OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Designing fairly fair classifiers via economic fairness notions
Authors: Safwan Hossain, Andjela Mladenovic, Nisarg Shah
Venue: Conference WWW 2020
Year: 2020

The past decade has witnessed a rapid growth of research on fairness in machine learning. In contrast, fairness has been formally studied for almost a century in microeconomics in the context of resource allocation, during which many general-purpose notions of fairness have been proposed. This paper explore the applicability of two such notions — envy-freeness and equitability — in machine learning. We propose novel relaxations of these fairness notions which apply to groups rather than individuals, and are compelling in a broad range of settings. Our approach provides a unifying framework by incorporating several recently proposed fairness definitions as special cases. We provide generalization bounds for our approach, and theoretically and experimentally evaluate the tradeoff between loss minimization and our fairness guarantees.
Meta-Learned Spatial-Temporal POI Auto-Completion for the Search Engine at Baidu Maps
Authors: Miao Fan, Yibo Sun, Jizhou Huang, Haifeng Wang, Ying Li
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Point Of Interest Auto-Completion (abbr. as POI-AC) is one of the featured functions for the search engine at Baidu Maps. It can dynamically suggest a list of POI candidates within milliseconds as a user enters each character (e.g., English, Chinese, or Pinyin character) into the search box. Ideally, a user may need to provide only one character and immediately obtain the desired POI at the top of the POI list suggested by POI-AC. In this way, the user's keystrokes can be dramatically saved, which significantly reduces the time and effort of typing, especially on mobile devices that have limited space for display and user interfaces. Despite using a user's profile and input prefixes for personalized POI suggestions, however, the state-of-the-art approach, i.e., P^3AC, still has a long way to go so as to generate not only personalized but, more importantly, time- and geography-aware suggestions. In this paper, we find that 17.9% of users tend to look for diverse POIs at different times or locations using the same prefix. This insight drives us to establish an end-to-end spatial-temporal POI-AC (abbr. as ST-PAC) module to replace P3AC at Baidu Maps. To alleviate the problem of the long-tail distribution of time- and location-specific data on POI-AC, we further propose a meta-learned ST-PAC (abbr. as MST-PAC) updated by an efficient MapReduce algorithm. MST-PAC can significantly overcome the "long-tail" issue and rapidly adapt to the cold-start POI-AC tasks with fewer examples. We sample several benchmark datasets from the large-scale search logs at Baidu Maps to assess the offline performance of MST-PAC in line with multiple metrics, including Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), Success Rate (SR) and normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG). The consistent improvements on these metrics give us more confidence to launch this meta-learned POI-AC module online. As a result, the critical indicator on user satisfaction online, i.e., the average number of keystrokes in a POI-AC session, significantly decreases as well. For now, MST-PAC has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps, handling billions of POI-AC requests every day. It confirms that MST-PAC is a practical and robust industrial solution for large-scale POI Search.
DuIVA: An Intelligent Voice Assistant for Hands-free and Eyes-free Voice Interaction with the Baidu Maps App
Authors: Jizhou Huang, Haifeng Wang 0001, Shiqiang Ding, Shaolei Wang
Venue: Conference KDD 2022
Year: 2022

