pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Action Guidance with MCTS for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Bilal Kartal, Pablo Hernandez-Leal, Matthew E. Taylor
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved great successes in recent years, however, one main challenge is the sample inefficiency. In this paper, we focus on how to use action guidance by means of a non-expert demonstrator to improve sample efficiency in a domain with sparse, delayed, and possibly deceptive rewards: the recently-proposed multi-agent benchmark of Pommerman. We propose a new framework where even a non-expert simulated demonstrator, e.g., planning algorithms such as Monte Carlo tree search with a small number rollouts, can be integrated within asynchronous distributed deep reinforcement learning methods. Compared to a vanilla deep RL algorithm, our proposed methods both learn faster and converge to better policies on a two-player mini version of the Pommerman game.
A comparison of Deep Learning performances with other machine learning algorithms on credit scoring unbalanced data
Authors: Louis Marceau, Lingling Qiu, Nick Vandewiele, Eric Charton
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Deep Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Training models on highly unbalanced data is admitted to be a challenging task for machine learning algorithms. Current studies on deep learning mainly focus on data sets with balanced class labels or unbalanced data, but with massive amount of samples available, like in speech recognition. However, the capacities of deep learning on imbalanced data with little samples is not deeply investigated in literature, while it is a very common application context in numerous industries. To contribute to fill this gap, this paper compares the performances of several popular machine learning algorithms previously applied with success to unbalanced data set with deep learning algorithms. We conduct those experiments on a highly unbalanced data set, used for credit scoring. We evaluate various configuration including neural network optimization techniques and try to determine their capacities when they operate with imbalanced corpora.
Finite-Time Performance of Distributed Temporal Difference Learning with Linear Function Approximation
Authors: Thinh T. Doan, Siva Theja Maguluri, Justin Romberg
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning

We study the policy evaluation problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning, modeled by a Markov decision process. In this problem, the agents operate in a common environment under a fixed control policy, working together to discover the value (global discounted accumulative reward) associated with each environmental state. Over a series of time steps, the agents act, get rewarded, update their local estimate of the value function, then communicate with their neighbors. The local update at each agent can be interpreted as a distributed variant of the popular temporal difference learning methods {\sf TD}$ (\lambda)$. Our main contribution is to provide a finite-analysis on the performance of this distributed {\sf TD}$(\lambda)$ algorithm for both constant and time-varying step sizes. The key idea in our analysis is to use the geometric mixing time $\tau$ of the underlying Markov chain, that is, although the "noise" in our algorithm is Markovian, its dependence is very weak at samples spaced out at every $\tau$. We provide an explicit upper bound on the convergence rate of the proposed method as a function of the network topology, the discount factor, the constant $\lambda$, and the mixing time $\tau$. Our results also provide a mathematical explanation for observations that have appeared previously in the literature about the choice of $\lambda$. Our upper bound illustrates the trade-off between approximation accuracy and convergence speed implicit in the choice of $\lambda$. When $\lambda=1$, the solution will correspond to the best possible approximation of the value function, while choosing $\lambda = 0$ leads to faster convergence when the noise in the algorithm has large variance.
Style Conditioned Recommendations
Authors: Murium Iqbal, Kamelia Aryafar, Timothy Anderton
Date: 2019-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Style Transfer

We propose Style Conditioned Recommendations (SCR) and introduce style injection as a method to diversify recommendations. We use Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE) architecture, where both the encoder and decoder are conditioned on a user profile learned from item content data. This allows us to apply style transfer methodologies to the task of recommendations, which we refer to as injection. To enable style injection, user profiles are learned to be interpretable such that they express users' propensities for specific predefined styles. These are learned via label-propagation from a dataset of item content, with limited labeled points. To perform injection, the condition on the encoder is learned while the condition on the decoder is selected per explicit feedback. Explicit feedback can be taken either from a user's response to a style or interest quiz, or from item ratings. In the absence of explicit feedback, the condition at the encoder is applied to the decoder. We show a 12% improvement on NDCG@20 over the traditional VAE based approach and an average 22% improvement on AUC across all classes for predicting user style profiles against our best performing baseline. After injecting styles we compare the user style profile to the style of the recommendations and show that injected styles have an average +133% increase in presence. Our results show that style injection is a powerful method to diversify recommendations while maintaining personal relevance. Our main contribution is an application of a semi-supervised approach that extends item labels to interpretable user profiles.
Production Ranking Systems: A Review
Authors: Murium Iqbal, Nishan Subedi, Kamelia Aryafar
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

