OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Dialogue Based Disease Screening Through Domain Customized Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Zhuo Liu, Yanxuan Li, Xingzhi Sun, Fei Wang, Gang Hu, Guotong Xie
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

In this paper, we study the problem of leveraging dialogue agents learned from reinforcement learning (RL) that can interact with patients for automatic disease screening. This application requires efficient and effective inquiry of appropriate symptoms to make accurate diagnosis recommendations. Existing studies have tried to use RL to perform both symptom inquiry and diagnosis simultaneously, which needs to deal with a large, heterogeneous action space that affects the learning efficiency and effectiveness. To address the challenge, we propose to leverage the models learned from the dialogue data to customize the settings of the reinforcement learning for more efficient action space exploration. In particular, a supervised diagnosis model is built and involved in the definition of state and reward. We also develop the clustering method to form a hierarchy in the action space. These customizations can make the learning task focus on checking the most relevant symptoms, which effectively boost the confidence of diagnosis. Besides, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework with the pretraining strategy is used to reduce the dimension of action space and help the model to converge. For empirical evaluations, we conduct extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets. The results have demonstrated the superiority of our approach in diagnostic accuracy and interaction efficiency compared with other baseline methods.
Categorization of Financial Transactions in QuickBooks
Authors: Juan Liu, Lei Pei, Ying Sun, Heather Simpson, Jocelyn Lu, Nhung Ho
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

This paper shares our work on building a machine learning system to categorize transactions for Intuit's QuickBooks product. Transaction categorization is challenging due to the complexity of accounting, the need for personalization, and the diversity of customers. We have broken down this monolithic problem into smaller pieces based on customers' life-cycle stages, and tailored solutions to address customer pain-points for each. Modern machine learning technologies such as deep neural networks, transfer learning, and few-shot learning are adopted to enable accurate transaction categorization. Furthermore our system learns user actions in real-time to provide relevant and in-time category recommendations. This in-session learning capability reduces user workload, improves customer experience, and helps to cultivate confidence.
Intention-aware Heterogeneous Graph Attention Networks for Fraud Transactions Detection
Authors: Can Liu, Li Sun, Xiang Ao, Jinghua Feng, Qing He, Hao Yang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Fraud transactions have been the major threats to the healthy development of e-commerce platforms, which not only damage the user experience but also disrupt the orderly operation of the market. User behavioral data is widely used to detect fraud transactions, and recent works show that accurate modeling of user intentions in behavioral sequences can propel further improvements on the performances. However, most existing methods treat each transaction as an independent data instance without considering the transaction-level interactions accessed by transaction attributes, e.g., information on remark, logistics, payment, device and etc., which may fail to achieve satisfactory results in more complex scenarios. In this paper, a novel heterogeneous transaction-intention network is devised to leverage the cross-interaction information over transactions and intentions, which consists of two types of nodes, namely transaction and intention nodes, and two types of edges, i.e., transaction-intention and transaction-transaction edges. Then we propose a graph neural method coined IHGAT(Intention-aware Heterogeneous Graph ATtention networks) that not only perceives sequence-like intentions, but also encodes the relationship among transactions. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset of Alibaba platform show that our proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both offline and online modes.
Lane Change Scheduling for Autonomous Vehicle: A Prediction-and-Search Framework
Authors: Shuncheng Liu, Han Su, Yan Zhao, Kai Zeng, Kai Zheng
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Automation in road vehicles is an emerging technology that has developed rapidly over the last decade. There have been many inter-disciplinary challenges posed on existing transportation infrastructure by autonomous vehicles (AV). In this paper, we conduct an algorithmic study on when and how an autonomous vehicle should change its lane, which is a fundamental problem in vehicle automation field and root cause of most 'phantom' traffic jams. We propose a prediction-and-search framework, called Cheetah (Change lane smart for autonomous vehicle), which aims to optimize the lane changing maneuvers of autonomous vehicle while minimizing its impact on surrounding vehicles. In the prediction phase, Cheetah learns the spatio-temporal dynamics from historical trajectories of surrounding vehicles with a deep model (GAS-LED) and predict their corresponding actions in the near future. A global attention mechanism and state sharing strategy are also incorporated to achieve higher accuracy and better convergence efficiency. Then in the search phase, Cheetah looks for optimal lane change maneuvers for the autonomous vehicle by taking into account a few factors such as speed, impact on other vehicles and safety issues. A tree-based adaptive beam search algorithm is designed to reduce the search space and improve accuracy. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data evidence that the proposed framework excels state-of-the-art competitors with respect to both effectiveness and efficiency.
