Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Improving Text-based Similar Product Recommendation for Dynamic Product Advertising at Yahoo

Retrieving similar products is a critical functionality required by many e-commerce websites as well as dynamic product advertising systems. Retargeting and Prospecting are two major forms of dynamic product advertising. Typically, after a user interacts with a product on an advertiser website (e.g., Macy's), when the user later visits a website (e.g., yahoo.com) supported by a dynamic product advertising system, the same product may be shown to the user as a Retargeting product ad, while some similar products may be shown to the user as Prospecting product ads on the web page. Similar products can enrich users' ad experience based on users' intent on the Prospecting product ads through which the users interacted. These product ads can also serve as substitutes when Retargeting ad candidates are out of stock. However, it is challenging to retrieve similar products among billions of products in a product catalog efficiently. Deep Siamese models allow efficient retrieval but do not put enough emphasize on key product attributes. To improve the quality of the similar products, we propose to first use a Siamese Transformer-based model to retrieve similar products and then refine them with the attribute "product name" that indicates the type of a product (e.g., running shoes, engagement ring, etc.) for post filtering. We propose a novel product name generation model that fine tunes a pre-trained Transformer-based language model with a sequence to sequence objective. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work using a generative approach for identifying product attributes. We introduce two applications of the proposed approach for the dynamic product advertising system of Yahoo for Retargeting and Prospecting respectively. Offline evaluation and online A/B testing shows that the proposed approach retrieves high quality similar products, leading to an increase of ad clicks and ad revenue.
GROWN+UP

Large pre-trained neural networks are ubiquitous and critical to the success of many downstream tasks in natural language processing and computer vision. However, within the field of web information retrieval, there is a stark contrast in the lack of similarly flexible and powerful pre-trained models that can properly parse webpages. Consequently, we believe that common machine learning tasks like content extraction and information mining from webpages have low-hanging gains that yet remain untapped. We aim to close the gap by introducing an agnostic deep graph neural network feature extractor that can ingest webpage structures, pre-train self-supervised on massive unlabeled data, and fine-tune to arbitrary tasks on webpages effectually. Finally, we show that our pre-trained model achieves state-of-the-art results using multiple datasets on two very different benchmarks: webpage boilerplate removal and genre classification, thus lending support to its potential application in diverse downstream tasks.
When Should We Use Linear Explanations?

The increasing interest in transparent and fair AI systems has propelled the research in explainable AI (XAI). One of the main research lines in XAI is post-hoc explainability, the task of explaining the logic of an already deployed black-box model. This is usually achieved by learning an interpretable surrogate function that approximates the black box. Among the existing explanation paradigms, local linear explanations are one of the most popular due to their simplicity and fidelity. Despite their advantages, linear surrogates may not always be the most adapted method to produce reliable, i.e., unambiguous and faithful explanations. Hence, this paper introduces Adapted Post-hoc Explanations (APE), a novel method that characterizes the decision boundary of a black-box classifier and identifies when a linear model constitutes a reliable explanation. Besides, characterizing the black-box frontier allows us to provide complementary counterfactual explanations. Our experimental evaluation shows that APE identifies accurately the situations where linear surrogates are suitable while also providing meaningful counterfactual explanations.
Incorporating Peer Reviews and Rebuttal Counter-Arguments for Meta-Review Generation

Peer review is an essential part of the scientific process in which the research papers are assessed by several reviewers. The author rebuttal phase, which is held at most top conferences, provides an opportunity for the authors to defend their work against the arguments made by the reviewers. The strengths and the weaknesses pointed out by the reviewers, as well as the authors' responses, will be evaluated by the area chair. The final decisions generally accompany meta-reviews regarding the reason for acceptance/rejection. Previous research has studied the generation of meta-review using transformer-based summarization models. However, few of them consider the rebuttals' content and the interaction between reviews and rebuttals' arguments, where the argumentation persuasiveness plays an important role in affecting the final decision. To generate a comprehensive meta-review that well organizes reviewers' opinions and authors' responses, we present a novel generation model that is capable of explicitly modeling the complicated argumentation structure from not only arguments between the reviewers and the authors but also the inter-reviewer discussions. Experimental results show that our model outperforms baselines in terms of both automatic evaluation and human evaluation, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.
Knowledge Distillation via Hypersphere Features Distribution Transfer

