OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
New Frontiers of Multi-Network Mining: Recent Developments and Future Trend
Authors: Boxin Du, Si Zhang, Yuchen Yan, Hanghang Tong
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Networks (i.e., graphs) are often collected from multiple sources and platforms, such as social networks extracted from multiple online platforms, team-specific collaboration networks within an organization, and inter-dependent infrastructure networks, etc. Such networks from different sources form the multi-networks, which can exhibit the unique patterns that are invisible if we mine the individual network separately. However, compared with single-network mining, multi-network mining is still under-explored due to its unique challenges. First ( multi-network models ), networks under different circumstances can be modeled into a variety of models. How to properly build multi-network models from the complex data? Second ( multi-network mining algorithms ), it is often nontrivial to either extend single-network mining algorithms to multi-networks or design new algorithms. How to develop effective and efficient mining algorithms on multi-networks? The objectives of this tutorial are to: (1) comprehensively review the existing multi-network models, (2) elaborate the techniques in multi-network mining with a special focus on recent advances, and (3) elucidate open challenges and future research directions. We believe this tutorial could be beneficial to various application domains, and attract researchers and practitioners from data mining as well as other interdisciplinary fields.
Automated Testing of Graphics Units by Deep-Learning Detection of Visual Anomalies
Authors: Lev Faivishevsky, Adi Szeskin, Ashwin K. Muppalla, Ravid Shwartz-Ziv, Itamar Ben-Ari, Ronen Laperdon, Benjamin Melloul, Tahi Hollander, Tom Hope, Amitai Armon
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

We present a novel system for performing real-time detection of diverse visual corruptions in videos, for validating the quality of graphics units in our company. The system is used for several types of content, including movies and 3D graphics, with strict constraints on low false alert rates and real-time processing of millions of video frames per day. These constraints required novel solutions involving both hardware and software, including new supervised and weakly-supervised methods we developed. Our deployed system has enabled a ~20X reduction of human effort and discovering new corruptions missed by humans and existing approaches.
Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Transformer: An Intelligent System for Evolving Android Malware Detection
Authors: Yujie Fan, Mingxuan Ju, Shifu Hou, Yanfang Ye, Wenqiang Wan, Kui Wang, Yinming Mei, Qi Xiong
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

The explosive growth and increasing sophistication of Android malware call for new defensive techniques to protect mobile users against novel threats. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose and develop an intelligent system named Dr.Droid to jointly model malware propagation and evolution for their detection at the first attempt. In Dr.Droid, we first exploit higher-level semantic and social relations within the ecosystem (e.g., app-market, app-developer, market-developer relations etc.) to characterize app propagation patterns; and then we present a structured heterogeneous graph to model the complex relations among different types of entities. To capture malware evolution, we further consider the temporal dependence and introduce a heterogeneous temporal graph to jointly model malware propagation and evolution by considering heterogeneous spatial dependencies with temporal dimensions. Afterwards, we propose a novel heterogeneous temporal graph transformer framework (denoted as HTGT) to integrate both spatial and temporal dependencies while preserving the heterogeneity to learn node representations for malware detection. Specifically, in our proposed HTGT, to preserve the heterogeneity, we devise a heterogeneous spatial transformer to derive heterogeneous attentions over each node and edge to learn dedicated representations for different types of entities and relations; to model temporal dependencies, we design a temporal transformer into the HTGT to attentively aggregate its historical sequences of a given node (e.g., app); the two transformers work in an iterative manner for representation learning. Promising experimental results based on the large-scale sample collections from anti-malware industry demonstrate the performance of Dr.Droid, by comparison with state-of-the-art baselines and popular mobile security products.
MoCha: Large-Scale Driving Pattern Characterization for Usage-based Insurance
Authors: Zhihan Fang, Guang Yang, Dian Zhang, Xiaoyang Xie, Guang Wang, Yu Yang, Fan Zhang, Desheng Zhang
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Given widely adopted vehicle tracking technologies, usage-based insurance has been a rising market over the past few years. With potential discounts from insurance companies, customers voluntarily install sensing devices in their vehicles for insurance companies, which are utilized to analyze their historical driving patterns to derive the risks of future driving. However, it is challenging to characterize and predict driving patterns, especially for new users with limited data. To address this issue, we propose and evaluate a system called MoCha to accurately characterize driving patterns for usage-based insurance. The key question we aim to explore with MoCha is whether we can fully explore long-term driving patterns of new users with only limited historical data of themselves by leveraging abundant data of other users and contextual information. To answer this question, we design (i) a multi-level driving pattern modeling component to capture the spatial-temporal dependency on both individual and group level, and (ii) a multi-task learning method to utilize underlying relations of driving metrics and predict multiple driving metrics simultaneously. We implement and evaluate MoCha with real-world on-board diagnostics data from a large insurance company with more than 340,000 vehicles. Further, we validate the usefulness of MoCha by predicting driving risks based on real-world claim data in a Chinese city, Shenzhen.
Multiple-Instance Learning from Similar and Dissimilar Bags
Authors: Lei Feng, Senlin Shu, Yuzhou Cao, Lue Tao, Hongxin Wei, Tao Xiang, Bo An, Gang Niu
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Multiple-instance learning (MIL) is an important weakly supervised binary classification problem, where training instances are arranged in bags, and each bag is assigned a positive or negative label. Most of the previous studies for MIL assume that training bags are fully labeled. However, in some real-world scenarios, it could be difficult to collect fully labeled bags, due to the expensive time and labor consumption of the labeling task. Fortunately, it could be much easier for us to collect similar and dissimilar bags (indicating whether two bags share the same label or not), because we do not need to figure out the underlying label of each bag in this case. Therefore, in this paper, we for the first time investigate MIL from only similar and dissimilar bags. To solve this new MIL problem, we propose a convex formulation to train a bag-level classifier based on empirical risk minimization and theoretically derive a generalization error bound. In addition, we also propose a strong baseline for this new MIL problem, which aims to train an instance-level classifier by minimizing the instance-level empirical risk. Extensive experimental results clearly demonstrate that our proposed baseline works well, while our proposed convex formulation is even better.
Maxmin-Fair Ranking: Individual Fairness under Group-Fairness Constraints
Authors: David García-Soriano, Francesco Bonchi
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

