OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Real-time recommendation of diverse related articles
Authors: Sofiane Abbar, Sihem Amer-Yahia, Piotr Indyk, Sepideh Mahabadi
Venue: Conference WWW 2013
Year: 2013

News articles typically drive a lot of traffic in the form of comments posted by users on a news site. Such user-generated content tends to carry additional information such as entities and sentiment. In general, when articles are recommended to users, only popularity (e.g., most shared and most commented), recency, and sometimes (manual) editors' picks (based on daily hot topics), are considered. We formalize a novel recommendation problem where the goal is to find the closest most diverse articles to the one the user is currently browsing. Our diversity measure incorporates entities and sentiment extracted from comments. Given the real-time nature of our recommendations, we explore the applicability of nearest neighbor algorithms to solve the problem. Our user study on real opinion articles from aljazeera.net and reuters.com validates the use of entities and sentiment extracted from articles and their comments to achieve news diversity when compared to content-based diversity. Finally, our performance experiments show the real-time feasibility of our solution.
A Critical Review of Online Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries
Authors: Alexandra Olteanu, Emre Kiciman, Carlos Castillo
Venue: Conference WSDM 2018
Year: 2018

Online social data like user-generated content, expressed or implicit relations among people, and behavioral traces are at the core of many popular web applications and platforms, driving the research agenda of researchers in both academia and industry. The promises of social data are many, including the understanding of "what the world thinks»» about a social issue, brand, product, celebrity, or other entity, as well as enabling better decision-making in a variety of fields including public policy, healthcare, and economics. However, many academics and practitioners are increasingly warning against the naive usage of social data. They highlight that there are biases and inaccuracies occurring at the source of the data, but also introduced during data processing pipeline; there are methodological limitations and pitfalls, as well as ethical boundaries and unexpected outcomes that are often overlooked. Such an overlook can lead to wrong or inappropriate results that can be consequential.
A large scale prediction engine for app install clicks and conversions
Authors: Narayan Bhamidipati, Ravi Kant, Shaunak Mishra
Venue: Conference CIKM 2017
Year: 2017

Predicting the probability of users clicking on app install ads and installing those apps comes with its own specific challenges. In this paper, we describe (a) how we built a scalable machine learning pipeline from scratch to predict the probability of users clicking and installing apps in response to ad impressions, (b) the novel features we developed to improve our model performance, (c) the training and scoring pipelines that were put into production, (d) our A/B testing process along with the metrics used to determine significant improvements, and (e) the results of our experiments. Our algorithmic improvements resulted in a 3X improvement in satisfaction for app install advertisers on our ad platform. In addition, we dive into how sequential model training, deep learning, and transfer learning resulted in a further 7% lift in conversion rate and 11% lift in revenue. Finally, we share the scientific, data-related, and product-related challenges that we encountered -- we expect others across the industry would greatly benefit from these considerations and our experiences when they kick-start similar efforts.
Bipartite Dynamic Representations for Abuse Detection
Authors: Andrew Z. Wang, Rex Ying, Pan Li, Nikhil Rao, Karthik Subbian, Jure Leskovec
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Abusive behavior in online retail websites and communities threatens the experience of regular community members. Such behavior often takes place within a complex, dynamic, and large-scale network of users interacting with items. Detecting abuse is challenging due to the scarcity of labeled abuse instances and complexity of combining temporal and network patterns while operating at a massive scale. Previous approaches to dynamic graph modeling either do not scale, do not effectively generalize from a few labeled instances, or compromise performance for scalability. Here we present BiDyn, a general method to detect abusive behavior in dynamic bipartite networks at scale, while generalizing from limited training labels. BiDyn develops an efficient hybrid RNN-GNN architecture trained via a novel stacked ensemble training scheme. We also propose a novel pre-training framework for dynamic graphs that helps to achieve superior performance at scale. Our approach outperforms recent large-scale dynamic graph baselines in an abuse classification task by up to 14% AUROC while requiring 10x less memory per training batch in both open and proprietary datasets.
Generating Paraphrase with Topic as Prior Knowledge
Authors: Yuanxin Liu, Zheng Lin, Fenglin Liu, Qinyun Dai, Weiping Wang
Venue: Conference CIKM 2019
Year: 2019

