OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Interpretable Personalized Experimentation
Authors: Han Wu, Sarah Tan, Weiwei Li 0006, Mia Garrard, Adam Obeng, Drew Dimmery, Shaun Singh, Hanson Wang, Daniel R. Jiang, Eytan Bakshy
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Black-box heterogeneous treatment effect (HTE) models are increasingly being used to create personalized policies that assign individuals to their optimal treatments. However, they are difficult to understand, and can be burdensome to maintain in a production environment. In this paper, we present a scalable, interpretable personalized experimentation system, implemented and deployed in production at Meta. The system works in a multiple treatment, multiple outcome setting typical at Meta to: (1) learn explanations for black-box HTE models; (2) generate interpretable personalized policies. We evaluate the methods used in the system on publicly available data and Meta use cases, and discuss lessons learnt during the development of the system.
FedAttack: Effective and Covert Poisoning Attack on Federated Recommendation via Hard Sampling
Authors: Chuhan Wu, Fangzhao Wu, Tao Qi, Yongfeng Huang 0001, Xing Xie 0001
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Federated learning (FL) is a feasible technique to learn personalized recommendation models from decentralized user data. Unfortunately, federated recommender systems are vulnerable to poisoning attacks by malicious clients. Existing recommender system poisoning methods mainly focus on promoting the recommendation chances of target items due to financial incentives. In fact, in real-world scenarios, the attacker may also attempt to degrade the overall performance of recommender systems. However, existing general FL poisoning methods for degrading model performance are either ineffective or not concealed in poisoning federated recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective and covert poisoning attack method on federated recommendation, named FedAttack. Its core idea is using globally hardest samples to subvert model training. More specifically, the malicious clients first infer user embeddings based on local user profiles. Next, they choose the candidate items that are most relevant to the user embeddings as hardest negative samples, and find the candidates farthest from the user embeddings as hardest positive samples. The model gradients inferred from these poisoned samples are then uploaded for aggregation. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets show that FedAttack can effectively degrade the performance of various federated recommender systems, meanwhile cannot be effectively detected nor defended by many existing methods.
Sample-Efficient Kernel Mean Estimator with Marginalized Corrupted Data
Authors: Xiaobo Xia, Shuo Shan, Mingming Gong, Nannan Wang 0001, Fei Gao 0006, Haikun Wei, Tongliang Liu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Estimating the kernel mean in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space is central to many kernel-based learning algorithms. Given a finite sample, an empirical average is used as a standard estimation of the target kernel mean. Prior works have shown that better estimators can be constructed by shrinkage methods. In this work, we propose to corrupt data examples with noise from known distributions and present a new kernel mean estimator, called the marginalized kernel mean estimator, which estimates kernel mean under the corrupted distributions. Theoretically, we justify that the marginalized kernel mean estimator introduces implicit regularization in kernel mean estimation. Empirically, on a variety of tasks, we show that the marginalized kernel mean estimator is sample-efficient and obtains much lower estimation errors than the existing estimators.
Multi Armed Bandit vs. A/B Tests in E-commence - Confidence Interval and Hypothesis Test Power Perspectives
Authors: Ding Xiang, Rebecca West, Jiaqi Wang, Xiquan Cui, Jinzhou Huang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

