OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Embedding Based Deduplication in E-commerce AutoComplete
Authors: Shaodan Zhai, Yuwei Chen, Yixue Li
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Query AutoComplete (QAC) is an important feature in e-commerce search engines, aimed at enhancing user experience by offering relevant query suggestions. However, these suggestions often include semantically duplicate entries derived from user logs. While the existing literature has made significant progress in query similarity learning for e-commerce applications, the specific challenge of query deduplication has received less attention. To address this issue, this paper presents a new industry-scale framework for QAC deduplication at Coupang, utilizing diverse data augmentation techniques to enhance deduplication accuracy effectively. Our results reveal that this approach substantially outperforms existing query similarity methods, providing valuable insights into the utility of various pre-trained models and data augmentation strategies. Online A/B testing further validates the significant impact of our deduplication framework on improving the e-commerce search experience, highlighting the importance of addressing semantic duplicates in QAC suggestions and offering a practical solution with proven effectiveness in a live e-commerce environment.
Are Large Language Models Good at Utility Judgments?
Authors: Hengran Zhang, Ruqing Zhang, Jiafeng Guo, Maarten de Rijke, Yixing Fan, Xueqi Cheng
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is considered to be a promising approach to alleviate the hallucination issue of large language models (LLMs), and it has received widespread attention from researchers recently. Due to the limitation in the semantic understanding of retrieval models, the success of RAG heavily lies on the ability of LLMs to identify passages with utility. Recent efforts have explored the ability of LLMs to assess the relevance of passages in retrieval, but there has been limited work on evaluating the utility of passages in supporting question answering. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive study about the capabilities of LLMs in utility evaluation for open-domain question answering (QA). Specifically, we introduce a benchmarking procedure and collection of candidate passages with different characteristics, facilitating a series of experiments with five representative LLMs. Our experiments reveal that: (i) well-instructed LLMs can distinguish between relevance and utility, and that LLMs are highly receptive to newly generated counterfactual passages. Moreover, (ii) we scrutinize key factors that affect utility judgments in the instruction design. And finally, (iii) to verify the efficacy of utility judgments in practical retrieval augmentation applications, we delve into LLMs' QA capabilities using the evidence judged with utility and direct dense retrieval results. (iv) We propose a k-sampling, listwise approach to reduce the dependency of LLMs on the sequence of input passages, thereby facilitating subsequent answer generation. We believe that the way we formalize and study the problem along with our findings contributes to a critical assessment of retrieval-augmented LLMs. Our code and benchmark can be found at https://github.com/ict-bigdatalab/utility_judgments.
Exogenous and Endogenous Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Complex Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Shiyao Cui, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu, Hongbo Xu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Low-resource Complex Named Entity Recognition aims to detect entities with the form of any linguistic constituent under scenarios with limited manually annotated data. Existing studies augment the text through the substitution of same type entities or language modeling, but suffer from the lower quality and the limited entity context patterns within low-resource corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method E2DA from both exogenous and endogenous perspectives. As for exogenous augmentation, we treat the limited manually annotated data as anchors, and leverage the powerful instruction-following capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to expand the anchors by generating data that are highly dissimilar from the original anchor texts in terms of entity mentions and contexts. As regards the endogenous augmentation, we explore diverse semantic directions in the implicit feature space of the original and expanded anchors for effective data augmentation. Our complementary augmentation method from two perspectives not only continuously expands the global text-level space, but also fully explores the local semantic space for more diverse data augmentation. Extensive experiments on 10 diverse datasets across various low-resource settings demonstrate that the proposed method excels significantly over prior state-of-the-art data augmentation methods.
ModelGalaxy: A Versatile Model Retrieval Platform
Authors: Wenling Zhang, Yixiao Li, Zhaotian Li, Hailong Sun, Xiang Gao, Xudong Liu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

With the growing number of available machine learning models and the emergence of model-sharing platforms, model reuse has become a significant approach to harnessing the power of artificial intelligence. One of the key issues to realizing model reuse resides in efficiently and accurately finding the target models that meet user needs from a model repository. However, the existing popular model-sharing platforms (e.g., Hugging Face) mainly support model retrieval based on model name matching and task filtering. If not familiar with the platform or specific models, users may suffer from low retrieval efficiency and a less user-friendly interaction experience. To address these issues, we have developed ModelGalaxy, a versatile model retrieval platform supporting multiple model retrieval methods, including keyword-based search, dataset-based search, and user-task-centric search. Moreover, ModelGalaxy leverages the power of large language models to provide users with easily retrieving and using models. Our source code is available at https://github.com/zwl906711886/ModelGalaxy.
