pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Tenrec: A Large-scale Multipurpose Benchmark Dataset for Recommender Systems
Authors: Guanghu Yuan, Fajie Yuan, Yudong Li, Beibei Kong, Shujie Li, Lei Chen, Min Yang, Chenyun Yu, Bo Hu, Zang Li, Yu Xu, XiaoHu Qie
Date: 2022-10-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Existing benchmark datasets for recommender systems (RS) either are created at a small scale or involve very limited forms of user feedback. RS models evaluated on such datasets often lack practical values for large-scale real-world applications. In this paper, we describe Tenrec, a novel and publicly available data collection for RS that records various user feedback from four different recommendation scenarios. To be specific, Tenrec has the following five characteristics: (1) it is large-scale, containing around 5 million users and 140 million interactions; (2) it has not only positive user feedback, but also true negative feedback (vs. one-class recommendation); (3) it contains overlapped users and items across four different scenarios; (4) it contains various types of user positive feedback, in forms of clicks, likes, shares, and follows, etc; (5) it contains additional features beyond the user IDs and item IDs. We verify Tenrec on ten diverse recommendation tasks by running several classical baseline models per task. Tenrec has the potential to become a useful benchmark dataset for a majority of popular recommendation tasks.
Simulated Contextual Bandits for Personalization Tasks from Recommendation Datasets
Authors: Anton Dereventsov, Anton Bibin
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Multi-Armed Bandits

We propose a method for generating simulated contextual bandit environments for personalization tasks from recommendation datasets like MovieLens, Netflix, Last.fm, Million Song, etc. This allows for personalization environments to be developed based on real-life data to reflect the nuanced nature of real-world user interactions. The obtained environments can be used to develop methods for solving personalization tasks, algorithm benchmarking, model simulation, and more. We demonstrate our approach with numerical examples on MovieLens and IMDb datasets.
RankT5: Fine-Tuning T5 for Text Ranking with Ranking Losses
Authors: Honglei Zhuang, Zhen Qin, Rolf Jagerman, Kai Hui, Ji Ma, Jing Lu, Jianmo Ni, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
Date: 2022-10-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Recently, substantial progress has been made in text ranking based on pretrained language models such as BERT. However, there are limited studies on how to leverage more powerful sequence-to-sequence models such as T5. Existing attempts usually formulate text ranking as classification and rely on postprocessing to obtain a ranked list. In this paper, we propose RankT5 and study two T5-based ranking model structures, an encoder-decoder and an encoder-only one, so that they not only can directly output ranking scores for each query-document pair, but also can be fine-tuned with "pairwise" or "listwise" ranking losses to optimize ranking performances. Our experiments show that the proposed models with ranking losses can achieve substantial ranking performance gains on different public text ranking data sets. Moreover, when fine-tuned with listwise ranking losses, the ranking model appears to have better zero-shot ranking performance on out-of-domain data sets compared to the model fine-tuned with classification losses.
DL based analysis of movie reviews
Authors: Mary Pa, Amin Kazemi
Date: 2022-10-10 00:00:00

Undoubtedly, social media are brainstormed by a tremendous volume of stories, feedback, reviews, and reactions expressed in various languages and idioms, even though some are factually incorrect. These motifs make assessing such data challenging, time-consuming, and vulnerable to misinterpretation. This paper describes a classification model for movie reviews founded on deep learning approaches. Almost 500KB pairs of balanced data from the IMDb movie review databases are employed to train the model. People's perspectives regarding movies were classified using both the long short-term memory (LSTM) and convolutional neural network (CNN) strategies. According to the findings, the CNN algorithm's prediction accuracy rate would be almost 97.4%. Furthermore, the model trained by LSTM resulted in accuracies of around and applying 99.2% within the Keras library. The model is investigated more by modification of model parameters. According to the outcomes, LTSM outperforms CNN in assessing IMDb movie reviews and is computationally less costly than LSTM.
SML:Enhance the Network Smoothness with Skip Meta Logit for CTR Prediction
Authors: Wenlong Deng, Lang Lang, Zhen Liu, Bin Liu
Date: 2022-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Learning-To-Rank

In light of the smoothness property brought by skip connections in ResNet, this paper proposed the Skip Logit to introduce the skip connection mechanism that fits arbitrary DNN dimensions and embraces similar properties to ResNet. Meta Tanh Normalization (MTN) is designed to learn variance information and stabilize the training process. With these delicate designs, our Skip Meta Logit (SML) brought incremental boosts to the performance of extensive SOTA ctr prediction models on two real-world datasets. In the meantime, we prove that the optimization landscape of arbitrarily deep skip logit networks has no spurious local optima. Finally, SML can be easily added to building blocks and has delivered offline accuracy and online business metrics gains on app ads learning to rank systems at TikTok.
Enhanced vectors for top-k document retrieval in Question Answering
Authors: Mohammed Hammad
Date: 2022-10-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Retrieval

