OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Robust uplift modeling with large-scale contexts for real-time marketing
Authors: Zexu Sun, Qiyu Han, Minqin Zhu, Hao Gong, Dugang Liu, Chen Ma
Venue: Conference KDD 2025
Year: 2025

Improving user engagement and platform revenue is crucial for online marketing platforms. Uplift modeling is proposed to solve this problem, which applies different treatments (e.g., discounts, bonus) to satisfy corresponding users. Despite progress in this field, limitations persist. Firstly, most of them focus on scenarios where only user features exist. However, in real-world scenarios, there are rich contexts available in the online platform (e.g., short videos, news), and the uplift model needs to infer an incentive for each user on the specific item, which is called real-time marketing. Thus, only considering the user features will lead to biased prediction of the responses, which may cause the cumulative error for uplift prediction. Moreover, due to the large-scale contexts, directly concatenating the context features with the user features will cause a severe distribution shift in the treatment and control groups. Secondly, capturing the interaction relationship between the user features and context features can better predict the user response. To solve the above limitations, we propose a novel model-agnostic Robust Uplift Modeling with Large-Scale Contexts (UMLC) framework for Real-time Marketing. Our UMLC includes two customized modules. 1) A response-guided context grouping module for extracting context features information and condensing value space through clusters. 2) A feature interaction module for obtaining better uplift prediction. Specifically, this module contains two parts: a user-context interaction component for better modeling the response; a treatment-feature interaction component for discovering the treatment assignment sensitive feature of each instance to better predict the uplift. Moreover, we conduct extensive experiments on a synthetic dataset and a real-world product dataset to verify the effectiveness and compatibility of our UMLC.
A Multi-stage Framework for Online Bonus Allocation Based on Constrained User Intent Detection
Authors: Chao Wang 0109, Xiaowei Shi, Shuai Xu, Zhe Wang 0068, Zhiqiang Fan, Yan Feng, An You, Yu Chen 0091
Venue: Conference KDD 2023
Year: 2023

With the explosive development of e-commerce for service, tens of millions of orders are generated every day on the Meituan platform. By allocating bonuses to new customers when they pay, the Meituan platform encourages them to use its own payment service for a better experience in the future. It can be formulated as a multi-choice knapsack problem (MCKP), and the mainstream solution is usually a two-stage method. The first stage is user intent detection, predicting the effect for each bonus treatment. Then, it serves as the objective of the MCKP, and the problem is solved in the second stage to obtain the optimal allocation strategy. However, this solution usually faces the following challenges: (1) In the user intent detection stage, due to the sparsity of interaction and noise, the traditional multi-treatment effect estimation methods lack interpretability, which may violate the domain knowledge that the marginal gain is non-negative with the increase of the bonus amount in economic theory. (2) There is an optimality gap between the two stages, which limits the upper bound of the optimal value obtained in the second stage. (3) Due to changes in the distribution of orders online, the actual cost consumption often violates the given budget limit. To solve the above challenges, we propose a framework that consists of three modules, i.e., User Intent Detection Module, Online Allocation Module, and Feedback Control Module. In the User Intent Detection Module, we implicitly model the treatment increment based on deep representation learning and constrain it to be non-negative to achieve monotonicity constraints. Then, in order to reduce the optimality gap, we further propose a convex constrained model to increase the upper bound of the optimal value. For the third challenge, to cope with the fluctuation of online bonus consumption, we leverage a feedback control strategy in the framework to make the actual cost more accurately approach the given budget limit. Finally, we conduct extensive offline and online experiments, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed framework, which reduced customer acquisition costs by 5.07% and is still running online.
Mm-dag: Multi-task dag learning for multi-modal data-with application for traffic congestion analysis
Authors: Tian Lan, Ziyue Li 0002, Zhishuai Li, Lei Bai 0001, Man Li 0003, Fugee Tsung, Wolfgang Ketter, Rui Zhao 0001, Chen Zhang 0007
Venue: Conference KDD 2023
Year: 2023