Mobile map apps such as the Baidu Maps app have become a ubiquitous and essential tool for users to find optimal routes and get turn-by-turn navigation services while driving. However, interacting with such apps while driving through visual-manual interaction modality inevitably causes driver distraction, due to the highly conspicuous nature of the time-sharing, multi-tasking behavior of the driver. In this paper, we present our efforts and findings of a 4-year longitudinal study on designing and implementing DuIVA, which is an intelligent voice assistant (IVA) embedded in the Baidu Maps app for hands-free, eyes-free human-to-app interaction in a fully voice-controlled manner. Specifically, DuIVA is designed to enable users to control the functionalities of Baidu Maps (e.g., navigation and location search) through voice interaction, rather than visual-manual interaction, which minimizes driver distraction and promotes safe driving by allowing the driver to keep "eyes on the road and hands on the wheel'' while interacting with the Baidu Maps app. DuIVA has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps since November 2017, which facilitates a better interaction modality with the Baidu Maps app and improves the accessibility and usability of the app by providing users with in-app voice activation, natural language queries, and multi-round dialogue. As of December 31, 2021, over 530 million users have used DuIVA, which demonstrates that DuIVA is an industrial-grade and production-proven solution for in-app intelligent voice assistants.
Personalized prefix embedding for POI auto-completion in the search engine of Baidu Maps
Authors: Jizhou Huang, Haifeng Wang 0001, Miao Fan, An Zhuo, Ying Li 0123
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Point of interest auto-completion (POI-AC) is a featured function in the search engine of many Web mapping services. This function keeps suggesting a dynamic list of POIs as a user types each character, and it can dramatically save the effort of typing, which is quite useful on mobile devices. Existing approaches on POI-AC for industrial use mainly adopt various learning to rank (LTR) models with handcrafted features and even historically clicked POIs are taken into account for personalization. However, these prior arts tend to reach performance bottlenecks as both heuristic features and search history of users cannot directly model personal input habits. In this paper, we present an end-to-end neural-based framework for POI-AC, which has been recently deployed in the search engine of Baidu Maps, one of the largest Web mapping applications with hundreds of millions monthly active users worldwide. In order to establish connections among users, their personal input habits, and correspondingly interested POIs, the proposed framework (abbr. P3AC) is composed of three components, i.e., a multi-layer Bi-LSTM network to adapt to personalized prefixes, a CNN-based network to model multi-sourced information on POIs, and a triplet ranking loss function to optimize both personalized prefix embeddings and distributed representations of POIs. We first use large-scale real-world search logs of Baidu Maps to assess the performance of P3AC offline measured by multiple metrics, including Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), Success Rate (SR), and normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (nDCG). Extensive experimental results demonstrate that it can achieve substantial improvements. Then we decide to launch it online and observe that some other critical indicators on user satisfaction, such as the average number of keystrokes and the average typing speed at keystrokes in a POI-AC session, which significantly decrease as well. In addition, we have released both the source codes of P3AC and the experimental data to the public for reproducibility tests.
GEDIT: Geographic-Enhanced and Dependency-Guided Tagging for Joint POI and Accessibility Extraction at Baidu Maps
Authors: Yibo Sun, Jizhou Huang, Chunyuan Yuan, Miao Fan, Haifeng Wang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
Venue: Conference CIKM 2021
Year: 2021

Providing timely accessibility reminders (such as closed and relocated) of a point-of-interest (POI) plays a vital role in improving user satisfaction of finding places and making visiting decisions. However, it is difficult to keep the POI database in sync with the real-world counterparts due to the dynamic nature of business changes and innovations. To alleviate this problem, we formulate and present a practical solution that jointly extracts POI mentions and identifies their coupled accessibility labels from unstructured text (hereafter referred to as joint POI and accessibility extraction). We approach this task as a sequence tagging problem, where the goal is to produce (POI name, accessibility label) pairs from unstructured text. This task is challenging because of two main issues: (1) POI names are often newly-coined words so as to successfully register new entities or brands and (2) there may exist multiple pairs in the text, which necessitates dealing with one-to-many or many-to-one mapping to make each POI coupled with its matching accessibility label. To this end, we propose a Geographic-Enhanced and Dependency-guIded sequence Tagging (GEDIT) model to concurrently address the two challenges. First, to alleviate challenge #1, we develop a geographic-enhanced pre-trained model to learn the text representations, which is able to significantly relieve the problem of newly-coined words. Second, to mitigate challenge #2, we apply a relational graph convolutional network to learn the tree node representations from the parsed dependency tree, which enables us to establish a correlation between a POI and its accessibility label. Finally, we construct a neural sequence tagging model by integrating and feeding the previously pre-learned representations into a CRF layer. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of GEDIT. In addition, it has already been deployed in production at Baidu Maps, and it successfully keeps processing hundreds of thousands of Web documents every week. Statistics show that the proposed solution can save significant human effort and labor costs to deal with the same amount of documents, which confirms that it is a practical way for POI accessibility maintenance.
Clear: Contrastive-prototype learning with drift estimation for resource constrained stream mining
Authors: Zhuoyi Wang, Yuqiao Chen, Chen Zhao, Yu Lin, Xujiang Zhao, Hemeng Tao, Yigong Wang, Latifur Khan
Venue: Conference WWW 2021
Year: 2021

Non-stationary data stream mining aims to classify large scale online instances that emerge continuously. The most apparent challenge compared with the offline learning manner is the issue of consecutive emergence of new categories, when tackling non-static categorical distribution. Non-stationary stream settings often appear in real-world applications, e.g., online classification in E-commerce systems that involves the incoming productions, or the summary of news topics on social networks (Twitter). Ideally, a learning model should be able to learn novel concepts from labeled data (in new tasks) and reduce the abrupt degradation of model performance on the old concept (also named catastrophic forgetting problem). In this work, we focus on improving the performance of the stream mining approach under the constrained resources, where both the memory resource of old data and labeled new instances are limited/scarce. We propose a simple yet efficient resource-constrained framework CLEAR to facilitate previous challenges during the one-pass stream mining. Specifically, CLEAR focuses on creating and calibrating the class representation (the prototype) in the embedding space. We first apply the contrastive-prototype learning on large amount of unlabeled data, and generate the discriminative prototype for each class in the embedding space. Next, for updating on new tasks/categories, we propose a drift estimation strategy to calibrate/compensate for the drift of each class representation, which could reduce the knowledge forgetting without storing any previous data. We perform experiments on public datasets (e.g., CUB200, CIFAR100) under stream setting, our approach is consistently and clearly better than many state-of-the-art methods, along with both the memory and annotation restriction.
Sequential cost-sensitive decision making with reinforcement learning
Authors: Edwin P. D. Pednault, Naoki Abe, Bianca Zadrozny
Venue: Conference KDD 2002
Year: 2002