An emerging dilemma that faces practitioners in large scale online experimentation for e-commerce is whether to use Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) algorithms for testing or traditional A/B testing (A/B). This paper provides a comprehensive comparison between the two, from the perspectives of confidence intervals, hypothesis test powers, and their relationships with traffic split and sample size both theoretically and numerically. We first make comparisons between MAB with A/B tests in terms of conditions under which disjoint confidence intervals occur, and analyze their connection with the traffic split. Then we explore the relationship between the two in terms of sample sizes needed to achieve the required hypothesis test power, and analyze under what conditions MAB could have a higher test power than A/B given the same sample size. Based on the theoretical analysis, we propose two new MAB algorithms that combine the strengths of traditional MAB and A/B together, with higher (or equal) test power and higher (or equal) expected rewards than A/B testing under certain common conditions in e-commerce. Last, we evaluate and compare the performance among the classical MAB algorithms, our newly proposed MAB algorithms, and A/B testing in terms of their accuracy of identifying ground truth winner with practical significance, power rewards trade-off, sample sizes etc. in both simulated datasets and industrial historical datasets. We hope the work can not only facilitate a better understanding of pros and cons of MAB and A/B testing, but also help build the connections between the two and provide possible approaches that can leverage the best from both worlds.
Contrastive Cross-domain Recommendation in Matching
Authors: Ruobing Xie, Qi Liu 0050, Liangdong Wang, Shukai Liu, Bo Zhang 0056, Leyu Lin
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) aims to provide better recommendation results in the target domain with the help of the source domain, which is widely used and explored in real-world systems. However, CDR in the matching (i.e., candidate generation) module struggles with the data sparsity and popularity bias issues in both representation learning and knowledge transfer. In this work, we propose a novel Contrastive Cross-Domain Recommendation (CCDR) framework for CDR in matching. Specifically, we build a huge diversified preference network to capture multiple information reflecting user diverse interests, and design an intra-domain contrastive learning (intra-CL) and three inter-domain contrastive learning (inter-CL) tasks for better representation learning and knowledge transfer. The intra-CL enables more effective and balanced training inside the target domain via a graph augmentation, while the inter-CL builds different types of cross-domain interactions from user, taxonomy, and neighbor aspects. In experiments, CCDR achieves significant improvements on both offline and online evaluations in a real-world system. Currently, we have deployed our CCDR on WeChat Top Stories, affecting plenty of users. The source code is in https://github.com/lqfarmer/CCDR.
End-to-End Semi-Supervised Ordinal Regression AUC Maximization with Convolutional Kernel Networks
Authors: Ziran Xiong, Wanli Shi, Bin Gu 0001
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Convolutional kernel networks (CKN) have been proposed to solve image classification tasks, and have shown competitive performance over classical neural networks while being easy to train and robust to overfitting. In real-world ordinal regression problems, we usually have plenty of unlabeled data but a limited number of labeled ordered data. Although recent research works have shown that directly optimizing AUC can impose a better ranking on the data than optimizing traditional error rate, it is still an open question to design an efficient semi-supervised ordinal regression AUC maximization algorithm based on CKN with convergence guarantee. To address this question, in this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised ordinal regression CKN algorithm (S^2 CKNOR) with end-to-end AUC maximization. Specifically, we decompose the ordinal regression into a series of binary classification subproblems and propose an unbiased non-convex objective function to optimize AUC, such that both labeled and unlabeled data can be used to enhance the model performance. Further, we propose a nested alternating minimization algorithm to solve the non-convex objective, where each (convex) subproblem is solved by a quadruply stochastic gradient algorithm, and the non-convex one is solved by the stochastic projected gradient method. Importantly, we prove that our S^2 CKNOR algorithm can finally converge to a critical point of the non-convex objective. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our S^2 CKNOR achieves the best AUC results on various real-world datasets.
COSSUM: Towards Conversation-Oriented Structured Summarization for Automatic Medical Insurance Assessment
Authors: Sheng Xu, Xiaojun Wan 0001, Sen Hu 0005, Mengdi Zhou, Teng Xu 0007, Hongbin Wang, Haitao Mi
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

In medical insurance industry, a lot of human labor is required to collect information of claimants. Human assessors need to converse with claimants in order to record key information and organize it into a structured summary. With the purpose of helping save human labor, we propose the task of conversation-oriented structured summarization which aims to automatically produce the desired structured summary from a conversation automatically. One major challenge of the task is that the structured summary contains multiple fields of different types. To tackle this problem, we propose a unified approach COSSUM based on prompting to generate the values of all fields simultaneously. By learning all fields together, our approach can capture the inherent relationship between them. Moreover, we propose a specially designed curriculum learning strategy for model training. Both automatic and human evaluations are performed, and the results show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Modern Theoretical Tools for Designing Information Retrieval System
Authors: Da Xu, Chuanwei Ruan
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

In the past decade, deep learning has significantly reshaped the landscape of information retrieval (IR). The community has recently begun to notice the potential dangers of overusing less-understood mechanisms and over-simplified assumptions to learn patterns and make decisions. In particular, there is growing concerns on the interpretation, reliability, social impact, and long-term utility of real-world IR systems. Therefore, it has become a pressing issue to bring the IR community comprehensive and systematic tools to understand empirical domain solutions and motivate principled design ideas. We focus on the three pillar stones of modern IR systems: pattern recognition with deep learning, causal inference analysis, and online decision making (with bandits and reinforcement learning). Our objectives are as follows.
Workshop on Applied Data Science for Healthcare (DSHealth): Transparent and Human-centered AI
Authors: Tao Xu 0020, Fei Wang 0001, Prithwish Chakraborty, Pei-Yun Sabrina Hsueh, Gregor Stiglic, Jiang Bian 0001, Lixia Yao, Alexej Gossmann, Florian Buettner 0001
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

