pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Singing Language Identification using a Deep Phonotactic Approach
Authors: Lenny Renault, Andrea Vaglio, Romain Hennequin
Date: 2021-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Language Identification, Phoneme Recognition

Extensive works have tackled Language Identification (LID) in the speech domain, however their application to the singing voice trails and performances on Singing Language Identification (SLID) can be improved leveraging recent progresses made in other singing related tasks. This work presents a modernized phonotactic system for SLID on polyphonic music: phoneme recognition is performed with a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)-based acoustic model trained with multilingual data, before language classification with a recurrent model based on the phonemes estimation. The full pipeline is trained and evaluated with a large and publicly available dataset, with unprecedented performances. First results of SLID with out-of-set languages are also presented.
Generating Interesting Song-to-Song Segues With Dave
Authors: Giovanni Gabbolini, Derek Bridge
Date: 2021-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

We introduce a novel domain-independent algorithm for generating interesting item-to-item textual connections, or segues. Pivotal to our contribution is the introduction of a scoring function for segues, based on their "interestingness". We provide an implementation of our algorithm in the music domain. We refer to our implementation as Dave. Dave is able to generate 1553 different types of segues, that can be broadly categorized as either informative or funny. We evaluate Dave by comparing it against a curated source of song-to-song segues, called The Chain. In the case of informative segues, we find that Dave can produce segues of the same quality, if not better, than those to be found in The Chain. And, we report positive correlation between the values produced by our scoring function and human perceptions of segue quality. The results highlight the validity of our method, and open future directions in the application of segues to recommender systems research.
Learning to Expand Audience via Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics for Recommendation and Advertising
Authors: Yongchun Zhu, Yudan Liu, Ruobing Xie, Fuzhen Zhuang, Xiaobo Hao, Kaikai Ge, Xu Zhang, Leyu Lin, Juan Cao
Date: 2021-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Marketing, Meta-Learning, Recommendation Systems

In recommender systems and advertising platforms, marketers always want to deliver products, contents, or advertisements to potential audiences over media channels such as display, video, or social. Given a set of audiences or customers (seed users), the audience expansion technique (look-alike modeling) is a promising solution to identify more potential audiences, who are similar to the seed users and likely to finish the business goal of the target campaign. However, look-alike modeling faces two challenges: (1) In practice, a company could run hundreds of marketing campaigns to promote various contents within completely different categories every day, e.g., sports, politics, society. Thus, it is difficult to utilize a common method to expand audiences for all campaigns. (2) The seed set of a certain campaign could only cover limited users. Therefore, a customized approach based on such a seed set is likely to be overfitting. In this paper, to address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage framework named Meta Hybrid Experts and Critics (MetaHeac) which has been deployed in WeChat Look-alike System. In the offline stage, a general model which can capture the relationships among various tasks is trained from a meta-learning perspective on all existing campaign tasks. In the online stage, for a new campaign, a customized model is learned with the given seed set based on the general model. According to both offline and online experiments, the proposed MetaHeac shows superior effectiveness for both content marketing campaigns in recommender systems and advertising campaigns in advertising platforms. Besides, MetaHeac has been successfully deployed in WeChat for the promotion of both contents and advertisements, leading to great improvement in the quality of marketing. The code has been available at \url{https://github.com/easezyc/MetaHeac}.
Personalization in E-Grocery: Top-N versus Top-k Rankings
Authors: Franziska Scherpinski, Stefan Lessmann
Date: 2021-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Business success in e-commerce depends on customer perceived value. A customer with high perceived value buys, returns, and recommends items. The perceived value is at risk whenever the information load harms users' shopping experience. In e-grocery, shoppers face an overwhelming number of items, the majority of which is irrelevant for the shopper. Recommender systems (RS) enable businesses to master information overload (IO) by providing users with an item ranking by relevance. Prior work proposes RS with short personalized rankings (top-k). Given large order sizes and high user heterogeneity in e-grocery, top-k RS are insufficient to diminish IO in this domain. To fill this gap and raise business performance, this paper introduces an RS with a personalized long ranking (top-N). Undertaking a randomized field experiment, the paper establishes the merit of shifting from top-k to top-N rankings. Specifically, the proposed RS reduces IO by 29.4% and lowers users' search time by 3.3 seconds per item. The field experiment also reveals a 7% uplift in revenue due to the top-N ranking. Substantial benefits for the customer and the company highlight the business value of top-N rankings as a new design requirement for recommender systems in e-grocery.
CNN Retrieval based Unsupervised Metric Learning for Near-Duplicated Video Retrieval
Authors: Hao Cheng, Ping Wang, Chun Qi
Date: 2021-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Metric Learning, Re-Ranking, Retrieval, Video Retrieval

