OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Fine-Grained Session Recommendations in E-commerce using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

Sustaining users' interest and keeping them engaged in the platform is very important for the success of an e-commerce business. A session encompasses different activities of a user between logging into the platform and logging out or making a purchase. User activities in a session can be classified into two groups: Known Intent and Unknown intent. Known intent activity pertains to the session where the intent of a user to browse/purchase a specific product can be easily captured. Whereas in unknown intent activity, the intent of the user is not known. For example, consider the scenario where a user enters the session to casually browse the products over the platform, similar to the window shopping experience in the offline setting. While recommending similar products is essential in the former, accurately understanding the intent and recommending interesting products is essential in the latter setting in order to retain a user. In this work, we focus primarily on the unknown intent setting where our objective is to recommend a sequence of products to a user in a session to sustain their interest, keep them engaged and possibly drive them towards purchase. We formulate this problem in the framework of the Markov Decision Process (MDP), a popular mathematical framework for sequential decision making and solve it using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques. However, training the next product recommendation is difficult in the RL paradigm due to large variance in browse/purchase behavior of the users. Therefore, we break the problem down into predicting various product attributes, where a pattern/trend can be identified and exploited to build accurate models. We show that the DRL agent provides better performance compared to a greedy strategy.
Accurate Bundle Matching and Generation via Multitask Learning with Partially Shared Parameters
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2022
Year: 2022

How can we recommend existing bundles to users accurately? How can we generate new tailored bundles for users? Recommending a bundle, or a group of various items, has attracted widespread attention in e-commerce owing to the increased satisfaction of both users and providers. Bundle matching and bundle generation are two representative tasks in bundle recommendation. The bundle matching task is to correctly match existing bundles to users while the bundle generation is to generate new bundles that users would prefer. Although many recent works have developed bundle recommendation models, they fail to achieve high accuracy since they do not handle heterogeneous data effectively and do not learn a method for customized bundle generation. In this paper, we propose BundleMage, an accurate approach for bundle matching and generation. BundleMage effectively mixes user preferences of items and bundles using an adaptive gate technique to achieve high accuracy for the bundle matching. BundleMage also generates a personalized bundle by learning a generation module that exploits a user preference and the characteristic of a given incomplete bundle to be completed. BundleMage further improves its performance using multi-task learning with partially shared parameters. Through extensive experiments, we show that BundleMage achieves up to 6.6% higher nDCG in bundle matching and 6.3x higher nDCG in bundle generation than the best competitors. We also provide qualitative analysis that BundleMage effectively generates bundles considering both the tastes of users and the characteristics of target bundles.
Masked Transformer for image Anomaly Localization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Image anomaly detection consists in detecting images or image portions that are visually different from the majority of the samples in a dataset. The task is of practical importance for various real-life applications like biomedical image analysis, visual inspection in industrial production, banking, traffic management, etc. Most of the current deep learning approaches rely on image reconstruction: the input image is projected in some latent space and then reconstructed, assuming that the network (mostly trained on normal data) will not be able to reconstruct the anomalous portions. However, this assumption does not always hold. We thus propose a new model based on the Vision Transformer architecture with patch masking: the input image is split in several patches, and each patch is reconstructed only from the surrounding data, thus ignoring the potentially anomalous information contained in the patch itself. We then show that multi-resolution patches and their collective embeddings provide a large improvement in the model's performance compared to the exclusive use of the traditional square patches. The proposed model has been tested on popular anomaly detection datasets such as MVTec and head CT and achieved good results when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches.
Hyperspectral Images Classification and Dimensionality Reduction using spectral interaction and SVM classifier
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Over the past decades, the hyperspectral remote sensing technology development has attracted growing interest among scientists in various domains. The rich and detailed spectral information provided by the hyperspectral sensors has improved the monitoring and detection capabilities of the earth surface substances. However, the high dimensionality of the hyperspectral images (HSI) is one of the main challenges for the analysis of the collected data. The existence of noisy, redundant and irrelevant bands increases the computational complexity, induce the Hughes phenomenon and decrease the target's classification accuracy. Hence, the dimensionality reduction is an essential step to face the dimensionality challenges. In this paper, we propose a novel filter approach based on the maximization of the spectral interaction measure and the support vector machines for dimensionality reduction and classification of the HSI. The proposed Max Relevance Max Synergy (MRMS) algorithm evaluates the relevance of every band through the combination of spectral synergy, redundancy and relevance measures. Our objective is to select the optimal subset of synergistic bands providing accurate classification of the supervised scene materials. Experimental results have been performed using three different hyperspectral datasets: "Indiana Pine", "Pavia University" and "Salinas" provided by the "NASA-AVIRIS" and the "ROSIS" spectrometers. Furthermore, a comparison with the state of the art band selection methods has been carried out in order to demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the proposed approach. Keywords: Hyperspectral images, remote sensing, dimensionality reduction, classification, synergic, correlation, spectral interaction information, mutual inform
Private and Reliable Neural Network Inference
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Reliable neural networks (NNs) provide important inference-time reliability guarantees such as fairness and robustness. Complementarily, privacy-preserving NN inference protects the privacy of client data. So far these two emerging areas have been largely disconnected, yet their combination will be increasingly important. In this work, we present the first system which enables privacy-preserving inference on reliable NNs. Our key idea is to design efficient fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) counterparts for the core algorithmic building blocks of randomized smoothing, a state-of-the-art technique for obtaining reliable models. The lack of required control flow in FHE makes this a demanding task, as naïve solutions lead to unacceptable runtime. We employ these building blocks to enable privacy-preserving NN inference with robustness and fairness guarantees in a system called Phoenix. Experimentally, we demonstrate that Phoenix achieves its goals without incurring prohibitive latencies. To our knowledge, this is the first work which bridges the areas of client data privacy and reliability guarantees for NNs.
Knowledge-Guided Exploration in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