The problem of ranking is a multi-billion dollar problem. In this paper we present an overview of several production quality ranking systems. We show that due to conflicting goals of employing the most effective machine learning models and responding to users in real time, ranking systems have evolved into a system of systems, where each subsystem can be viewed as a component layer. We view these layers as being data processing, representation learning, candidate selection and online inference. Each layer employs different algorithms and tools, with every end-to-end ranking system spanning multiple architectures. Our goal is to familiarize the general audience with a working knowledge of ranking at scale, the tools and algorithms employed and the challenges introduced by adopting a layered approach.
Learning abstract perceptual notions: the example of space
Authors: Alexander V. Terekhov, J. Kevin O'Regan
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning

Humans are extremely swift learners. We are able to grasp highly abstract notions, whether they come from art perception or pure mathematics. Current machine learning techniques demonstrate astonishing results in extracting patterns in information. Yet the abstract notions we possess are more than just statistical patterns in the incoming information. Sensorimotor theory suggests that they represent functions, laws, describing how the information can be transformed, or, in other words, they represent the statistics of sensorimotor changes rather than sensory inputs themselves. The aim of our work is to suggest a way for machine learning and sensorimotor theory to benefit from each other so as to pave the way toward new horizons in learning. We show in this study that a highly abstract notion, that of space, can be seen as a collection of laws of transformations of sensory information and that these laws could in theory be learned by a naive agent. As an illustration we do a one-dimensional simulation in which an agent extracts spatial knowledge in the form of internalized ("sensible") rigid displacements. The agent uses them to encode its own displacements in a way which is isometrically related to external space. Though the algorithm allowing acquisition of rigid displacements is designed \emph{ad hoc}, we believe it can stimulate the development of unsupervised learning techniques leading to similar results.
Music Recommendations in Hyperbolic Space: An Application of Empirical Bayes and Hierarchical Poincaré Embeddings
Authors: Tim Schmeier, Sam Garrett, Joseph Chisari, Brett Vintch
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00

Matrix Factorization (MF) is a common method for generating recommendations, where the proximity of entities like users or items in the embedded space indicates their similarity to one another. Though almost all applications implicitly use a Euclidean embedding space to represent two entity types, recent work has suggested that a hyperbolic Poincar\'e ball may be more well suited to representing multiple entity types, and in particular, hierarchies. We describe a novel method to embed a hierarchy of related music entities in hyperbolic space. We also describe how a parametric empirical Bayes approach can be used to estimate link reliability between entities in the hierarchy. Applying these methods together to build personalized playlists for users in a digital music service yielded a large and statistically significant increase in performance during an A/B test, as compared to the Euclidean model.
Topic Modeling with Wasserstein Autoencoders
Authors: Feng Nan, Ran Ding, Ramesh Nallapati, Bing Xiang
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2019 7
Tasks: Diversity, Generative Adversarial Network, Topic Models

We propose a novel neural topic model in the Wasserstein autoencoders (WAE) framework. Unlike existing variational autoencoder based models, we directly enforce Dirichlet prior on the latent document-topic vectors. We exploit the structure of the latent space and apply a suitable kernel in minimizing the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) to perform distribution matching. We discover that MMD performs much better than the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in matching high dimensional Dirichlet distribution. We further discover that incorporating randomness in the encoder output during training leads to significantly more coherent topics. To measure the diversity of the produced topics, we propose a simple topic uniqueness metric. Together with the widely used coherence measure NPMI, we offer a more wholistic evaluation of topic quality. Experiments on several real datasets show that our model produces significantly better topics than existing topic models.
Personalized Attraction Enhanced Sponsored Search with Multi-task Learning
Authors: Wei Zhao, Boxuan Zhang, Beidou Wang, Ziyu Guan, Wanxian Guan, Guang Qiu, Wei Ning, Jiming Chen, Hongmin Liu
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning

We study a novel problem of sponsored search (SS) for E-Commerce platforms: how we can attract query users to click product advertisements (ads) by presenting them features of products that attract them. This not only benefits merchants and the platform, but also improves user experience. The problem is challenging due to the following reasons: (1) We need to carefully manipulate the ad content without affecting user search experience. (2) It is difficult to obtain users' explicit feedback of their preference in product features. (3) Nowadays, a great portion of the search traffic in E-Commerce platforms is from their mobile apps (e.g., nearly 90% in Taobao). The situation would get worse in the mobile setting due to limited space. We are focused on the mobile setting and propose to manipulate ad titles by adding a few selling point keywords (SPs) to attract query users. We model it as a personalized attractive SP prediction problem and carry out both large-scale offline evaluation and online A/B tests in Taobao. The contributions include: (1) We explore various exhibition schemes of SPs. (2) We propose a surrogate of user explicit feedback for SP preference. (3) We also explore multi-task learning and various additional features to boost the performance. A variant of our best model has already been deployed in Taobao, leading to a 2% increase in revenue per thousand impressions and an opt-out rate of merchants less than 4%.
IntentGC: a Scalable Graph Convolution Framework Fusing Heterogeneous Information for Recommendation
Authors: Jun Zhao, Zhou Zhou, Ziyu Guan, Wei Zhao, Wei Ning, Guang Qiu, Xiaofei He
Date: 2019-07-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Embedding

The remarkable progress of network embedding has led to state-of-the-art algorithms in recommendation. However, the sparsity of user-item interactions (i.e., explicit preferences) on websites remains a big challenge for predicting users' behaviors. Although research efforts have been made in utilizing some auxiliary information (e.g., social relations between users) to solve the problem, the existing rich heterogeneous auxiliary relationships are still not fully exploited. Moreover, previous works relied on linearly combined regularizers and suffered parameter tuning. In this work, we collect abundant relationships from common user behaviors and item information, and propose a novel framework named IntentGC to leverage both explicit preferences and heterogeneous relationships by graph convolutional networks. In addition to the capability of modeling heterogeneity, IntentGC can learn the importance of different relationships automatically by the neural model in a nonlinear sense. To apply IntentGC to web-scale applications, we design a faster graph convolutional model named IntentNet by avoiding unnecessary feature interactions. Empirical experiments on two large-scale real-world datasets and online A/B tests in Alibaba demonstrate the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art algorithms.
Tripartite Vector Representations for Better Job Recommendation
Authors: Mengshu Liu, Jingya Wang, Kareem Abdelfatah, Mohammed Korayem
Date: 2019-07-23 00:00:00

Job recommendation is a crucial part of the online job recruitment business. To match the right person with the right job, a good representation of job postings is required. Such representations should ideally recommend jobs with fitting titles, aligned skill set, and reasonable commute. To address these aspects, we utilize three information graphs ( job-job, skill-skill, job-skill) from historical job data to learn a joint representation for both job titles and skills in a shared latent space. This allows us to gain a representation of job postings/ resume using both elements, which subsequently can be combined with location. In this paper, we first present how the presentation of each component is obtained, and then we discuss how these different representations are combined together into one single space to acquire the final representation. The results of comparing the proposed methodology against different base-line methods show significant improvement in terms of relevancy.
Completing partial recipes using item-based collaborative filtering to recommend ingredients
Authors: Paula Fermín Cueto, Meeke Roet, Agnieszka Słowik
Date: 2019-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Dimensionality Reduction, Recommendation Systems

Increased public interest in healthy lifestyles has motivated the study of algorithms that encourage people to follow a healthy diet. Applying collaborative filtering to build recommendation systems in domains where only implicit feedback is available is also a rapidly growing research area. In this report we combine these two trends by developing a recommendation system to suggest ingredients that can be added to a partial recipe. We implement the item-based collaborative filtering algorithm using a high-dimensional, sparse dataset of recipes, which inherently contains only implicit feedback. We explore the effect of different similarity measures and dimensionality reduction on the quality of the recommendations, and find that our best method achieves a recall@10 of circa 40%.
Collaborative Filtering and Multi-Label Classification with Matrix Factorization
Authors: Vikas Kumar
Date: 2019-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Collaborative Filtering, General Classification, Matrix Completion, Multi-class Classification, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Machine learning techniques for Recommendation System (RS) and Classification has become a prime focus of research to tackle the problem of information overload. RS are software tools that aim at making informed decisions about the services that a user may like. On the other hand, classification technique deals with the categorization of a data object into one of the several predefined classes. In the multi-label classification problem, unlike the traditional multi-class classification setting, each instance can be simultaneously associated with a subset of labels. The focus of thesis is on the development of novel techniques for collaborative filtering and multi-label classification. We propose a novel method of constructing a hierarchical bi-level maximum margin matrix factorization to handle matrix completion of ordinal rating matrix. Taking the cue from the alternative formulation of support vector machines, a novel loss function is derived by considering proximity as an alternative criterion instead of margin maximization criterion for matrix factorization framework. We extended the concept of matrix factorization for yet another important problem of machine learning namely multi-label classification which deals with the classification of data with multiple labels. We propose a novel piecewise-linear embedding method with a low-rank constraint on parametrization to capture nonlinear intrinsic relationships that exist in the original feature and label space. We also study the embedding of labels together with the group information with an objective to build an efficient multi-label classifier. We assume the existence of a low-dimensional space onto which the feature vectors and label vectors can be embedded. We ensure that labels belonging to the same group share the same sparsity pattern in their low-rank representations.
Detecting Radical Text over Online Media using Deep Learning
Authors: Armaan Kaur, Jaspal Kaur Saini, Divya Bansal
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Deep Learning