As important data carriers, the drastically increasing number of multimedia videos often brings many duplicate and near-duplicate videos in the top results of search. Near-duplicate video retrieval (NDVR) can cluster and filter out the redundant contents. In this paper, the proposed NDVR approach extracts the frame-level video representation based on convolutional neural network (CNN) features from fully-connected layer and aggregated intermediate convolutional layers. Unsupervised metric learning is used for similarity measurement and feature matching. An efficient re-ranking algorithm combined with k-nearest neighborhood fuses the retrieval results from two levels of features and further improves the retrieval performance. Extensive experiments on the widely used CC\_WEB\_VIDEO dataset shows that the proposed approach exhibits superior performance over the state-of-the-art.
DAGNN: Demand-aware Graph Neural Networks for Session-based Recommendation
Authors: Liqi Yang, Linhan Luo, Lifeng Xin, Xiaofeng Zhang, Xinni Zhang
Date: 2021-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Session-Based Recommendations

Session-based recommendations have been widely adopted for various online video and E-commerce Websites. Most existing approaches are intuitively proposed to discover underlying interests or preferences out of the anonymous session data. This apparently ignores the fact these sequential behaviors usually reflect session user's potential demand, i.e., a semantic level factor, and therefore how to estimate underlying demands from a session is challenging. To address aforementioned issue, this paper proposes a demand-aware graph neural networks (DAGNN). Particularly, a demand modeling component is designed to first extract session demand and the underlying multiple demands of each session is estimated using the global demand matrix. Then, the demand-aware graph neural network is designed to extract session demand graph to learn the demand-aware item embedddings for the later recommendations. The mutual information loss is further designed to enhance the quality of the learnt embeddings. Extensive experiments are evaluated on several real-world datasets and the proposed model achieves the SOTA model performance.
Enumerating Fair Packages for Group Recommendations
Authors: Ryoma Sato
Date: 2021-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Recommendation Systems

Package-to-group recommender systems recommend a set of unified items to a group of people. Different from conventional settings, it is not easy to measure the utility of group recommendations because it involves more than one user. In particular, fairness is crucial in group recommendations. Even if some members in a group are substantially satisfied with a recommendation, it is undesirable if other members are ignored to increase the total utility. Many methods for evaluating and applying the fairness of group recommendations have been proposed in the literature. However, all these methods maximize the score and output only one package. This is in contrast to conventional recommender systems, which output several (e.g., top-$K$) candidates. This can be problematic because a group can be dissatisfied with the recommended package owing to some unobserved reasons, even if the score is high. To address this issue, we propose a method to enumerate fair packages efficiently. Our method furthermore supports filtering queries, such as top-$K$ and intersection, to select favorite packages when the list is long. We confirm that our algorithm scales to large datasets and can balance several aspects of the utility of the packages.
Recommendations and Results Organization in Netflix Search
Authors: Sudarshan Lamkhede, Christoph Kofler
Date: 2021-05-28 00:00:00

Personalized recommendations on the Netflix Homepage are based on a user's viewing habits and the behavior of similar users. These recommendations, organized for efficient browsing, enable users to discover the next great video to watch and enjoy without additional input or an explicit expression of their intents or goals. The Netflix Search experience, on the other hand, allows users to take active control of discovering new videos by explicitly expressing their entertainment needs via search queries. In this talk, we discuss the importance of producing search results that go beyond traditional keyword-matches to effectively satisfy users' search needs in the Netflix entertainment setting. Motivated by users' various search intents, we highlight the necessity to improve Search by applying approaches that have historically powered the Homepage. Specifically, we discuss our approach to leverage recommendations in the context of Search and to effectively organize search results to provide a product experience that meaningfully adds value for our users.
Linear-Time Self Attention with Codeword Histogram for Efficient Recommendation
Authors: Yongji Wu, Defu Lian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lu Yin, Mingyang Yin, Jingren Zhou, Hongxia Yang
Date: 2021-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Sequential Recommendation