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the issues of cost-sensitive learning and decision making in a variety of applications of data mining. A number of approaches have been developed that are effective at optimizing cost-sensitive decisions when each decision is considered in isolation. However, the issue of sequential decision making, with the goal of maximizing total benefits accrued over a period of time instead of immediate benefits, has rarely been addressed. In the present paper, we propose a novel approach to sequential decision making based on the reinforcement learning framework. Our approach attempts to learn decision rules that optimize a sequence of cost-sensitive decisions so as to maximize the total benefits accrued over time. We use the domain of targeted' marketing as a testbed for empirical evaluation of the proposed method. We conducted experiments using approximately two years of monthly promotion data derived from the well-known KDD Cup 1998 donation data set. The experimental results show that the proposed method for optimizing total accrued benefits out performs the usual targeted-marketing methodology of optimizing each promotion in isolation. We also analyze the behavior of the targeting rules that were obtained and discuss their appropriateness to the application domain.
Neural input search for large scale recommendation models
Authors: Manas R. Joglekar, Cong Li, Mei Chen, Taibai Xu, Xiaoming Wang, Jay K. Adams, Pranav Khaitan, Jiahui Liu, Quoc V. Le
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Recommendation problems with large numbers of discrete items, such as products, webpages, or videos, are ubiquitous in the technology industry. Deep neural networks are being increasingly used for these recommendation problems. These models use embeddings to represent discrete items as continuous vectors, and the vocabulary sizes and embedding dimensions, despite their heavy influence on the model's accuracy, are often manually selected in a heuristical manner.
Autofeature: Searching for feature interactions and their architectures for click-through rate prediction
Authors: Farhan Khawar, Xu Hang, Ruiming Tang, Bin Liu, Zhenguo Li, Xiuqiang He
Venue: Conference CIKM 2020
Year: 2020

Click-through rate prediction is an important task in commercial recommender systems and it aims to predict the probability of a user clicking on an item. The event of a user clicking on an item is accompanied by several user and item features. As modelling the feature interactions effectively can lead to better predictions, it has been the focus of many recent approaches including deep learning-based models. However, the existing approaches either (i) model all possible feature interactions for a given order, or (ii) manually select which feature interactions to model. Besides, they use the same network structure or function to model all the feature interactions while ignoring the difference of complexity among them. To address these issues, we propose a neural architecture search based approach called AutoFeature that automatically finds essential feature interactions and selects an appropriate structure to model each of these interactions. Specifically, we first define a flexible architecture search space for the CTR prediction task which covers many popular designs such as PIN, PNN and DeepFM, etc., and enables higher-order interactions. Then we propose an efficient neural architecture search algorithm that recursively refines the search space by partitioning it into several subspaces and samples from higher quality ones. Extensive experiments on multiple CTR prediction benchmarks show the superiority of our AutoFeature over the state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, our experiments show that the learned architectures use fewer flops/parameters and hence can efficiently incorporate higher-order feature interactions. This further boosts the performance. Finally, we show that AutoFeature can find meaningful feature interactions.
Autofis: Automatic feature interaction selection in factorization models for click-through rate prediction
Authors: Bin Liu 0072, Chenxu Zhu, Guilin Li 0001, Weinan Zhang 0001, Jincai Lai, Ruiming Tang, Xiuqiang He 0001, Zhenguo Li, Yong Yu 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Learning feature interactions is crucial for click-through rate (CTR) prediction in recommender systems. In most existing deep learning models, feature interactions are either manually designed or simply enumerated. However, enumerating all feature interactions brings large memory and computation cost. Even worse, useless interactions may introduce noise and complicate the training process. In this work, we propose a two-stage algorithm called Automatic Feature Interaction Selection (AutoFIS). AutoFIS can automatically identify important feature interactions for factorization models with computational cost just equivalent to training the target model to convergence. In the \emph{search stage}, instead of searching over a discrete set of candidate feature interactions, we relax the choices to be continuous by introducing the architecture parameters. By implementing a regularized optimizer over the architecture parameters, the model can automatically identify and remove the redundant feature interactions during the training process of the model. In the \emph{re-train stage}, we keep the architecture parameters serving as an attention unit to further boost the performance. Offline experiments on three large-scale datasets (two public benchmarks, one private) demonstrate that AutoFIS can significantly improve various FM based models. AutoFIS has been deployed onto the training platform of Huawei App Store recommendation service, where a 10-day online A/B test demonstrated that AutoFIS improved the DeepFM model by 20.3\% and 20.1\% in terms of CTR and CVR respectively.
Automated embedding size search in deep recommender systems
Authors: Haochen Liu, Xiangyu Zhao 0001, Chong Wang, Xiaobing Liu, Jiliang Tang
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2020
Year: 2020