SuicidEmoji: Derived Emoji Dataset and Tasks for Suicide-Related Social Content
Authors: Tianlin Zhang, Kailai Yang, Shaoxiong Ji, Boyang Liu, Qianqian Xie, Sophia Ananiadou
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Early suicidal ideation detection using social media is crucial for mental health surveillance. Simultaneously, emojis from the posts can help us better understand users' emotions and predict mental health conditions. However, research in emoji-based suicide analysis remains underexplored, with few resources available, which can restrict the development of studying emoji usage patterns among users with suicidal ideation. In this work, we build a derived suicide-related emoji dataset named SuicidEmoji, which contains 25k emoji posts (2,329 suicide-related posts and 22,722 posts for the control group users) filtered from about 1.3 million crawled Reddit data. To the best of our knowledge, SuicidEmoji is the first suicide-related emoji dataset. Based on SuicidEmoji, we propose two novel tasks: emoji-aware suicidal ideation detection and emoji prediction, for which we build two benchmark subdatasets from SuicidEmoji to evaluate the performance of advanced methods including pre-trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs). We analyze the experimental results of two PLMs and the highly capable LLMs, which reveal the significance and challenges of emoji-based suicide-related NLP tasks. The dataset is avaliable at https://github.com/TianlinZhang668/SuicidEmoji.
COMI: COrrect and MItigate Shortcut Learning Behavior in Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Lili Zhao, Qi Liu, Linan Yue, Wei Chen, Liyi Chen, Ruijun Sun, Chao Song
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), despite their notable progress across information retrieval tasks, encounter the issues of shortcut learning and struggle with poor generalization due to their reliance on spurious correlations between features and labels. Current research mainly mitigates shortcut learning behavior using augmentation and distillation techniques, but these methods could be laborious and introduce unwarranted biases. To tackle these, in this paper, we propose COMI, a novel method to COrrect and MItigate shortcut learning behavior. Inspired by the ways students solve shortcuts in educational scenarios, we aim to reduce model's reliance on shortcuts and enhance its ability to extract underlying information integrated with standard Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM). Specifically, we first design Correct Habit (CoHa) strategy to retrieve the top m challenging samples for priority training, which encourages model to rely less on shortcuts in the early training. Then, to extract more meaningful underlying information, the information derived from ERM is separated into task-relevant and task-irrelevant information, the former serves as the primary basis for model predictions, while the latter is considered non-essential. However, within task-relevant information, certain potential shortcuts contribute to overconfident predictions. To mitigate this, we design Deep Mitigation (DeMi) network with shortcut margin loss to adaptively control the feature weights of shortcuts and eliminate their influence. Besides, to counteract unknown shortcut tokens issue in NLP, we adopt locally interpretable module-LIME to help recognize shortcut tokens. Finally, extensive experiments conducted on NLP and CV tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of COMI, which can perform well on both IID and OOD samples.
Leave No Patient Behind: Enhancing Medication Recommendation for Rare Disease Patients
Authors: Zihao Zhao, Yi Jing, Fuli Feng, Jiancan Wu, Chongming Gao, Xiangnan He
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Medication recommendation systems have gained significant attention in healthcare as a means of providing tailored and effective drug combinations based on patients' clinical information. However, existing approaches often suffer from fairness issues, as recommendations tend to be more accurate for patients with common diseases compared to those with rare conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel model called Robust and Accurate REcommendations for Medication (RAREMed), which leverages the pretrain-finetune learning paradigm to enhance accuracy for rare diseases. RAREMed employs a transformer encoder with a unified input sequence approach to capture complex relationships among disease and procedure codes. Additionally, it introduces two self-supervised pre-training tasks, namely Sequence Matching Prediction (SMP) and Self Reconstruction (SR), to learn specialized medication needs and interrelations among clinical codes. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that RAREMed provides accurate drug sets for both rare and common disease patients, thereby mitigating unfairness in medication recommendation systems. The implementation is available via https://github.com/zzhUSTC2016/RAREMed.
MTMS: Multi-teacher Multi-stage Knowledge Distillation for Reasoning-Based Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Zhuo Zhao, Zhiwen Xie, Guangyou Zhou, Jimmy Xiangji Huang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

As the field of machine reading comprehension (MRC) continues to evolve, it is unlocking enormous potential for its practical application. However, the currently well-performing models predominantly rely on massive pre-trained language models with at least several hundred million or even over one hundred billion parameters. These complex models not only require immense computational power but also extensive storage, presenting challenges for resource-limited environments such as online education.Current research indicates that specific capabilities of larger models can be transferred to smaller models through knowledge distillation. However, prior to our work, there were no small models specifically designed for MRC task with complex reasoning abilities. In light of this, we present a novel multi-teacher multi-stage distillation approach, MTMS. It facilitates the easier deployment of reasoning-based MRC task on resource-constrained devices, thereby enabling effective applications. In this method, we design a multi-teacher distillation framework that includes both a logical teacher and a semantic teacher. This framework allows MTMS to simultaneously extract features from different perspectives of the text, mitigating the limitations inherent in single-teacher information representations. Furthermore, we introduce a multi-stage contrastive learning strategy. Through this strategy, the student model can progressively align with the teacher models, effectively bridging the gap between them. Extensive experimental outcomes on two inference-based datasets from real-world scenarios demonstrate that MTMS requires nearly 10 times fewer parameters compared with the teacher model size while achieving the competitive performance.
