OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Self-Supervised Denoising through Independent Cascade Graph Augmentation for Robust Social Recommendation
Authors: Youchen Sun, Zhu Sun 0001, Yingpeng Du, Jie Zhang 0002, Yew Soon Ong
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Social Recommendation (SR) typically exploits neighborhood influence in the social network to enhance user preference modeling. However, users' intricate social behaviors may introduce noisy social connections for user modeling and harm the models' robustness. Existing solutions to alleviate social noise either filter out the noisy connections or generate new potential social connections. Due to the absence of labels, the former approaches may retain uncertain connections for user preference modeling while the latter methods may introduce additional social noise. Through data analysis, we discover that (1) social noise likely comes from the connected users with low preference similarity; and (2) Opinion Leaders (OLs) play a pivotal role in influence dissemination, surpassing high-similarity neighbors, regardless of their preference similarity with trusting peers. Guided by these observations, we propose a novel Self-Supervised Denoising approach through Independent Cascade Graph Augmentation, for more robust SR. Specifically, we employ the independent cascade diffusion model to generate an augmented graph view, which traverses the social graph and activates the edges in sequence to simulate the cascading influence spread. To steer the augmentation towards a denoised social graph, we (1) introduce a hierarchical contrastive loss to prioritize the activation of OLs first, followed by high-similarity neighbors, while weakening the low-similarity neighbors; and (2) integrate an information bottleneck based contrastive loss, aiming to minimize mutual information between original and augmented graphs yet preserve sufficient information for improved SR. Experiments conducted on two public datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art while also exhibiting higher robustness to different extents of social noise.
MGMatch: Fast Matchmaking with Nonlinear Objective and Constraints via Multimodal Deep Graph Learning
Authors: Yu Sun 0051, Kai Wang 0064, Zhipeng Hu, Runze Wu 0001, Yaoxin Wu, Wen Song 0004, Xudong Shen, Tangjie Lv, Changjie Fan
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

As a core problem of online games, matchmaking is to assign players into multiple teams to maximize their gaming experience. With the rapid development of game industry, it is increasingly difficulty to explicitly model players' experiences as linear functions. Instead, it is often modeled in a data-driven way by training a neural network. Meanwhile, complex rules must be satisfied to ensure the robustness of matchmaking, which are often described using logical operators. Therefore, matchmaking in practical scenarios is a challenging combinatorial optimization problem with nonlinear objective, linear constraints and logical constraints, which receives much less attention in previous research. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning method for high-quality matchmaking in real-time. We first cast the problem as standard mixed-integer programming (MIP) by linearizing ReLU networks and logical constraints. Then, based on supervised learning, we design and train a multi-modal graph learning architecture to predict optimal solutions end-to-end from instance data, and solve a surrogate problem to efficiently obtain feasible solutions. Evaluation results on real industry datasets show that our method can deliver near-optimal solutions within 100ms.
Dual-Assessment Driven Pruning: Iterative Optimizing Layer-wise Sparsity for Large Language Model
Authors: Qinghui Sun, Weilun Wang, Yanni Zhu, Shenghuan He, Hao Yi, Zehua Cai, Hong Liu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated efficacy in various domains, but deploying these models is economically challenging due to extensive parameter counts. Numerous efforts have been dedicated to reducing the parameter count of these models without compromising performance, employing a technique known as model pruning. Conventional pruning methods assess the significance of weights within individual layers and typically apply uniform sparsity levels across all layers, potentially neglecting the varying significance of each layer. To address this oversight, we first propose a dual-assessment driven pruning strategy that employs both intra-layer metric and global performance metric to comprehensively evaluate the impact of pruning. Then our method leverages an iterative optimization algorithm to find the optimal layer-wise sparsity distribution, thereby minimally impacting model performance. Extensive benchmark evaluations on state-of-the-art LLM architectures such as LLaMAv2 and OPT across a variety of NLP tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. When applied to the LLaMaV2-7B model with an overall pruning sparsity of 80%, our method achieves a 50% reduction in perplexity compared to the benchmark. The results indicate that our method significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in preserving performance after pruning.