Paraphrase generation can be modeled as a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) learning problem. Nonetheless, a typical Seq2Seq model is liable to convey the original meaning incorrectly, as the vectorial representation of the given sentence is sometimes inadequate in recapitulating complicated semantic. Naturally, paraphrases concern the same topic, which can serve as an auxiliary guidance to promote the preservation of source semantic. Moreover, some interesting words for restatements can be derived from the topical information. To exploit topic in paraphrase generation, we incorporate topic words into the Seq2Seq framework through a topic-aware input and a topic-biased generation distribution. Direct supervision signals are also introduced to help dealing with the topic information more accurately. Empirical studies on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed method significantly improves the basic Seq2Seq model, and it is comparable with the state-of-the-art systems.
DeepLight: Deep Lightweight Feature Interactions for Accelerating CTR Predictions in Ad Serving
Authors: Wei Deng, Junwei Pan, Tian Zhou, Deguang Kong, Aaron Flores, Guang Lin
Venue: Conference WSDM 2021
Year: 2021

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial task in online display advertising. The embedding-based neural networks have been proposed to learn both explicit feature interactions through a shallow component and deep feature interactions using a deep neural network (DNN) component. These sophisticated models, however, slow down the prediction inference by at least hundreds of times. To address the issue of significantly increased serving delay and high memory usage for ad serving in production, this paper presents \emph{DeepLight}: a framework to accelerate the CTR predictions in three aspects: 1) accelerate the model inference via explicitly searching informative feature interactions in the shallow component; 2) prune redundant layers and parameters at intra-layer and inter-layer level in the DNN component; 3) promote the sparsity of the embedding layer to preserve the most discriminant signals. By combining the above efforts, the proposed approach accelerates the model inference by 46X on Criteo dataset and 27X on Avazu dataset without any loss on the prediction accuracy. This paves the way for successfully deploying complicated embedding-based neural networks in production for ad serving.
Pcard: personalized restaurants recommendation from card payment transaction records
Authors: Min Du, Robert Christensen, Wei Zhang, Feifei Li
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Personalized Point of Interest (POI) recommendation that incorporates users' personal preferences is an important subject of research. However, challenges exist such as dealing with sparse rating data and spatial location factors. As one of the biggest card payment organizations in the United States, our company holds abundant card payment transaction records with numerous features. In this paper, using restaurant recommendation as a demonstrating example, we present a personalized POI recommendation system (Pcard) that learns user preferences based on user transaction history and restaurants' locations. With a novel embedding approach that captures user embeddings and restaurant embeddings, we model pairwise restaurant preferences with respect to each user based on their locations and dining histories. Finally, a ranking list of restaurants within a spatial region is presented to the user. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is able to achieve high accuracy and present effective recommendations.
Ghashing: Semantic graph hashing for approximate similarity search in graph databases
Authors: Zongyue Qin, Yunsheng Bai, Yizhou Sun
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Graph similarity search aims to find the most similar graphs to a query in a graph database in terms of a given proximity measure, say Graph Edit Distance (GED). It is a widely studied yet still challenging problem. Most of the studies are based on the pruning-verification framework, which first prunes non-promising graphs and then conducts verification on the small candidate set. Existing methods are capable of managing databases with thousands or tens of thousands of graphs, but fail to scale to even larger database, due to their exact pruning strategy. Inspired by the recent success of deep-learning-based semantic hashing in image and document retrieval, we propose a novel graph neural network (GNN) based semantic hashing, i.e. GHashing, for approximate pruning. We first train a GNN with ground-truth GED results so that it learns to generate embeddings and hash codes that preserve GED between graphs. Then a hash index is built to enable graph lookup in constant time. To answer a query, we use the hash codes and the continuous embeddings as two-level pruning to retrieve the most promising candidates, which are sent to the exact solver for final verification. Due to the approximate pruning strategy leveraged by our graph hashing technique, our approach achieves significantly faster query time compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining a high recall. Experiments show that our approach is on average 20x faster than the only baseline that works on million-scale databases, which demonstrates GHashing successfully provides a new direction in addressing graph search problem for large-scale graph databases.
Progrpgan: Progressive GAN for route planning
Authors: Tao-Yang Fu, Wang-Chien Lee
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Learning to route has received significant research momentum as anew approach for the route planning problem in intelligent transportation systems. By exploring global knowledge of geographical areas and topological structures of road networks to facilitate route planning, in this work, we propose a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework, namely Progressive Route Planning GAN (ProgRPGAN), for route planning in road networks. The novelty of ProgRPGAN lies in the following aspects: 1) we propose to plan a route with levels of increasing map resolution, starting on a low-resolution grid map, gradually refining it on higher-resolution grid maps, and eventually on the road network in order to progressively generate various realistic paths; 2) we propose to transfer parameters of the previous-level generator and discriminator to the subsequent generator and discriminator for parameter initialization in order to improve the efficiency and stability in model learning; and 3) we propose to pre-train embeddings of grid cells in grid maps and intersections in the road network by capturing the network topology and external factors to facilitate effective model learn-ing. Empirical result shows that ProgRPGAN soundly outperforms the state-of-the-art learning to route methods, especially for long routes, by 9.46% to 13.02% in F1-measure on multiple large-scale real-world datasets. ProgRPGAN, moreover, effectively generates various realistic routes for the same query.
Fast and Scalable Distributed Loopy Belief Propagation on Real-World Graphs
Authors: Saehan Jo, Jaemin Yoo, U Kang
Venue: Conference WSDM 2018
Year: 2018