Social Media has influenced the way people socially connect, interact and opinionize. The growth in technology has enhanced communication and dissemination of information. Unfortunately,many terror groups like jihadist communities have started consolidating a virtual community online for various purposes such as recruitment, online donations, targeting youth online and spread of extremist ideologies. Everyday a large number of articles, tweets, posts, posters, blogs, comments, views and news are posted online without a check which in turn imposes a threat to the security of any nation. However, different agencies are working on getting down this radical content from various online social media platforms. The aim of our paper is to utilise deep learning algorithm in detection of radicalization contrary to the existing works based on machine learning algorithms. An LSTM based feed forward neural network is employed to detect radical content. We collected total 61601 records from various online sources constituting news, articles and blogs. These records are annotated by domain experts into three categories: Radical(R), Non-Radical (NR) and Irrelevant(I) which are further applied to LSTM based network to classify radical content. A precision of 85.9% has been achieved with the proposed approach
Multi-Modal Adversarial Autoencoders for Recommendations of Citations and Subject Labels
Authors: Lukas Galke, Florian Mai, Iacopo Vagliano, Ansgar Scherp
Date: 2019-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Citation Recommendation, Diversity

We present multi-modal adversarial autoencoders for recommendation and evaluate them on two different tasks: citation recommendation and subject label recommendation. We analyze the effects of adversarial regularization, sparsity, and different input modalities. By conducting 408 experiments, we show that adversarial regularization consistently improves the performance of autoencoders for recommendation. We demonstrate, however, that the two tasks differ in the semantics of item co-occurrence in the sense that item co-occurrence resembles relatedness in case of citations, yet implies diversity in case of subject labels. Our results reveal that supplying the partial item set as input is only helpful, when item co-occurrence resembles relatedness. When facing a new recommendation task it is therefore crucial to consider the semantics of item co-occurrence for the choice of an appropriate model.
hood2vec: Identifying Similar Urban Areas Using Mobility Networks
Authors: Xin Liu, Konstantinos Pelechrinis, Alexandros Labrinidis
Date: 2019-07-17 00:00:00

Which area in NYC is the most similar to Lower East Side? What about the NoHo Arts District in Los Angeles? Traditionally this task utilizes information about the type of places located within the areas and some popularity/quality metric. We take a different approach. In particular, urban dwellers' time-variant mobility is a reflection of how they interact with their city over time. Hence, in this paper, we introduce an approach, namely hood2vec, to identify the similarity between urban areas through learning a node embedding of the mobility network captured through Foursquare check-ins. We compare the pairwise similarities obtained from hood2vec with the ones obtained from comparing the types of venues in the different areas. The low correlation between the two indicates that the mobility dynamics and the venue types potentially capture different aspects of similarity between urban areas.
A hybrid neural network model based on improved PSO and SA for bankruptcy prediction
Authors: Fatima Zahra Azayite, Said Achchab
Date: 2019-07-16 00:00:00

Predicting firm's failure is one of the most interesting subjects for investors and decision makers. In this paper, a bankruptcy prediction model is proposed based on Artificial Neural networks (ANN). Taking into consideration that the choice of variables to discriminate between bankrupt and non-bankrupt firms influences significantly the model's accuracy and considering the problem of local minima, we propose a hybrid ANN based on variables selection techniques. Moreover, we evolve the convergence of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by proposing a training algorithm based on an improved PSO and Simulated Annealing. A comparative performance study is reported, and the proposed hybrid model shows a high performance and convergence in the context of missing data.