Deep recommender systems have achieved promising performance on real-world recommendation tasks. They typically represent users and items in a low-dimensional embedding space and then feed the embeddings into the following deep network structures for prediction. Traditional deep recommender models often adopt uniform and fixed embedding sizes for all the users and items. However, such design is not optimal in terms of not only the recommendation performance and but also the space complexity. In this paper, we propose to dynamically search the embedding sizes for different users and items and introduce a novel embedding size adjustment policy network (ESAPN). ESAPN serves as an automated reinforcement learning agent to adaptively search appropriate embedding sizes for users and items. Different from existing works, our model performs hard selection on different embedding sizes, which leads to a more accurate selection and decreases the storage space. We evaluate our model under the streaming setting on two real-world benchmark datasets. The results show that our proposed framework outperforms representative baselines. Moreover, our framework is demonstrated to be robust to the cold-start problem and reduce memory consumption by around 40%-90%. The implementation of the model is released.
Towards Automated Neural Interaction Discovery for Click- Through Rate Prediction
Authors: Qingquan Song, Dehua Cheng, Hanning Zhou, Jiyan Yang, Yuandong Tian, Xia Hu 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is one of the most important machine learning tasks in recommender systems, driving personalized experience for billions of consumers. Neural architecture search (NAS), as an emerging field, has demonstrated its capabilities in discovering powerful neural network architectures, which motivates us to explore its potential for CTR predictions. Due to 1) diverse unstructured feature interactions, 2) heterogeneous feature space, and 3) high data volume and intrinsic data randomness, it is challenging to construct, search, and compare different architectures effectively for recommendation models. To address these challenges, we propose an automated interaction architecture discovering framework for CTR prediction named AutoCTR. Via modularizing simple yet representative interactions as virtual building blocks and wiring them into a space of direct acyclic graphs, AutoCTR performs evolutionary architecture exploration with learning-to-rank guidance at the architecture level and achieves acceleration using low-fidelity model. Empirical analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of AutoCTR on different datasets comparing to human-crafted architectures. The discovered architecture also enjoys generalizability and transferability among different datasets.
Whole-chain recommendations
Authors: Xiangyu Zhao, Long Xia, Lixin Zou, Hui Liu, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
Venue: Conference CIKM 2020
Year: 2020

With the recent prevalence of Reinforcement Learning (RL), there have been tremendous interests in developing RL-based recommender systems. In practical recommendation sessions, users will sequentially access multiple scenarios, such as the entrance pages and the item detail pages, and each scenario has its specific characteristics. However, the majority of existing RL-based recommender systems focus on optimizing one strategy for all scenarios or separately optimizing each strategy, which could lead to sub-optimal overall performance. In this paper, we study the recommendation problem with multiple (consecutive) scenarios, i.e., whole-chain recommendations. We propose a multi-agent RL-based approach (DeepChain), which can capture the sequential correlation among different scenarios and jointly optimize multiple recommendation strategies. To be specific, all recommender agents (RAs) share the same memory of users' historical behaviors, and they work collaboratively to maximize the overall reward of a session. Note that optimizing multiple recommendation strategies jointly faces two challenges in the existing model-free RL model - (i) it requires huge amounts of user behavior data, and (ii) the distribution of reward (users' feedback) are extremely unbalanced. In this paper, we introduce model-based RL techniques to reduce the training data requirement and execute more accurate strategy updates. The experimental results based on a real e-commerce platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Personalizing LinkedIn Feed
Authors: Deepak Agarwal, Bee-Chung Chen, Qi He, Zhenhao Hua, Guy Lebanon, Yiming Ma, Pannagadatta Shivaswamy, Hsiao-Ping Tseng, Jaewon Yang, Liang Zhang
Venue: Conference KDD 2015
Year: 2015

LinkedIn dynamically delivers update activities from a user's interpersonal network to more than 300 million members in the personalized feed that ranks activities according their "relevance" to the user. This paper discloses the implementation details behind this personalized feed system at LinkedIn which can not be found from related work, and addresses the scalability and data sparsity challenges for deploying the system online. More specifically, we focus on the personalization models by generating three kinds of affinity scores: Viewer-ActivityType Affinity, Viewer-Actor Affinity, and Viewer-Actor-ActivityType Affinity. Extensive experiments based on online bucket tests (A/B experiments) and offline evaluation illustrate the effect of our personalization models in LinkedIn feed.