Signed Graph Neural Network with Latent Groups
Authors: Haoxin Liu, Ziwei Zhang, Peng Cui, Yafeng Zhang, Qiang Cui, Jiashuo Liu, Wenwu Zhu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Signed graph representation learning is an effective approach to analyze the complex patterns in real-world signed graphs with the co-existence of positive and negative links. Most previous signed graph representation learning methods resort to balance theory, a classic social theory that originated from psychology as the core assumption. However, since balance theory is shown equivalent to a simple assumption that nodes can be divided into two conflicting groups, it fails to model the structure of real signed graphs. To solve this problem, we propose Group Signed Graph Neural Network (GS-GNN) model for signed graph representation learning beyond the balance theory assumption. GS-GNN has a dual GNN architecture that consists of the global and the local module. In the global module, we adopt a more generalized assumption that nodes can be divided into multiple latent groups and that the groups can have arbitrary relations and propose a novel prototype-based GNN to learn node representations based on the assumption. In the local module, to give the model enough flexibility in modeling other factors, we do not make any prior assumptions, treat positive links and negative links as two independent relations, and adopt a relational GNN to learn node representations. Both modules can complement each other, and the concatenation of two modules is fed into downstream tasks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our GS-GNN model on both synthetic and real-world signed graphs by greatly and consistently outperforming all the baselines and achieving new state-of-the-art results. Our implementation is available in PyTorch.
HGK-GNN: Heterogeneous Graph Kernel based Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Qingqing Long, Lingjun Xu, Zheng Fang, Guojie Song
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

While Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable results in a variety of applications, recent studies exposed important shortcomings in their ability to capture heterogeneous structures and attributes of an underlying graph. Furthermore, though many Heterogeneous GNN (HGNN) variants have been proposed and have achieved state-of-the-art results, there are limited theoretical understandings of their properties. To this end, we introduce graph kernel to HGNNs and develop a Heterogeneous Graph Kernel-based Graph Neural Networks (HGK-GNN). Specifically, we incorporate the Mahalanobis distance (MD) to build a Heterogeneous Graph Kernel (HGK), and incorporating it into deep neural architectures, thus leveraging a heterogeneous GNN with a heterogeneous aggregation scheme. Also, we mathematically bridge HGK-GNN to metapath-based HGNNs, which are the most popular and effective variants of HGNNs. We theoretically analyze HGK-GNN with the indispensable Encoder and Aggregator component in metapath-based HGNNs, through which we provide a theoretical perspective to understand the most popular HGNNs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce HGK into the field of HGNNs, and mark a first step in the direction of theoretically understanding and analyzing HGNNs. Correspondingly, both graph and node classification experiments are leveraged to evaluate HGK-GNN, where HGK-GNN outperforms a wide range of baselines on six real-world datasets, endorsing the analysis.
AliCoCo2: Commonsense Knowledge Extraction, Representation and Application in E-commerce
Authors: Xusheng Luo, Le Bo, Jinhang Wu, Lin Li, Zhiy Luo, Yonghua Yang, Keping Yang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Commonsense knowledge used by humans while doing online shopping is valuable but difficult to be captured by existing systems running on e-commerce platforms. While construction of common- sense knowledge graphs in e-commerce is non-trivial, representation learning upon such graphs poses unique challenge compared to well-studied open-domain knowledge graphs (e.g., Freebase). By leveraging the commonsense knowledge and representation techniques, various applications in e-commerce can be benefited. Based on AliCoCo, the large-scale e-commerce concept net assisting a series of core businesses in Alibaba, we further enrich it with more commonsense relations and present AliCoCo2, the first commonsense knowledge graph constructed for e-commerce use. We propose a multi-task encoder-decoder framework to provide effective representations for nodes and edges from AliCoCo2. To explore the possibility of improving e-commerce businesses with commonsense knowledge, we apply newly mined commonsense relations and learned embeddings to e-commerce search engine and recommendation system in different ways. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed representation learning method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the task of knowledge graph completion (KGC), and applications on search and recommendation indicate great potential value of the construction and use of commonsense knowledge graph in e-commerce. Besides, we propose an e-commerce QA task with a new benchmark during the construction of AliCoCo2, for testing machine common sense in e-commerce, which can benefit research community in exploring commonsense reasoning.