This paper proposes to learn Multi-task, Multi-modal Direct Acyclic Graphs (MM-DAGs), which are commonly observed in complex systems, e.g., traffic, manufacturing, and weather systems, whose variables are multi-modal with scalars, vectors, and functions. This paper takes the traffic congestion analysis as a concrete case, where a traffic intersection is usually regarded as a DAG. In a road network of multiple intersections, different intersections can only have someoverlapping and distinct variables observed. For example, a signalized intersection has traffic light-related variables, whereas unsignalized ones do not. This encourages the multi-task design: with each DAG as a task, the MM-DAG tries to learn the multiple DAGs jointly so that their consensus and consistency are maximized. To this end, we innovatively propose a multi-modal regression for linear causal relationship description of different variables. Then we develop a novel Causality Difference (CD) measure and its differentiable approximator. Compared with existing SOTA measures, CD can penalize the causal structural difference among DAGs with distinct nodes and can better consider the uncertainty of causal orders. We rigidly prove our design's topological interpretation and consistency properties. We conduct thorough simulations and one case study to show the effectiveness of our MM-DAG. The code is available under https://github.com/Lantian72/MM-DAG.
Attentive heterogeneous graph embedding for job mobility prediction
Authors: Le Zhang, Ding Zhou, Hengshu Zhu, Tong Xu, Rui Zha, Enhong Chen, Hui Xiong
Venue: Conference KDD 2021
Year: 2021

Job mobility prediction is an emerging research topic that can benefit both organizations and talents in various ways, such as job recommendation, talent recruitment, and career planning. Nevertheless, most existing studies only focus on modeling the individual-level career trajectories of talents, while the impact of macro-level job transition relationships (e.g., talent flow among companies and job positions) has been largely neglected. To this end, in this paper we propose an enhanced approach to job mobility prediction based on a heterogeneous company-position network constructed from the massive career trajectory data. Specifically, we design an Attentive heterogeneous graph embedding for sequential prediction (Ahead) framework to predict the next career move of talents, which contains two components, namely an attentive heterogeneous graph embedding (AHGN) model and a Dual-GRU model for career path mining. In particular, the AHGN model is used to learn the comprehensive representation for company and position on the heterogeneous network, in which two kinds of aggregators are employed to aggregate the information from external and internal neighbors for a node. Afterwards, a novel type-attention mechanism is designed to automatically fuse the information of the two aggregators for updating node representations. Moreover, the Dual-GRU model is devised to model the parallel sequences that appear in pair, which can be used to capture the sequential interactive information between companies and positions. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset for evaluating our Ahead framework. The experimental results clearly validate the effectiveness of our approach compared with the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of job mobility prediction.
Leveraging invariant principle for heterophilic graph structure distribution shifts
Authors: Jinluan Yang, Zhengyu Chen, Teng Xiao, Yong Lin, Wenqiao Zhang, Kun Kuang
Venue: Conference WWW 2025
Year: 2025

Heterophilic Graph Neural Networks (HGNNs) have shown promising results for semi-supervised learning tasks on graphs. Notably, most real-world heterophilic graphs are composed of a mixture of nodes with different neighbor patterns, exhibiting local node-level homophilic and heterophilic structures. However, existing works are only devoted to designing better HGNN backbones or architectures for node classification tasks on heterophilic and homophilic graph benchmarks simultaneously, and their analyses of HGNN performance with respect to nodes are only based on the determined data distribution without exploring the effect caused by this structural difference between training and testing nodes. How to learn invariant node representations on heterophilic graphs to handle this structure difference or distribution shifts remains unexplored. In this paper, we first discuss the limitations of previous graph-based invariant learning methods from the perspective of data augmentation. Then, we propose \textbf{HEI}, a framework capable of generating invariant node representations through incorporating heterophily information to infer latent environments without augmentation, which are then used for invariant prediction, under heterophilic graph structure distribution shifts. We theoretically show that our proposed method can achieve guaranteed performance under heterophilic graph structure distribution shifts. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and backbones can also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method compared with existing state-of-the-art baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/Yangjinluan/HEI
Toward Structure Fairness in Dynamic Graph Embedding: A Trend-aware Dual Debiasing Approach
Authors: Yicong Li 0001, Yu Yang 0012, Jiannong Cao 0001, Shuaiqi Liu 0002, Haoran Tang, Guandong Xu
Venue: Conference KDD 2024
Year: 2024