KDD DSHealth 2022, aims to build on the success of the past four years to further catalyze the development of links between academic and commercial data science groups and the rapidly developing translational medicine informatics community. The workshop will stimulate discussion as to strategic areas for development and will lead to future cross-disciplinary collaborations. In accordance with the multi-year goal to continue fostering this community as a series of KDD workshops via timely topics, this year the workshop will focus on the transparency and human-centered AI in healthcare. The workshop invites full papers, as well as work-in-progress on the application of data science in healthcare. The workshop will feature four invited talks from eminent speakers, spanning academia, industry, clinical researchers, and governmental regulatory bodies. In addition, selected papers will be invited to publish in a special issue of Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research. The summary gives a brief description of the full-day workshop to be held on August 14th, 2022.
Mixture of Virtual-Kernel Experts for Multi-Objective User Profile Modeling
Authors: Zhenhui Xu, Meng Zhao, Liqun Liu 0006, Lei Xiao, Xiaopeng Zhang, Bifeng Zhang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

In industrial applications like online advertising and recommendation systems, diverse and accurate user profiles can greatly help improve personalization. Deep learning is widely applied to mine expressive tags to users from their historical interactions in the system, e.g., click, conversion action in the advertising chain. The usual approach is to take a certain action as the objective, and introduce multiple independent Two-Tower models to predict the possibility of users' action on tags (known as CTR or CVR prediction). The predicted users' high probably attractive tags are to represent their preferences. However, the single-action models cannot learn complementarily and support effective training on data-sparse actions. Besides, limited by the lack of information fusion between the two towers, the model learns insufficiently to represent users' preferences on various tag topics well. This paper introduces a novel multi-task model called Mixture of Virtual-Kernel Experts (MVKE) to learn user preferences on various actions and topics unitedly. In MVKE, we propose a concept of Virtual-Kernel Expert, which focuses on modeling one particular facet of the user's preferences, and all of them learn coordinately. Besides, the gate-based structure used in MVKE builds an information fusion bridge between two towers, improving the model's capability and maintaining high efficiency. We apply the model in Tencent Advertising System, where both online and offline evaluations show that our method has a significant improvement compared with the existing ones and brings about an obvious lift to actual advertising revenue.
Multiwave COVID-19 Prediction from Social Awareness Using Web Search and Mobility Data
Authors: Jiawei Xue 0001, Takahiro Yabe, Kota Tsubouchi, Jianzhu Ma, Satish V. Ukkusuri
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Recurring outbreaks of COVID-19 have posed enduring effects on global society, which calls for a predictor of pandemic waves using various data with early availability. Existing prediction models that forecast the first outbreak wave using mobility data may not be applicable to the multiwave prediction, because the evidence in the USA and Japan has shown that mobility patterns across different waves exhibit varying relationships with fluctuations in infection cases. Therefore, to predict the multiwave pandemic, we propose a Social Awareness-Based Graph Neural Network (SAB-GNN) that considers the decay of symptom-related web search frequency to capture the changes in public awareness across multiple waves. Our model combines GNN and LSTM to model the complex relationships among urban districts, inter-district mobility patterns, web search history, and future COVID-19 infections. We train our model to predict future pandemic outbreaks in the Tokyo area using its mobility and web search data from April 2020 to May 2021 across four pandemic waves collected by Yahoo Japan Corporation under strict privacy protection rules. Results demonstrate our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines such as ST-GNN, MPNN, and GraphLSTM. Though our model is not computationally expensive (only 3 layers and 10 hidden neurons), the proposed model enables public agencies to anticipate and prepare for future pandemic outbreaks.
Towards a Native Quantum Paradigm for Graph Representation Learning: A Sampling-based Recurrent Embedding Approach
Authors: Ge Yan 0001, Yehui Tang, Junchi Yan
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Graph representation learning has been extensively studied, and recent models can well incorporate both node features and graph structures. Despite these progress, the inherent scalability challenge for classical computers of processing graph data and solving the downstream tasks (many are NP-hard) is still a bottleneck for existing classical graph learning models. On the other hand, quantum computing is known a promising direction for its theoretically verified scalability as well as the increasing evidence for the access to physical quantum machine in near-term. Different from many existing classical-quantum hybrid machine learning models on graphs, in this paper we take a more aggressive initiative for developing a native quantum paradigm for (attributed) graph representation learning, which to our best knowledge, has not been fulfilled in literature yet. Specifically, our model adopts the well-established theory and technique in quantum computing e.g. quantum random walk, and adapt it to the attributed graph. Then the node attribute quantum state sequence is fed into a quantum recurrent network to obtain the final node embedding. Experimental results on three public datasets show the effectiveness of our quantum model which also outperforms a classical learning approach GraphRNA notably in terms of efficiency even on a classical computer. Though it is still restricted to the classical loss-based learning paradigm with gradient descent for model parameter training, while our computing scheme is compatible with quantum computing without involving classical computers. This is in fact largely in contrast to many hybrid quantum graph learning models which often involve many steps and modules having to be performed on classical computers.
Numerical Tuple Extraction from Tables with Pre-training
Authors: Qingping Yang, Yixuan Cao 0001, Ping Luo 0001
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Tables are omnipresent on the web and in various vertical domains, storing massive amounts of valuable data. However, the great flexibility in the table layout hinders the machine from understanding this valuable data. In order to unlock and utilize knowledge from tables, extracting data as numerical tuples is the first and critical step. As a form of relational data, numerical tuples have direct and transparent relationships between their elements and are therefore easy for machines to use. Extracting numerical tuples requires a deep understanding of intricate correlations between cells. The correlations are presented implicitly in texts and visual appearances of tables, which can be roughly classified into Hierarchy and Juxtaposition. Although many studies have made considerable progress in data extraction from tables, most of them only consider hierarchical relationships but neglect the juxtapositions. Meanwhile, they only evaluate their methods on relatively small corpora. This paper proposes a new framework to extract numerical tuples from tables and evaluate it on a large test set. Specifically, we convert this task into a relation extraction problem between cells. To represent cells with their intricate correlations in tables, we propose a BERT-based pre-trained language model, TableLM, to encode tables with diverse layouts. To evaluate the framework, we collect a large finance dataset that includes 19,264 tables and 604K tuples. Extensive experiments on the dataset are conducted to demonstrate the superiority of our framework compared to a well-designed baseline.
TAG: Toward Accurate Social Media Content Tagging with a Concept Graph
Authors: Jiuding Yang, Weidong Guo, Bang Liu 0003, Yakun Yu, Chaoyue Wang, Jinwen Luo, Linglong Kong, Di Niu, Zhen Wen
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Although conceptualization has been widely studied in semantics and knowledge representation, it is still challenging to find the most accurate concept terms to tag fast-growing social media content. This is partly attributed to the fact that most traditional knowledge bases contain general terms of the world, such as trees and cars, which are not interesting to users, and do not have the defining power for social media content. Another reason is that the intricate use of tense, negation and grammar in social media content may change the logic or emphasis of the content, thus focusing on different main ideas. In this paper, we present TAG, a high-quality concept matching dataset consisting of 10,000 labeled pairs of fine-grained concepts and web-styled natural language sentences, mined from open-domain social media content. The concepts we provide are the trending terms on social media and have the right granularity to define user interests, e.g., highly educated actors instead of just actors. In the meantime, TAG offers a concept graph which interconnects these fine-grained concepts and entities to provide contextual information. We evaluate a wide range of neural text matching models as well as pre-trained language models for the concept matching task on TAG, and point out their insufficiency to tag social media content to characterize its main idea. We further propose a novel graph-graph matching framework that demonstrates superior abstraction and generalization performance by better utilizing both the structural information in the concept graph and logic interactions between semantic units in the natural language sentence via syntactic dependency parsing.
HoloViz: Visualization and Interactive Dashboards in Python
Authors: Sophia Yang, Marc Skov Madsen, James A. Bednar
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