Modern day applications, especially information retrieval webapps that involve "search" as their use cases are gradually moving towards "answering" modules. Conversational chatbots which have been proved to be more engaging to users, use Question Answering as their core. Since, precise answering is computationally expensive, several approaches have been developed to prefetch the most relevant documents/passages from the database that contain the answer. We propose a different approach that retrieves the evidence documents efficiently and accurately, making sure that the relevant document for a given user query is not missed. We do so by assigning each document (or passage in our case), a unique identifier and using them to create dense vectors which can be efficiently indexed. More precisely, we use the identifier to predict randomly sampled context window words of the relevant question corresponding to the passage along with the words of passage itself. This naturally embeds the passage identifier into the vector space in such a way that the embedding is closer to the question without compromising he information content. This approach enables efficient creation of real-time query vectors in ~4 milliseconds.
Using Interventions to Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of Text-Matching Recommendation Systems
Authors: Parikshit Bansal, Yashoteja Prabhu, Emre Kiciman, Amit Sharma
Date: 2022-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Product Recommendation, Recommendation Systems, Text Matching

Given a user's input text, text-matching recommender systems output relevant items by comparing the input text to available items' description, such as product-to-product recommendation on e-commerce platforms. As users' interests and item inventory are expected to change, it is important for a text-matching system to generalize to data shifts, a task known as out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization. However, we find that the popular approach of fine-tuning a large, base language model on paired item relevance data (e.g., user clicks) can be counter-productive for OOD generalization. For a product recommendation task, fine-tuning obtains worse accuracy than the base model when recommending items in a new category or for a future time period. To explain this generalization failure, we consider an intervention-based importance metric, which shows that a fine-tuned model captures spurious correlations and fails to learn the causal features that determine the relevance between any two text inputs. Moreover, standard methods for causal regularization do not apply in this setting, because unlike in images, there exist no universally spurious features in a text-matching task (the same token may be spurious or causal depending on the text it is being matched to). For OOD generalization on text inputs, therefore, we highlight a different goal: avoiding high importance scores for certain features. We do so using an intervention-based regularizer that constraints the causal effect of any token on the model's relevance score to be similar to the base model. Results on Amazon product and 3 question recommendation datasets show that our proposed regularizer improves generalization for both in-distribution and OOD evaluation, especially in difficult scenarios when the base model is not accurate.
CLEAR: Causal Explanations from Attention in Neural Recommenders
Authors: Shami Nisimov, Raanan Y. Rohekar, Yaniv Gurwicz, Guy Koren, Gal Novik
Date: 2022-10-07 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Explanation

We present CLEAR, a method for learning session-specific causal graphs, in the possible presence of latent confounders, from attention in pre-trained attention-based recommenders. These causal graphs describe user behavior, within the context captured by attention, and can provide a counterfactual explanation for a recommendation. In essence, these causal graphs allow answering "why" questions uniquely for any specific session. Using empirical evaluations we show that, compared to naively using attention weights to explain input-output relations, counterfactual explanations found by CLEAR are shorter and an alternative recommendation is ranked higher in the original top-k recommendations.
Digital Human Interactive Recommendation Decision-Making Based on Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Xiong Junwu, Xiaoyun Feng, Yunzhou Shi, James Zhang, Zhongzhou Zhao, Wei Zhou
Date: 2022-10-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Graph Embedding, Interactive Recommendation, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Digital human recommendation system has been developed to help customers find their favorite products and is playing an active role in various recommendation contexts. How to timely catch and learn the dynamics of the preferences of the customers, while meeting their exact requirements, becomes crucial in the digital human recommendation domain. We design a novel practical digital human interactive recommendation agent framework based on Reinforcement Learning(RL) to improve the efficiency of the interactive recommendation decision-making by leveraging both the digital human features and the superior flexibility of RL. Our proposed framework learns through real-time interactions between the digital human and customers dynamically through the state-of-art RL algorithms, combined with multimodal embedding and graph embedding, to improve the accuracy of personalization and thus enable the digital human agent to timely catch the attention of the customer. Experiments on real business data demonstrate that our framework can provide better personalized customer engagement and better customer experiences.
Digital Asset Valuation: A Study on Domain Names, Email Addresses, and NFTs
Authors: Kai Sun
Date: 2022-10-06 00:00:00