We study a novel problem of fairness in ranking aimed at minimizing the amount of individual unfairness introduced when enforcing group-fairness constraints. Our proposal is rooted in the distributional maxmin fairness theory, which uses randomization to maximize the expected satisfaction of the worst-off individuals. We devise an exact polynomial-time algorithm to find maxmin-fair distributions of general search problems (including, but not limited to, ranking), and show that our algorithm can produce rankings which, while satisfying the given group-fairness constraints, ensure that the maximum possible value is to individuals.
Data Science for Assembly Engineering
Authors: Sharon C. Glotzer
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Discovery and design of new materials able to self assemble from nanoscale building blocks are becoming increasingly enabled by large-scale molecular simulation. Aided by fast simulation codes leveraging powerful computer architectures, an unprecedented amount of data can be generated in the blink of an eye, shifting the effort and focus of the computational scientist from the simulation to the data. How do we manage so much data, and what do we do with it when we have it? In this talk, we discuss the applications of data science and data-driven thinking to molecular and materials simulation. Although we do so in the context of assembly engineering of soft matter, the tools and techniques discussed are general and applicable to a wide range of problems. We present applications of machine learning to automated, structure identification of complex colloidal crystals, high-throughput mapping of phase diagrams, the study of kinetic pathways between fluid and solid phases, and the discovery of previously elusive design rules and structure-property relationships. Biography: Sharon C. Glotzer is the John W. Cahn Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, the Stuart W. Churchill Collegiate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and the Anthony C. Lembke Department Chair of Chemical Engineering. She is also Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Physics, Applied Physics, and Macromolecular Science and Engineering. Her research on computational assembly science and engineering aims toward predictive materials design of colloidal and soft matter: using computation, geometrical concepts, and statistical mechanics, her research group seeks to understand complex behavior emerging from simple rules and forces, and use that knowledge to design new classes of materials. Glotzer's group also develops and disseminates powerful open-source software including the particle simulation toolkit, HOOMD-blue, which allows for fast molecular simulation of materials on graphics processors, the signac framework for data and workflow management, and several analysis and visualization tools. Glotzer received her B.S. in Physics from UCLA and her PhD in Physics from Boston University. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Meaning Error Rate: ASR domain-specific metric framework
Authors: Ludmila Gordeeva, Vasily Ershov, Oleg Gulyaev, Igor Kuralenok
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Speech recognition became a popular task during the last decade. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are used in many fields: virtual assistants, call-center automation, device speech interfaces, etc. Each application defines its own measure of quality. Improvement in one domain could lead to loss of the recognition quality in the other domain. For ASR services open to the public, it is essential to provide reasonable quality for all customers in their scenarios. State-of-the-art metrics currently do not fit well for this purpose as they do not adapt to domain specifics. In our work, we build a speech recognition quality evaluation framework that unifies feedback coming from different types of customers into a single metric. For this purpose, we collect feedback from customers, train a new dedicated metric for each customer based on their feedback, and finally aggregate these metrics in a single criterion of quality. The resulting metrics have two significant properties: they compare recognition quality in different domains, and their results are easy to interpret.
Towards Computing a Near-Maximum Weighted Independent Set on Massive Graphs
Authors: Jiewei Gu, Weiguo Zheng, Yuzheng Cai, Peng Peng
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