This paper proposes a new method to drastically speed up deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) training for problems that have the property of state-action permissibility (SAP). Two types of permissibility are defined under SAP. The first type says that after an action $a_t$ is performed in a state $s_t$ and the agent has reached the new state $s_{t+1}$, the agent can decide whether $a_t$ is permissible or not permissible in $s_t$. The second type says that even without performing $a_t$ in $s_t$, the agent can already decide whether $a_t$ is permissible or not in $s_t$. An action is not permissible in a state if the action can never lead to an optimal solution and thus should not be tried (over and over again). We incorporate the proposed SAP property and encode action permissibility knowledge into two state-of-the-art deep RL algorithms to guide their state-action exploration together with a virtual stopping strategy. Results show that the SAP-based guidance can markedly speed up RL training.
Average Age of Information Penalty of Short-Packet Communications with Packet Management
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we analyze the non-linear age of information (AoI) performance in a point-to-point short packet communication system, where a transmitter generates packets based on status updates and transmits the packets to a receiver. Specifically, we investigate three packet management strategies, namely, the non-preemption with no buffer strategy, the non-preemption with one buffer strategy, and the preemption strategy. To characterize the level of the receiver's dissatisfaction on outdated data, we adopt a generalized α-βAoI penalty function into the analysis and derive closed-form expressions for the average AoI penalty achieved by the three packet management strategies. Simulation results are used to corroborate our analysis and explicitly evaluate the impact of various system parameters, such as the coding rate and status update generation rate, on the AoI performance. Additionally, we find that the value of αreflects the system transmission reliability.
Re-looking at the View Update Problem
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2022
Year: 2022

Relational databases have always had a means for creating a pseudo-table, called a view, defined by a query. Views are like tables in most ways, except that they are read-only and cannot be updated. The problem of how to update views has attracted a lot of attention in the 1980s but is unsolved. The best approach from that time was by Bancilhon and Spyratos. I use one of their overlooked theorems and find a number of simple solutions for common relational operators.
List Agreement Expansion from Coboundary Expansion
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2022
Year: 2022