Existing works on valuing digital assets on the Internet typically focus on a single asset class. To promote the development of automated valuation techniques, preferably those that are generally applicable to multiple asset classes, we construct DASH, the first Digital Asset Sales History dataset that features multiple digital asset classes spanning from classical to blockchain-based ones. Consisting of 280K transactions of domain names (DASH_DN), email addresses (DASH_EA), and non-fungible token (NFT)-based identifiers (DASH_NFT), such as Ethereum Name Service names, DASH advances the field in several aspects: the subsets DASH_DN, DASH_EA, and DASH_NFT are the largest freely accessible domain name transaction dataset, the only publicly available email address transaction dataset, and the first NFT transaction dataset that focuses on identifiers, respectively. We build strong conventional feature-based models as the baselines for DASH. We next explore deep learning models based on fine-tuning pre-trained language models, which have not yet been explored for digital asset valuation in the previous literature. We find that the vanilla fine-tuned model already performs reasonably well, outperforming all but the best-performing baselines. We further propose improvements to make the model more aware of the time sensitivity of transactions and the popularity of assets. Experimental results show that our improved model consistently outperforms all the other models across all asset classes on DASH.
Active Image Indexing
Authors: Pierre Fernandez, Matthijs Douze, Hervé Jégou, Teddy Furon
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Copy Detection, Quantization, Retrieval

Image copy detection and retrieval from large databases leverage two components. First, a neural network maps an image to a vector representation, that is relatively robust to various transformations of the image. Second, an efficient but approximate similarity search algorithm trades scalability (size and speed) against quality of the search, thereby introducing a source of error. This paper improves the robustness of image copy detection with active indexing, that optimizes the interplay of these two components. We reduce the quantization loss of a given image representation by making imperceptible changes to the image before its release. The loss is back-propagated through the deep neural network back to the image, under perceptual constraints. These modifications make the image more retrievable. Our experiments show that the retrieval and copy detection of activated images is significantly improved. For instance, activation improves by $+40\%$ the Recall1@1 on various image transformations, and for several popular indexing structures based on product quantization and locality sensitivity hashing.
Restricted Bernoulli Matrix Factorization: Balancing the trade-off between prediction accuracy and coverage in classification based collaborative filtering
Authors: Ángel González-Prieto, Abraham Gutiérrez, Fernando Ortega, Raúl Lara-Cabrera
Date: 2022-10-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Collaborative Filtering, Prediction, Recommendation Systems

Reliability measures associated with the prediction of the machine learning models are critical to strengthening user confidence in artificial intelligence. Therefore, those models that are able to provide not only predictions, but also reliability, enjoy greater popularity. In the field of recommender systems, reliability is crucial, since users tend to prefer those recommendations that are sure to interest them, that is, high predictions with high reliabilities. In this paper, we propose Restricted Bernoulli Matrix Factorization (ResBeMF), a new algorithm aimed at enhancing the performance of classification-based collaborative filtering. The proposed model has been compared to other existing solutions in the literature in terms of prediction quality (Mean Absolute Error and accuracy scores), prediction quantity (coverage score) and recommendation quality (Mean Average Precision score). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model provides a good balance in terms of the quality measures used compared to other recommendation models.
AnalogVNN: A fully modular framework for modeling and optimizing photonic neural networks
Authors: Vivswan Shah, Nathan Youngblood
Date: 2022-10-14 00:00:00
Tasks: BIG-bench Machine Learning, GPU, Hyperparameter Optimization, Management

AnalogVNN, a simulation framework built on PyTorch which can simulate the effects of optoelectronic noise, limited precision, and signal normalization present in photonic neural network accelerators. We use this framework to train and optimize linear and convolutional neural networks with up to 9 layers and ~1.7 million parameters, while gaining insights into how normalization, activation function, reduced precision, and noise influence accuracy in analog photonic neural networks. By following the same layer structure design present in PyTorch, the AnalogVNN framework allows users to convert most digital neural network models to their analog counterparts with just a few lines of code, taking full advantage of the open-source optimization, deep learning, and GPU acceleration libraries available through PyTorch. Code is available at https://analogvnn.github.io
Antifragile Control Systems: The case of an oscillator-based network model of urban road traffic dynamics
Authors: Cristian Axenie, Margherita Grossi
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00