The vertices in many graphs are weighted unequally in real scenarios, but the previous studies on the maximum independent set (MIS) ignore the weights of vertices. Therefore, the weight of an MIS may not necessarily be the largest. In this paper, we study the problem of maximum weighted independent set (MWIS) that is defined as the set of independent vertices with the largest weight. Since it is intractable to deliver the exact solution for large graphs, we design a reducing and tie-breaking framework to compute a near-maximum weighted independent set. The reduction rules are critical to reduce the search space for both exact and greedy algorithms as they determine the vertices that are definitely (or not) in the MWIS while preserving the correctness of solutions. We devise a set of novel reductions including low-degree reductions and high-degree reductions for general weighted graphs. Extensive experimental studies over real graphs confirm that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-arts significantly in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.
Learning from Imbalanced and Incomplete Supervision with Its Application to Ride-Sharing Liability Judgment
Authors: Lan-Zhe Guo, Zhi Zhou, Jie-Jing Shao, Qi Zhang, Feng Kuang, Gao-Le Li, Zhang-Xun Liu, Guobin Wu, Nan Ma, Qun (Tracy) Li, Yufeng Li
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

In multi-label tasks, sufficient and class-balanced label is usually hard to obtain, which makes it challenging to train a good classifier. In this paper, we consider the problem of learning from imbalanced and incomplete supervision, where only a small subset of labeled data is available and the label distribution is highly imbalanced. This setting is of importance and commonly appears in a variety of real applications. For instance, considering the ride-sharing liability judgment task, liability disputes usually due to a variety of reasons, however, it is expensive to manually annotate the reasons, meanwhile, the distribution of reason is often seriously imbalanced. In this paper, we present a systemic framework Limi consisting of three sub-steps, that is, Label Separating, Correlation Mining and Label Completion. Specifically, we propose an effective two-classifier strategy to separately tackle head and tail labels so as to alleviate the performance degradation on tail labels while maintaining high performance on head labels. Then, a novel label correlation network is adopted to explore the label relation knowledge with flexible aggregators. Moreover, the Limi framework completes the label on unlabeled instances in a semi-supervised fashion. The framework is general, flexible, and effective. Extensive experiments on diverse applications, such as the ride-sharing liability judgment task from Didi and various benchmark tasks, demonstrate that our solution is clearly better than many competitive methods.
Deep Generative Models for Spatial Networks
Authors: Xiaojie Guo, Yuanqi Du, Liang Zhao
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Spatial networks represent crucial data structures where the nodes and edges are embedded in a geometric space. Nowadays, spatial network data is becoming increasingly popular and important, ranging from microscale (e.g., protein structures), to middle-scale (e.g., biological neural networks), to macro-scale (e.g., mobility networks). Although, modeling and understanding the generative process of spatial networks are very important, they remain largely under-explored due to the significant challenges in automatically modeling and distinguishing the independency and correlation among various spatial and network factors. To address these challenges, we first propose a novel objective for joint spatial-network disentanglement from the perspective of information bottleneck as well as a novel optimization algorithm to optimize the intractable objective. Based on this, a spatial-network variational autoencoder (SND-VAE) with a new spatial-network message passing neural network (S-MPNN) is proposed to discover the independent and dependent latent factors of spatial and networks. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over the state-of-the-arts by up to 66.9% for graph generation and 37.3% for interpretability.
Generalized Zero-Shot Extreme Multi-label Learning
Authors: Nilesh Gupta, Sakina Bohra, Yashoteja Prabhu, Saurabh Purohit, Manik Varma
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Extreme Multi-label Learning (XML) involves assigning the subset of most relevant labels to a data point from millions of label choices. A hitherto unaddressed challenge in XML is that of predicting unseen labels with no training points. These form a significant fraction of total labels and contain fresh and personalized information desired by end users. Most existing extreme classifiers are not equipped for zero-shot label prediction and hence fail to leverage unseen labels. As a remedy, this paper proposes a novel approach called ZestXML for the task of Generalized Zero-shot XML (GZXML) where relevant labels have to be chosen from all available seen and unseen labels. ZestXML learns to project a data point's features close to the features of its relevant labels through a highly sparsified linear transform. This L0-constrained linear map between the two high-dimensional feature vectors is tractably recovered through a novel optimizer based on Hard Thresholding. By effectively leveraging the sparsities in features, labels and the learnt model, ZestXML achieves higher accuracy and smaller model size than existing XML approaches while also promoting efficient training & prediction, real-time label update as well as explainable prediction. Experiments on large-scale GZXML datasets demonstrated that ZestXML can be up to 14% and 10% more accurate than state-of-the-art extreme classifiers and leading BERT-based dense retrievers respectively, while having 10x smaller model size. ZestXML trains on largest dataset with 31M labels in just 30 hours on a single core of a commodity desktop. When added to an large ensemble of existing models in Bing Sponsored Search Advertising, ZestXML significantly improved click yield of IR based system by 17% and unseen query coverage by 3.4% respectively. ZestXML's source code and benchmark datasets for GZXML will be publically released for research purposes here.
Training Recommender Systems at Scale: Communication-Efficient Model and Data Parallelism
Authors: Vipul Gupta, Dhruv Choudhary, Ping Tak Peter Tang, Xiaohan Wei, Xing Wang, Yuzhen Huang, Arun Kejariwal, Kannan Ramchandran, Michael W. Mahoney
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