One of the key components in PCP constructions are agreement tests. In agreement test the tester is given access to subsets of fixed size of some set, each equipped with an assignment. The tester is then tasked with testing whether these local assignments agree with some global assignment over the entire set. One natural generalization of this concept is the case where, instead of a single assignment to each local view, the tester is given access to $l$ different assignments for every subset. The tester is then tasked with testing whether there exist $l$ global functions that agree with all of the assignments of all of the local views. In this work we present sufficient condition for a set system to exhibit this generalized definition of list agreement expansion. This is, to our knowledge, the first work to consider this natural generalization of agreement testing. Despite initially appearing very similar to agreement expansion, list agreement expansion seem to require a different set of techniques. This is due to the fact that the natural extension of agreement testing does not suffice when testing for list agreement, as list agreement crucially relies on a global structure. It follows that if a local assignments satisfy list agreement they must not only agree locally but also exhibit some additional structure. In order to test for the existence of this additional structure we use a connection between covering spaces of a high dimensional complex and its coboundaries. We use this connection as a form of ``decoupling''. Moreover, we show that any set system that exhibits list agreement expansion also supports direct sum testing. This is the first scheme for direct sum testing that works regardless of the parity of the sizes of the local sets. Prior to our work the schemes for direct sum testing were based on the parity of the sizes of the local tests.
QUILL: Query Intent with Large Language Models using Retrieval Augmentation and Multi-stage Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive results on a variety of text understanding tasks. Search queries though pose a unique challenge, given their short-length and lack of nuance or context. Complicated feature engineering efforts do not always lead to downstream improvements as their performance benefits may be offset by increased complexity of knowledge distillation. Thus, in this paper we make the following contributions: (1) We demonstrate that Retrieval Augmentation of queries provides LLMs with valuable additional context enabling improved understanding. While Retrieval Augmentation typically increases latency of LMs (thus hurting distillation efficacy), (2) we provide a practical and effective way of distilling Retrieval Augmentation LLMs. Specifically, we use a novel two-stage distillation approach that allows us to carry over the gains of retrieval augmentation, without suffering the increased compute typically associated with it. (3) We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed approach (QUILL) on a billion-scale, real-world query understanding system resulting in huge gains. Via extensive experiments, including on public benchmarks, we believe this work offers a recipe for practical use of retrieval-augmented query understanding.
GraphMAD: Graph Mixup for Data Augmentation using Data-Driven Convex Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We develop a novel data-driven nonlinear mixup mechanism for graph data augmentation and present different mixup functions for sample pairs and their labels. Mixup is a data augmentation method to create new training data by linearly interpolating between pairs of data samples and their labels. Mixup of graph data is challenging since the interpolation between graphs of potentially different sizes is an ill-posed operation. Hence, a promising approach for graph mixup is to first project the graphs onto a common latent feature space and then explore linear and nonlinear mixup strategies in this latent space. In this context, we propose to (i) project graphs onto the latent space of continuous random graph models known as graphons, (ii) leverage convex clustering in this latent space to generate nonlinear data-driven mixup functions, and (iii) investigate the use of different mixup functions for labels and data samples. We evaluate our graph data augmentation performance on benchmark datasets and demonstrate that nonlinear data-driven mixup functions can significantly improve graph classification.
Beyond Homophily with Graph Echo State Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Graph Echo State Networks (GESN) have already demonstrated their efficacy and efficiency in graph classification tasks. However, semi-supervised node classification brought out the problem of over-smoothing in end-to-end trained deep models, which causes a bias towards high homophily graphs. We evaluate for the first time GESN on node classification tasks with different degrees of homophily, analyzing also the impact of the reservoir radius. Our experiments show that reservoir models are able to achieve better or comparable accuracy with respect to fully trained deep models that implement ad hoc variations in the architectural bias, with a gain in terms of efficiency.
Nearest Neighbor Language Models for Stylistic Controllable Generation
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Recent language modeling performance has been greatly improved by the use of external memory. This memory encodes the context so that similar contexts can be recalled during decoding. This similarity depends on how the model learns to encode context, which can be altered to include other attributes, such as style. We construct and evaluate an architecture for this purpose, using corpora annotated for politeness, formality, and toxicity. Through extensive experiments and human evaluation we demonstrate the potential of our method to generate text while controlling style. We find that style-specific datastores improve generation performance, though results vary greatly across styles, and the effect of pretraining data and specific styles should be explored in future work.
A Game Benchmark for Real-Time Human-Swarm Control
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

