Zhang, Quanyu Dai, Xu Chen, Zhenhua Dong, Ruiming Tang
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, there has been growing interest in integrating causal inference into recommender systems to answer the hypothetical question: "what would be the potential feedback when a user is recommended a product?" Various unbiased estimators, including Inverse Propensity Score (IPS) and Doubly Robust (DR), have been proposed to address this question. However, these estimators often assume that confounders are precisely observable, which is not always the case in real-world scenarios. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method called Adversarial Training-based IPS (AT-IPS), which uses adversarial training to handle noisy confounders. The proposed method defines a feasible region for the confounders, obtains the worst-case noise (adversarial noise) within the region, and jointly trains the propensity model and the prediction model against such noise to improve their robustness. We provide a theoretical analysis of the accuracy-robustness tradeoff of AT-IPS and demonstrate its superior performance compared to other popular estimators on both real-world and semi-synthetic datasets.
Offline policy evaluation in large action spaces via outcome-oriented action grouping
Authors: Jie Peng, Hao Zou, Jiashuo Liu, Shaoming Li, Yibao Jiang, Jian Pei, Peng Cui
Venue: Conference WWW 2023
Year: 2023

Offline policy evaluation (OPE) aims to accurately estimate the performance of a hypothetical policy using only historical data, which has drawn increasing attention in a wide range of applications including recommender systems and personalized medicine. With the presence of rising granularity of consumer data, many industries started exploring larger action candidate spaces to support more precise personalized action. While inverse propensity score (IPS) is a standard OPE estimator, it suffers from more severe variance issues with increasing action spaces. To address this issue, we theoretically prove that the estimation variance can be reduced by merging actions into groups while the distinction among these action effects on the outcome can induce extra bias. Motivated by these, we propose a novel IPS estimator with outcome-oriented action Grouping (GroupIPS), which leverages a Lipschitz regularized network to measure the distance of action effects in the embedding space and merges nearest action neighbors. This strategy enables more robust estimation by achieving smaller variances while inducing minor additional bias. Empirically, extensive experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Revisiting user mobility and social relationships in lbsns: a hypergraph embedding approach
Authors: Dingqi Yang, Bingqing Qu, Jie Yang, Philippe Cudré-Mauroux
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Location Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have been widely used as a primary data source to study the impact of mobility and social relationships on each other. Traditional approaches manually define features to characterize users' mobility homophily and social proximity, and show that mobility and social features can help friendship and location prediction tasks, respectively. However, these hand-crafted features not only require tedious human efforts, but also are difficult to generalize. In this paper, by revisiting user mobility and social relationships based on a large-scale LBSN dataset collected over a long-term period, we propose LBSN2Vec, a hypergraph embedding approach designed specifically for LBSN data for automatic feature learning. Specifically, LBSN data intrinsically forms a hypergraph including both user-user edges (friendships) and user-time-POI-semantic hyperedges (check-ins). Based on this hypergraph, we first propose a random-walk-with-stay scheme to jointly sample user check-ins and social relationships, and then learn node embeddings from the sampled (hyper)edges by preserving n-wise node proximity (n = 2 or 4). Our evaluation results show that LBSN2Vec both consistently and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art graph embedding methods on both friendship and location prediction tasks, with an average improvement of 32.95% and 25.32%, respectively. Moreover, using LBSN2Vec, we discover the asymmetric impact of mobility and social relationships on predicting each other, which can serve as guidelines for future research on friendship and location prediction in LBSNs.
Ranking with ordered weighted pairwise classification
Authors: Nicolas Usunier, David Buffoni, Patrick Gallinari
Venue: Conference ICML 2009
Year: 2009

In ranking with the pairwise classification approach, the loss associated to a predicted ranked list is the mean of the pairwise classification losses. This loss is inadequate for tasks like information retrieval where we prefer ranked lists with high precision on the top of the list. We propose to optimize a larger class of loss functions for ranking, based on an ordered weighted average (OWA) (Yager, 1988) of the classification losses. Convex OWA aggregation operators range from the max to the mean depending on their weights, and can be used to focus on the top ranked elements as they give more weight to the largest losses. When aggregating hinge losses, the optimization problem is similar to the SVM for interdependent output spaces. Moreover, we show that OWA aggregates of margin-based classification losses have good generalization properties. Experiments on the Letor 3.0 benchmark dataset for information retrieval validate our approach.