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a widely applicable DNN (Deep Neural Network) compression technology, which aims to transfer knowledge from a pretrained teacher neural network to a target student neural network. In practice, an enormous teacher is extracted through the compression of a neural network to train a relatively compact student. In general, current KD approaches mostly minimize divergence between the intermediate layers or logits of the teacher network and student network. However, these methods ignore important features distribution in the teacher network space, which leads to the defect of current KD approaches in the fine-grained categorization task, e.g., metric learning. For this, we propose a novel approach that transfers features distribution in the hyperspherical space from the teacher network to the student network. Specifically, our approach facilitates the student to learn the distribution among samples in the teacher and reduces the intra-class variance. Extensive experimental evaluations on three well-known metric learning datasets show that our method can distill higher-level knowledge from the teacher network and achieve state-of-the-art performance.
Multi-Aspect Embedding of Dynamic Graphs

Graph embedding is regarded as one of the most advanced techniques for graph data analyses due to its significant performance. However, the majority of existing works only focus on static graphs while ignoring the ubiquitous dynamic graphs. In fact, the temporal evolution of edges in a dynamic graph sets a harsh challenge for the traditional embedding algorithms. To solve the problem, in this paper we propose a Dynamic Graph Multi-Aspect Embedding (DGMAE) to automatically learn the proper number of aspects and their distributions in each temporal duration based on a distance dependent Chinese Restaurant Process. The proposed method can encode the inherent property of varying interactions among nodes along the time and present different aspect-influences to nodes embedding. Our extensive experiments on several public datasets show the performance improvement over state-of-the-art works.
SWAG-Net: Semantic Word-Aware Graph Network for Temporal Video Grounding

In this paper, to effectively capture non-sequential dependencies among semantic words for temporal video grounding, we propose a novel framework called Semantic Word-Aware Graph Network (SWAG-Net), which adopts graph-guided semantic word embedding in an end-to-end manner. Specifically, we define semantic word features as node features of semantic word-aware graphs and word-to-word correlations as three edge types (i.e., intrinsic, extrinsic, and relative edges) for diverse graph structures. We then apply Semantic Word-aware Graph Convolutional Networks (SW-GCNs) to the graphs for semantic word embedding. For modality fusion and context modeling, the embedded features and video segment features are merged into bi-modal features, and the bi-modal features are aggregated by incorporating local and global contextual information. Leveraging the aggregated features, the proposed method effectively finds a temporal boundary semantically corresponding to a sentence query in an untrimmed video. We verify that our SWAG-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods on Charades-STA and ActivityNet Captions datasets.
℘-MinHash Algorithm for Continuous Probability Measures

This paper studies the scale-invariant "probability Jaccard'' (ProbJ), noted as ℐ℘, which is another variant of weighted Jaccard similarity. The standard and commonly used Jaccard index is not invariant of data scaling. Thus, the probability Jaccard can be a potentially useful extension to probability distributions. Before our paper, the problem of hashing the ℐ℘ for continuous probability measures is an open problem, where rigorous definitions and analysis are still absent in literature. In our work, we solve this problem systematically and completely. Specifically, we formalize the definition of ℐ℘ in continuous measure space, and propose a general ℘-MinHash sampling algorithm which generates samples following any target distribution, and preserves ℐ℘ between two distributions by the hash collision. In addition, a refined early stopping rule is proposed under a practical boundedness assumption. We validate the theory through simulation and experiments, and demonstrate the application of our method in machine learning problems.
Shoe Size Resolution in Search Queries and Product Listings using Knowledge Graphs

The Fashion domain is one of the most profitable domains in most of the e-commerce shops, shoes being one of the top-selling categories within this domain. When shopping for shoes, one of the most important aspects for the buyers is the shoe size. Shoe size charts differ between different brands, geographical regions, genders and age groups. Not providing some of these details, as a buyer or a seller, could lead to a query intent to inventory mismatch and reduced or wrong search results. Furthermore, buying the wrong shoe size is one of the top reasons for product returns, which causes shipping delays and loss in revenue. To address this issue, we propose an approach for shoe size resolution and normalization in search queries and product listings using Knowledge Graphs.
Multi-agent Transformer Networks for Multimodal Human Activity Recognition