We present a game benchmark for testing human-swarm control algorithms and interfaces in a real-time, high-cadence scenario. Our benchmark consists of a swarm vs. swarm game in a virtual ROS environment in which the goal of the game is to capture all agents from the opposing swarm; the game's high-cadence is a result of the capture rules, which cause agent team sizes to fluctuate rapidly. These rules require players to consider both the number of agents currently at their disposal and the behavior of their opponent's swarm when they plan actions. We demonstrate our game benchmark with a default human-swarm control system that enables a player to interact with their swarm through a high-level touchscreen interface. The touchscreen interface transforms player gestures into swarm control commands via a low-level decentralized ergodic control framework. We compare our default human-swarm control system to a flocking-based control system, and discuss traits that are crucial for swarm control algorithms and interfaces operating in real-time, high-cadence scenarios like our game benchmark. Our game benchmark code is available on Github; more information can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/swarm-game-benchmark.
Completely Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) faces three major difficulties: cross-domain, heterogeneous models, and non-i.i.d. labels scenarios. Existing FL methods fail to handle the above three constraints at the same time, and the level of privacy protection needs to be lowered (e.g., the model architecture and data category distribution can be shared). In this work, we propose the challenging "completely heterogeneous" scenario in FL, which refers to that each client will not expose any private information including feature space, model architecture, and label distribution. We then devise an FL framework based on parameter decoupling and data-free knowledge distillation to solve the problem. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves high performance in completely heterogeneous scenarios where other approaches fail.
Mitigating Health Disparities in EHR via Deconfounder
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Health disparities, or inequalities between different patient demographics, are becoming crucial in medical decision-making, especially in Electronic Health Record (EHR) predictive modeling. To ensure the fairness of sensitive attributes, conventional studies mainly adopt calibration or re-weighting methods to balance the performance on among different demographic groups. However, we argue that these methods have some limitations. First, these methods usually mean a trade-off between the model's performance and fairness. Second, many methods completely attribute unfairness to the data collection process, which lacks substantial evidence. In this paper, we provide an empirical study to discover the possibility of using deconfounder to address the disparity issue in healthcare. Our study can be summarized in two parts. The first part is a pilot study demonstrating the exacerbation of disparity when unobserved confounders exist. The second part proposed a novel framework, Parity Medical Deconfounder (PriMeD), to deal with the disparity issue in healthcare datasets. Inspired by the deconfounder theory, PriMeD adopts a Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) to learn latent factors (substitute confounders) for observational data, and extensive experiments are provided to show its effectiveness.
Self-Supervised Learning with Multi-View Rendering for 3D Point Cloud Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Recently, great progress has been made in 3D deep learning with the emergence of deep neural networks specifically designed for 3D point clouds. These networks are often trained from scratch or from pre-trained models learned purely from point cloud data. Inspired by the success of deep learning in the image domain, we devise a novel pre-training technique for better model initialization by utilizing the multi-view rendering of the 3D data. Our pre-training is self-supervised by a local pixel/point level correspondence loss computed from perspective projection and a global image/point cloud level loss based on knowledge distillation, thus effectively improving upon popular point cloud networks, including PointNet, DGCNN and SR-UNet. These improved models outperform existing state-of-the-art methods on various datasets and downstream tasks. We also analyze the benefits of synthetic and real data for pre-training, and observe that pre-training on synthetic data is also useful for high-level downstream tasks. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/VinAIResearch/selfsup_pcd.
Long-HOT: A Modular Hierarchical Approach for Long-Horizon Object Transport
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

We address key challenges in long-horizon embodied exploration and navigation by proposing a new object transport task and a novel modular framework for temporally extended navigation. Our first contribution is the design of a novel Long-HOT environment focused on deep exploration and long-horizon planning where the agent is required to efficiently find and pick up target objects to be carried and dropped at a goal location, with load constraints and optional access to a container if it finds one. Further, we propose a modular hierarchical transport policy (HTP) that builds a topological graph of the scene to perform exploration with the help of weighted frontiers. Our hierarchical approach uses a combination of motion planning algorithms to reach point goals within explored locations and object navigation policies for moving towards semantic targets at unknown locations. Experiments on both our proposed Habitat transport task and on MultiOn benchmarks show that our method significantly outperforms baselines and prior works. Further, we validate the effectiveness of our modular approach for long-horizon transport by demonstrating meaningful generalization to much harder transport scenes with training only on simpler versions of the task.