Given graphs with millions or billions of vertices and edges, how can we efficiently make inferences based on partial knowledge? Loopy Belief Propagation(LBP) is a graph inference algorithm widely used in various applications including social network analysis, malware detection, recommendation, and image restoration. The algorithm calculates approximate marginal probabilities of vertices in a graph within a linear running time proportional to the number of edges. However, when it comes to real-world graphs with millions or billions of vertices and edges, this cost overwhelms the computing power of a single machine. Moreover, this kind of large-scale graphs does not fit into the memory of a single machine. Although several distributed LBP methods have been proposed, previous works do not consider the properties of real-world graphs, especially the effect of power-law degree distribution on LBP. Therefore, our work focuses on developing a fast and scalable LBP for such large real-world graphs on distributed environment.
Extraction and classification of dense communities in the web
Authors: Yon Dourisboure, Filippo Geraci, Marco Pellegrini
Venue: Conference WWW 2007
Year: 2007

The World Wide Web (WWW) is rapidly becoming important for society as a medium for sharing data, information and services, and there is a growing interest in tools for understanding collective behaviors and emerging phenomena in the WWW. In this paper we focus on the problem of searching and classifying communities in the web. Loosely speaking a community is a group of pages related to a common interest. More formally communities have been associated in the computer science literature with the existence of a locally dense sub-graph of the web-graph (where web pages are nodes and hyper-links are arcs of the web-graph). The core of our contribution is a new scalable algorithm for finding relatively dense subgraphs in massive graphs. We apply our algorithm on web-graphs built on three publicly available large crawls of the web (with raw sizes up to 120M nodes and 1G arcs). The effectiveness of our algorithm in finding dense subgraphs is demonstrated experimentally by embedding artificial communities in the web-graph and counting how many of these are blindly found. Effectiveness increases with the size and density of the communities: it is close to 100% for communities of a thirty nodes or more (even at low density). It is still about 80% even for communities of twenty nodes with density over 50% of the arcs present. At the lower extremes the algorithm catches 35% of dense communities made of ten nodes. We complete our Community Watch system by clustering the communities found in the web-graph into homogeneous groups by topic and labelling each group by representative keywords.
Degnn: Improving graph neural networks with graph decomposition
Authors: Xupeng Miao, Nezihe Merve Gürel, Wentao Zhang, Zhichao Han, Bo Li, Wei Min, Susie Xi Rao, Hansheng Ren, Yinan Shan, Yingxia Shao, Yujie Wang, Fan Wu, Hui Xue, Yaming Yang, Zitao Zhang, Yang Zhao, Shuai Zhang, Yujing Wang, Bin Cui, Ce Zhang
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Mining from graph-structured data is an integral component of graph data management. A recent trending technique, graph convolutional network (GCN), has gained momentum in the graph mining field, and plays an essential part in numerous graph-related tasks. Although the emerging GCN optimization techniques bring improvements to specific scenarios, they perform diversely in different applications and introduce many trial-and-error costs for practitioners. Moreover, existing GCN models often suffer from oversmoothing problem. Besides, the entanglement of various graph patterns could lead to non-robustness and harm the final performance of GCNs. In this work, we propose a simple yet efficient graph decomposition approach to improve the performance of general graph neural networks. We first empirically study existing graph decomposition methods and propose an automatic connectivity-ware graph decomposition algorithm, DeGNN. To provide a theoretical explanation, we then characterize GCN from the information-theoretic perspective and show that under certain conditions, the mutual information between the output after l layers and the input of GCN converges to 0 exponentially with respect to l. On the other hand, we show that graph decomposition can potentially weaken the condition of such convergence rate, alleviating the information loss when GCN becomes deeper. Extensive experiments on various academic benchmarks and real-world production datasets demonstrate that graph decomposition generally boosts the performance of GNN models. Moreover, our proposed solution DeGNN achieves state-of-the-art performances on almost all these tasks.
Real-Time Streaming Graph Embedding Through Local Actions
Authors: Xi Liu, Ping-Chun Hsieh, Nick Duffield, Rui Chen, Muhe Xie, Xidao Wen
Venue: Conference WWW 2019
Year: 2019