Recent studies successfully learned static graph embeddings that are structurally fair by preventing the effectiveness disparity of high- and low-degree vertex groups in downstream graph mining tasks. However, achieving structure fairness in dynamic graph embedding remains an open problem. Neglecting degree changes in dynamic graphs will significantly impair embedding effectiveness without notably improving structure fairness. This is because the embedding performance of high-degree and low-to-high-degree vertices will significantly drop close to the generally poorer embedding performance of most slightly changed vertices in the long-tail part of the power-law distribution. We first identify biased structural evolutions in a dynamic graph based on the evolving trend of vertex degree and then propose FairDGE, the first structurally Fair Dynamic Graph Embedding algorithm. FairDGE learns biased structural evolutions by jointly embedding the connection changes among vertices and the long-short-term evolutionary trend of vertex degrees. Furthermore, a novel dual debiasing approach is devised to encode fair embeddings contrastively, customizing debiasing strategies for different biased structural evolutions. This innovative debiasing strategy breaks the effectiveness bottleneck of embeddings without notable fairness loss. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FairDGE achieves simultaneous improvement in the effectiveness and fairness of embeddings.
Joint Multisided Exposure Fairness for Recommendation
Authors: Haolun Wu, Bhaskar Mitra, Chen Ma, Fernando Diaz, Xue Liu
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Prior research on exposure fairness in the context of recommender systems has focused mostly on disparities in the exposure of individual or groups of items to individual users of the system. The problem of how individual or groups of items may be systemically under or over exposed to groups of users, or even all users, has received relatively less attention. However, such systemic disparities in information exposure can result in observable social harms, such as withholding economic opportunities from historically marginalized groups (allocative harm) or amplifying gendered and racialized stereotypes (representational harm). Previously, Diaz et al. developed the expected exposure metric -- that incorporates existing user browsing models that have previously been developed for information retrieval -- to study fairness of content exposure to individual users. We extend their proposed framework to formalize a family of exposure fairness metrics that model the problem jointly from the perspective of both the consumers and producers. Specifically, we consider group attributes for both types of stakeholders to identify and mitigate fairness concerns that go beyond individual users and items towards more systemic biases in recommendation. Furthermore, we study and discuss the relationships between the different exposure fairness dimensions proposed in this paper, as well as demonstrate how stochastic ranking policies can be optimized towards said fairness goals.
A novel prompt tuning for graph transformers: Tailoring prompts to graph topologies
Authors: Jingchao Wang 0002, Zhengnan Deng, Tongxu Lin, Wenyuan Li 0007, Shaobin Ling
Venue: Conference KDD 2024
Year: 2024

Deep graph prompt tuning (DeepGPT), which only tunes a set of continuous prompts for graph transformers, significantly decreases the storage usage during training. However, DeepGPT is limited by its uniform prompts to input graphs with various structures. This is because different graph structures dictate various feature interactions between nodes, while the uniform prompts are not dynamic to tailor the feature transformation for the graph topology. In this paper, we propose a <u>T</u>opo-specific <u>G</u>raph <u>P</u>rompt <u>T</u>uning (TGPT ), which provides topo-specific prompts tailored to the topological structures of input graphs. Specifically, TGPT learns trainable embeddings for graphlets and frequencies, where graphlets are fundamental sub-graphs that describe the structure around specific nodes. Based on the statistic data about graphlets of input graph, topo-specific prompts are generated by graphlet embeddings and frequency embeddings. The topo-specific prompts include node-level topo-specific prompts for specified nodes, a graph-level topo-specific prompt for the entire graph, and a task-specific prompt to learn task-related information. They are all inserted into specific graph nodes to perform feature transformation, providing specified feature transformation for input graphs with different topological structures. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms existing lightweight fine-tuning methods and DeepGPT in molecular graph classification and regression with comparable parameters.
Intsgd: Adaptive floatless compression of stochastic gradients
Authors: Konstantin Mishchenko, Bokun Wang, Dmitry Kovalev, Peter Richtárik
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

We propose a family of adaptive integer compression operators for distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) that do not communicate a single float. This is achieved by multiplying floating-point vectors with a number known to every device and then rounding to integers. In contrast to the prior work on integer compression for SwitchML by Sapio et al. (2021), our IntSGD method is provably convergent and computationally cheaper as it estimates the scaling of vectors adaptively. Our theory shows that the iteration complexity of IntSGD matches that of SGD up to constant factors for both convex and non-convex, smooth and non-smooth functions, with and without overparameterization. Moreover, our algorithm can also be tailored for the popular all-reduce primitive and shows promising empirical performance.
Improving message-passing gnns by asynchronous aggregation
Authors: Jialong Chen, Tianchi Liao, Chuan Chen, Zibin Zheng
Venue: Conference CIKM 2024
Year: 2024

Message passing (MP) is a popular paradigm for designing graph neural networks (GNNs), which iteratively aggregates neighbor information and updates node embeddings. However, this paradigm suffers from several issues: First, long-range information struggles to be fully utilized, known as over-squashing. Second, excessive MP layers lead to indistinguishable representations, referred to as over-smoothing. Finally, vanilla MPNNs fail to meet the ability of training in heterophilic graphs. In this paper, we provide a unified insight into these defects: node embeddings are sent to neighbors at a constant "pace" and are aggregated immediately. Such synchronicity causes embeddings closer to the output to be more important, i.e. local priority, manifesting the aforementioned issues. Based on this, Asyn-MPNN, an asynchronous framework that customizes the speed of information aggregation, is proposed, which can unify many popular GNNs. We further propose the automated asynchronous (a Asyn) layer, which achieves effects similar to Asyn-MPNN but without introducing extra hyperparameters and can be integrated into any GNN. aAsyn-MPNN validates its performance through extensive experiments on both graph-level and node-level tasks and achieves leading results on tasks from long-range graph benchmark.
Neural retrievers are biased towards llm-generated content
Authors: Sunhao Dai, Yuqi Zhou 0001, Liang Pang 0001, Weihao Liu 0001, Xiaolin Hu 0001, Yong Liu 0018, Xiao Zhang 0034, Gang Wang 0056, Jun Xu 0001
Venue: Conference KDD 2024
Year: 2024

Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the paradigm of information retrieval (IR) applications, especially in web search, by generating vast amounts of human-like texts on the Internet. As a result, IR systems in the LLM era are facing a new challenge: the indexed documents are now not only written by human beings but also automatically generated by the LLMs. How these LLM-generated documents influence the IR systems is a pressing and still unexplored question. In this work, we conduct a quantitative evaluation of IR models in scenarios where both human-written and LLM-generated texts are involved. Surprisingly, our findings indicate that neural retrieval models tend to rank LLM-generated documents higher. We refer to this category of biases in neural retrievers towards the LLM-generated content as the \textbf{source bias}. Moreover, we discover that this bias is not confined to the first-stage neural retrievers, but extends to the second-stage neural re-rankers. Then, in-depth analyses from the perspective of text compression indicate that LLM-generated texts exhibit more focused semantics with less noise, making it easier for neural retrieval models to semantic match. To mitigate the source bias, we also propose a plug-and-play debiased constraint for the optimization objective, and experimental results show its effectiveness. Finally, we discuss the potential severe concerns stemming from the observed source bias and hope our findings can serve as a critical wake-up call to the IR community and beyond. To facilitate future explorations of IR in the LLM era, the constructed two new benchmarks are available at https://github.com/KID-22/Source-Bias.
Stereo Matching with Non-Linear Diffusion
Authors: Daniel Scharstein, Richard Szeliski
Venue: Conference CVPR 1996
Year: 1996

One of the central problems in stereo matching (and other image registration tasks) is the selection of optimal window sizes for comparing image regions. This paper addresses this problem with some novel algorithms based on iteratively diffusing support at different disparity hypotheses, and locally controlling the amount of diffusion based on the current quality of the disparity estimate. It also develops a novel Bayesian estimation technique which significantly outperforms techniques based on area-based matching (SSD) and regular diffusion. We provide experimental results on both synthetic and real stereo image pairs.
Calibration of a Structured Light System: A Projective Approach
Authors: Du Q. Huynh
Venue: Conference CVPR 1997
Year: 1997

We present in this paper a novel calibration method that uses cross ratio to compute world points falling onto any given light stripe plane of a structured light system. We show that, by using 4 known non-coplanar sets of 3 collinear world points, the direct 4/spl times/3 image-to-world transformation matrix for each light stripe plane can also be recovered from plane-to-plane homography. Preliminary experiments conducted with a calibration target and a mannequin suggest that this novel calibration method is robust and is applicable to many shape measurement task.
Self-calibration and metric reconstruction in spite of varying and unknown internal camera parameters
Authors: Marc Pollefeys, Reinhard Koch, Luc Van Gool
Venue: Conference ICCV 1998
Year: 1998

In this paper the feasibility of self-calibration in the presence of varying internal camera parameters is under investigation. A self-calibration method is presented which efficiently deals with all kinds of constraints on the internal camera parameters. Within this framework a practical method is proposed which can retrieve metric reconstruction from image sequences obtained with uncalibrated zooming/focusing cameras. The feasibility of the approach is illustrated on real and synthetic examples.
A probabilistic framework for combining tracking algorithms
Authors: Ido Leichter, Michael Lindenbaum, Ehud Rivlin
Venue: Conference CVPR 2004
Year: 2004

For the past few years researches have been investigating enhancing tracking performance by combining several different tracking algorithms. We propose an analytically justified, probabilistic framework to combine multiple tracking algorithms. The separate tracking algorithms considered output a probability distribution function of the tracked state, sequentially for each image. The algorithms may output either an explicit probability distribution function, or a sample-set of it via condensation. The proposed framework is general and allows the combination of any set of separate tracking algorithms of this kind, even on different state spaces of different dimensionality, under a few reasonable assumptions. In many of the investigated settings, our approach allows us to treat the separate tracking algorithms as "closed boxes ". In other words, only the state distributions in the input and output are needed for the combination process. The suggested framework was successfully tested using various state spaces and datasets.