Human activity recognition has become an important challenge yet to resolve while also having promising benefits in various applications for years. Existing approaches have made great progress by applying deep-learning and attention-based methods. However, the deep learning-based approaches may not fully exploit the features to resolve multimodal human activity recognition tasks. Also, the potential of attention-based methods still has not been fully explored to better extract the multimodal spatial-temporal relationship and produce robust results. In this work, we propose Multi-agent Transformer Network (MATN), a multi-agent attention-based deep learning algorithm, to address the above issues in multimodal human activity recognition. We first design a unified representation learning layer to encode the multimodal data, which preprocesses the data in a generalized and efficient way. Then we develop a multimodal spatial-temporal transformer module that applies the attention mechanism to extract the salient spatial-temporal features. Finally, we use a multi-agent training module to collaboratively select the informative modalities and predict the activity labels. We have extensively conducted experiments to evaluate MATN's performance on two public multimodal human activity recognition datasets. The results show that our model has achieved competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches, which also demonstrates scalability, effectiveness, and robustness.
The Interaction Graph Auto-encoder Network Based on Topology-aware for Transferable Recommendation

Deep learning-based recommendation systems have made significant strides in recent years. However, the problem of recommendation systems' generalizability has not been solved. After the training phase, most current models can only solve problems on a particular dataset and are not as generalizable as NLP and CV models. Therefore, a large amount of computing power is required to make conventional recommendation models available to different trades. In real-world scenarios, offline retailers often opt out of recommendation algorithms due to a lack of computer capacity, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage. As a result, we propose an Interaction Graph Auto-encoder Network (IGA) based on topology-aware to address the transferable recommendation problem. IGA is composed primarily of the following components: Interaction Feature Subgraph Extraction, Subgraph Node Labeling, Subgraph Interaction Auto-encoder, and Interaction Preference Attention Network. IGA can transfer knowledge from the training dataset to the new dataset without fine-tuning and give users reliable, personalized recommendation results. Experiments on the MovieLens, Douban, LastFM, and Book-Crossing datasets demonstrate that IGA outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in transferable scenarios. Additionally, IGA requires fewer computing power and is highly adaptable across datasets.
An In-depth Interactive and Visualized Platform for Evaluating and Analyzing MRC Models

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has made leaps and bounds when focusing on answering questions. However, since the existing accuracy-based evaluation metrics are agnostic to the nuances of neural networks, the true understanding and inferencing abilities of MRC models remain largely unknown. To address the above limitations, InDepth-Eva-MRC, an interactive and visualized platform, is proposed to provide analysis from cognitive fine-grained for MRC models. Concretely, the platform makes post-hoc systems to explain the behavior of MRC models. On the one hand, it analyzes the linguistic bias via performances with different linguistic properties. On the other hand, it performs skill-based analysis methods based on the modified test samples and semi-automatically generated test samples. Furthermore, through its detailed and interactive visualizations, the platform offers in-depth results analysis and model comparison from cognitive fine-grained. A screencast video and additional external material are available on https://github.com/thuiar/InDepth-Eva-MRC.
DASH: An Agile Knowledge Graph System Disentangling Demands, Algorithms, Data Resources, and Humans

Knowledge graph (KG) is an important branch of artificial intelligence, which has attracted increasing research interest. However, in most enterprises, it is challenging to quickly construct KGs with multi-source and heterogeneous data and apply KGs to meet diverse business demands. To deal with these challenges, we propose an agile knowledge graph system following the novel principle of disentangling Demands, Algorithms, data reSources, and Humans (DASH). Specifically, our system is equipped with prior information-based knowledge extraction, self-supervised knowledge integration, and hierarchical knowledge base question answering algorithms that have outstanding generalizability and portability. Meanwhile, we propose a semi-automatic data accumulation framework to reduce labor costs of data annotations. Based on DASH, we develop a Web application with easy-to-use functionalities such as canvases and drag-and-drop, and illustrate its usage in a financial scenario.
SmartIndex: An Index Advisor with Learned Cost Estimator

As an important part of database optimization, index selection problem remains a hot topic. Existing methods tend to use the cost estimated by the DBMS optimizer to measure the benefit of an index. However, due to the limitations of the cost estimation model in database management system (DBMS), these methods may not find the optimal index configuration. To address this problem, we present SmartIndex, an index advisor for relational database with learned cost estimator. We first design a graph convolutional network (GCN) based cost estimation model to predict a query's execution time on certain indexes. After that, we use a greedy method for index selection under certain constraints including number of indexes and storage cost of indexes, which can find better solutions for a given workload.
Federated K-Private Set Intersection