Recently, considerable research attention has been paid to graph embedding, a popular approach to construct representations of vertices in latent space. Due to the curse of dimensionality and sparsity in graphical datasets, this approach has become indispensable for machine learning tasks over large networks. The majority of the existing literature has considered this technique under the assumption that the network is static. However, networks in many applications, including social networks, collaboration networks, and recommender systems, nodes, and edges accrue to a growing network as streaming. A small number of very recent results have addressed the problem of embedding for dynamic networks. However, they either rely on knowledge of vertex attributes, suffer high-time complexity or need to be re-trained without closed-form expression. Thus the approach of adapting the existing methods designed for static networks or dynamic networks to the streaming environment faces non-trivial technical challenges. These challenges motivate developing new approaches to the problems of streaming graph embedding. In this paper, we propose a new framework that is able to generate latent representations for new vertices with high efficiency and low complexity under specified iteration rounds. We formulate a constrained optimization problem for the modification of the representation resulting from a stream arrival. We show this problem has no closed-form solution and instead develop an online approximation solution. Our solution follows three steps: (1) identify vertices affected by newly arrived ones, (2) generating latent features for new vertices, and (3) updating the latent features of the most affected vertices. The new representations are guaranteed to be feasible in the original constrained optimization problem. Meanwhile, the solution only brings about a small change to existing representations and only slightly changes the value of the objective function. Multi-class classification and clustering on five real-world networks demonstrate that our model can efficiently update vertex representations and simultaneously achieve comparable or even better performance compared with model retraining.
MonLAD: Money laundering agents detection in transaction streams
Authors: Xiaobing Sun, Wenjie Feng, Shenghua Liu, Yuyang Xie, Siddharth Bhatia, Bryan Hooi, Wenhan Wang, Xueqi Cheng
Venue: Conference WSDM 2022
Year: 2022

Given a stream of money transactions between accounts in a bank, how can we accurately detect money laundering agent accounts and suspected behaviors in real-time? Money laundering agents try to hide the origin of illegally obtained money by dispersive multiple small transactions and evade detection by smart strategies. Therefore, it is challenging to accurately catch such fraudsters in an unsupervised manner. Existing approaches do not consider the characteristics of those agent accounts and are not suitable to the streaming settings. Therefore, we propose MonLAD and MonLAD-W to detect money laundering agent accounts in a transaction stream by keeping track of their residuals and other features; we devise AnoScore algorithm to find anomalies based on the robust measure of statistical deviation. Experimental results show that MonLAD outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on real-world data and finds various suspicious behavior patterns of money laundering. Additionally, several detected suspected accounts have been manually-verified as agents in real money laundering scenario.
Algorithmic cartography: Placing points of interest and ads on maps
Authors: Mohammad Mahdian, Okke Schrijvers, Sergei Vassilvitskii
Venue: Conference KDD 2015
Year: 2015

We study the problem of selecting a set of points of interest (POIs) to show on a map. We begin with a formal model of the setting, noting that the utility of a POI may be discounted by (i) the presence of competing businesses nearby as well as (ii) its position in the set of establishments ordered by distance from the user. We present simple, approximately optimal selection algorithms, coupled with incentive compatible pricing schemes in case of advertiser supplied points of interest. Finally, we evaluate our algorithms on real data sets and show that they outperform simple baselines.
Linked variational autoencoders for inferring substitutable and supplementary items
Authors: Vineeth Rakesh, Suhang Wang, Kai Shu, Huan Liu
Venue: Conference WSDM 2019
Year: 2019

Recommendation in the modern world is not only about capturing the interaction between users and items, but also about understanding the relationship between items. Besides improving the quality of recommendation, it enables the generation of candidate items that can serve as substitutes and supplements of another item. For example, when recommending Xbox, PS4 could be a logical substitute and the supplements could be items such as game controllers, surround system, and travel case. Therefore, given a network of items, our objective is to learn their content features such that they explain the relationship between items in terms of substitutes and supplements. To achieve this, we propose a generative deep learning model that links two variational autoencoders using a connector neural network to create Linked Variational Autoencoder (LVA). LVA learns the latent features of items by conditioning on the observed relationship between items. Using a rigorous series of experiments, we show that LVA significantly outperforms other representative and state-of-the-art baseline methods in terms of prediction accuracy. We then extend LVA by incorporating collaborative filtering (CF) to create CLVA that captures the implicit relationship between users and items. By comparing CLVA with LVA we show that inducing CF-based features greatly improve the recommendation quality of substitutable and supplementary items on a user level.