In this paper, we consider hybrid parallelism---a paradigm that employs both Data Parallelism (DP) and Model Parallelism (MP)---to scale distributed training of large recommendation models. We propose a compression framework called Dynamic Communication Thresholding (DCT) for communication-efficient hybrid training. DCT filters the entities to be communicated across the network through a simple hard-thresholding function, allowing only the most relevant information to pass through. For communication efficient DP, DCT compresses the parameter gradients sent to the parameter server during model synchronization. The threshold is updated only once every few thousand iterations to reduce the computational overhead of compression. For communication efficient MP, DCT incorporates a novel technique to compress the activations and gradients sent across the network during the forward and backward propagation, respectively. This is done by identifying and updating only the most relevant neurons of the neural network for each training sample in the data. We evaluate DCT on publicly available natural language processing and recommender models and datasets, as well as recommendation systems used in production at Facebook. DCT reduces communication by at least 100x and 20x during DP and MP, respectively. The algorithm has been deployed in production, and it improves end-to-end training time for a state-of-the-art industrial recommender model by 37%, without any loss in performance.
Data Quality for Machine Learning Tasks
Authors: Nitin Gupta, Shashank Mujumdar, Hima Patel, Satoshi Masuda, Naveen Panwar, Sambaran Bandyopadhyay, Sameep Mehta, Shanmukha C. Guttula, Shazia Afzal, Ruhi Sharma Mittal, Vitobha Munigala
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

The quality of training data has a huge impact on the efficiency, accuracy and complexity of machine learning tasks. Data remains susceptible to errors or irregularities that may be introduced during collection, aggregation or annotation stage. This necessitates profiling and assessment of data to understand its suitability for machine learning tasks and failure to do so can result in inaccurate analytics and unreliable decisions. While researchers and practitioners have focused on improving the quality of models, there are limited efforts towards improving the data quality. Assessing the quality of the data across intelligently designed metrics and developing corresponding transformation operations to address the quality gaps helps to reduce the effort of a data scientist for iterative debugging of the ML pipeline to improve model performance. This tutorial highlights the importance of analysing data quality in terms of its value for ML applications. Finding the data quality issues in data helps different personas like data stewards, data scientists, subject matter experts, or machine learning scientists to get relevant data insights and take remedial actions to rectify any issue. This tutorial surveys all the important data quality related approaches for structured, unstructured and spatio-temporal domains discussed in literature, focusing on the intuition behind them, highlighting their strengths and similarities, and illustrates their applicability to real-world problems. Finally we will discuss the interesting work IBM Research is doing in this space.
Budget Allocation as a Multi-Agent System of Contextual & Continuous Bandits
Authors: Benjamin Han, Carl Arndt
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Budget allocation for online advertising suffers from multiple complications, including significant delay between the initial ad impression to the call to action as well as cold-start prediction problems for ad campaigns with limited or no historical performance data. To address these issues, we introduce the Contextual Budgeting System (CBS ), a budget allocation framework using a multi-agent system of contextual & continuous Multi-Armed Bandits. Our proposed solution decomposes the problem into a convex optimization problem whose objective is drawn using Thompson Sampling. In order to efficiently deal with context and cold-start, we propose a transfer learning mechanism using supervised learning methods that augment simple parametric models. We apply an implementation of this algorithm to all spending for new driver acquisition at Lyft and measure a (22 ± 10)% improvement in the mean Cost Per user Acquisition (CPA) over a previous non-contextual model, based on Markov Chain Monte-Carlo, generating tens of millions of dollars annually in efficiency improvements while also increasing total user acquisition.
DI-2021: The Second Document Intelligence Workshop
Authors: Benjamin Han, Douglas Burdick, Dave Lewis, Yijuan Lu, Hamid Motahari, Sandeep Tata
Venue: KDD
Year: 2021

Business documents are central to the operation of all organizations, and they come in all shapes and sizes: project reports, planning documents, technical specifications, financial statements, meeting minutes, legal agreements, contracts, resumes, purchase orders, invoices, and many more. The ability to read, understand and interpret these documents, referred to here as Document Intelligence (DI), is challenging due to not only many domains of knowledge involved, but also their complex formats and structures, internal and external cross references deployed, and even less-than-ideal quality of scans and OCR oftentimes performed on them. This workshop aims to explore and advance the current state of research and practice in answering these challenges.