DHMAE: A Disentangled Hypergraph Masked Autoencoder for Group Recommendation
Authors: Yingqi Zhao, Haiwei Zhang, Qijie Bai, Changli Nie, Xiaojie Yuan
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Group recommendation aims to suggest items to a group of users that are suitable for the group. Although some existing powerful deep learning models have achieved improved performance, various aspects remain unexplored: (1) Most existing models using contrastive learning tend to rely on high-quality data augmentation which requires precise contrastive view generation; (2) There is multifaceted natural noise in group recommendation, and additional noise is introduced during data augmentation; (3) Most existing hypergraph neural network-based models over-entangle the information of members and items, ignoring their unique characteristics. In light of this, we propose a highly effective Disentangled Hypergraph Masked Auto Encoder-enhanced method for group recommendation (DHMAE), combining a disentangled hypergraph neural network with a graph masked autoencoder. This approach creates self-supervised signals without data augmentation by masking the features of some nodes and hyperedges and then reconstructing them. For the noise problem, we design a masking strategy that relies on pre-computed degree-sensitive probabilities for the process of masking features. Furthermore, we propose a disentangled hypergraph neural network for group recommendation scenarios to extract common messages of members and items and disentangle them during the convolution process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models and effectively addresses the noise issue.
Enhancing Baidu Multimodal Advertisement with Chinese Text-to-Image Generation via Bilingual Alignment and Caption Synthesis
Authors: Kang Zhao, Xinyu Zhao, Zhipeng Jin, Yi Yang, Wen Tao, Cong Han, Shuanglong Li, Lin Liu
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence have revolutionized information retrieval and content generation, opening up new opportunities for the e-commerce industry. In particular, text-to-image generation models offer a novel approach to guiding the image generation process using natural language input, which is inspiring for multimodal search advertising. Traditional multimodal search ads require advertisers to prepare ad creatives, such as ad images, which is time-consuming and requires uniform image specifications and content quality inspection. To this end, we propose a streamlined generation framework for search ad image creatives. First, we prepare a Chinese image caption model with high-quality image-caption pairs to bootstrap training data refinement. With curated high-quality images and synthesized descriptive captions, we then train a Chinese text-to-image generation model, the largest to date, using SDXL and a 10-billion multimodal text encoder. Specifically, we introduce a two-stage bilingual multimodal representation alignment process to seamlessly integrate the text encoder with the generation model. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework, including assessments of image captioning and image generation. The implementation of our framework in Baidu Search Ads shows significant revenue increase, For example, beauty industry ads with generated image creatives achieve a 29% higher click-through rate (CTR).
Poisoning Decentralized Collaborative Recommender System and Its Countermeasures
Authors: Ruiqi Zheng, Liang Qu, Tong Chen, Kai Zheng, Yuhui Shi, Hongzhi Yin
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

To make room for privacy and efficiency, the deployment of many recommender systems is experiencing a shift from central servers to personal devices, where the federated recommender systems (FedRecs) and decentralized collaborative recommender systems (DecRecs) are arguably the two most representative paradigms. While both leverage knowledge (e.g., gradients) sharing to facilitate learning local models, FedRecs rely on a central server to coordinate the optimization process, yet in DecRecs, the knowledge sharing directly happens between clients. On the flip side, knowledge sharing also opens a backdoor for model poisoning attacks, where adversaries disguise themselves as benign clients and disseminate polluted knowledge to achieve malicious goals like promoting an item's exposure rate. Although research on such poisoning attacks provides valuable insights into finding security loopholes and corresponding countermeasures, existing attacks mostly focus on FedRecs, and are either inapplicable or ineffective for DecRecs. Compared with FedRecs where the tampered information can be universally distributed to all clients once uploaded to the cloud, each adversary in DecRecs can only communicate with neighbor clients of a small size, confining its impact to a limited range. To fill the gap, we present a novel attack method named Poisoning with Adaptive Malicious Neighbors (PAMN). With item promotion in top-K recommendation as the attack objective, PAMN effectively boosts target items' ranks with several adversaries that emulate benign clients (i.e., users) and transfers adaptively crafted gradients conditioned on each adversary's neighbors. A diversity-driven regularizer is further designed in PAMN to allow the adversaries to reach a broader group of multifaceted benign users. Moreover, with the vulnerabilities of DecRecs uncovered, a dedicated defensive mechanism based on user-level gradient clipping with sparsified updating is proposed. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the poisoning attack and the robustness of our defensive mechanism.