Are we really making much progress?: Revisiting, benchmarking and refining heterogeneous graph neural networks
Authors: Qingsong Lv, Ming Ding, Qiang Liu, Yuxiang Chen, Wenzheng Feng, Siming He, Chang Zhou, Jianguo Jiang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have been blossoming in recent years, but the unique data processing and evaluation setups used by each work obstruct a full understanding of their advancements. In this work, we present a systematical reproduction of 12 recent HGNNs by using their official codes, datasets, settings, and hyperparameters, revealing surprising findings about the progress of HGNNs. We find that the simple homogeneous GNNs, e.g., GCN and GAT, are largely underestimated due to improper settings. GAT with proper inputs can generally match or outperform all existing HGNNs across various scenarios. To facilitate robust and reproducible HGNN research, we construct the Heterogeneous Graph Benchmark (HGB) , consisting of 11 diverse datasets with three tasks. HGB standardizes the process of heterogeneous graph data splits, feature processing, and performance evaluation. Finally, we introduce a simple but very strong baseline Simple-HGN-which significantly outperforms all previous models on HGB-to accelerate the advancement of HGNNs in the future.
BLOCKSET (Block-Aligned Serialized Trees): Reducing Inference Latency for Tree ensemble Deployment
Authors: Meghana Madhyastha, Kunal Lillaney, James Browne, Joshua T. Vogelstein, Randal C. Burns
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

We present methods to serialize and deserialize gradient-boosted trees and random forests that optimize inference latency when models are not loaded into memory. This arises when models are larger than memory, but also systematically when models are deployed on low-resource devices in the Internet of Things or run as cloud microservices where resources are allocated on demand. Block-Aligned Serialized Trees (BLOCKSET) introduce the concept of selective access for random forests and gradient boosted trees in which only the parts of the model needed for inference are deserialized and loaded into memory. %BLOCKSET combines concepts from external memory algorithms and data-parallel %layouts of random forests that maximize I/O-density for in-memory models. Using principles from external memory algorithms, we block-align the serialization format in order to minimize the number of I/Os. For gradient boosted trees, this results in a more than five time reduction in inference latency over layouts that do not perform selective access and a 2 times latency reduction over techniques that are selective, but do not encode I/O block boundaries in the layout.
Needle in a Haystack: Label-Efficient Evaluation under Extreme Class Imbalance
Authors: Neil G. Marchant, Benjamin I. P. Rubinstein
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Important tasks like record linkage and extreme classification demonstrate extreme class imbalance, with 1 minority instance to every 1 million or more majority instances. Obtaining a sufficient sample of all classes, even just to achieve statistically-significant evaluation, is so challenging that most current approaches yield poor estimates or incur impractical cost. Where importance sampling has been levied against this challenge, restrictive constraints are placed on performance metrics, estimates do not come with appropriate guarantees, or evaluations cannot adapt to incoming labels. This paper develops a framework for online evaluation based on adaptive importance sampling. Given a target performance metric and model for p(y|x), the framework adapts a distribution over items to label in order to maximize statistical precision. We establish strong consistency and a central limit theorem for the resulting performance estimates, and instantiate our framework with worked examples that leverage Dirichlet-tree models. Experiments demonstrate an average MSE superior to state-of-the-art on fixed label budgets.
Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network for Spatio-Temporal Data Modeling
Authors: Chuizheng Meng, Sirisha Rambhatla, Yan Liu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
MULTIVERSE: Mining Collective Data Science Knowledge from Code on the Web to Suggest Alternative Analysis Approaches
Authors: Mike A. Merrill, Ge Zhang, Tim Althoff
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Data analyses are based on a series of "decision points" including data filtering, feature operationalization and selection, model specification, and parametric assumptions. "Multiverse Analysis" research has shown that a lack of exploration of these decisions can lead to non-robust conclusions based on highly sensitive decision points. Importantly, even if myopic analyses are technically correct, analysts' focus on one set of decision points precludes them from exploring alternate formulations that may produce very different results. Prior work has also shown that analysts' exploration is often limited based on their training, domain, and personal experience. However, supporting analysts in exploring alternative approaches is challenging and typically requires expert feedback that is costly and hard to scale. Here, we formulate the tasks of identifying decision points and suggesting alternative analysis approaches as a classification task and a sequence-to-sequence prediction task, respectively. We leverage public collective data analysis knowledge in the form of code submissions to the popular data science platform Kaggle to build the first predictive model which supports Multiverse Analysis. Specifically, we mine this code repository for 70k small differences between 40k submissions, and demonstrate that these differences often highlight key decision points and alternative approaches in their respective analyses.We leverage information on relationships within libraries through neural graph representation learning in a multitask learning framework. We demonstrate that our model, MULTIVERSE, is able to correctly predict decision points with up to 0.81 ROC AUC, and alternative code snippets with up to 50.3% GLEU, and that it performs favorably compared to a suite of baselines and ablations. We show that when our model has perfect information about the location of decision points, say provided by the analyst, its performance increases significantly from 50.3% to 73.4% GLEU. Finally, we show through a human evaluation that real data analysts find alternatives provided by MULTIVERSE to be more reasonable, acceptable, and syntactically correct than alternatives from comparable baselines, including other transformer-based seq2seq models.
VisualTextRank: Unsupervised Graph-based Content Extraction for Automating Ad Text to Image Search
Authors: Shaunak Mishra, Mikhail Kuznetsov, Gaurav Srivastava, Maxim Sviridenko
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Numerous online stock image libraries offer high quality yet copyright free images for use in marketing campaigns. To assist advertisers in navigating such third party libraries, we study the problem of automatically fetching relevant ad images given the ad text (via a short textual query for images). Motivated by our observations in logged data on ad image search queries (given ad text), we formulate a keyword extraction problem, where a keyword extracted from the ad text (or its augmented version) serves as the ad image query. In this context, we propose VisualTextRank: an unsupervised method to (i) augment input ad text using semantically similar ads, and (ii) extract the image query from the augmented ad text. VisualTextRank builds on prior work on graph based context extraction (biased TextRank in particular) by leveraging both the text and image of similar ads for better keyword extraction, and using advertiser category specific biasing with sentence-BERT embeddings. Using data collected from the Verizon Media Native (Yahoo Gemini) ad platform's stock image search feature for onboarding advertisers, we demonstrate the superiority of VisualTextRank compared to competitive keyword extraction baselines (including an 11% accuracy lift over biased TextRank). For the case when the stock image library is restricted to English queries, we show the effectiveness of VisualTextRank on multilingual ads (translated to English) while leveraging semantically similar English ads. Online tests with a simplified version of VisualTextRank led to a 28.7% increase in the usage of stock image search, and a 41.6% increase in the advertiser onboarding rate in the Verizon Media Native ad platform.
Zero-shot Multi-lingual Interrogative Question Generation for "People Also Ask" at Bing
Authors: Rajarshee Mitra, Rhea Jain, Aditya Srikanth Veerubhotla, Manish Gupta
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Multi-lingual question generation (QG) is the task of generating natural language questions for single answer passage in any given language. In this paper, we design a system for supporting multi-lingual QG in the "People Also Ask" (PAA) module for Bing. For zero shot setting, the primary challenge is to transfer the knowledge from trained QG model in the pivot language to other languages without further addition of training data in these languages. Compared to other zero-shot tasks, the differentiating and challenging aspect in QG is to preserve the question structure so that the resulting output is interrogative. Existing models for similar tasks tend to generate natural language queries or copy sub-span of the passage, failing to preserve the question structure. In our work, we demonstrate how knowledge transfer in multi-lingual IQG (Interrogative QG) can be significantly improved using auxiliary tasks either in multi-task or pre-training task setting. We explore two kinds of tasks - cross-lingual translation and multi-lingual denoising auto-encoding of questions, especially when using translate-train. Using data for 13 languages from Bing PAA as well as online A/B tests, we show that both of these tasks significantly improve the quality of zero-shot IQG on non-trained languages.
The Third International TrueFact Workshop: Making a Credible Web for Tomorrow
Authors: Subhabrata Mukherjee, Qi Li, Sihong Xie, Philip S. Yu, Jing Gao
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

The Third International TrueFact Workshop: Making a Credible Web for Tomorrow is geared towards bringing academic, industry and government researchers and practitioners together to tackle the challenges in misinformation, data quality, truth finding, fact-checking, credibility analysis and rumor detection -- in heterogeneous and multi-modal sources of information including texts, images, videos, relational data, social networks and knowledge graphs.