Existing traffic control systems only possess a local perspective over the multiple scales of traffic evolution, namely the intersection level, the corridor level, and the region level respectively. But luckily, despite its complex mechanics, traffic is described by various periodic phenomena. Workday flow distributions in the morning and evening commuting times can be exploited to make traffic adaptive and robust to disruptions. Additionally, controlling traffic is also based on a periodic process, choosing the phase of green time to allocate to opposite directions right of the pass and complementary red time phase for adjacent directions. In our work, we consider a novel system for road traffic control based on a network of interacting oscillators. Such a model has the advantage to capture temporal and spatial interactions of traffic light phasing as well as the network-level evolution of the traffic macroscopic features (i.e. flow, density). In this study, we propose a new realization of the antifragile control framework to control a network of interacting oscillator-based traffic light models to achieve region-level flow optimization. We demonstrate that antifragile control can capture the volatility of the urban road environment and the uncertainty about the distribution of the disruptions that can occur. We complement our control-theoretic design and analysis with experiments on a real-world setup comparatively discussing the benefits of an antifragile design for traffic control.
Holographic single particle imaging for weakly scattering, heterogeneous nanoscale objects
Authors: Abhishek Mall, Kartik Ayyer
Date: 2022-10-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Single particle imaging (SPI) at X-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) is a technique to determine the 3D structure of nanoscale objects like biomolecules from a large number of diffraction patterns of copies of these objects in random orientations. Millions of low signal-to-noise diffraction patterns with unknown orientation are collected during an X-ray SPI experiment. The patterns are then analyzed and merged using a reconstruction algorithm to retrieve the full 3D-structure of particle. The resolution of reconstruction is limited by background noise, signal-to-noise ratio in diffraction patterns and total amount of data collected. We recently introduced a reference-enhanced holographic single particle imaging methodology [Optica 7,593-601(2020)] to collect high enough signal-to-noise and background tolerant patterns and a reconstruction algorithm to recover missing parameters beyond orientation and then directly retrieve the full Fourier model of the sample of interest. Here we describe a phase retrieval algorithm based on maximum likelihood estimation using pattern search dubbed as MaxLP, with better scalability for fine sampling of latent parameters and much better performance in the low signal limit. Furthermore, we show that structural variations within the target particle are averaged in real space, significantly improving robustness to conformational heterogeneity in comparison to conventional SPI. With these computational improvements, we believe reference-enhanced SPI is capable of reaching sub-nm resolution biomolecule imaging.
Biomarkers of nutritional status in honeybee haemolymph: effects of different biotechnical approaches for Varroa destructor treatment and wintering phase Riccardo
Authors: CABBRI, FERLIZZA, NANETTI, MONARI, ANDREANI, GALUPPI, ISANI
Date: 2018-08-13 00:00:00
Proceeding: Apidologie 2018 8

Oxalic acid achieves its maximum efficacy against Varroa destructor during the active season only when coupled with brood manipulation techniques like brood interruption and brood removal. This study aimed to assess the impact of these manipulations on the colony nutritional status and the subsequent wintering phase, focusing on selected haemolymph biomarkers: total proteins (TP), zinc (Zn), vitellogenin (VG) and apolipophorin (APO). Twenty-five days after the manipulations (T1), colonies that underwent brood interruption (BI) stored more TP and VG than colonies in the brood removal group (BR), with a lower APO percentage, suggesting a lower metabolic effort in summer. In winter, honeybee colonies of all groups reached similar concentrations of the above-mentioned parameters, but colonies in the BI group showed a higher population. TP, VG and APO are shown to be promising biomarkers of nutritional status of the colony. Basing on the results obtained, we suggest brood interruption coupled with oxalic acid as the preferred organic method for the control of V. destructor in summer.
Controlling Travel Path of Original Cobra
Authors: Mriganka Basu RoyChowdhury, Arabin K Dey
Date: 2022-10-15 00:00:00

In this paper we propose a kernel based COBRA which is a direct approximation of the original COBRA. We propose a novel tuning procedure for original COBRA parameters based on this kernel approximation. We show that our proposed algorithm provides much better accuracy than other COBRAs and faster than usual Gridsearch COBRA. We use two datasets to illustrate our proposed methodology over existing COBRAs.
The Minimum Wage as an Anchor: Effects on Determinations of Fairness by Humans and AI
Authors: Dario G. Soatto
Date: 2022-10-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Language Modelling

I study the role of minimum wage as an anchor for judgements of the fairness of wages by both human subjects and artificial intelligence (AI). Through surveys of human subjects enrolled in the crowdsourcing platform Prolific.co and queries submitted to the OpenAI's language model GPT-3, I test whether the numerical response for what wage is deemed fair for a particular job description changes when respondents and GPT-3 are prompted with additional information that includes a numerical minimum wage, whether realistic or unrealistic, relative to a control where no minimum wage is stated. I find that the minimum wage influences the distribution of responses for the wage considered fair by shifting the mean response toward the minimum wage, thus establishing the minimum wage's role as an anchor for judgements of fairness. However, for unrealistically high minimum wages, namely $50 and $100, the distribution of responses splits into two distinct modes, one that approximately follows the anchor and one that remains close to the control, albeit with an overall upward shift towards the anchor. The anchor exerts a similar effect on the AI bot; however, the wage that the AI bot perceives as fair exhibits a systematic downward shift compared to human subjects' responses. For unrealistic values of the anchor, the responses of the bot also split into two modes but with a smaller proportion of the responses adhering to the anchor compared to human subjects. As with human subjects, the remaining responses are close to the control group for the AI bot but also exhibit a systematic shift towards the anchor. During experimentation, I noted some variability in the bot responses depending on small perturbations of the prompt, so I also test variability in the bot's responses with respect to more meaningful differences in gender and race cues in the prompt, finding anomalies in the distribution of responses.