This tutorial will show you how to do visualization and build interactive dashboards using HoloViz, which is an open-source visualization ecosystem comprising seven packages. You will learn how to turn nearly any notebook into a deployable dashboard, how to build visualizations easily even for big, streaming, and multidimensional data, how to build interactive drill-down exploratory tools for your data and models without having to run a web-technology software development project, and finally how to deploy your dashboard.
Enhancing Machine Learning Approaches for Graph Optimization Problems with Diversifying Graph Augmentation
Authors: Chen-Hsu Yang, Chih-Ya Shen
Venue: KDD
Year: 2022

Recently, many machine learning-based approaches that effectively solve graph optimization problems have been proposed. These approaches are usually trained on graphs randomly generated with graph generators or sampled from existing datasets. However, we observe that such training graphs lead to poor testing performance if the testing graphs are not generated analogously, i.e., the generalibility of the models trained on those randomly generated training graphs are very limited. To address this critical issue, in this paper, we propose a new framework, named Learning with Iterative Graph Diversification (LIGD), and formulate a new research problem, named Diverse Graph Modification Problem (DGMP), that iteratively generate diversified training graphs and train the models that solve graph optimization problems to significantly improve their performance. We propose three approaches to solve DGMP by considering both the performance of the machine-learning approaches and the structural properties of the training graphs. Experimental results on well-known problems show that our proposed approaches significantly boost the performance of both supervised and reinforcement learning approaches and produce near-optimal results, significantly outperforming the baseline approaches, such as graph augmentation and deep learning-based graph generation approaches.