CrossLight: Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning for Cross-City Traffic Signal Control
Authors: Qian Sun 0005, Rui Zha, Le Zhang 0010, Jingbo Zhou 0003, Yu Mei 0002, Zhiling Li, Hui Xiong 0001
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

The recent advancements in Traffic Signal Control (TSC) have highlighted the potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) as a promising solution to alleviate traffic congestion. Current research in this area primarily concentrates on either online or offline learning strategies, aiming to create optimized policies for specific cities. Nevertheless, the transferability of these policies to new cities is impeded by constraints such as the limited availability of high-quality data and the expensive and risky exploration process. To this end, in this paper, we present an innovative cross-city Traffic Signal Control (TSC) paradigm called CrossLight. Our approach involves meta training using offline data from source cities and adaptively fine-tuning in the target city. This novel methodology aims to address the challenges of transferring TSC policies across different cities effectively. In our proposed approach, we start by acquiring meta-decision pattern knowledge through trajectory dynamics reconstruction via pre-training in source cities. To address disparities in road network topologies between cities, we dynamically construct city topological structures based on the extracted meta-knowledge during the offline meta-training phase. These structures are then used to distill pattern-structure aware representations of decision trajectories from the source cities. To identify effective initial parameters for the learnable components, we employ the Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) framework, a popular meta-learning approach. During adaptive fine-tuning in the target city, we introduce a replay buffer that is iteratively updated using online interactions with a rank and filter mechanism. This mechanism, along with a carefully designed exploration strategy, ensures a balance between exploitation and exploration, thereby fostering both the diversity and quality of the trajectories for fine-tuning. Finally, extensive experiments across four cities validate that CrossLight achieves comparable performance in new cities with minimal fine-tuning iterations, surpassing both existing online and offline methods. This success underscores that our CrossLight framework emerges as a groundbreaking and potent paradigm, offering a feasible and effective solution to the intelligent transportation community.
PEMBOT: Pareto-Ensembled Multi-task Boosted Trees
Authors: Gokul Swamy 0002, Anoop Saladi, Arunita Das, Shobhit Niranjan
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Multi-task problems frequently arise in machine learning when there are multiple target variables, which share a common synergy while being sufficiently different that optimizing on any of the task does not necessarily imply an optimum for the others. In this work, we develop PEMBOT, a novel Pareto-based multi-task classification framework using a gradient boosted tree architecture. The proposed methodology involves a) generating multiple instances of Pareto optimal trees, b) diverse subset selection using a determinantal point process (DPP) model, and c) ensembling of diverse Pareto optimal trees to yield the final output. We tested our framework on a problem from an e-commerce domain wherein the task is to predict at order placement time the different adverse scenarios in the order shipment journey such as the package getting lost or damaged during shipment. This model enables us to take preemptive measures to prevent these scenarios from happening resulting in significant operational cost savings. Further, to show the generality of our approach, we demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on a publicly available wine quality prediction dataset and compare against state-of-the-art baselines.
First Workshop on Generative AI for Recommender Systems and Personalization
Authors: Narges Tabari, Aniket Anand Deshmukh, Wang-Cheng Kang, Hamed Zamani, Rashmi Gangadharaiah, Julian J. McAuley, George Karypis
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Personalization is key in understanding user behavior and has been a main focus in the fields of knowledge discovery and information retrieval. Building personalized recommender systems is especially important now due to the vast amount of user-generated textual content, which offers deep insights into user preferences. The recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted research areas, mainly in Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Discovery, giving these models the ability to handle complex tasks and learn context. However, the use of generative models and user-generated text for personalized systems and recommendation is relatively new and has shown some promising results. This workshop is designed to bridge the research gap in these fields and explore personalized applications and recommender systems. We aim to fully leverage generative models to develop AI systems that are not only accurate but also focused on meeting individual user needs. Building upon the momentum of previous successful forums, this workshop seeks to engage a diverse audience from academia and industry, fostering a dialogue that incorporates fresh insights and anticipates over 50 attendees, including key stakeholders in the field.
Hierarchical Linear Symbolized Tree-Structured Neural Processes
Authors: Jinyang Tai, Yi-Ke Guo
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Traditional Neural Processes (NPs) and their variants aim to learn relationships between context sample points but do not consider multi-level information, resulting in a limited ability to learn complex distributions.This paper draws inspiration from features such as the hierarchical nature and interpretability of tree-like structures. This paper proposes a Hierarchical Linear Symbolized Tree-structured Neural Processes (HLNPs) architecture. This framework utilizes variables to build a top-down hierarchical linear symbolized tree-structured network architecture, enhancing positional representation information in a hierarchical manner along the deterministic path. In the latent distribution, the hierarchical linear symbolized tree-structured network approximates functions discretely through a layered approach. By decomposing the latent complex distribution into several simpler sub-problems using sum and product symbols, the upper bound of optimization is thereby increased. The tree structure discretizes variables to capture model uncertainty in the form of entropy. This approach also imparts a causal effect to the HLNPs model. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the HLNPs models for 1D data, Bayesian optimization, and 2D data.