Predicting Micro-video Popularity via Multi-modal Retrieval Augmentation
Authors: Ting Zhong, Jian Lang, Yifan Zhang, Zhangtao Cheng, Kunpeng Zhang, Fan Zhou
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Accurately predicting the popularity of micro-videos is crucial for real-world applications such as recommender systems and identifying viral marketing opportunities. Existing methods often focus on limited cross-modal information within individual micro-videos, overlooking the potential advantages of exploiting vast repository of past videos. We present MMRA, a multi-modal retrieval-augmented popularity prediction model that enhances prediction accuracy using relevant retrieved information. MMRA first retrieves relevant instances from a multi-modal memory bank, aligning video and text through transformation mechanisms involving a vision model and a text-based retriever. Additionally, a multi-modal interaction network is carefully designed to jointly capture cross-modal correlations within the target video and extract informative knowledge through retrieved instances, ultimately enhancing the prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on the real-world micro-video dataset demonstrate the superiority of MMRA when compared to state-of-the-art models. The code and data are available at https://github.com/ICDM-UESTC/MMRA.
EASE-DR: Enhanced Sentence Embeddings for Dense Retrieval
Authors: Xixi Zhou, Yang Gao, Xin Jie, Xiaoxu Cai, Jiajun Bu, Haishuai Wang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Recent neural information retrieval models using dense text representations generated by pre-trained models commonly face two issues. First, a pre-trained model (e.g., BERT) usually truncates a long document before giving its representation, which may cause the loss of some important semantic information. Second, although pre-training models like BERT have been widely used in generating sentence embeddings, a substantial body of literature has shown that the pre-training models often represent sentence embeddings in a homogeneous and narrow space, known as the problem of representation anisotropy, which hurts the quality of dense vector retrieval. In this paper, we split the query and the document in information retrieval into two sets of natural sentences and generate their sentence embeddings with BERT, the most popular pre-trained model. Before aggregating the sentence embeddings to get the entire embedding representations of the input query and document, to alleviate the usual representation degeneration problem of sentence embeddings from BERT, we sample the variational auto-encoder's latent space distribution to obtain isotropic sentence embeddings and utilize supervised contrastive learning to uniform the distribution of these sentence embeddings in the representation space. Our proposed model undergoes training optimization for both the query and the document in the abovementioned aspects. Our model performs well in evaluating three extensively researched neural information retrieval datasets.
Multimodal Representation and Retrieval [MRR 2024]
Authors: Xinliang Zhu, Arnab Dhua, Douglas Gray, I. Zeki Yalniz, Tan Yu, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Bryan A. Plummer
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Multimodal data is available in many applications like e-commerce production listings, social media posts and short videos. However, existing algorithms dealing with those types of data still focus on uni-modal representation learning by vision-language alignment and cross-modal retrieval. In this workshop, we target to bring a new retrieval problem where both queries and documents are multimodal. With the popularity of vision language modeling, large language models (LLMs), retrieval augmented generation (RAG), and multimodal LLM, we see a lot of new opportunities for multimodal representation and retrieval tasks. This event will be a comprehensive half-day workshop focusing on the subject of multimodal representation and retrieval. The agenda includes keynote speeches, oral presentations, and an interactive panel discussion.
Adaptive Fair Representation Learning for Personalized Fairness in Recommendations via Information Alignment
Authors: Xinyu Zhu, Lilin Zhang, Ning Yang
Venue: SIGIR
Year: 2024

Personalized fairness in recommendations has been attracting increasing attention from researchers. The existing works often treat a fairness requirement, represented as a collection of sensitive attributes, as a hyper-parameter, and pursue extreme fairness by completely removing information of sensitive attributes from the learned fair embedding, which suffer from two challenges: huge training cost incurred by the explosion of attribute combinations, and the suboptimal trade-off between fairness and accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel Adaptive Fair Representation Learning (AFRL) model, which achieves a real personalized fairness due to its advantage of training only one model to adaptively serve different fairness requirements during inference phase. Particularly, AFRL treats fairness requirements as inputs and can learn an attribute-specific embedding for each attribute from the unfair user embedding, which endows AFRL with the adaptability during inference phase to determine the non-sensitive attributes under the guidance of the user's unique fairness requirement. To achieve a better trade-off between fairness and accuracy in recommendations, AFRL conducts a novel Information Alignment to exactly preserve discriminative information of non-sensitive attributes and incorporate a debiased collaborative embedding into the fair embedding to capture attribute-independent collaborative signals, without loss of fairness. Finally, the extensive experiments conducted on real datasets together with the sound theoretical analysis demonstrate the superiority of AFRL.