Self-attention has become increasingly popular in a variety of sequence modeling tasks from natural language processing to recommendation, due to its effectiveness. However, self-attention suffers from quadratic computational and memory complexities, prohibiting its applications on long sequences. Existing approaches that address this issue mainly rely on a sparse attention context, either using a local window, or a permuted bucket obtained by locality-sensitive hashing (LSH) or sorting, while crucial information may be lost. Inspired by the idea of vector quantization that uses cluster centroids to approximate items, we propose LISA (LInear-time Self Attention), which enjoys both the effectiveness of vanilla self-attention and the efficiency of sparse attention. LISA scales linearly with the sequence length, while enabling full contextual attention via computing differentiable histograms of codeword distributions. Meanwhile, unlike some efficient attention methods, our method poses no restriction on casual masking or sequence length. We evaluate our method on four real-world datasets for sequential recommendation. The results show that LISA outperforms the state-of-the-art efficient attention methods in both performance and speed; and it is up to 57x faster and 78x more memory efficient than vanilla self-attention.
Rethinking Lifelong Sequential Recommendation with Incremental Multi-Interest Attention
Authors: Yongji Wu, Lu Yin, Defu Lian, Mingyang Yin, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Jingren Zhou, Hongxia Yang
Date: 2021-05-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Sequential recommendation plays an increasingly important role in many e-commerce services such as display advertisement and online shopping. With the rapid development of these services in the last two decades, users have accumulated a massive amount of behavior data. Richer sequential behavior data has been proven to be of great value for sequential recommendation. However, traditional sequential models fail to handle users' lifelong sequences, as their linear computational and storage cost prohibits them from performing online inference. Recently, lifelong sequential modeling methods that borrow the idea of memory networks from NLP are proposed to address this issue. However, the RNN-based memory networks built upon intrinsically suffer from the inability to capture long-term dependencies and may instead be overwhelmed by the noise on extremely long behavior sequences. In addition, as the user's behavior sequence gets longer, more interests would be demonstrated in it. It is therefore crucial to model and capture the diverse interests of users. In order to tackle these issues, we propose a novel lifelong incremental multi-interest self attention based sequential recommendation model, namely LimaRec. Our proposed method benefits from the carefully designed self-attention to identify relevant information from users' behavior sequences with different interests. It is still able to incrementally update users' representations for online inference, similarly to memory network based approaches. We extensively evaluate our method on four real-world datasets and demonstrate its superior performances compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
We Know What You Want: An Advertising Strategy Recommender System for Online Advertising
Authors: Liyi Guo, Junqi Jin, Haoqi Zhang, Zhenzhe Zheng, Zhiye Yang, Zhizhuang Xing, Fei Pan, Lvyin Niu, Fan Wu, Haiyang Xu, Chuan Yu, Yuning Jiang, Xiaoqiang Zhu
Date: 2021-05-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Advertising expenditures have become the major source of revenue for e-commerce platforms. Providing good advertising experiences for advertisers by reducing their costs of trial and error in discovering the optimal advertising strategies is crucial for the long-term prosperity of online advertising. To achieve this goal, the advertising platform needs to identify the advertiser's optimization objectives, and then recommend the corresponding strategies to fulfill the objectives. In this work, we first deploy a prototype of strategy recommender system on Taobao display advertising platform, which indeed increases the advertisers' performance and the platform's revenue, indicating the effectiveness of strategy recommendation for online advertising. We further augment this prototype system by explicitly learning the advertisers' preferences over various advertising performance indicators and then optimization objectives through their adoptions of different recommending advertising strategies. We use contextual bandit algorithms to efficiently learn the advertisers' preferences and maximize the recommendation adoption, simultaneously. Simulation experiments based on Taobao online bidding data show that the designed algorithms can effectively optimize the strategy adoption rate of advertisers.
Document Domain Randomization for Deep Learning Document Layout Extraction
Authors: Meng Ling, Jian Chen, Torsten Möller, Petra Isenberg, Tobias Isenberg, Michael Sedlmair, Robert S. Laramee, Han-Wei Shen, Jian Wu, C. Lee Giles
Date: 2021-05-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Document Layout Analysis

We present document domain randomization (DDR), the first successful transfer of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained only on graphically rendered pseudo-paper pages to real-world document segmentation. DDR renders pseudo-document pages by modeling randomized textual and non-textual contents of interest, with user-defined layout and font styles to support joint learning of fine-grained classes. We demonstrate competitive results using our DDR approach to extract nine document classes from the benchmark CS-150 and papers published in two domains, namely annual meetings of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and IEEE Visualization (VIS). We compare DDR to conditions of style mismatch, fewer or more noisy samples that are more easily obtained in the real world. We show that high-fidelity semantic information is not necessary to label semantic classes but style mismatch between train and test can lower model accuracy. Using smaller training samples had a slightly detrimental effect. Finally, network models still achieved high test accuracy when correct labels are diluted towards confusing labels; this behavior hold across several classes.
OpinionMine:ABayesian-based framework for opinion mining using Twitter Data
Authors: Stefanos Zervoudakis, Emmanouil Marakakis, Haridimos Kondylakis, Stefanos Goumas
Date: 2021-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Incremental Learning, Opinion Mining