Enhancing Personalized Headline Generation via Offline Goal-conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models
Authors: Xiaoyu Tan, Leijun Cheng, Xihe Qiu, Shaojie Shi, Yuan Cheng, Wei Chu, Yinghui Xu, Yuan Qi 0001
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Recently, significant advancements have been made in Large Language Models (LLMs) through the implementation of various alignment techniques. These techniques enable LLMs to generate highly tailored content in response to diverse user instructions. Consequently, LLMs have the potential to serve as robust, customizable recommendation systems in the field of content recommendation. However, using LLMs with user individual information and online exploration remains a challenge, which are important perspectives in developing personalized news headline generation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to generate personalized news headlines using LLMs with extensive online exploration. The proposed approach involves initially training an offline goal-conditioned policy using supervised learning. Subsequently, online exploration is employed to collect new data for the next training iteration. Results from simulations, experiments, and real-word scenario demonstrate that our framework achieves outstanding performance on established benchmarks and can effectively generate personalized headlines under different reward settings. By treating the LLM as a goal-conditioned agent, the model can perform online exploration by modifying the goals without frequently retraining the model. To the best of our knowledge, this work represents the first investigation into the capability of LLMs to generate customized news headlines with goal-conditioned reinforcement learning via supervised learning within LLMs.
Business Policy Experiments using Fractional Factorial Designs: Consumer Retention on DoorDash
Authors: Yixin Tang, Yicong Lin, Navdeep S. Sahni
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

This paper investigates an approach to both speed up business decision-making and lower the cost of learning through experimentation by factorizing business policies and employing fractional factorial experimental designs for their evaluation. We illustrate how this method integrates with advances in the estimation of heterogeneous treatment effects, elaborating on its advantages and foundational assumptions. We empirically demonstrate the implementation and benefits of our approach and assess its validity in evaluating consumer promotion policies at DoorDash, which is one of the largest delivery platforms in the US. Our approach discovers a policy with 5% incremental profit at 67% lower implementation cost.
Causal Estimation of Exposure Shifts with Neural Networks and an Application to Inform Air Quality Standards in the US
Authors: Mauricio Tec, Kevin Josey, Oladimeji Mudele, Francesca Dominici
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

A fundamental task in causal inference is estimating the effect of a distribution shift in the treatment variable. We refer to this problem as shift-response function (SRF) estimation. Existing neural network methods for causal inference lack theoretical guarantees and practical implementations for SRF estimation. In this paper, we introduce Targeted Regularization for Exposure Shifts with Neural Networks (TRESNET), a method to estimate SRFs with robustness and efficiency guarantees. Our contributions are twofold. First, we propose a targeted regularization loss for neural networks with theoretical properties that ensure double robustness and asymptotic efficiency specific to SRF estimation. Second, we extend targeted regularization to support loss functions from the exponential family to accommodate non-continuous outcome distributions (e.g., discrete counts). We conduct benchmark experiments demonstrating TRESNET's broad applicability and competitiveness. We then apply our method to a key policy question in public health to estimate the causal effect of revising the US National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for PM 2.5 from 12 μg/m3 to 9 μg/m3. This change has been recently proposed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Our goal is to estimate the reduction in deaths that would result from this anticipated revision using data consisting of 68 million individuals across the U.S.
The 2nd International Workshop: From Innovation to Scale (I2S) - Successfully Build, Commercialize, and Scale AI Innovations
Authors: Ankur Teredesai, Michael Zeller, Mohak Shah, Shenghua Bao, Wee Hyong Tok, Linsey Pang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

In recent years, there have been exciting and accelerated developments in AI with novel developments in foundation models, deep learning, new AI applications across numerous verticals, and more. In addition, the pace of adoption of these innovations driven by both academic and industry research labs has sped up with both big tech companies and startups looking to deliver value-differentiated products and services. With Generative AI (GenAI) garnering significant attention, the second edition of the I2S workshop focuses on two aspects: First, bringing together AI thought leaders from academia, big tech, and startups to discuss the opportunities, use-case themes, challenges, and risks of GenAI in various business verticals; and Second, bringing together startup founders to share experiences and lessons learned in commercializing GenAI innovations into successful enterprises highlighting challenges through the entire commercial journey - from productization to acquiring customers, building a team, and securing funding.