Private set intersection (PSI) is a popular protocol that allows multiple parties to evaluate the intersection of their sets without revealing them to each other. PSI has numerous practical applications, including privacy preserving data mining and location-based services. In this work, we develop a new approach for the PSI problem within the federated analytics framework. In particular, we consider a setting where a server wants to determine (query) which among its local set of data identifiers appears coupled with the same value in at least K of the N parties. Applications for this framework include but are not limited to: double-filing insurance verification, credit scoring and password checkup on an institutional level. To address the proposed setting, we propose a new protocol Fed-K-PSI that allows the server to answer this query while being oblivious to the data of identifiers that do not satisfy the distributed query at the parties. In addition, Fed-K-PSI also maintains the anonymity of the parties by hiding which K parties satisfied the query, or which value associated with the identifier which caused the query to be successful. Our proposed setting does not lend itself directly to state-of-the-art approaches in PSI based on Oblivious Transfer, since the server does not have a complete representation of a datapoint (only the identifier, but no value). Our proposed approach tackles this problem by constructing a distributed function at the parties, which encodes the datapoints and returns a deterministic known property if and only if the value for a given identifier is the same in at least K of the N parties. We show that Fed-K-PSI achieves a strong information-theoretic privacy guarantee and is resilient to collusion scenarios among honest-but-curious parties. We also evaluate Fed-K-PSI via extensive experiments to study the effect of the different system parameters.
Sequence Prediction under Missing Data

Missing data scenarios are very common in ML applications in general and time-series/sequence applications are no exceptions. This paper pertains to a novel Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based solution for sequence prediction under missing data. Our method is distinct from all existing approaches. It tries to encode the missingness patterns in the data directly without trying to impute data either before or during model building. Our encoding is lossless and achieves compression. It can be employed for both sequence classification and forecasting. We focus on forecasting here in a general context of multi-step prediction in presence of possible exogenous inputs. In particular, we propose novel variants of Encoder-Decoder (Seq2Seq) RNNs for this. The encoder here adopts the above mentioned pattern encoding, while at the decoder which has a different structure, multiple variants are feasible. We demonstrate the utility of our proposed architecture via multiple experiments on both single and multiple sequence (real) data-sets. We consider both scenarios where (i)data is naturally missing and (ii)data is synthetically masked.
ClozeSearch: A Collocation Retrieval Application to Assist in Scientific Writing

This paper presents a slot-filling retrieval application, ClozeSearch, for searching collocates to assist users in scientific writing. ClozeSearch suggests plausible collocates to fill in user-created slots within the query text. To ease the query formulation, we adapt the autocomplete feature to a slot-filling fashion of querying. Given a query prefix with slots, we select multiple valid terms to replace each slot and then provide complete suggestions based on such hypothetical prefixes. To reduce the search space for sampling the terms, we leveraged histogram pruning. Moreover, we propose two alternatives based on syntactic graph and deep language model for better flexibility in coping with long queries. Experimental results show that our proposed methods outperform the conventional pattern-based matching by a maximum of 0.18 points in F1-score.
LearnShapley: Learning to Predict Rankings of Facts Contribution Based on Query Logs

To explain query results, a recent line of work has proposed to leverage the game-theoretic notion of Shapley values to quantify the contribution of each input fact to each result. Despite significant recent breakthroughs improving the complexity of computing Shapley values in query answering, the computation remains quite costly. To this end, we propose an approach that aims at ranking input facts based on their (hidden) Shapley values. Our method utilizes a repository of queries over the same database for which we do store exact Shapley values. Intuitively, some queries bear similarity in the ways they transform data, and consequently in the contribution of database facts to their outputs. In this manner, given a new query and a query result, we can learn and predict the ranking of contributing facts. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we introduce DBShap, a curated dataset of queries and query results, along with the contributing facts and respective Shapley values. Second, we define the task of predicting the ranking of facts contribution w.r.t a query and query result. Finally, we propose a solution for the prediction task based on BERT.
Binary Classification with Positive Labeling Sources

To create a large amount of training labels for machine learning models effectively and efficiently, researchers have turned to Weak Supervision (WS), which uses programmatic labeling sources rather than manual annotation. Existing works of WS for binary classification typically assume the presence of labeling sources that are able to assign both positive and negative labels to data in roughly balanced proportions. However, for many tasks of interest where there is a minority positive class, negative examples could be too diverse for developers to generate indicative labeling sources. Thus, in this work, we study the application of WS on binary classification tasks with positive labeling sources only. We propose WEAPO, a simple yet competitive WS method for producing training labels without negative labeling sources. On 10 benchmark datasets, we show WEAPO achieves the highest averaged performance in terms of both the quality of synthesized labels and the performance of the final classifier supervised with these labels. We incorporated the implementation of WEAPO into WRENCH, an existing benchmarking platform.