This article studies opinion mining from social media with probabilistic logic reasoning. As it is known, Twitter is one of the most active social networks, with millions of tweets sent daily, where multiple users express their opinion about traveling, economic issues, political decisions etc. As such, it offers a valuable source of information for opinion mining. In this paper we present OpinionMine, a Bayesian-based framework for opinion mining, exploiting Twitter Data. Initially, our framework imports Tweets massively by using Twitter’s API. Next, the imported Tweets are further processed automatically for constructing a set of untrained rules and random variables. Then, a Bayesian Network is derived by using the set of untrained rules, the random variables and an evidence set. After that, the trained model can be used for the evaluation of new Tweets. Finally, the constructed model can be retrained incrementally, thus becoming more robust. As application domain for the development of our methodology we have selected tourism because it is one of the most popular topics in social media. Our framework can predict users’ intention to visit a place. Among the advantages of our framework is that it follows an incremental learning strategy. That is, the derived model can be retrained incrementally with new training sets thus becoming more robust. Further, our framework can be easily adapted to opinion mining from social media on other topics, whereas the rules of the derived model are constructed in an efficient way and automatically.
UE throughput guaranteed small cell on /off algorithm with machine learning
Authors: Tae-yoon park, jong-won Han and een -kee hong
Date: 2020-06-03 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, Management

Abstract:Ultra-dense network (UDN) has been considered a promising solution to improve the signal quality of cell edge UEs and enhance the serving coverage. However, a large number of small cells causes severe inter-cell interference and high energy consumption, and efficient small cell management is an important issue. In this paper, a UE throughput guaranteed small cell on/off algorithm in UDN environment is proposed to solve the problem of UE throughput reduction due to small cell off process. The proposed small cell on/off algorithm with machine learning is executed by the following processes: First, the network attributes that affect UE throughput are analyzed. Second, the correlation between UE throughput and network attributes is evaluated through multiple linear regression analysis. Third, through understanding the correlation between UE throughput and network attributes, we determine the proper criteria for small cell on/off process. Simulation results show that the proposed small cell on/off algorithm can improve the total network energy efficiency as well as efficiently ensure sufficient UE throughput. Compare to the conventional algorithm, the proposed algorithm shows more than 75% improvements of average network energy efficiency. whole network.View less
Constraint-Based Inference of Heuristics for Foreign Exchange Trade Model Optimization
Authors: Nikolay Ivanov, Qiben Yan
Date: 2021-05-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Algorithmic Trading, Model Optimization

The Foreign Exchange (Forex) is a large decentralized market, on which trading analysis and algorithmic trading are popular. Research efforts have been focusing on proof of efficiency of certain technical indicators. We demonstrate, however, that the values of indicator functions are not reproducible and often reduce the number of trade opportunities, compared to price-action trading. In this work, we develop two dataset-agnostic Forex trading heuristic templates with high rate of trading signals. In order to determine most optimal parameters for the given heuristic prototypes, we perform a machine learning simulation of 10 years of Forex price data over three low-margin instruments and 6 different OHLC granularities. As a result, we develop a specific and reproducible list of most optimal trade parameters found for each instrument-granularity pair, with 118 pips of average daily profit for the optimized configuration.
The Logic of Strategic Assets: From Oil to Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Jeffrey Ding, Allan Dafoe
Date: 2020-01-09 00:00:00

What resources and technologies are strategic? This question is often the focus of policy and theoretical debates, where the label "strategic" designates those assets that warrant the attention of the highest levels of the state. But these conversations are plagued by analytical confusion, flawed heuristics, and the rhetorical use of "strategic" to advance particular agendas. We aim to improve these conversations through conceptual clarification, introducing a theory based on important rivalrous externalities for which socially optimal behavior will not be produced alone by markets or individual national security entities. We distill and theorize the most important three forms of these externalities, which involve cumulative-, infrastructure-, and dependency-strategic logics. We then employ these logics to clarify three important cases: the Avon 2 engine in the 1950s, the U.S.-Japan technology rivalry in the late 1980s, and contemporary conversations about artificial intelligence.