Latent Diffusion-based Data Augmentation for Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph Model
Authors: Yuxing Tian, Aiwen Jiang, Qi Huang, Jian Guo 0016, Yiyan Qi
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Continuous-Time Dynamic Graph (CTDG) precisely models evolving real-world relationships, drawing heightened interest in dynamic graph learning across academia and industry. However, existing CTDG models encounter challenges stemming from noise and limited historical data. Graph Data Augmentation (GDA) emerges as a critical solution, yet current approaches primarily focus on static graphs and struggle to effectively address the dynamics inherent in CTDGs. Moreover, these methods often demand substantial domain expertise for parameter tuning and lack theoretical guarantees for augmentation efficacy. To address these issues, we propose Conda, a novel latent diffusion-based GDA method tailored for CTDGs. Conda features a sandwich-like architecture, incorporating a Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) and a conditional diffusion model, aimed at generating enhanced historical neighbor embeddings for target nodes. Unlike conventional diffusion models trained on entire graphs via pre-training, Conda requires historical neighbor sequence embeddings of target nodes for training, thus facilitating more targeted augmentation. We integrate Conda into the CTDG model and adopt an alternating training strategy to optimize performance. Extensive experimentation across six widely used real-world datasets showcases the consistent performance improvement of our approach, particularly in scenarios with limited historical data.
Graph Reasoning with LLMs (GReaL)
Authors: Anton Tsitsulin, Bryan Perozzi, Bahare Fatemi, Jonathan J. Halcrow
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Graphs are a powerful tool for representing and analyzing complex relationships in real-world applications. Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities by advancing state-of-the-art on many language-based benchmarks. Their ability to process and understand natural language open exciting possibilities in various domains. Despite the remarkable progress in automated reasoning with natural text, reasoning on graphs with LLMs remains an understudied problem that has recently gained more attention.This tutorial builds upon recent advances in expressing reasoning problems through the lens of tasks on graph data. The first part of the tutorial will provide an in-depth discussion of techniques for representing graphs as inputs to LLMs. The second, hands-on, portion will demonstrate these techniques in a practical setting. As a learning outcome of participating in the tutorial, participants will be able to analyze graphs either on free-tier Colab or their local machines with the help of LLMs.
R-Eval: A Unified Toolkit for Evaluating Domain Knowledge of Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models
Authors: Shangqing Tu, Yuanchun Wang 0002, Jifan Yu, Yuyang Xie, Yaran Shi, Xiaozhi Wang, Jing Zhang 0001, Lei Hou 0001, Juanzi Li
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Large language models have achieved remarkable success on general NLP tasks, but they may fall short for domain-specific problems. Recently, various Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (RALLMs) are proposed to address this shortcoming. However, existing evaluation tools only provide a few baselines and evaluate them on various domains without mining the depth of domain knowledge. In this paper, we address the challenges of evaluating RALLMs by introducing the R-Eval toolkit, a Python toolkit designed to streamline the evaluation of different RAG workflows in conjunction with LLMs. Our toolkit, which supports popular built-in RAG workflows and allows for the incorporation of customized testing data on the specific domain, is designed to be user-friendly, modular, and extensible. We conduct an evaluation of 21 RALLMs across three task levels and two representative domains, revealing significant variations in the effectiveness of RALLMs across different tasks and domains. Our analysis emphasizes the importance of considering both task and domain requirements when choosing a RAG workflow and LLM combination. We are committed to continuously maintaining our platform at https://github.com/THU-KEG/R-Eval to facilitate both the industry and the researchers.
The 4th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics
Authors: Steven Ullman, Benjamin M. Ampel, Sagar Samtani, Shanchieh Yang, Hsinchun Chen
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Cybersecurity remains a grand societal challenge. Large and constantly changing attack surfaces are non-trivial to protect against malicious actors. Entities like the United States and the European Union have recently emphasized the value of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for advancing cybersecurity. For example, the National Science Foundation has called for AI systems that can enhance cyber threat intelligence, detect new and evolving threats, and analyze massive troves of cybersecurity data. The 4th Workshop on Artificial Intelligence-enabled Cybersecurity Analytics (co-located with ACM KDD) sought to make significant and novel contributions within these relevant topics. Submissions were reviewed by highly qualified AI for cybersecurity researchers and practitioners spanning academia and private industry firms.
Breaking Barriers: A Hands-On Tutorial on AI-Enabled Accessibility to Social Media Content
Authors: Julio Villena, Rosa Català, Janine García, Concepción Polo, Yessika Labrador, Francisco del-Valle, Bhargav Ayyagari
Venue: KDD
Year: 2024

Reddit's mission is to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world. This hands-on tutorial explores the immense potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve accessibility to social media content for individuals with different disabilities, including hearing, visual, and cognitive impairments. We will design and implement a variety of AI-based approaches based on multimodal open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge the gap between research and real-world applications.